What Are the Three Main Elements of Music and How Can They Make You a Better Jazz Guitarist

Whenever I get asked to teach a workshop or a clinic, one of the things that I always like to talk about, at least a little bit in each class, is what I call the Three Elements of Music. The three most important, fundamental items that any musician needs to be successful, plus a fourth that I add in at the end of the talk. These three items are so important to any musical genre or performer that I would argue any music that is lacking one or more of these elements is unlistenable, or at the very least, almost totally ignored by the concert-going public.

So what exactly are the Three Elements of Music?

Whenever we get to a point in the class where students are leaning towards one or two of the elements and ignoring the others I’ll stop the class and say, “OK, let’s name the Three Elements of Music.” At first I usually get blank stares, but then the students will catch on and usually suggest Harmony, followed by Melody and finally, and usually with a little nudging, Rhythm. These are the Three Elements of Music, just not in what I would consider the proper order of importance. The three things that every musician and piece of music needs to engage their audience in a deep and meaningful way.

Think about it. Would you want to listen to music that didn’t have good rhythm and/or time? Would you buy a record full of unmemorable melodies? Would you pay money to see a concert where there was no sense of harmony, either between the musicians on stage, within the music or both? Most people would answer no to all of these questions, at least most people I know. So, let’s take a look at how we can ensure that as guitarists we are practicing the Three Elements of Music every day, staring with the most important element, rhythm.

Matt Warnock Trio in Curitiba Photo: Priscilla Fiedler

Rhythm

Why would I say that rhythm is the most important element of music? It’s because anybody can understand and enjoy rhythm. If we can walk in pace and have a heartbeat we can feel a pulse and groove along to our favorite song. Not everyone can sing in tune or understand harmony, but we all get rhythm. Yet, when I ask students “How do you practice rhythm?” they often answer, “Well, I don’t.” This is a problem, because if you have great time, then you can get away with a lot in your melodic and harmonic playing. But, if you don’t have good time, you can play the same notes and subs as John Coltrane would and sound awful. Rhythm is that important.

So, exactly how do we practice rhythm? Well, there are far too many ways to do this than I could list here, but the first step is to understand that rhythm is a thing, like a scale or a chord or a lick, that can be isolated and practiced. One of the biggest problems that I find with students is that they don’t have command over rhythmic groupings, yet they can play scales and arpeggios at a million miles an hour.

For me, it’s not enough to just play “fast” and “slow,” or “double-time” or “half-time.” These are good adjectives for certain tempos, but they aren’t specific enough to matter when it comes to our playing. As guitarists we need to be more specific. We need to play quarter-notes, half-notes, sixteenth-note triplets, quintuplets and any other rhythmic group we can think of, but that’s the key. They need to be specific.

When I’m soloing, I am constantly thinking of the rhythms I am using, what I just used and what I want to use in the next part of the solo-just as I would any scale, lick, phrase, arpeggio, substitution or any other melodic and harmonic device I have in my bag at any given time. This is something that a lot of people ignore in their practicing, isolating specific rhythms and perfecting them, as we would any scale fingering.

So, the first thing that we need to make sure that we can do is to be able to play specific rhythms, at various tempos, and nail them every time. Don’t aim for “fast” and “slow.” Be able to play sixteenth notes—and even whole notes—with precision.

Here is a great way to develop our sense of rhythm and begin to perfect these specific rhythms:

• Pick a tune
• Pick a rhythm
• Set the metronome at 40 bpm
• Solo using only that rhythm until you’re comfortable at that tempo
• Raise the metronome 10 clicks
• Repeat until it’s too fast to control
• Repeat this process with another rhythm

The important thing is to stick with a rhythm, especially at the slow tempos, until you are absolutely comfortable with it and can solo with it non-stop on a tune. Try to practice these rhythms until you are absolutely confident with them, then start to mix them up. For example, one bar of each, four bars of each, half a bar of one, half a bar of the other etc.

If you have total control of these basic rhythms, then mixing them up, at any tempo, will be a piece of cake.

• Whole Notes
• Whole Note Triplets
• Half Notes
• Half Note Triples
• Quarter Notes
• Quarter Note Triplets
• Eighth Notes
• Eighth Note Triplets
• Sixteenth Notes
• Sixteenth Note Triplets

Make sure to practice rhythm every day and to be aware of what rhythms you are using, and how you are fitting into the groove of a song, at all times. Often just being aware of your time and focusing on playing solid rhythms is enough to elevate your playing to new levels, without learning any new scales, licks or chord voicings. Everything sounds better with good rhythm.

Teaching a Clinic at the College of Charleston

Melody

If everyone can feel and understand rhythm, I would argue that many, if not most, people can understand melody. Yes, some people can’t sing on key, but just about all of us can hum along with the radio, sing to ourselves in the shower or when we’re stuck in traffic, and so for me, melody is the second most important element of music. It is what people remember when they finish hearing a song or walk out of a club after a concert. It’s the “hook” that we dig into our listener’s ears, and those players that have a strong sense of melody often have long and very successful careers.

When most guitarists hear the words “melodic playing,” they think of Scales, Arpeggios, patterns and licks. Yes, those are certainly important tools that we can use to create melodies, but they aren’t melodies themselves, and this is where most players get stuck. We are often taught that if we learn enough scales, all the right arpeggios and memorize lines from our favorite solos that we’ll be able to play jazz. But, I can tell you that after spending hours a day for over a decade of my life in the practice room doing this, it’s not going to happen. At least for me it didn’t.

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t learn scales and arpeggios and licks, those are very important tools that we need to know, all over the neck and in 12 keys, but they’re not the be all and end all of playing jazz. If we want to play melodically and learn to create melodies, then it’s better to check out the building blocks of this music we call jazz. What phrases, motifs and small, digestible melodic devices come back time and again when we analyze our favorite solos.

Since I spent all that time in the practice room, I’ll save you some of those hours I spent banging my head against the wall. Here is a list ten of the most common melodic devices I’ve found in the hundreds of transcriptions I’ve done, and that have been shown to me by my teachers along the way.

This is not by any means a complete list, so if you have something you’d like to add, put it in the comments section below. That way it’ll grow over time for future readers to enjoy.

Most, if not all of these devices can be found in my Building Bebop Vocabulary series if you want to see examples and learn more about these devices.

Melodic Devices

• Enclosures: One Note Below, One Note Above
• Enclosures: One Note Above, One Note Below
• Lower Neighbors
• Upper Neighbors
• Octave Displacement
• 1-2-3-5
• 5-3-2-1
• 3-7 Triads
• 3-9 Arpeggios
• Passing Tones (Bebop Scales and Other Variations)

As was the case with rhythm, we should make sure that we practice melody in our playing every day, and be just as specific. If these ten items are found in the solos of many of the greatest players who ever lived, then it would probably be a good idea to put the time in to master them in our own playing. So, here is an example of how to practice any/all of these items, without just running them up and down the neck.

• Pick a Tune
• Pick a Melodic Device
• Start the Metronome at 40 bpm
• Improvise With Only That Device Over a Tune
• Click the Metronome Up 10 Beats
• Repeat Until the Tempo is Too Fast
• Repeat Process with Another Melodic Device

By focusing on one device at a time we’re putting on “handcuffs” as I tell my students. We’re purposefully handicapping ourselves so that we can force ourselves to internalize that specific device, and it also forces us to be very creative in how we use that device, since it’s the only improvisational tool we have at our disposal. Then, when we eventually take the handcuffs off and solo using everything we have in our bag, you’d be surprised at how much clearer our lines are, how much more creative we can be and just how much more interesting our playing has become.

Playing my Koentopp Guitar Photo: Priscilla Fiedler

Harmony

We’ve now arrived at the third element of music, harmony. I think it is indicative of the problems that jazz education faces these days when every student I ask always names harmony as the most important element of music. Everyone can understand and feel rhythm, many if not most people enjoy and understand melody, but few people understand harmony. Harmony is a learned element, something that people spend years studying to master, and that only fellow musicians or dedicated fans can really fully understand in the moment when a band is up on stage. So why then is there such a strong focus on harmony in the study and performance of jazz?

Yes, I will be the first to say that harmony is a vital tool for any improviser, in any genre, and that one needs to have a deep understanding of harmony and harmonic function in order to become a performer, but if it is all we’re studying, or if it takes up most of our practice time at the expense of the other two elements, is that such a good thing? If we can play the most complex changes, use the most outside subs and hit every single change with perfect voice-leading, does that matter if we don’t have good time or can’t play a memorable idea?

This is a problem that I’ve found time and again with older, more experienced students that come to me for advice. They know their instruments inside and out. They can make any changes I put in front of them, and have a solid understanding of harmony. Yet, they either drag or rush their notes, don’t ever seem to lock into the groove of a song, or are just running outlines through changes and never playing anything remotely resembling a melody, or that the average person could get stuck in their head after a show.

So, exactly how do we study harmony without ignoring the other two elements, rhythm and melody? One way I’ve found that works well is to isolate changes and break things down to their lowest denominators, so that the harmony is fairly simple, and then build things up from there. For example:

• Take a Tune
• Isolate the first chord in the song
• Put the metronome at 40
• Practice soloing over this chord using one rhythm and one melodic device
• Crank the metronome up by 10 clicks until it’s too fast
• Repeat with the second chord of the song
• Combine the first two chords and repeat
• Repeat this process with all the chords of the first phrase
• Repeat this process with all of the phrases in the song separately
• Repeat this process with all of the phrases together, playing the whole song
• Change the rhythmic motive and melodic device and repeat

Again, just like we did with the other two elements, by breaking down the harmony of any song to small, easy to digest chunks, we allow ourselves to not only practice playing over the chords of the tune, we allow ourselves to do so while including rhythm and harmony in our playing as well. So, we are now using all three elements at the same time, ensuring that we aren’t focusing on just one or two of them and ignoring the others.

Tyler Ross and Matt Warnock in Charleston

Emotion: The Fourth Element

We’ve now come to the point in my talk about the Three Elements of Music when students always ask, “What about dynamics, and phrasing, and, and, and…” My answer to that question is, “Yes, emotion is an equally important element of music, but, you can’t be fully involved in the music emotionally, or engage your audience in an emotional way, if you don’t have command of the other three elements.”

Music needs to have dynamics, it needs to come from the heart and mean something to the performer, but it is very difficult to put our heart and soul into a piece if we’re thinking about making the changes, playing unmemorable melodies or trying to find the groove all night. But, if we have command of rhythm, melody and harmony, then we can insert ourselves into the song in a deeper way, which will only allow our audience members to connect with us as performers and with our music, regardless of style or genre.

Having a command of the Three Elements of music will not guarantee that you’ll become a world-famous guitarist, or that you’ll even get a call for a gig on Friday night. But, if you don’t have a strong sense of rhythm, melody and harmony, then you can guarantee that you won’t get that call for the next local, regional or national gig.

Practicing a little bit of each of the elements everyday can also increase our enjoyment in the practice room. Use improvisation to learn new melodic and rhythm devices, as well as new harmony, and whenever possible combine all three elements in a way that ensures you’re not only solidifying your understanding of music and your ability to play it, but having a good time while doing so.

Hopefully you’ve made it through this article and I’ve been able to at least open your minds to one or more aspects of music that are lacking in your practice routine. And one day, if you find yourself in one of my workshops and I ask, “What are the Three Elements of Music,” you’ll confidently raise your hand and say, “Rhythm, Melody and Harmony.”

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