Rocco Zifarelli Video Masterclass pt 5

In the fifth instalment of our six-part video series, Rocco Zifarelli demonstrates some exciting jazz-fusion soloing over a 6/8 groove with plenty of chord changes. Jon Bishop is your tour guide.

- Jon Bishop

This month we are delighted to have yet another chance to study with and learn from Italian fusion wizard, Rocco Zifarelli. This time we are looking at a very harmonically challenging piece by Jason Sidwell; Fortitude. The first thing to note is the piece has a 6/8 time signature. There are moments though where you could feel it as 3/4 time. The tempo here is 180bpm for each of the six quaver pulses so it’s well worth having a fretboard roadmap established prior to setting sail on a freeform-improvised solo.

As Rocco explains, the track has a lot of different chords and many of them are from different keys, so it’s not possible to navigate the song with just one or two scales.

In fact, trying to improvise a solo using scales would be incredibly challenging and the results may not end up being that musical to the ear. To this end, there is no need to have scale boxes to work from this month.

Instead, Rocco demonstrates his strategy of establishing a fretboard road map of triad arpeggios. These arpeggios outline the chord changes in a far more musical way. Rocco meticulously talks us through the various options and demonstrates them in the video. To help you conceptualize these fingerings we have notated the eight demonstrated examples from Rocco’s chat (see boxout examples 1-8). By studying these examples you will be able to memorize the various fingerings and arpeggio shapes required.