Bach Shapes

A unique approach to scale/interval practice, Bach Shapes is the music of J.S. Bach distilled to its basic elements: beautiful melodic shapes. These can be studied as technical exercises, or used as building blocks for jazz improvisation. Suitable for any instrument and currently being used by guitarists, oboists, clarinetists and more. The studies are drawn from Bach's violin, cello, flute and keyboard music and ordered by difficulty, transposed into all keys. Learn to stretch your range and play intervals more evenly with these musical studies. At the end are four etudes based on jazz standards. The cover and interior has been beautifully designed by Chrissy Kurpeski.

The ear is key, and Bach's melodies teach us how to voice lead through chords better than anything else, so what could be more applicable to us as jazz improvisers?

The 70 pages of exercises here will teach you to:

Learn to pre-hear intervals, which will help you learn to play what you are hearing faster than any other approach.

Improve your pitch. Practice these with any drone found on Youtube.

Improve your technique.

Increase your vocabulary of melodic shapes, usable in so many situations!

Apply interval patterns to jazz harmonic progressions via 4 jazz etudes on standard progressions.

All of the Shapes in this book come directly from the music of J.S. Bach. There has never been a book like this before, and this is just the beginning. Bach Shapes II will be out in 2021 and when you subscribe to Jon De Lucia's mailing list you will get access to all kinds of extra materials related to the book:

Video Tutorials

Recordings of the examples in the book

Links to articles about the book

Free downloads of Bach duets

more to come!

Buy Bach Shapes now and let's get to work!