Developing Rhythm in Improvisation

These rhythmic cells can be used to improvise on any song you are working on. Here are a few ways I would suggest applying these rhythms.

1. Begin by getting to know each of these rhythms well by practicing them individually. Improvise over a song only using one rhythmic cell. Repeat until you are sick of that cell then move on to another. The rhythm you play will be the same but you will have to adjust the notes in respect to the chord changes.

2. Displace a rhythmic cell. Similar to exercise one, pick one cell to work with. Place the rhythmic cell at different parts of the beats. Ex. If you look at cell 1, we could displace the entire rhythmic idea to start on the "+ 1" which would create an entire different idea.

3. Mix and match rhythmic ideas. This is the next step to ingrain these rhythms into your vocabulary. Find different ways to invert these cells. Try and reverse the rhythms or mix the order of cells.

Video Example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzwbWZERaQ4&t=28s