Amid the fast flow of notes that so often characterizes a jazz solo, it’s good to add a little punctuation. Your listeners need it and so do you–a pause here, an accent there, something to break things up for the sake of creative interest. I probably should devote an entire article to the concept of space. In this post, however, I want to talk for a second about a more subtle form of musical punctuation: repeat notes.

I don’t know whether I’m using an actual technical term, but “repeat notes” is the handle I’m hanging on the concept I’m about to describe. It’s as simple a technique as you can imagine: you simply repeat a note in the midst of your flow of ideas. You may repeat it just once. You may repeat it several times for dramatic effect. You may choose to ghost the note or use an alternate fingering for effect. The point is, you’re momentarily bringing the jumble of tones to rest on a single pitch, and you’re working that pitch, spotlighting it, whether for a microsecond or for several bars.

Like many musical concepts, this one is easier to illustrate than to explain. So click on the image and take a look at the exercise I’ve included. It’ll give you a start on repeat notes. From there, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

By the way, the note heads with X’s are ghost notes. For whatever reason–probably because we’re talking about punctuating solos–it seemed appropriate to include a few of them in this exercise along with the repeat notes.