The Key, The Chord and The Blues Scale [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

Blues and Jazz are two genres that share the same roots and have a lot of things in common. You can make some really great lines by mixing things from Blues and Jazz.In this lesson I am going to look at 5 licks that do that and talk a bit about how they are constructed and how you can make lines like that.

The Key, the Chord and the Blues scale The core of this lesson is of course the 5 licks that contain some of the characteristic melodies, phrasing and techniques found in Blues mixed with arpeggios, extensions and chromatic passing notes that you find in Jazz. The result are lines that will fit in both a Jazz and a Blues context, and you can probably put them to use in a lot of jazz standards as well. All the examples are in the key of Bb, so they are thought from the Bb7 chord. Bb is a very common key for a Jazz Blues, there are numerous famous jazz blues themes in Bb, think Tenor Madness or Blue Monk. The backdrop of the Bb7 is the Bb mixolydian or Eb major scale:

Since we are using the basic Bb7 chord then the arpeggio of that is also useful:

But since we are playing blues the Bb minor pentatonic is also a useful place to look for melodies.

In this lesson I am assuming that you know what a BB7 is and how to play over it and is somewhat familiar with arpeggios, chord tones and a minor pentatonic scale.

The 5 Jazz Blues licks We are going to look at some licks that make use of Blues phrasing and scale and some jazz lines. In general blues lines can be both in the chord (so mixolydian) or strictly blues from the minor pentatonic scale. Blues with also contain leading notes, but the melodies tend to be based more on the basic chord notes (the triad maybe the 7th) than extensions which gives them a more rooted sound. In the first example I am walking up the arpeggio from the 5th to the root and from there we get a typical blues cliche that is using an Eb/Bb like suspension with double stops. From there the line continues with a jazz line that starts on the 5th(F) and skips up to the 9th(C) from where it descends adding a chromatic passing note and finally comes to ret on the 5th.

Leading notes are a part of the Blues language aswell as jazz, even though it is used a bit differently. The 2nd example starts out with leading notes to the 3rd(D) and uses that before it resolves to the root. From there it continues with a melody taken from the Bb blues scale, which is the minor pentatonic scale with an added b5(E). The minor pentatonic line is finally resolved to a 3rd and from there we get a small line ending the melody on the b7(Ab)

The third example is a line derived from the good old Chuck Berry Boogie Woogie pattern, but not used as a melody an octave higher. It then continues down the arpeggio in bar 2 and ends with an encircling of the 3rd and a 6th skip up to the root. The melodies that skips a 6th up or down are very common to the blues. Usually the melody will skip between chord notes. If a melody skips like this in Jazz it is much more likely to be resolved in stepwise motion in the other direction. This is somewhat a type of melody that is much more common or even specific to Blues.

Patterns of 3 notes are common in both styles, but the repeating 3 note pattern idea is much more common in Blues (think Chuck Berry again). In the 4th line I start out with a 3 note motief that is played twice befor the line continues down the minor pentatonic scale to the root. From there it goes on with a leading note line connectinfg the 9th to the 3rd and the the first 3 note motief that now resolves to the 5th of Bb.

In the last example I am starting of with a line that is basically a jazz line that is played with blues phrasing. First half of bar 1 is a D dim triad and from there the line continues with a part of an F minor pentatonic scale. The 2nd haf of the line is again using double stops and using the cliche chromatic movement of a minor 3rd interval from the 3rd and 5th to the b7 and 5th.

I hope you can use my examples to get started making your own Jazz Blues lines and explore that way of playing in your own improvisations! The best way to work on the material I went over here is to take the examples and trying to make them into my own lines. One way is to start with a part of one of the examples and make a different ending. Another approach would be to take a part of a line and compose 10 new lines that use that part.

5 Jazz Blues Licks in F Mixing Blues phrasing and melodies with Jazz chromaticism and harmony can give you some really great dom7th lines. In this lesson I am going to go over 5 examples and some exercises to help you get started exploring this.

Scales and Arpeggios for Jazz Blues All the examples in this lesson are on an F7 chord. I also kept the material in the position around the 6th fret. To be able to mix Jazz and Blues we of course need to have the material to play both Jazz and Blues in this position. For that we need an overview of the essential scales and arpeggios. Since we are mixing two genres we need to get the tools to play each of them. In the Licks I can then easier explain where we are pulling the different parts from. On the Jazz side of things we need is a scale for the F7 chord. Since F7 is the dominant of Bb major that would be a Bb major scale:

And then it is also important to know the chord tones of the F7 chord, in other words: The Arpeggio:

For the blues we can get away with one simple scale, namely the minor pentatonic scale:

This position for the pentatonic scale is not the most common, but still has some great blues options!

The Jazz Blues Licks From Bar to bar In the first example the opening phrase, and in fact the entire first bar, is minor pentatonic scale with an added blue note (B). The second bar is coming more from the mixolydian sound but then using slides to keep the bluesy feel. What is often the case with these more bluesy sounding lines is that they tend to make less use of extensions and rely more on resting or resolving to the notes of the basic triad.

Is it blues or passing notes? The second example is direcly going in to the mix and we don’t get a part that is clearly on thing or the other. The first part of the lick also uses the Blue note, but now as a more jazzy row of chormatic passing notes. It then continues with somthing that in this context sounds like F7 arpeggio material. In the second bar we get a descending scale run from D to A with a lower passing note added before the A. The phrase concludes with a diatonic 6h skip up to the root. A melody that is very common to Blues and Country.

Bluesey triplets Triplets and triplet phrasing are part of shuffle and blues phrasing. Much more so than most bop language. In the 3rd Lick I am starting with a triplet phrase that is using the leading note to the 3rd and then continuing with a melody outlining an A dim triad. From there it descends down an F7 arpeggio with an added passing note between the root and the 7th. This is a bebop cliché that some people have even made scales out of. In the second bar we have a variation of the 6th interval, this time from the b7 to the 5th and from there the scale moves down the triad to end on the root.

Double stops The first part of example four could be interpreted as F major pentatonic but you could also think of it as a Dm7 arpeggio. The second bar is a phrase constructed from a repeated double stop idea. Double stops are an integral part of blues repertoire(Think Chuck Berry). This phrase is somewhat reminiscent of a Wes Montgomery phrase from Smokin’ at the Half note.

The phrase above starts with an arpeggio run that ends on and emphasizes the 7th of the chord. In the second bar it continues with another double stop and a descending pentatonic scale run. This is resolved to the major 3rd and then skips up to the root, a very typical blues phrase. Very often in Jazz Blues phrasing you will find that the blues phrases are resolved. Since Ab and Bb both are notes with some tension over an F7 it often works better in a jazz context to resolve them (mostly to the 3rd(A))

Bb Jazz Blues – The Basics When playing over a progression like the Bb jazz blues you need to be aware of certain things and be able to play different things so that you have the material you need to really improvise following the harmony of the blues: The Chords, the Scales and the Arpeggios. I have also added a transcription of a chorus of me soloing over the blues as an example of using the material covered.

In this lesson I have made 4 choruses of exercises: The chords, the scales that go with the chords. The arpeggios that are the melodic version of the chords and finally a solo chorus which demonstrates how you might use the other exercises when playing over the Bb blues. To keep it simple I have kept all exercises in one position so that if you go through the exercises you should begin to have a tool set to improvise over the Bb blues in that position.

The chord voicings To improvise over a song you probably need to be able to play the chords so you can hear the harony and how it moves. In the following example I have written out a set of voicings to play the Bb Blues.

You’ll notice that I in general don’t write out which extensions I use, so I write out the basic type of chord and if whoever is playing a chord he can fill in extensions to his own taste. This is common practice in Jazz in general.

The Scales In the 2nd example I added a scale to each chord. The way I am playing the scales is that I start on the root and run up to the 7th, this gives you a bit of time to switch to the next chord. This way of applying scales to a progression is the same as you’ll find in Barry Harris exercises. It is a nice way to add the scale in a musical way so that you hear how they spell out the harmony.

The Bb7,Eb7,Cm7 and F7 are easily understood in terms of where they sit in the key, since it is all mixolydian or dorian. The E dim scale is in fact an F harmonic minor from E to E. You can see how I arrive by this by looking at it from the Bb7 scale: Bb C D Eb F G Ab Bb If I need to fit an E dim in there then an easy way to do that is to replace the D with a Db and the Eb with an E: Bb C Db E F G Ab Bb which you can write out from F to recognize that it as an F harmonic minor scale. For the G7(b9) you need to look at it as a dominant resolving to Cm, which tells us that we should use a Cm scale for it. In this context the (actually in most contexts) that means using the C harmonic minor scale. You can

use this approach to determine what scale you should use for any auxiliary dominant.

The Arpeggios When playing over changing harmony the best way to really follow the chords is of course to use the notes of the chords in your solo. Therefore it is very important to be able to play the chords of the progression as arpeggios. In example 3 I have written out the arpeggios in this position. To make it easier to connect the different arpeggios I have written them out in a similar range which means that I don’t always start on the root of each chord. You should practice the arpeggios like I’ve written them out, but you would get a lot from also improvising over the progression just using the arpeggios.

When you solo over the progression the target notes you choose to make lines that clearly reflects the harmony.

The solo As an example of how you can use the material I have written out a short improvised solo on a Bb blues.

I hope you can use the exercises and the materials to get started improvising over a Jazz Blues progression. You can check out some of my other lessons on Blues, arpeggios and target notes for more ideas.

Jazz Blues Soloing In this lesson I will try to go through how you make lines on a Bb jazz blues using the arpeggios of the chord. First I’ll go through the arpeggios and give some suggestions on how to practice them, and then discuss how you make lines with them. I got a request for this lesson after having done this lesson on developing your comping ideas: Jazz Blues Comping. The idea is to give a set of materials that is easy to learn and still give you the ability to play the blues so that you can really hear the changes, which is a necessary skill if you want to be able to play jazz as a style. Let’s first have a look at the chord progression:

I guess I better point out that I’ve simplified the chords a bit, so that there are one bar II V’s, mainly because you don’t always have to play both chords when you are soloing and it makes it a bit easier in terms of how much time you have to spell out each chord.

The arpeggios I’ve chosen to show the arpeggios from the 5th to the first string because that makes them 1 bar long and therefore easier to play over the chord progression. If you wish to expand them to the full position then that should not be too difficult. I chose this position because it is close to a place where you can play the chords and associating the chords and the arpeggios with each other is a very good idea.

As I mention in the video it is very useful to practice the arpeggios not onyl up and down but also in sequences of 3 or skipping one note or what ever you can think of. The more you can do the more freedom you’ll have when you start improvising.

Learning the arpeggios on the progression When you study a progression that you are not yet familiar with it can be a great exercise to play the arpeggios of the chords in a few ways. The first

exercise is to just play all the arpeggios ascending on the progression like this:

Another exercise that is very useful in terms of getting an overview of the arpeggios and practicing to connect them already is to play one arpeggio and when the chord changes then start the next arpeggio on the closest note. I’ve also made a lesson on doing this with scales: Practicing Scales through changes. As I do in this example.

This exercise is quite demanding, but at the same time will really get you good at connecting lines across different chords, which is very useful for staying melodic.

Target notes As I demonstrate in the video the thinking behing making harmony clear in a solo line is to target certain notes of the strong beats (in this case the 1). The idea is that a strong and logical sounding line will be a line that has the direction towards a clear target note. In the video I demonstrate how I use this principle while practicing rubato and on the whole blues. The target notes I chose for the chords are in most cases 3rds and 7ths since they are determining the sound of the chord. I am sure you have heard about this before. Here is an overview of the target notes:

The only place where I deviate from the 3rds and 7ths targets is the E diminished chord which is identical with the Eb7 chord except for the root, so the root is a useful target note in that case (which is not often the case). A transcription of the solo I play in the video around 8:40 is available as a download for 1 euro here: Jazz Blues Soloing – Solo example at 8:42 I hope you can use the arpeggios and these ideas to get a firmer grip on jazz blues improvising. The material is fundamental, but so worthwhile that is is something that I find myself returning to again and again without exhausting the possibilities. The approach is also really good for other progressions.

How to Learn to Play Jazz Chords – Study Guide 0 0

You want to learn how to play Jazz Chords. An important part of playing Jazz is to be able to interpret and play the rich chord language of the genre. This list of lessons is an ordered way to work your way through this

from getting to know a basic vocabulary to having more freedom in comping with different types of chord voicings.

Your Feedback is very valuable Remember that the guides are here to help you so if you have suggestions for this or other guides then let me know! I might have missed something or you have another idea for something that is important to check out! Feel free to send me an e-mail or message via social media. I have also collected the videos in a Playlist on Youtube if you prefer that: Playlist: How to Learn to Play Jazz Chords – Study Guide

The Jazz Chord Survival Kit and vocabulary The first three lessons deal with a basic chord vocabulary and how to use it when playing important chord progressions and jazz standards   

First II V I chord voicing sets How to play Jazz Chords on Guitar F Jazz Blues Comping – Jazz Chords and Concepts

Leaving out the root and getting used to upper-structures Once you know some chords and can play a few songs you can start to expand your vocabulary. There are two main topics you should add first: Triads as Jazz chord voicings and Drop2 voicings. These two are the foundation for most other voicings and you can build on this knowledge to really build an extensive chord vocabulary.   

Look Mom No Root! Jazz Chord Survival Kit Part 2 – Introduction to rootless voicings Triads – Easy 3 note Jazz Chords – How to get started using triads as chord voicings C Jazz Blues with triad voicings – Applying Triad voicings to a Blues in C

The Essential Drop2 Voicings

Drop2 chords form a huge chunk of all the voicings that are used in jazz. These lessons will take you through a lot of material using drop2 voicings. If you want to hear Drop2 chords in action then just put on a Wes Montgomery album, he used them extensively in his chord solos and comping.     

Drop 2 voicings – Part 1 – Basic Chords and how to use them Drop2 voicings – Part 2 – Adding Extensions to Cadences Drop 2 voicings part 3 – Alterations, Altered Dominants and more Download Drop 2 Voicing Diagrams How to use Drop 2 Chords on a Jazz Blues

Developing Comping skills beyond the chords Playing Chords does require more than just knowing what chord to play where. Some of the other skills that are equally important are discussed in these lessons:    

Developing Basic Comping Rhythms Melodic Comping – Stronger than voice-leading You Don’t Need That Many Chord Voicings, It’s How You Use Them Learning Jazz Standards – What you need to Know and Be Able to Do With It

More Modern sounds If we look beyond the triads and Drop2 voicings it is of course possible to start checking out more modern sounds that may not immediately be covered in the lessons I already included. These voicings are both more extreme with having large intervals or much more cluster like with second intervals:     

Modern 3 note voicings and voice leading – compact flexible voicings for modern jazz The Minor Chord You Never Use – A discussion of the m7(13) chord and how it is used Drop2&4 voicings – Part 1 Jazz Chord Essentials – 3 note 7th chords part 1 Jazz Chord Essentials – 3 note 7th chords part 2

Allan Holdsworth Chord Series

One of my favorite players when it comes to modern jazz chords is Allan Holdsworth. Since I have made several lessons inspired by his chordal language I though it only right to include some of these lessons. I am obviously a huge fan, but there is a lot to be learned from him and the chords are very beautiful and worthwhile checking out. Even if they are not all easy to play.   

Chords – In the Style of Allan Holdsworth – Voicings and Inversions Modal chords – Using Holdsworth Voicings – You can add new textures to your comping Allan Holdsworth Chords on a Jazz Standard – Advanced Modern Chord Voicings applied to Days of Wine and Roses

Chord Solos One way of getting good at comping is to get good at playing chord solos. Being able to improvise solos with chords really helps develop your freedom and ability to play solid comping behind others. For that reason I have included a few of the lessons I have on chord soloing that you can dig into if you want to take this approach.   

Best exercise for jazz guitar chord solos! The way to develop a chord solo vocabulary Bb Jazz Blues Chord Solo Jazz Blues Chord Solo

Jazz Chord Essentials – Shell voicings I thought I’d make this 3rd lesson on Jazz voicings about a simple reduced way of playing chords that then also lends it self very well to situations where you need to play the bass. Being simple and compact also makes it very easy to extend so a lot of things can be build from them. As I demonstrate in the video: full chords with extensions, bass lines. They are also useful for playing bossa novas and sambas as well as typical Freddie Green style 4 to the bar stuff. Let’s first have a look at how shell voicings are constructed. A shell voicing is the bare necessities version of a jazz chord, so the chord is reduced to three notes. The most defining notes of a chord would be:   

The Root (what chord is it) The Third (is it major or minor) The Seventh (major/minor/6th)

For voice-leading purposes I’ll make two different sorts of shell voicings. Both have the chord (3rd and 7th) on the 3rd and 4th string and the root is in one variation on the 5th string, in the other one it is on the 6th string. There are rules for voice-leading, but the essence is that if you don’t have to go to the closest note in the next chord when going from one chord to the next. Setting the chords up like this makes it easy to stay in one place with the chord and move the root a 4th or a 5th (which are the most common changes). You will also notice that I am calling the 7th chord m7(b5) even if it does not contain the flatted 5th, so I am naming them according to the key. I do that in the video too.

As usual the best way to learn it is to put it through a song as I do in the video, but here are a few examples on a turnaround in C.

One of the ways I use shell voicings is to use them as a basis and then add extensions or melody notes on top like this:

You might notice that especially the sets with the root on the 6th string tend to become drop3 voicings when you add extensions. And if you watch the video you’ll see several applications of these kinds of chords in different styles.

Shell Voicings as Arpeggios In this lesson I want to demonstrate how you can use the Shell Voicings as arpeggios to get some nice more open interval structures from some shapes you might already have in your fingers. I already talked about Shell Voicings used for comping in an earlier lesson: Jazz Chord Essentials: Shell Voicings The main thing is of course that it is a voicing containing the root, 3rd and 7th of the chord. When using it for soloing the nice thing is of course the fact that it as a melody contains a 3rd interval and a 5th interval so it will open up the melodies a bit. There’s a famous Pat Metheny line that uses this type of voicing, but it’s so Pat Metheny that nobody else can really use it (yet anyway..) so I’ll be taking a different approach.

All the examples in this lesson are in the key of Eb, so let’s first look at two exercises to get more used to using this sort of arpeggios. Example 1 is the Eb Major scale played in shell voicings on two sets of strings:

As I suggest in the video you should probably try to arpeggiate them in a few ways. Since they are 1 note per string that’s a very healthy exercise for your right hand. Example 2 is the B minor melodic or Bb altered scale in shell voicings.

For the B minor you probably want to check some arpeggiations too of course. Don’t forget that picking patterns like this with arpeggios that have one note per string are really good exercises for alternate picking and right hand precision in general.

Putting it to use When looking for “shell arpeggios” to use over a chord the best bet is to take one that is in a distance of a 3rd or a 5th away from the root of the

chord you are improvising on. They work well because they share many notes with the chord that is being played under your solo. For the Fm7, you might try AbMaj7 and Cm7 shell voicings. When it comes to the Bb7alt it is a bit more free because there are quite a lot of alterations and since we’ve already established the sound on the Fm7 chord, you can be more free. That said it is still better to stay fairly close to the root to avoid making a line that sounds like another chord than what you intend.

In the first example I start out with an AbMaj7 shell voicing on the Fm7. The G is then resolved chromatically to f which in turn is part of a chromatic enclosure leading to D the 3rd of Bb7alt. On the Bb7alt I play a Dmaj7 shell voicing. In the scale it would actually be a Dmaj7#5 chord, but since a shell voicing does not have a 5th it seemed weird to call it that. After that I descend down a BmMaj7 arpeggio that resolves to the 5th of Eb(Bb)

The 2nd example opens with an arpeggiation of an Fm7 shell voicing. For me this arpeggiation pattern for 3 note/3 string arpeggios is very useful. Probably because it emphasizes the highes note in the arpeggio. The line continues with an Fm triad that continues stepwise up to the 7th

of Bb. On the Bb7alt I then play an BmMaj7 shell which is resolved stepwise down to the 9th of Ebmaj7 via the D.

In the 3rd example I start out with a Cm7 shell. In this line it works really well as a sort of suspension of the 3rd of F (Ab). After that I play an Fm7 arpeggio that is then lead into an arpeggiation of a Dmaj7 shell and an E triad before resolving to the 5th of Eb. I hope you can use these examples as a way to get an idea about how I use voicings like these, and then make it part of your own playing.

Jazz Chord Essentials – Drop 2 voicings – Part 1 In this lesson series I want to demonstrate a set of voicings that are fairly easy to play on the guitar, but will cover most sort of chords. I also want to talk a bit about how you approach playing chords in terms of interpretation of chord extensions, substitutes, connecting or voice-leading the chords. Hopefully it can help you learn and construct some new chords, and I hope it also helps you find new ways to play songs you already know and expand your ability to play chords freely.

Interpreting Chord Symbols and Improvising In most jazz styles you are free to improvise with the chords when you are comping. This means that you can (tastefully, I hope) choose the chords (and extensions) you play and the way you play them. One aspect of this freedom means that some chords are so similar that you can group them together. Here’s a list of groups:  

Major7: Cmaj7, C, C6, Cmaj7(9), Cmaj7(#11), Cmaj7(13) etc Minor7: Cm7, Cm9, Cm11 etc

   

Dom7: C7, C9, C7(#11) C7(13) etc. Half Diminished: Cm7(b5) Cm7b5(9), Cm7b5(11) etc Altered Dominant: C7(b9), C7(b5), C7(b9,b13), C7(b13#9) etc. MinorMaj: CmMaj7, Cm6, Cm6/9, CmMaj7(9) etc

I guess for now the list is more of a reference, but what this means is that when you see one of the chords above you can substitute it with one of the other ones if you want to. With practice you’ll be able to do this without thinking because you get used to thinking of several voicings as part of the same sound. Enough talk! Let’s play an example. Here’s a recording of a simple tonal vamp in G: GMaj7 E7 Am7 D7, I’ll play it a few times with different voicings. The voicings are all Drop2 voicings, I also recorded a simple two beat bassline to make the chords a bit clearer.

It could be that some of these voicings does not come across to you as drop 2 voicings, but they can be derived from them as I well demonstrate in this series. The secondary goal in this is also that you start to think of new ways to get voicings from the ones you already know, by using some of the principles I use here.

A few basic exercises In general I won’t really spent too much time on the music theory involved, just mention it and you are free to ask or look it up elsewhere if you want to know more. You probably already noticed that I don’t play the root in the bass on all chords. This is because I’d suggest using these type of chords in a context where there is a bass player so leave him to play the bass notes and you can focus on the chord and how that sounds. Let’s first cover some basic chords on the top 4 strings in drop 2 voicings. In a major scale you have 4 types of diatonic chords: m7, dom7. Maj7 and m7(b5). Here are each of these from the key of G:

I only show this for the 4 top strings since that is what you probably need the most, but you can play these voicings on the middle and bottom sets of 4 strings too. Here’s an overview of those fingerings: Overview of Drop 2 voicings on guitar You can probably leave it for later and just start with the top 4 string sets. The method is the same for all sets of strings… You need to know these quite wel as they will be the base of everything else you need to do. Try to play them through a scale so that you practice your knowledge of diatonic chords too, that will soon be something you need to know and understand. Here’s an exercise combining th

em in a basic II V I cadence.

And here’s how to take it through the 1st 16 bars of Autumn Leaves, which is a handy tune because it has most of the chords in the key:

I’d recommend that you try this out with several jazz standards to become familiar with finding the right chords and get used to the fingerings and the sounds. That will make it much easier to go to the subject of the next lesson where we’ll start adding more extensions, look at how one voicing can be used over another chord and add some alterations to the dominants.

Jazz Chord Essentials – Drop 2 voicings – Part 2 So now you have an overview of the basic drop2 voicings from the previous lesson: Jazz Chord Essential Part 1. Here’s a short video on how I might use chords in a solo on a blues in C. As you can probably hear I am not only using the chords in their basic form, but I am using different versions of the same type of chord to make simple melodies that then make up the solo. In order to expand the drop2 voicings from the last lesson and build other skills to play something like this we need to work on a few things:

Adding extensions to chords

Let’s look at how we can add more colors to the voicings we already have and a few tricks that will help you use and expand what you already know. So far we’ve been concerned with the basic chords so Am7 was simply root, third, fifth and seventh, but as I explained in the first lesson you can use Am9 or Am11 instead of Am7. Instead of making 5 or more note voicings we can use these rules to exapand the sounds:    

9th (or b9 or #9) can replace the root 13th, b13th, b5, #5 can replace the 5th 6th can replace the 7th 4th or 2nd can replace the 3rd

This means that if we want to make an Am9 voicing you take the Am7 voicing and change A to B. You might notice that this means that you’ll be playing the notes B C E G which is a Cmaj7, so you can use Maj7 voicings to play minor 9 voicings. If you use the same approach to D7, you have D F# A C and that becomes E F# A C which is F#m7(b5). On Gmajor7 you have G B D F# and get A B D F# which is Bm7. You’ll notice that I prefer just using the “category” Chord symbols Am7 even though I am playing the 9th. Think of it as part of the process of not having a one to one combination from chord symbol to voicing, something you probably already had to abandon with several ways to play a C or a G chord.

Altered Dominants One way to vary the sound of cadences is to use an altered dominant. This almost only works when the dominant is in fact resolving to a I chord, but that is for another lesson on theory. One observation that is handy is that if you play a D7(b9,b13) having substituted the root with b9 and the fifth with the b13 you have these notes: Eb F# Bb C which are exactly the same notes as Cm7(b5) (or Ebm6) . So that gives us this set of II V I

Cadences:

Of course these are just examples on how you can change the voicings to get other extensions.

Melodies in the voicings When I play chords behind a soloist I am often playing melodies with the top voice of the chords to make the harmony more logical to the listener. I also sometimes play parts of a solo in chords. One way to develop the skills needed for this is to use chords to play a melody. The simplest possible melody is probably a scale on, so let’s do a few exercises with that:

As you can see there are a few notes in the G major scale that are tricky to harmonize, and there are several options on how to deal with them. The note C is never going to sound like a Gmaj7 chord so I chose to play an Am7 there. I could have substituted it with a C# and used a Gmaj7(#11). Let’s make a similar exercise using a turnaround: Am7 D7alt Gmaj7 E7alt. With this exercise I am just forcing myself to move up the neck in small steps, not really any system, even if it’s almost chromatic. I guess for all of these “melodic” voicing exercises the goal is to be able to make your own more than actually play mine!

I hope you like the lesson. Feel free to connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, G+, YouTube etc. if you have any questions or if you want to stay up to date with lessons, cd releases and concerts.