Altered Scale Make Sure You Learn This First!

Throwing in a surprising altered lick can add tension and a cool outside sound to your solos—but for many players, the altered scale feels confusing and abstract. I also struggled to make it sound right in my solos—until my teacher gave me a simple trick that made everything click! In this video, I’ll share that trick with you, along with three essential rules that’ll make using the altered scale much easier. You don’t want to get stuck playing the same safe solos over and over.

The Altered Scale

Before we get to the rules, let’s start with the foundation —because if you skip this, the altered scale won’t make sense, and your solos won’t work at all.

Not everyone agrees on what “altered dominant” and “altered scale” really mean, but in this video, I’ll connect everything to the altered scale as part of the melodic minor.

And as you’ll see, this scale actually breaks some of the rules you’d expect, so you need to approach it differently to make it work in your solos.

Hearing the sound of altered dominants in a chord progression will make everything easier later when we get to soloing—so listen closely to these examples

Here’s an unaltered G7:

And with an altered G7:

What you hear is that there is a lot more tension on the G7alt with a #9 and a b5 that moves up to the b13 before resolving to Cmaj7.

The important things to remember are: altered extensions, #9, b13 , no perfect 5th, and that it is resolving, in this case, G7alt to Cmaj7(9).

I know that some people don’t like seeing the chord written as G7alt, but essentially, that means that it is a dominant from the altered scale, and as you probably already realized, In jazz, specific and vertical chord symbols don’t describe what is being played 99% of the time, so in some ways it is actually the best description

For G7, The altered scale is just the Ab melodic minor scale played from G to G—so a simple version of it would be:

Let’s look at what notes are in there, and see if you spot one thing that is a bit weird:

The root, a b9, and a #9, the major 3rd, the b5, a b13 and a b7.

Of course, the notes are the same as Ab melodic minor,

which you may already know and be able to play. Did you see that the 3rd is not the 3rd note in the scale? That is a bit strange, but nice since you then have the #9 and the b9…

Let’s get to Rule #1, which is about tension, and how to understand and hear the altered scale:

Rule #1 – Every Note (Except The Root) Wants To Resolve

This first rule is crucial for ensuring the altered sound flows naturally in your solos. Every note in the altered scale—except the root—creates tension and wants to resolve somewhere.

Once you understand how these notes resolve, you can start using them in simple, musical ways. And in a bit, I’ll show you how to turn this into 3-note altered licks that already sound great.

But first, let’s go through how each note resolves:

G doesn’t do anything, the b9, Ab resolves to G. The #9, Bb, is a bit special that resolves down to G, but does it via the b9:

The 3rd, B resolves up to the root. The b5 resolves down to the root. The b13 resolves up to the 3rd, and the b7 resolves down to the 3rd as it always does, here that is F down to E.

Once you understand how these notes resolve, you can start creating simple but strong 3-note altered licks.

Here’s an example:

It is really just one note per chord, 5th of Dm7 moving down to the b9 on G7alt and resolving to the 5th of Cmaj7:

This already introduces something important for Rule #2, which we’ll get to next—but let’s hear another example first:

And if you add chords, you get:

Now we can get to Rule #2, which tells you about how your altered lines should flow:

Rule #2 – Altered Lines MUST Have Direction

The altered scale creates tension that wants to resolve—and that’s exactly how your solo lines should work: they need to move toward the resolution.

You can start doing this in a simple way with a line like this:

Where the altered part is just a descending scale run that resolves to the 5th of Cmaj7.

But you can also create more interesting and complex lines, like this:

It is essential to land on strong chord tones when resolving. A great way to practice this is by targeting the 3rd of the chord you resolve to, in this case: E over Cmaj7.

Here’s how you can approach it from above:

And here’s how you can approach it from below:

These examples are fairly simple scale-based melodies, but the main thing is to take your time and experiment with ways to end on E naturallyl

If you still find it difficult to get used to thinking all these notes then there is a shortcut for that too – I’ll get back to that later.

But first, these lines are mostly based on scale movement—and that brings us to Rule #3, where we explore more options.

Rule #3 – There Is No G7alt Arpeggio

This might sound like a pretty useless rule—but it’s actually the key to playing great altered lines without getting stuck in boring scale runs.

As you already know, G7 altered uses the same notes as Ab melodic minor. That means we can use its diatonic arpeggios to build strong altered lines. Here are the arpeggios from Ab melodic minor. I am writing them out with a B instead of a Cb because that makes more sense in the G7 context, there is no 100& correct way to write it.

The arpeggio built on G is Gø (G half-diminished: G, Bb, Db, F).

That doesn’t give a strong altered dominant sound, so we need something better. To get the real altered sound, you want arpeggios that contain the 3rd of G7, B.

So these:

AbmMaj7, Bmaj7(#5), Db7, and Fø

Let’s explore what they give us and see how they work in real solos.

Fø, is probably the easiest to use because it really is just a G7(b9,b13) without the G.

And a bonus is that if you use the arpeggio from the 3rd of Dm7 chord in the II V,

then you can voice lead the line and in that way make it motivic and more melodic.

Like this:

And here you can see how the Fmaj7 on Dm7 chord is transforming first to Fø on G7alt, and then also to Em7 over Cmaj7.

It is a great way to make the II V I make more sense as a melody or a story

A similar strategy works well for Db7 but here I use it so it sounds a bit more like a call-response statement because of the direction of the melody:

Another great option is the Bmaj7(#5), which also has the augmented triad in there! That’s a geat sound for altered.

The Dm7 line starts with an Fmaj7 pivot arpeggio with a leading note, then transitions to the Bmaj7(#5) is targeting the Eb, which gives us that clear b13 on G7.

The arpeggio also adds the #9, the Bb, and in resolving that, I also introduce the b9, Ab. This makes the resolution stronger and more natural-sounding.

The final go-to altered arpeggio is AbmMaj7, and this one is perfect for arpeggio combination melodies:

Here you have the AbmMAj7 chained together with the Fø arppegio,

And this type of melody works very well for several chords, check Kurt Rosenwinkel and Charlie Parker, they both use it quite often.

The Thought Trick

If you’ve ever struggled to make altered lines sound like music, I know exactly how that feels—because I had the same problem. I was practicing arpeggios and triads from the altered scale, but it was hard to actually hear melodies with them, and think all the weird altered notes. That’s when my teacher, Bjarne Roupe, gave me a trick that instantly made it easier. Instead of thinking in terms of the altered dominant, he told me to use tritone substitution and think that. At the time, I was working on Stella By Starlight, and on the two bars of G7 in the bridge,

he suggested that I approach it as Db7(#11), so a Lydian dominant, instead of G7 altered.

This was a game changer—because suddenly, I knew the sound of the Db7 chord and could use familiar Db7 lines and still resolve smoothly to Cm7 while the comping was still playing G7 altered. You can lean even more into the Db7 sound like this:

The note Db, the b5, is probably the hardest note to hear in a G7 altered sound,

but thinking Db7(#11) made it easier to hear and play strong melodic lines.

Here we rely on that G altered is the same set of notes as Ab melodic minor which is of course also the same set of notes as Db lydian dominant.

So it is really just the same scale, you are just thinking about it a little bit differently. Later on, I switched back to thinking in terms of G7 altered, but this approach helped me internalize the sound first.

The way you think about a concept opens up new possibilities—and that applies to chords just as much as solos.

If you think getting better at jazz chords is just about learning new grips, you’re missing a huge part of the picture. The real skill is making basic chords sound amazing in a real musical setting. In this video, I’ll show you three exercises that will completely change how you comp—helping you develop the real skills you need, not just a bunch of shapes.

Learn Jazz, Make Music.

https://jenslarsen.nl/3-basic-jazz-chord-exercises-that-will-change-your-playing-in-2024/

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