Autumn Leaves – Beautiful Chord Melody For Jazz Beginners

Chord melody is one of the most fun things to play. And it is pretty mind-blowing that you can take a song and play it on guitar as if you are an entire orchestra, and that doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds. I’ll show you in this video.

I am sure you have listened to the masters of this style like Joe Pass or Ted Greene, who seem to do impossible things as solo performers, but Chord melody does not have to be complicated at all, and you can start with a song that you anyway want to learn: Autumn Leaves!

#1 The Right Foundation

This first version is pretty simple, but it will cover some important things to get right and if you do that, it is a great foundation to build on.

In the beginning, you want to have the harmony clear by playing the melody and putting a chord on beat one of each bar. It is pretty easy to play, and then we can level up the rhythm next:

I have a complete chorus with the entire song later in the video. As you can tell, it makes it a lot easier that the melody is the same motif moving down the neck. In general, even though it is called chord melody, then the melody is more important than the chords, so make sure that you know the melody really well and that it doesn’t disappear when you are playing because you are thinking about the chords, that is a very common beginner problem. When it comes to chords, the best place to start for chord melody, and for jazz in general, is shell-voicings.

Autumn Leaves is in Gm, and the chords you want to be able to play are the shell voicings in Gm. There are two sets, with the root on the 5th string:

and with the root on the 6th string:

Almost all the chords you will see in this video are derived from these shell-voicings by adding notes and sometimes leaving out the root.

Let’s level up the arrangement a bit with some rhythm!

#2 Jazz Is About Rhythm

It’s a bit boring to always have the chords on the beat, and the melody of Autumn Leaves has a motivic structure that makes it very easy to add a bit of rhythm and use call-response to make it sound a bit more like Jazz.

I am using the same chords as I was in the first version. The only difference is adding rhythm to the chords and playing them between the phrases of the melody. I am sure you can hear the difference

This already works, and you could play the entire song like this, but let’s first add a few nice chromatic things to the chords because, like this, that is also easier than you think. After that, I’ll show you the entire song.

#3 Fancy Jazz Tricks (but still easy)

Even with these 3-note chords, you can add some flow and chromatic color to the arrangement, mostly just by taking a fret next to where you want to go. In that respect, passing chords are often over-complicated with theory, and these are just about moving notes up or down a fret.

For the first bars of the song, let’s add a passing note for the F7

You can also add a passing chord for the Ebmaj7 and this turns out to be E7 as a tritone substitute, but notice that it is really just 2 notes that move down a fret when you go to Ebmaj7.

The same trick, but then moving up a fret gives you this passing chord going to D7, which would be complicated to analyze, but you don’t really need to. Just listen:

And on the Gm6,

there is no other chord, but you can create movement by going from the 5th up to the 6th, like this:

There are many options. It is just about experimenting and picking what you like. Before I go into some more advanced things, let’s check out how the whole song could sound with a few basic tricks but mostly keeping it simple. I adjust where I play the chords in a few places because that works better with the melody, and, as I already mentioned, the melody is the most important.

One example is the beginning of the B-part, where I leave out the Aø chord for most of the bar, just play the melody and then insert it before the change to D7:

Another place that is adjusted a bit is the faster-moving chords towards the end.

You could play it with shell voicings, but I choose to use a Drop3 Gm7

instead to have the melody as the top note over the Gm7 chord.

And the whole thing sounds like this:

Of course, you can download the PDF for this on my website; there’s a link in the video description. But let me show you how to level up what you can do with the chords. Ironically, you do this by going back to the basic first version I showed you.

#4 Advanced Chords

 

The advantage of shell voicings is that they are easy to play 3-note chords and are very clear voicings that include the bass note. But you can also combine them with rootless voicings to get more flexibility with what you can do in terms of colors and melodies.

Shell Voicings:

  • Easy To Play
  • 3-Note Chords
  • Clear
  • Flexible

For the 1st bars, if you play the basic shell-voicing under the melody on the Cm7, then you have a whole bar to add more interesting fills:

This gives you some options that are fun to explore. You can use bigger chords like drop2 and drop3 versions as well:

And add a tritone sub as a passing chord in the minor II V to get from Aø to D7 again just think of it as D7 moved up a fret:

And if you add this to the song, you get this:

But you also have the option to change the chords, which is incredibly powerful for chord melody. I’ll explain why.

#5 Transposition and Reharmonization

When you play an instrumental version of a song with lyrics, you are faced with a problem: Often, a melody has repeats, and the lyrics are the only thing that makes the repeat interesting for the listener. In Autumn Leaves, you see that in the first 8 bars that are pretty much identical to the 2nd 8 bars.

There are, of course, several ways to work around that. A great one that works well with this example is to move the melody up an octave.

The way I do that here I am by re-using some of the simpler chord concepts I already showed you.

You can also explore changing the chords to make the repeated part sound different and more surprising, which works really well since the listener already expects it to sound a certain way from hearing it the first time.

Of course, the topic of Reharmonization is Gigantic, but you can do a lot with a few tritone substitutions for Autumn Leaves. Here, I am using tritone substitutions for Cm7 and Bbmaj7.

The most distinct one is probably the Db7(13) for the Gm6, which also works as a great transition back to Cm7:

 

Once you start exploring reharmonization, you can find a lot of beautiful sounds, but you also need a more general way to create chord melody arrangements from standards, and that is what I discuss in this video together with the story of the first song I ever played as a chord melody arrangement. A song that I actually don’t like that much. Check it out!

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