Chord Melody: Make Sure You Do THIS! (the 2-note method)

Chord Melody is one of the most beautiful and fun ways to play Jazz guitar. You’re playing the whole song: melody, harmony and rhythm – all at once!

But most students try to learn this by reading difficult arrangements written by others, and that is a dead end!

If you want to learn chord melody and have fun playing songs that way, you need a different strategy—one actually that works.

Getting The Foundation Right

Let me help you fix some common mistakes, and in the process, show you a better approach by creating a chord melody arrangement.

This first part is pretty simple, but it is almost never how students try to learn chord melody. It is very easy to find transcriptions of beautiful arrangements, either in books or online lessons, and I also post a transcription and a video every week on my Patreon page:

which by now, has 300 of them. But while learning from transcriptions can be very useful, it is only if you do it the right way.

Mistake #1 – Jumping In

Most jazz guitarists start with the final product – a complex arrangement – rather than building the skills needed to actually play it.

Let me show you what to do instead, so you have something you can play. Playing chord melody should not be the same as learning a piece of classical music. The goal is to play YOUR version of the song with melody and chords together. The worst thing you can do is start by trying to sight-read a very complicated arrangement that somebody else wrote. That is very difficult and probably the reason most people give up in frustration. If you zoom out a bit and think about what your goal is, then it becomes easier. Here’s a step-by-step process that actually works, starting with the most important foundation.

Mistake #2- The Most Important Word In Chord Melody

The goal is to play a song—and the most important part of any song is the melody. The melody is the song.

We change chords all the time in jazz, but the melody stays the same—that’s what people recognize. So the first thing you need to do is learn the melody, and really know it well, because you want to be able to move it around on the neck later. For this video, I’ll use the first part of All The Things You Are to walk you through the process.

Here’s how the melody could sound on its own:

Notice how even just the melody by itself is very strong. Many students rush past this step, but mastering the melody alone will make every step that follows easier. This is what ties everything together—so this is where you want to start. Not with a difficult and heavily embellished arrangement. Just the melody. Playing the melody helps you hear how the song should sound in time, figure out the phrasing that fits, and it also sets you up for the next important ingredient…

Mistake #3 – The Other Word

Now that you know the melody, it is also a good idea to just play through the chords. Doing so might even sort out parts of the chord melody arrangement, but the main goal is to hear and internalize the sound of the harmony. You start to hear how the melody and the chords fit together, and you will probably realize if there are chords that you don’t know and need to study or figure out.

Playing the chords in time helps with hearing the rhythm, figuring out where the harmony is busy or where something important happens.

Mistake #4 – Pick A Tempo

Another important thing to keep in mind is what you want to end up with. That’s one of the reasons I’m using All The Things You Are—there are so many great versions at different tempos. You might hear it at a medium swing like this Chet Baker version:

All The Things You Are – Chet Baker

Or you might prefer something a lot faster, like this Pat Metheny trio take:

All The Things You Are – Pat Metheny

The tempo you choose makes a big difference. At a slower tempo, you have more space for things like passing chords and fills—but if you try that in a fast version, it can sound messy and unclear.

That’s why you want to think about the feel and tempo early on: it will shape the decisions you make as you build your chord melody. This brings us to another important point—the process you use to create the arrangement…

Mistake #5 – Start Simple!

When you are learning to solo on a song: You don’t start with complex lines and substitutions—you begin with clear, basic phrases. That helps you internalize the song, the form, and the harmony. Then you can start adding more interesting rhythms, chromatic notes, and colors.

It is the same for chord melody, you also want to start with a very simple version—just the melody and the most basic harmony underneath it. If it’s easy to play, you can focus on phrasing the melody and keeping good time, which is just as important for the music as the harmony. That gives you a solid foundation—and once you have that, you’ll start hearing spots where you can add more: Extra harmony, fills, counterpoint—all the fun stuff.

A great place to begin is just adding a bass note under the melody. For All The Things You Are, it could look like this in the first few bars:

This approach is so simple that you can still phrase the melody freely and make it sound natural and not mechanical. It has to be music.

From here, you can start figuring out how to fit full chords into the arrangement…

The Real Foundation

The way that you add harmony to the melody in this video is by playing the melody high and adding a chord under it. That’s why it helps to keep the melody mostly on the top two strings, only going to the 3rd string as an exception here and there. For All The Things You Are, that means the first melody note, Ab, fits perfectly into a voicing like this:

The next note Db could be harmonized with this Bbm7 chord,

but you could also use this wider voicing

which is a bit more difficult, but more on that one later.

The G on the Eb7 could be harmonized like this

and then I use a drop2 on the top string set for Abmaj7.

You first play the 3 lower notes and then add in the melody on the E string. The Dbmaj7 is essentially the same voicing on another string set, and then another high drop2 for G7,

again first 3 notes then adding the 4th note as a melody. Here you could also play a larger G7,

but that gets a little bit stretchy, and then it resolves to Cmaj7. I’ll return to the alternative voicings later. Now you have this:

The important thing is that this version feels easy to play—before you start adding extra stuff like passing chords, fills, or counter melodies. You need to be able to get the music across, and that only works if it is easy to play, feels natural, and lets you focus on the phrasing and rhythm. That basic version is your foundation—don’t skip that step. Now let’s look at some of the things you can add once you’re comfortable with the melody and chords. And there’s one really important thing to keep in mind as you start expanding your arrangement…

Making It Shine!

A lot of things are pretty easy to add to All The Things You Are once you have a solid basic version. It is at this stage that you can use transcriptions of arrangements and incorporate ideas from them into your chord melody. This example uses passing chords and inner voice movement to make the arrangement flow and adds a bit of energy:

I’ll get to the trick that helps the Cmaj7 move to the next section. The Fm7 remains the same voicing, but I am adding a B7 as a passing chord to transition to the Bbm7.

Essentially a tritone substitution. Notice that I am using the larger Bbm7 voicing

so I can add inner voice movement to get to Eb7 and keep things moving.

The Eb7 gets a b5 leading note to move to Abmaj7, which I kept as it was.

The Dbmaj7 switches to a Db6 also to create inner-voice movement since the melody is the same note, and it helps us get to G7, by enclosing the B.

The G7 is again the larger voicing which resolves to Cmaj7. On The Cmaj7, you have a chromatic version of the Maj7 to Maj6, which at the end moves to a Cmaj7#11.

You can shift the Cmaj7#11 notes in parallel down to a Cm7(11) for the next A-part.

All of these small moves and extra chords add motion and color, but they only work because the foundation is clear and easy to play.

Flexible chords!

One of the most important skills you can develop—for both simple and advanced chord melody—is the ability to think in flexible chords.

You want to be able to easily add the melody on top without having to know a 1000 inversions. In this video, I break down a system for that. This is also how Joe Pass thinks about chords—and it’s an incredibly powerful approach when you’re creating your own arrangements. Check it out!

Learn Jazz, Make Music

https://jenslarsen.nl/the-jazz-chord-system-that-pros-use-but-nobody-teaches/

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