Tag Archives: chord melody jazz

An Amazing Exercise For Jazz Chords (And Your Playing In General)

Jazz Chords can seem like these mysterious grips with difficult names.

They sound beautiful but you don’t really know what is going on, and even if you can play this chord then there are so many other things that you hear people do with it, and you want to learn that too!

Of course, you need to practice playing the voicings, but somehow just running up and down diatonic chords and inversions is not really helping you play like that, so you need to go beyond this:

And this:

You need to really dig into the chords and learn how to use them, and there is one thing you want to work on that can help you do that, and it will teach you a lot of other great things at the same time about Jazz, about Harmony, Theory, and the guitar.

Chord Melody – Making Music Is The Exercise

The exercise I am talking about is not one of those exercises where you sit down every day with a metronome and go through your scales. What you want to work on is:

putting the chords that you practice to use, and you want to put the theory you know to use and in that process learn to play a song as a beautiful chord melody arrangement

How do you get started with this?

A basic recipe for a chord melody arrangement is to learn your shell-voicings, and then take the song that you want to turn into a chord melody

and figure out how to play the melody on the two highest strings.

Put those two together by adding a chord under the notes that are on the 1 of the bar

or if there is no melody then just play the chord. This way it is pretty simple to make your own harmonized version of that song.

This already works and is not too difficult if you start with an easy song and not a bebop theme but you can take it a lot further and when you do that then you start to develop a lot of useful skills.

Make It Your Sound

 Already with this basic arrangement, you can start to tweak it and add in other chord voicings that you might like better. Essentially you can just experiment with adding other voicings instead of what you first had. You are just refining the first version and adding some more colors — as I am doing here with a different Fmaj7 or adding the 9th on the Eb7.

This is about looking at what note is in the melody and then just trying different options for the chord with that melody note. For example, you could use these variations for the first chord:

Optional voice-over: Melody on shell-voicing, drop2 voicing, adding a 13th to the chord, or adding a 9th to the chord by shifting it up a position.

And there are many options and interesting colors you can check out.

When you are working on this then you are getting a much better understanding of what notes are in the chords and how those chords actually sound in context, which is incredibly useful, also when you improvise You might come across a place where you only know one option, but that only means that you can explore how to create some variations of that chord and learn some new things in that way.

But as you are probably already realizing then you want to do more than just play a chord here and there, you want to also add some movement to the arrangement within the chords, to give it a flow, especially when the melody isn’t moving.

Fills & Creative Voice-Leading

In this next example, you will see how you can add some moving voices that help you get to the next chord, and there are also a few different fills that you can add to not just play the chord but also embellish it and make it more interesting:

A lot of this is about finding practical ways to move a voice so that it helps you get to the next chord or realizing that there is nothing happening in the melody so you have time to add an arpeggiated or more embellished version of the chord.

On the Eb7 I am also harmonizing each note of the melody to create a different sound, there are many options to explore and it is really just about trying things out and seeing what you like.

This is of course already giving you a ton of options that you can develop in your own arrangements, but you can go even further and start changing the song to make it surprising to the listener.

Getting Creative With The Chords

The most important thing to keep in mind when you reharmonize the song and change the chords is that you use that the listener expects to hear one thing and then you play something else. This sometimes means that it works better to introduce reharmonization as an embellishment when you have first played the “normal” changes.

But you can do a lot of fun things with this, let’s start simple:

Here the first chord basic Fmaj7 chord is turned into a more unstable and interesting Fmaj7(#5). The Aø chord is also embellished a bit with a 9th, and the D7 is played with diminished scale harmony again a different sound. These are pretty easy ways to reharmonize the song by just choosing other sounds for the chords than you might expect. On the Gm7 you can hear some added chords that work really well for keeping things moving along, so they are just there to add momentum to a long note in the melody.

A more radical version where the chords a used much more freely and just chosen to fit the melody and serve the bass movement with more or less random chords to make it fit the melody could be something like this:

Comping!

There are so many things to learn about chords and explore on the fretboard like this. The other important thing that you want to get started on for playing better Jazz is being able to turn chords into great sounding comping, and if you check out this video then you will see how that is maybe not as difficult as you might think, and what you need to pay attention to.

Comping A Jazz Standard – This Is How To Get Started

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10 Chord Melody Intros You Need To Know

It doesn’t really matter if you are playing chord melody arrangements by yourself or if you are in a band. Being able to play a great sounding intro to a song and really set up the listener for a piece of music is very practical.

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Content: 

00:00 Intro

00:55 The Turnaround – The Perfect Intro

02:43 #IV – All of Tonal Harmony (almost..)

04:42 Modal Interchange and Beautiful Colors

06:49 Pedal point – Creating Tension

08:23 II V chain – Minor Cadence movement

10:25 Melodic Pedal Point

12:04 Start On A Tritone Substitution

14:00 Sus4 Pedal point

14:58 Lady Bird Turnaround – Modal Interchange

16:26 Phrygian Intro – Pretend to be another key

18:38 Complete Chord Melody Arrangement to Check out

18:45 Like the video? Check out my Patreon page!

 

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How To Learn Jazz Chord Melody – Study Guide

These videos will help you learn to play and create your own beautiful chord melody arrangements.

The videos cover a lot of ground with putting chords under a melody, using different Jazz chords, and even playing chord solos and improvising in a solo guitar setting.

You can check them out on YouTube here: Chord Melody – Beautiful Jazz Guitar – Learn Jazz, Make Music

Easy Autumn Leaves Chord Melody and Quick How-to-Play!

Easy Chord Melody Lesson for Autumn Leaves with transcription and tabs. A short video explaining how to play the arrangement.

Autumn Leaves is a great song to get starting playing easy chord melody arrangements on guitar.

Chord melody is the style or technique where you play the melody of the song and add chords to it. Mostly making it a complete solo guitar arrangement with both harmony and melody.

In this lesson, you will learn a chord melody arrangement of Autumn Leaves. The chords that you will use are for the biggest part simple 3-note voicings called shell-voicings and I have also included some exercises to check those out.

Get the PDF here: Easy Autumn Leaves Chord Melody

Chord Solos – How To Get Started The Easy Way

I am sure you have heard a great chord solo by Wes, George Benson or Joe Pass, and it is a great sound that seems almost impossible to get into your own playing, but if you are a little practical about how you start working on it then it may not be as difficult as you think.

In this lesson, I am going to take one area of the neck and a II V I in G major and then I will show you how to start making your own chord solo licks with a few voicings that you probably already know.

Get the PDF here: Chord Solos – How To Get Started The Easy Way

Autumn Leaves – How To Use Drop 2 For An Easy Chord Melody

This video is on a chord melody arrangement of Autumn Leaves.You will learn how it is constructed. And give you different options in terms of Jazz chords and reharmonizations that you can use in your own jazz guitar chord melody arrangements

One of the things that I learned the most from when it comes to harmony and comping was harmonizing melodies, so making chord melody arrangements. When I was starting out I harmonized everything I could. That taught me so much about how to comp with more melody and play chords under a theme.

In this video, I am going to show you an arrangement of Autumn Leaves that uses drop2 voicings and you can use this as a solo arrangement but it also works great if you are playing in a band. I am also going to add some extra tricks to give you a way to add some color to your own songs.

Get the PDF here: Autumn Leaves – Chord Melody with Drop2

3 Things You Need To Know For Chord Melody

Chord Melody is Melody with Chords, so you take a melody and then you add chords to it. This is a way to play both harmony and melody of a song and you can do a lot of different things with chord melody arrangements and really add a beautiful another dimension to the song you are playing, making it a solo performance.

This video is taking a look at some important aspects of playing and making chord melody arrangements. Focusing on some different things that most people forget to consider.

Get the PDF here: 3 Things You Need To Know For Chord Melody

Chord Solo – How To Make Melodies And Find Chords

How Do you play chord solos? It is something we hear people do all the time on our favorite Jazz Guitar records by Wes, Joe Pass or George Benson. But it seems really complicated to play a Jazz guitar Chord Solo.

In this video, I am going to give you an example of an Easy Chord solo and then I am going to talk about how you can practice making your own solos. Another thing that you don’t want to miss is how working on this type of playing is something that can really boost your single-note solos.

Get the PDF here: Chord Solo – How To Make Melodies And Find Chords

Best exercise for jazz guitar chord solos! – Brain and fingers!

Chord solos have been a part of the Jazz Guitar skill set since the ’50s and ’60s when players like Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery used it in their music. A Chord solo is a harmonized melody line, so you don’t only improvise a melody, you also harmonize it by adding chords to it.

This might seem a little scary to start working on, but if what you want to work on is harmonizing melodies. One of the simplest melodies you can harmonize is a scale, so in this lesson, I will take an F major scale and show you how you can harmonize it with both some chords and some progressions.

Get the PDF here: Best exercise for jazz guitar chord solos! – Brain and fingers!

A more structured approach to Chord Melody

Chord Melody Survival Kit

 

3 Things You Need To Know For Chord Melody

Chord Melody is Melody with Chords, so you take a melody and then you add chords to it. This is a way to play both harmony and melody of a song and you can do a lot of different things with chord melody arrangements and really add a beautiful other dimension to the song you are playing, making it a solo performance.

I am going to go over 3 things that are really important if you want to make your own chord melody arrangements and that you will also find in the arrangements and playing of people who are great at chord melody like Joe Pass and Ted Greene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32QgdXfEs0I

#1 Play The Melody on the top strings.

If you want to harmonize a melody then you need to add harmony under the melody. For the guitar This makes it more practical to play the melody on the top strings.

I would suggest aiming for having as much of the melody as possible placed on the E and B strings. That way it is a lot easier to add a chord under it and most of the time you can even use the same voicings you usually do for comping.

In example 1 I have written out the melody for body and soul on the top strings

And if you want to add chords under it you can do so in this way:

#2 Add Chords on the heavy beats

Be practical! Go for the arrangement that is playable. It will get you further and it is important that you can perform your arrangement as a piece of music, not just a technical exercise.

As an example of a melody that moves a lot here is a harmonization of Fly Me To The Moon. Notice how I only use chords when the chords are changing.

#3 Dynamics: I need to hear the melody

In many ways this is almost the most important thing to keep in mind: You are playing a melody and adding some chords when that is possible. Not playing chords and occasionally hinting at a melody that is also there.

The main thing to practice here is to get used to emphasizing the top note in the chord, a skill that you will also find very useful for comping and chord soloing.

The way to work on this is to learn to play the chords while not so much making the top note louder but more making the chord softer. This is both easier and will sound more natural. Another thing that is important is that you want to have some dynamic range to phrase the melody.

Check out an Easy Chord Melody

If you want to explore another chord melody arrangement to work on these skills then you can check out this lesson: Easy Autumn Leaves Chord Melody and Quick How-to-Play!

And of course if you really want to work on your chord melody skills:

Chord Melody Survival Kit

https://jenslarsen.nl/product/chord-melody-survival-kit/

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Chord Melody – The 2 Positions You Need to Know

We don’t think too much in positions when it comes to Chords and Chord Melody Guitar. That is something that is connected more to scales, but it does make sense to have this perspective especially if you want to work on ways to improvise in a solo guitar setting where you want to use full chords with a root.

In The first video I did on this topic I was working on one position and exploring some options there. In this video I am going to look at the other one and show you how to improvise there on a II V I giving you a way to look at the chords so that you can take a voicing and add a melody on top of that.

The 1st Position from the Previous Lesson.

This lesson is continues from a previous video I made on the topic. You can check out here: Chord Melody Solo Process

The position I discuss in that lesson is the one use in that lesson is around this set of notes:

The best way to think of this “position” (since it isn’t really a position) is as a set of root notes.

The “other” Chord Melody Position

By starting with the root of the II chord on the 6th string you get this position. Showed here with Shell-voicings.

Examples and “Chord melody Solo Scales”

The way I am going to explain this is by looking at some examples and use those to make some scale positions of notes with one main chord voicing.

The first example could be something like this:

Finding scales for each chord

The notes that can be used for each of the chord are found in the C major scale. I am leaving out notes that don’t fit the chord or it’s function.

You can find another example with the same note-pool is shown here below:

Adding an altered dominant

A similar set of chords and notes but using an altered dominant would look like this:

An example of how this is used is shown here below.

Notice that sometimes the chord voicing changes to allow for the rest of the line to be more playable. This is how I am playing the line on the Dm7 chord.

Another example of how the altered dominant can be used is shown here below. The melody here is a motif stated on the II chord and then developed on the Valt chord.

Joe Pass Chord solo book

A book, that I have used and learned a lot from is this book of transcribed chord solos. I mention it in the video.

Joe Pass – Chord solos
 http://amzn.to/2kk2zei (affiliate link)

Chord Melody Survival Kit

If you want to develop your skills with chord melody then you can check out this lesson where I break down my basic process for making a chord melody and demonstrate how to turn this into an arrangement.

The lesson includes 3 arrangements and video lessons describing how they are made.

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Get the PDF!

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Chord Melody – This is How To Play Solos

You already play chord melody guitar arrangements of standards, but Improvising in a solo guitar setting where you are playing chords and an improvised melody can be really difficult and seem impossible to learn.

In this video I am going to show you how to use chords as a position to create a scale where you can improvise with and in that way solo in a Chord Melody setting.

This is one of the ways I approach improvising in a solo guitar setting and it is technically much less demanding than trying to for example harmonize every melody note. In fact you can probably get started right away, and a bonus is that practicing this will make you a lot better at making your own chord melody arrangements.

This video came about because I was making videos for my Patrons discussing how I prepared a solo gig. It was a request to demonstrate one of the approaches I use for soloing.

A Practical Approach to improvising

The best way to demonstrate my method or approach is to just give you some examples and in breaking them down showing you what the idea is.

The first example is a II V I lick in C major.

I would assume that you already know the basic chords that are shown as diagrams above the sheet music.

The way I see this II V I lick is basically as a melody using these basic chords.

Try playing this example

Building a Scale for each chord voicing

The way I see the available notes for the Dm7 and G7 vocings I have the two “scales” associated with both chords.

Notice that I actually have two voicings for G7 but again these two voicngs are (for me at least) variations on the same voicing. Probably centered around the 7th and 3rd on the D and G string.

Variations of voicings

One way to build vocabulary is to have several options for the combinations of voicings. In this video I am doing this by using different Dm7 voicings.

The example below is using a different type of chord voicing.

Here the notes available with the Dm7 is a little different and is shown here below.

Variations and more chords 

The example here below is using several voicings on the G7. Again the focus is on using voicings that are variations of the same chord. You can see that it is that thinking that I use on the G7 chord.

The line is using a variation of the previous Dm7 chord, now with a 3rd in the melody instead of the 9th,

I also added some more interesting rhythms to the line and really use a chord to emphasize the top-note of the melody on the G7.

Chord Melody Survival Kit

If you want to develop your skills with chord melody then you can check out this lesson where I break down my basic process for making a chord melody and demonstrate how to turn this into an arrangement.

The lesson contains 3 arrangements and video lessons describing how they are made.

Get a free E-book

If you want to download a Free E-book of 15 II Valt I licks then subscribe to my newsletter:

Get the PDF!

You can also download the PDF of my examples here:

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If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for topics then please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or  send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and feel free to connect with me via Instagram,Twitter Google+ or Facebook to keep up to date with new lessons, concerts and releases.