Tag Archives: how to play jazz chord melody

How To Learn Jazz Chord Melody – Study Guide

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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

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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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Get the PDF!

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