Tag Archives: how to solo on guitar

3 Reasons You Will Regret Not Working On Chord Soloing

Once I started getting interested in Jazz and Jazz guitar then it didn’t take long until I heard some of the first chord solos especially Wes Montgomery and shortly after Joe Pass, and That was pretty mind-blowing coming from Pearl Jam and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

The idea of soloing with chords like that was completely new to me, and that seemed both unbelievably difficult and also the coolest thing I had ever heard, so of course, I had to figure this out!

Besides being a great sound that you can use in your solos then there are actually a few other things that you can really take up a few levels if you start working on playing chord solos, and as you will see, it doesn’t have to be that difficult.

How Not To Start!

#1 Too Simple and hard to use

#2 Too Difficult and hard to use

The #1 Mistake that I see students make when they start with chord solos is not being practical and starting with harmonized scales that are technically much more difficult to use, requires more theory, and is in general much more information.

That is not the place to start. I didn’t try to take that exact approach but, but I also made a mess out of it!

You want to keep it practical and simple, If you are new to improvising and want to learn what you can play over a m7 chord then you don’t start with “A love Supreme”

and I will give you a much more practical strategy in this video.

In the beginning, I didn’t have a choice, I had a few CDs but there were no transcriptions, so I was limited to whatever I could figure out by ear, which was a pretty steep limitation. I managed to figure out a few Wes things here and there and The George Bensons solos on the Borgia Stick which have some chord solo parts. But this wasn’t really getting me anywhere for two reasons:

it was either too simple to help me create my own solos or too difficult to play and therefore impossible to use.

I was mostly listening to Wes, and when Wes plays chord solos then he is really block-harmonizing a lot, so he will in fact play different chord voicings under each melody note which makes it demanding to play, and also requires you to have quite a few things figured out about chords and theory.

From Wes’ solo on “The Thumb”

Joe Pass And A Winning Strategy

But that changed later once I started having lessons after having moved from Århus to Copenhagen.

One of my teachers at the time, Morten Kargaard, gave me a photocopy of a chord solo from Joe Pass’ chord solo book.

Learning that solo was a LOT of work, which quite a few of my students also can tell you, but while working on it then I started to see some things in the Joe Pass solo that were a lot easier to move into my own playing, because phrases were often a static chord under a moving melody, so visually you would see the chord and then use the notes available to create a chord solo phrase.

This was a huge breakthrough and quickly gave me something I could move over to my own playing. Let me show you how easy this is to work with and then also how it will help your single-note soloing.

A 3-minute Chord Solo method

Let’s take a II V In G major, so Am7 D7 Gmaj7.

Here’s an Am7 chord to start with:

and you can use these 4 notes as different melodies over that:

For D7 then let’s use this D7alt:

and then these 4 notes for melody options:

For Gmaj7 then this is a great Gmaj7(9)

And you have these 4 notes:

Now you have the chords next to each other and melodies that are close to each other as well, so turning that into a solo phrase is not that difficult:

Or another variation like this one:

And this is a lot easier to start with instead of being stuck with having to put different chords under each note in the melody that you want to improvise, which of course you can start working on later, but it can also help you get another dimension into your single-note solos as well.

Wes Montgomery And The Power Of Limitation

Before I moved to The Netherlands to study I lived in Copenhagen and I was lucky to sometimes get to play with musicians that were a lot further than I was. While jamming with a piano player he gave me some advice that I, unfortunately, couldn’t put to use right away, but it later turned out to be very useful!

When you are working on chord solos in the way that I just showed you for the II V I in G major then you can’t play dense bebop lines like you usually do:

But that limitation is actually really useful because, you don’t want to play dense lines all the time, you also want to play more sparse melodies with more emphasis on rhythm. The kind of phrases you hear Wes use very often, like his solo on Four On Six:

Technically you can’t really play harmonized bebop lines in chord solos and therefore the lines are more simple, but you can still make some solid chord solo lines and that is actually helping you get into exactly those types of “Wes” melodies. That was also the observation the piano player made when we were jamming: “your solos lack rhythm but you actually play much more interesting stuff when you play chord solos, so you need to get that into your solos as well”. At that time, I couldn’t really implement that, but a few years later that realization really helped me develop that type of phrasing in my playing because I was already used to hearing those phrases in my chord solos. And this is really about taking phrases like this one:

And realize that it works without the chords as well:

Let’s look at another thing that working on this type of chord soloing really helps you develop.

Making Jazz Chords Into Music

The biggest challenge when it comes to comping is to go from chord symbols to music. Because a row of letters is, of course, not really music.

One of the strongest ways to get your chords to work together is melody, so if you can go further than just playing the chords like a robot and start to add some rhythm and melody to how you play them then you are really getting somewhere.

You want to turn it into phrases, repeat motifs and make it a story

That would be something like this:

But really this is just playing “lazy” or “sparse” chord solo phrases, so approaching comping like this will give you material from your chord solos and also help you develop new chord solo material as you are comping the song.

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5 Easy Jazz Solo Exercises That You Want To Know

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A huge part of playing Jazz solos is following the chord progression. Learning how to solo over chord changes can seem difficult, but there are very useful exercises to help you develop that skill, and this video will help you nail the changes so that you don’t end up failing to keep up with the chords but instead naturally flow through the progression.

The Turnaround And A Surprising First Exercise

The chord progression I am using in this lesson is a fairly basic turnaround in the key of C major, and I am going to keep it all in this area of the neck:

Example 1 – C major scale

The first solo exercise is actually not to solo at all, because for any chord progression you want to solo over there is one thing you have to be able to do that is not about soloing:

You need to be able to play the chords so that you have an idea about what the progression sounds like.

A clear and basic way to do this could be:

I am using very basic chord voicings for this, if you want some more on learning chord voicings like this then there is a link to a video on that in the description.

If you think about it then I am sure you understand why this is important, even if it is not the first thing you think about. This is also related to why you get told to learn the melody of any song you want to solo on: The Melody is the real gateway to hearing the chords.

Now you know what the chords sound like, so let’s turn them into something you can use in a solo, which is the topic of the next two exercises, and then some exercises on how to get it to sound great!

The Arpeggios

It is probably not a surprise that to follow the chord progression then the “melodic” version of the chords, the arpeggios is a very practical thing to learn.

You want to think about it as this: If the chord is a Cmaj7 then you hear those notes in the background, and if you play one of those notes then of course that fits with what is going on.

Of course, just knowing the arpeggio doesn’t mean that you can play great solos, but we will get to that later in the video.

First, let’s just play the basic arpeggios of the chords.

Exercise #2 – Play The Arpeggios

You can already start to solo with this material and play things like this:

Example 2 – Solo with Arpeggios

If the Arpeggios is the skeleton of the progression then the surrounding notes are the meat, so let’s add some meat to the solo with some Barry Harris exercises

Barry’s Scales

Exercise #3 – The Barry Harris Scale Exercise

When you play the scales like this you are still clearly getting the chord sound across because the chord tones are on the beat.

You may notice that I am using a different scale on the A7, because that is a secondary dominant resolving to a minor chord, Dm7 the II chord in the scale. I am not going to get into analyzing progressions too much here, but if you want to check out a video on secondary dominants, then there is a link in the video description.

The short description is that the secondary dominant takes the scale from the chord it resolves to, so in this case that is Dm harmonic to resolve to the Dm7, giving us an A7(b9)

These first exercises are things you can do on any song you study and get more material to use, let’s have a look at how you can use it.

Playing Towards Target Notes

Maybe the most important skill when it comes to learning to improvise is to be able to think ahead and not get stuck on the chord you are on. When you play then you always want to be playing towards the next chord, that is what keeps you from feeling you have to keep up with the chord changes.

So how do you do that?

This is a lot easier than you might think, you choose a note that you want to hit on the next chord and then you play towards that, this will do two things:

Your melodies always have a direction and sound logical because of that
You never feel like you have to keep up because you are always ahead of what is happening.

Choosing Target Notes

You can do a lot with choosing different target notes, but for now, I am going to focus on using notes that are not a note in the previous chord or and also a strong part of the color of the new chord.

The easy choice for a target note is to take the 3rd of the chord like this:

Example 4a

An example of a note that works really well as a color of the chord but that isn’t a core chord tone would be to use the b9 on the A7, so a Bb.

This note is very clearly not a part of Cmaj7 or Dm7 and in the key of C, the Bb is a sort of signal that you are moving to the subdominant area, in this case, the Dm7.

It can be a good idea to just play the target notes over the chords to hear how they sound.

Create a Flow In Your Solo

Now that you have the target notes then you can start practicing playing towards that note. So you are thinking about the target note and try to get to it in a natural way.

Exercise #4 – Soloing Playing Towards Target Notes

Remember that you can go back and check the examples again to hear what is going on and get used to how they sound. That is going to make it easier to learn them

You want to practice playing like this so that it starts to become easy and becomes a part of how you play, but already in this exercise you can hear how it really works to play from chord to chord and you don’t sound like “isolated licks” per bar.

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Chord Solos – How To Get Started The Easy Way

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I am sure you have heard Wes, George Benson or Joe Pass play great chord solos, 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.

The II V I

Keep in mind that this will help you develop your own chord solos, but it can also be a great addition to your comping and chord melody arrangements. I am going to build this up using drop2 voicings. The starting point is this II V I in G major. A chord solo is a melody that is harmonized with chords, so from these chords you want to be able to play a melody. Let’s start with the Am7 and the D7.

Chords for Am7

For Am7 you caa use these 4 melody notes which only really use two chords: In the sheet music I have written out what extensions are in the chord, but that is not that important, you can better just think of all of them as Am7 and as chords you can use to make melodies You might be thinking, 4 notes? That’s not enough for solos! But actually you can make some really good melodies just with these simple voicings Chord solos tend to have a lot simple melodies, which is good because that also makes it a lot easier to play them. Since you are playing a full chord you don’t have to spell out the harmony with arpeggios and It is as much about the rhythm. Here is another basic example:

Chords for D7

The same top note melody for the D7 could be these voicings:

A II V I Chord Solo Lick

For now I am going to stick with one Gmaj7 voicing and then we can expand on that later in the video along with adding alterations and some different types of chromatic chords. With these voicings then you already can make a line like this: The melody is pretty simple and I am as much trying to make the rhythm interesting while having a strong stepwise (and often repeating) melody.

Chromatic Passing Chords

The next thing to do is to add some chromatic chords. For the Am7 you could add two chromatic leading notes to the melody that you can harmonize by inserting a chord that is a going to slide into its target note from a half step below: You can play the slides like that or pluck both chords. The same but then descending where I am adding an Eb7 that moves down to D7 would be this: With these chromatic passing chords you can now make a much more interesting II V I lick like this: And as you can see I am just using the chords and melodies from the previous examples. How to work on this and get it into your playing. When you practice this then you should first just play through the exercises and get those into your fingers a bit. If you then use my examples as inspiration to make some II V I licks for yourself and from there move it into a song that you know. Remember that a great way to practice this is also to use that way of thinking and playing when you are comping, there you have more time to work with it and it doesn’t have to be so busy so you can really get the techniques and the melodies into your playing in a more natural way.

The b9 Guitar-hack

If you look at a D7(b9): D F# A C Eb then that is really a F#dim with a D in the bass. This is useful because diminished chords are symmetrical so they are really really easy to move around on the guitar and that makes them perfect for chord solos. For the area of the neck that I am using that means that I have these voicings: This you could use in a II V I like this: On the D7 you can also use chromatic chords similar and here that means more dim chords which are nice and easy to play

A few more options for Gmaj7

Now we can have a look at what to do with the Gmaj7. Here are 3 voicings that will work really well. Notice that I am using a G6 to harmonize when the G is in the melody. This is also going to give us some more options in the next section.

Some Chromatic tricks for Gmaj7

There are few ways to add chromatic movement to a Gmaj7. The first one is a similar passing chord to the previous examples, but the second one is keeping some of the chords in one place and move the outer voices in half steps.

II V I lick with the new Chromatic voice-leading

If you put these to use in a II V on lick then that could be something like this:

Level up your chord soloing!

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5 Exercises That Will Help You Solo over Chord Changes

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Learning how to solo over chord changes is pretty difficult, especially if you also want to be free to play melodies that move across the chords so that you are not just playing something on one chord and something else on the next. In this video, I am going to show you 5 exercises that will help you develop these skills. The exercises are mostly pretty common and are probably more about how you understand the chord changes and think about the exercises that will help you learn to play better solos. I think you will see what I mean along the way.

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5 Exercises for soloing over chord changes – Patreon

Content:

0:00 Intro

1:00 #1 Learn The Arpeggios But Not Only How To Play Them

2:13 Not Only Thinking In Intervals – Here’s Why!

3:56 #2 Give It Some Context – Add the Scales

4:47 #3 Put It In The Same Range – Where the Real Overview Is

5:56 #4 Connect the Chords – Voice-leading and Melodies

6:48 #5 Think Ahead – Universal Good Advice, Also in Jazz Solos

10:07 Avoid these mistakes in your solos!

10:18 Like the video? Check out my Patreon page

Improvising over Chord Changes with Target Notes:

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When You Really Know The Chords

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If you play Jazz then you need to know how to solo over jazz chords!

In this video, I am going to talk about how just assigning a scale to a chord is not really helping you play a better solo, but another approach which will make your solos sound a lot better.

There are many ways to think about a chord progression or a piece of music, but some of the common ways we break down harmony are really not helping if you want to learn how to solo over chord changes or Jazz Standards.

Locked in Thinking Scales

I have often come across students who spend a lot of time thinking about what scale goes where. This is also often what you will find phone apps say that they can figure out or in old Aebersold books.

Obviously it is nice to have a pool of notes to use when you are soloing and a scale is a practical thing that we can play.

And if you have to think about what scale you are playing you will not sound very good.

At the same time, 7 notes don’t really tell you a lot about how it sounds, you are not going to start all your lines on the root so it is far from a complete picture.

A lot of pieces have the same 7 notes happening all the time, but they don’t sound the same (think of 4 bars of Autumn Leaves). It is also difficult to know what to play out of those 7 notes that work well over the chord. There is more to it that will make it easier to play a good solo line.

Know the chords and How the Harmony moves

First, let’s look at what you need to know and a simple way to use that before I will get into some very useful soloing concepts. So this is what you need to know and then I’ll talk about a few ways to use it.

If you know the chords and the notes in the chords you can also see how each note in the chord moves from one chord to the next, but that is only possible if you really have a good overview of it and can voice-lead from one chord to the next.

You can figure out the Target notes that you want to emphasize in your solo since they are mostly chord tones and often you can look at notes that are not in the previous chord. ‘

This already helps you play something that connects with the chords and is clearly following the harmony.

Voice-leading for melodies and solos!

In the video, I also demonstrate how Voice-leading phrases is a great way to generate lines and something you want to have in your system.

This becomes a tool to really tie together different phrases and make youse solo a more complete musical whole.

Content:

0:00 Intro

0:37 Locked in Thinking Scales

0:52 Music is not just a Group of Notes

1:18 Autumn Leaves Example

2:10 Know the chords and how the harmony moves

2:26 Getting the Overview – Understanding a Chord Progression

3:03 I Remember You Example

3:30 Not just what the notes are but also how the voices move

4:38 Using Voice-leading in Comping and Soloing

4:53 Target Notes 3 examples

6:12 Voice-leading As A Melodic Tool

6:30 Moving Motifs with the harmony

7:29 One way to Practice this

7:53 Going through the progression

8:40 Example – Solo Using the Simple Exercise

9:09 Analyzing the Solo on the song – 3 ways of using voice-leading in a solo

10:44 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

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How To Solo Over Chord Changes – The 5 Level Challenge

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Soloing over chord changes is a part of Jazz. It is a skill we need and in this video, I am going to go over 5 levels of exercises where you actually solo over chord changes and that will also test your knowledge of the chords, the fretboard and your ability to play strong melodies.

I am curious how far you can go, there are not that many who can do all 5 levels, but leave a comment with how far you can get. You can always pause the video and give it a try!

To keep it a bit short I am going to cover this just using a turnaround, but you could do this with any song or chord progression.

I am going to use a turnaround in C (play chords) and I am not really going to explain the scales etc. because if you are checking this out then you should have an idea about what those are already.

A lot of what this is going is about training very basic skills but getting them to a high level. Something that is very important in music. The last level is quite demanding and a goal I think we should all work towards.

The Never-ending scale exercise

Best Exercise for Difficult Chord Progressions – Never ending Scale Exercise

Check out more on improvising over chord changes

How To Solo Over Chord Changes The Right Way

3 ways to Solo over Chord Changes – Important Jazz Strategies

Content

0:00 Intro – A Dm7(9) voicing you already play

0:23 Making great sounding chords with inversions.

1:05 A little Voice-leading and a II V I Chord set

1:52 Inversions of the II V I Chords

2:22 Using Inversions and creating new sounds

2:47 Cmaj7 Shell-voicing and inversions

3:08 II Valt I chord set and inversions

3:59 A Great Counter-movement Trick for Shell-Voicings

4:45 Altered dominant Shell-voicing tricks

5:11 Putting it to use on a II V I Example 1

5:35 Example 2

5:53 Example 3 Inner-Voice movement ideas for these chords

6:24 Other Inversions

6:59 Like The Video? Check out my Patreon Page!

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How To Solo Over Chord Changes The Right Way

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When you start soloing over chord changes in Jazz then the first concern is often what to play over each chord. Of course, that is important, but maybe the most difficult part is how to play it, so that is what I want to focus on in this video:

How to play from one chord to the next in any chord progression

A Method that helps you play better solos not just fragments

And this is really because I found that to be such a huge difference for my own playing and it is time and time again what makes my students play lines that really connect with the changes and makes their solos sound much stronger and more natural.

In this lesson, I am going to quickly go over a progression and some chords, then find some target notes and talk about how you put those two things together to start creating some solid logical solo lines.

Here’s a basic II V I in C major.

Let’s keep it really simple: I am going to focus on playing from Dm7 to G7, so the first part of a II V I progression.

The progression is in C, so we don’t really need more than the C major scale: C major. As I have talked about in some of my other videos it is really useful(or necessary) to know the arpeggios for each of the chords etc.

Understanding the chord movement and how to play it

If you play from Dm7 to G7 then the most important note to change is the C in Dm7 moving to B in G7.

The is something we can use as a target note. If you want to play a solo that sounds like a logical melody and really connects well with the changes then using the B as a target note is a great choice.

So the idea is that if we play the B on beat 1 of the G7 bar then you can hear the chord change in the line.

One of the most important things to be able to do in music in general and jazz especially is thinking ahead. If you know you want to play a B on G7 then you can improvise a melody on Dm7 that leads into the B.

You can hear how it works here:

Solo Over Chord Changes- How Tor Practice

If you want to use this then you need to practice making lines on Dm7 moving to B., Of course, you can change to other target notes, I picked B because that is a very clear note and easy to hear.

So if you practice making lines that work like this then you might get something like this:

I would suggest you sit down and just try to improvise or compose lines, so play out of time but still think 8th notes so that you are working on being able to play lines from Dm7 to G7. As you work on this you get used to this way of thinking and you can easily implement it on other chord progressions as well. B-Roll – improvising rubato

I am of course using this on a II V I, but you can probably see how this will work on any chord set. They don’t have to use the same scale or be in the same key. This works on any chord progression.

Choosing Target Notes to Improvise Towards

The easiest choice is to pick a note that was not there in the previous chord or scale, so here I use B. If it was an altered dominant I could have taken a b13 or a b9 as well since they are not strong notes on Dm7 (or Cmaj7 for that matter)

For the res,t the 3rd is usually very clear, and often the 5th is too. In the beginning, you want to pick clear notes so that when you play a solo line without comping you can still hear the harmony change. This is really useful for your ears and helps you play a lot stronger solos.

Example on Take The A-Train

Another example: Take The A-train. Going from Cmaj7 to D7(#11).

Example one: Target note F# moving from C to D7.

Another good option for a target note is the melody note G#.

If you want to explore some other approaches that will help you improvise better solos and use other concepts than what I have covered here then check out this lesson where I am talking about improvising over chord changes but also how you might approach it in different ways:

3 ways to improvise over chord changes

Explore Target notes on Rhythm Changes

One of the most important strategies for soloing and how to learn that working on Rhythm Changes:

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Melodic Solo – What You Should Be Practicing!

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We often talk about whether a solo is melodic or not, but what does that mean and how do you practice towards playing more melodic? Most Melodic Solo Guitar Lesson videos talk about which notes to play, but it is actually more important to learn to think on another level and to find ways of connecting the things that you play.

In this guitar lesson, I take a look at some of the things that can make your jazz guitar solos more melodic. Demonstrate what is and isn’t melodic and give you some exercises to work with for adding a story, stronger overall sense of melody.

If you want some more ideas for what to practice and keep in mind when planning your practice schedule then check out this post:

Content:

0:00 Intro
0:24 The Level You Need To Take Songs To
0:48 Learning How to play melodies not just notes
1:15 Listen To Yourself – Be Creative
1:46 Example – A Bad Solo
2:08 The Process of Playing a Solo
2:30 A Story in The Solo
2:55 #1 Think in Phrases
3:32 #2 Call-Response
4:01 Example – Solo using Call-Response
4:24 Two Ways of Using Call-Response
4:34 1st – Two Voices or a Conversation
5:43 Practicing Call-Response
6:34 2nd – More Subtle call-response
6:45 The Wes Montgomery Example
7:55 Practicing The 2nd Call- Response idea
9:14 #3 Motivic Improvisation
9:42 Motives From Darth Vader to Autumn Leaves
10:26 Example – Motivic Solo
10:48 The Three Note Motif from the solo
11:50 Motifs vs Call-Response
12:24 Motif Practice
12:58 How To Practice Motivic Improvisation
13:52 Like The Video? Check out My Patreon Page!

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