With some of the great Melodic minor sounds like Lydian dominant and altered dominants, it is difficult to find arpeggios that really work, especially if you only check out the diatonic arpeggios.
In this video, I am going to show you some arpeggios that you can use that really nails the sound of these chords and adds some beautiful colors. And once you get started using them here you will discover how they also great in some other places.
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Melodic minor is an awesome sound! It is a really beautiful rich minor sound. But sometimes we immediately get lost in Altered scale, Lydian dominant, Locrian Natural 2, etc and that is a pity because the tonic minor sound is certainly worth exploring.
In this video I am going to show you how to start using it, some of the things you can use to make lines and also how you can use it to get into some other great melodic minor sounds on other chords.
Hearing the sound in the chords
To have a place to use this, maybe take Autumn Leaves in G minor. (Sheet music)
In bars 7-8 there are two bars of tonic Gm.
A tonic minor chord is either a Gm6 or a GmMaj7 chord.
In a cadence that sounds like this:
Or like this:
In Autumn Leaves there is also a riff used on the Gm which is in fact a Gm6 arpeggio.
The Scale (The way we use it in Jazz🙂 )
A G minor melodic scale is G natural minor scale like G A Bb C D Eb F G where we change it so it has a maj6th and a maj7th:
G A Bb C D E F# G
If you play the scale it could be something like this:
In classical music, you use the melodic minor ascending and the natural minor descending.
That’s not how we do it in Jazz in part because that would mean that the one playing chords has to change the chord depending on the soloist playing descending or ascending melodies.
You can hear me play these two examples in the video if you want an idea about the difference:
Exploring the Harmony and the Sounds
If you want to improvise over a tonic minor chord then it is good to have the scale and also some arpeggios. Let’s start with the diatonic triads
So here we have the diatonic harmony of the scale in Triads: Gm Am Bbaug C D Edim F#dim Gm
In the example below I am using a Edim and D major triad pair over the Gm6 chord:
The great thing about Melodic Minor
A great aspect of Melodic minor is that the lines that fit one of the chords also mostly works over other sounds. In this way you can use a Gm6 line as an F#7 altered:
Or a Lydian dominant sound like this C7 backdoor dominant in D major:
A great progression for Melodic Minor: Minor Blues
You can also download the PDF of my examples here:
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.