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Improvising Over Chord Changes


V7#5b9

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The following free resource material comes from Richie Zellon’s YouTube channel and his personal website. I think it will clear up any misconceptions one might still have about jazz improvisation. Even if you are not into jazz and improvisation, you may still find the information interesting and enlightening.

Overview Of Special Considerations…

I.  We must have a proper understanding of all the chord-scale relationships within the harmonic progression we wish to improvise over. In brief, this means we must understand the function of each note in a scale in relationship to its offspring chords as well as the overall tonality at hand (e.g. major, minor, modal, etc).

Remember all notes fit into one of 2 categories: harmonic tones and non-harmonic tones. To summarize:

A. Harmonic Tones include all chord tones and upper extensions diatonic to the scale of the moment.

B. Non-Harmonic Tones include any “avoid notes” diatonic to the scale of the moment and all non-diatonic chromatic notes.

II. When we improvise a melodic line we are dealing with both a vertical and horizontal relationship to the current harmonic progression. The development of a good sounding phrase fully depends on an understanding of how these 2 aspects within your line interact with the moving chords.

VERTICAL: When improvising over a given chord we should be primarily focused on outlining the most important harmonic tones of its mother scale. Thus our melodic line for most of the time takes on the shape of a gradually ascending and descending vertical structure also known as melodic contour. A good example of a vertical structure would be a 7th chord arpeggio.

HORIZONTAL: A good example of horizontal movement takes place whenever we play a scale or any succession of notes in step-wise motion. Therefore, unless we are playing lines consisting exclusively of 3rds or larger intervals, there is an ongoing balance of horizontal and vertical movement in our melodies. However note that at the point of  transition from one chord to another , our primary focus usually shifts from vertical to horizontal as we must connect both structures in a seamless linear fashion. This is what is referred to as voice leading and is best accomplished by resolving to the closest guide tone (ie. 3rd or 7th) of the new chord. Consequently the smoothest transitions employ step-wise motion.

The following videos constitute a four-part tutorial on how to use “The Jazz Guitarists Signature Series” to expand your improvisational vocabulary. You will undoubtedly see that improvisation goes beyond the simple memorization of licks and the plug-and-play idea. There is even an element of spontaneity in it, but for the most part, it comes from what you learn in the practice room. 

 

 

 

 

 

If you had the patience and tenacity to come this far in this post, I’ll throw at you one more video as an example of phrases (licks) deconstruction and usage.

 

 

All this material is available for free, and I’m sure it will complement any improvisation study materials you may already have, like the ones recommended by Steve. If however, you find your materials insufficient in some areas, Richie has an excellent, college level, two-volume series on improvisation.

Edited by V7#5b9
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