The Maestro

It seems to me that one of the biggest hurdles beginner jazz guitarists face when it comes to comping is getting away from the bulky barre chords we all memorize when we first start playing. You know, the “all you have to do is lift up your pinky to get a minor 7th” kind of chords. It’s very hard to get to a point where you start playing less to actually say more.

The smallest number of notes you can play on your own to play any kind of harmony is to notes which, when played together, is known as a dyad.

In the world of jazz guitar, dyads are a great way to keep the soundscape open while still maintaining some semblance of a harmony. Especially if you are playing with another harmonic instrument (e.g. piano, vibes) you need to keep your chords tight and light.

And so, today we’re going to work on a few ideas to improve your comping using our little friends the dyads.

Will Any Old Notes Do?

No. Let’s talk about that first. I mean, technically the answer is “yes,” but if you want to sound like you know what you’re doing you should consider targeting the “right” notes. For example, when playing a standard 7th chord (root, 3rd, 5th, 7th) you will probably want your dyad to be comprised of the 3rd and 7th. These two notes will define the larger character of the chord; meaning, I’m not worried about altered tones at the moment.

So to start I want you to pick a song — or I’ll pick for you; how about There Will Never Be Another You — and figure out the dyads for each chord in the ‘A’ section.

Go ahead… I’ll wait until your done.

(Yes, this is the part when you actually have to do some work on your own. Don’t be a slacker!)

The Dyads

Here is the chord progression:

EbMaj7 / / /  |  / / / /  |  Dm7b5 / / /  |  G7 / / /  |  Cm7 / / /  |  / / / /  |  Bbm7 / / /  |  Eb7 / / /  |
AbMaj7 / / /  |  Db7 / / /  |  EbMaj7 / / /  |  Cm7 / / /  |  F7 / / /  |  / / / /  |  Fm7 / / /  |  Bb7 / / /  |

And… here are the dyads for each chord:

EbMaj7: G, D
Dm7b5: F, C
G7: B, F
Cm7: Eb, Bb
Bbm7: Db, Ab
Eb7: G, Db
AbMaj7: C, G
Db7: F, Cb
EbMaj7: G, D
Cm7: Eb, Bb
F7: A, Eb
Fm7: Ab, Eb
Bb7: D, Ab

Figuring out the dyads were really Assignment #1, but I know you all cheated so we’ll give you another first assignment.

Assignment #1

On the guitar, take each set of adjacent two strings (E/A, A/D, D/G, D/B, B/E) and play all of the dyads. Only play all of the dyads on each string group separately; don’t combine them.

Assignment #2

One you have done this on all five string group combinations, play the inversions. For example, on the EbMaj7 where you were playing the G note on the low E string and the D note on the A string, now I want you to reverse them.

Assignment #3

Now, what I want you to do is connect the chords together using the least amount of voice movement you can. For example, for the first two dyads, it’s best to keep the same interval and just move the whole dyad down a whole step; the G from the EbMaj7 move to the F of the Dm7b5, and the D from the EbMaj7 moves to the C.

For the next chord, however, it’s better to invert the dyad. Doing so allows you to keep the F as a common note between the two chords and move the C from the Dm7b5 moves to B (the 3rd of the G7).

The more common notes you can keep between chords, the less work you have to do, and the better you will sound. (Trust me, you will.)

Assignment #4

Now that you have some inversion ideas down, try to stay in one area of the fingerboard and utilize all five string groups to comp your way through the entire ‘A’ section. Feel free to take a few chords an octave higher or lower to break things up. (Remember, when comping behind someone you want to stay out of their range, so don’t just jump around the octaves for the hell of it. But you should try it to understand the principle.)

Assignment #5

Here’s where it gets fun. Don’t confine yourself to adjacent-string groups anymore. You still obviously want to only play dyads, but try widening the intervals a bit by skipping a few strings in between notes. Repeat the previous assignments using this new fingering.

Assignment #6

At this point I think it’s safe for you to use more than just the 3rd and 7th notes of the chord. For m7b5 chord, try using the b5 and the 7 as your dyads. For altered dominants, try the 3rd or 7th and one of the altered tones (b5, #b, b9, #9). Bear in mind, however, that when you finally start to play with other musicians (keep reading…) you will want to keep your chords simple so you and the person you’re backing up aren’t tripping all over each other.

Assignment #7

Stop sitting in your bedroom playing by yourself. Using dyads will make you a better comper, but if you are playing by yourself then you’ll never really “get” it. Go out and find someone to comp behind. That’s when you’ll really put your practice to the test and see how dyads work.

A surefire way to kickstart your comping and get to the next level is to remove yourself from those Doobie Brothers chords you’ve been playing your whole life. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be jazz! Just think of how insanely awesome your death metal band would sound if you were comping instead of riffing and playing dyads instead of drop-tune power chords?

Good luck!

Better Comping With Dyads is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

These are not the roots you're looking for.

It’s fun chord Friday here on Fretterverse! I can’t believe how long it’s been since we’ve broken out the staff paper and done some actual guitar work. I hope you had a chance to digest and start working on yesterday’s phrasing exercise. Though you should continue with the phrasing work from yesterday, today we’re going to go back to my favorite subject.

One thing that I love about jazz is the variety of tonal colors coming from the harmony instruments. A good comper will never play the exact same thing twice in the same song, very unlike rock and roll. It’s this variety that adds the spice to the soup and makes for a very tasty tune.

And so with that in mind we’re going to look at a concept that I call “root substitutions.” The general premise here is to substitute the note of a chord – in this case, the root (duh!) – with another note in order to give your comping a much more interesting sound.

How interesting? Well, that part is up to you. All I can do is give you hints and suggestions. I will tell you that these chord subs, along with a very nice looking, wide-brimmed, red velvet pimp hat, will make you the coolest player ever! Since I’m all out of hats, I’ll have to help you with the chords.

First, a few concepts. In jazz, frequently the person providing the harmony will raise the 4th note of the major chord scale in order to give a Lydian sound. So we’re going to do the same thing. Throughout the examples we’ll be playing in the key of C Major but raising the ‘F’ notes to ‘F#’ for a Lydian sound. Do not get confused! We are not playing in the key of D Major, as much as your ear and brain may want to think that way. We’re still playing in C Major but using a Lydian sound.

The basic chords we’ll be using are standard diatonic 7th chords with the 5th removed, working on the 5-4-3 string group (A, D, G strings). Here is the first chord:

As I said, no 5th. Taking out the 5th will open up the chord’s sound a bit. With this structure in mind, and taking the #11 substitution into consideration, here are all of the chords in C Major:

As you play through the examples, again, remember that we’re in C Major. The second chord is going to sound like a D7, which technically speaking it is, but you have to think in terms of C. If it helps, use a backing track to play a walking bass line in C to help get the sound in your head. You can take the root note of each chord and displace them up an octave to help avoid register clashes with the bass:

Try both of those on the 5-4-3 string group and get the sound into your ear. When you have done this a few times, go back to the first set of chords and substitute the root note of each chord with the next note of the C Major scale (keeping in mind the #11).

As you can see, in the first chord we substituted the root – ‘C’ – with the next higher note of a C Major scale – ‘D’. The next chords replaces ‘D’ with ‘E’, and the next chord replaces ‘E’ with ‘F#’. What I love about these substitutions is that the typical guitar chord intervals are changed to give us more piano-like voicings instead. I much prefer these sounds to the ones created by the typical block chord.

But, everyone’s mileage may vary. If these chords are way too hip for your elbow-patched blazer, you can displace the new root of each chord up an octave as well:

A tad bit too much on the Masterpiece Theater for my taste, but it’s better to have all of these chords available in your mental chord dictionary.

Once you’ve practiced this chord substitution for a while, you can move the entire chord structures up an octave. This may end up sounding much better when a bass player is present. Obviously, you want to be able to play all of these chord ideas in every key and in every area of the fingerboard. You can also start to add more substitutions to hip the chords up even more – especially on the V7 chords of each key.

Bottom line? Experiment and have fun!

Chord Hacks: Root Substitutions is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

I'd like some 2% 4th chords, please.

As I have discussed in previous posts, traditional harmony/theory constructs chords in intervals of a third. There is another type of chord construction that is quite common in jazz, called “quartal harmony” or sometimes better known as “4th chords.”

Quartal harmony is most commonly associated with the modal jazz of the late 1950′s and 60′s. For those of you who have ever heard the greatest jazz recording ever made – Miles Davis‘ Kind of Blue – you are already familiar with the sound.

Quartal harmony and 4th chords translate extremely well to the guitar, making anyone who plays them an instant multi-platinum record selling artist and put on the Grammy short list. (It’s true, just ask Lil’ Wayne; he’ll tell ya.)

Let’s hip ourselves to a little modal jazz and quartal harmony, shall we?

Would you rather I throw one of these wrenches at you instead?

One of the great aspects of 4th chords is their slightly ambiguous/rootless quality. Because they don’t contain any tension notes such as the 3rd and 7th in a traditional chord, they have something of a more mysterious and aloof sound to them (to my ears, anyway). To form 4th chords, simply stack a chord using intervals of a 4th. Here is what they look like in D:

Now, I’m hoping you played through this example before continuing to read, because I purposely threw a wrench into the works. Did you figure out what it was? If not, please go back, play through the chords, and think about the concept for a minute. See if you can figure it out. It’s a great exercise for your brain.

You should have noticed that some of these chords are not built in perfect fourth intervals. The third chord, for example, has the notes Bb to E, which is a tritone/augmented 4th, not a perfect fourth (which should be Eb). So why are we not using perfect fourths? The answer is because we’re playing music, not engaging in theoretical discussions about music. You always have to keep in mind that it has to sound right just as much (if not more) as be right from an academic standpoint. If you are playing a quartal harmony vamp in ‘D’ the Eb will probably not sound very good. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t. It’s up to you to figure out what is appropriate and go from there. In most modal songs the E natural note will most likely sound better, so your chord will include the tritone from Bb to E and then stack the ‘A’ note as a perfect fourth above ‘E’. Read that again if it doesn’t make sense, especially the part about playing music.

Quartal Harmony Comping

Now when we comp, as mentioned in several other posts, we don’t necessarily want to play thick chords with lots of voices. This muddies up the music and makes it difficult for the soloist to stretch out. For that reason, we can remove the root voice of each chord and only play the three upper voices, like this:

The sound is essentially the same, but it breathes a little better.

Chord Inversions

One very cool feature of these chords occurs when you start to use inversions. By taking the bottom note of each chord and transposing it up one octave, you create some very hip chord voicings that you can use in your comping.

Definitely play these voicings over a ‘D’ bass vamp and listen to how they sound. The 2nd intervals sound great to me, very pianistic in nature. You can also experiment with a second inversion, moving what is now the bottom note up an octave as well. (Figure this out on your own, folks. I want to keep your brains actively working.)

You don’t have to only play these chords over modal tunes, by the way. These chords also sound great as substitutes for many minor chords, especially minor 11 chords. Again, let your ear guide you; if it sounds good then use it. If not, modify it. If that still doesn’t work, throw it out and do something else.

That is, in a nutshell, the concept of 4th chords and playing quartal harmony. I suggest you get some modal playalong tunes (or use Band in a Box) and go to town for a while. Also experiment with moving voices in each chord so you’re not just clunking chord after chord. If you have not heard Kind of Blue, buy it and absorb it. If you don’t know who McCoy Tyner is, now is the time to start thinking about non-guitarists for a spell.

4th Chords and Quartal Harmony is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

(1 = high E string, 2 = B string, 3 = G string, etc…)

1234
1235
1236
1245
1246
1256
1345
1346
1356
1456
2345
2346
2356
2456
3456

That’s certainly a lot of string group combinations, so for the time being I want to concentrate on only one group – 2345; we’re going to make this as simple as possible. So, in using the 2345 group that means we’re only going to play chords using the B, G, D, and A strings. This is the most comfortable playing area of the guitar. (We’ll go beyond this a bit later.)

The guitar poses another unique problem (in addition to only having six strings). Unlike the piano, playing large chords (7th chords, 9th chords, etc…) while retaining their original note stacking in thirds is incredibly difficult to do. The arm and hand just aren’t capable of spreading wide enough to accommodate these notes, given the fact that guitars are tuned in 4ths (the exception being the major 3rd tuning between the ‘G’ and ‘B’ strings). Because of this, the guitar is perfectly suited for playing the chords in inversions.

Let’s start in the key of C, using a CMaj7 chord. The stacked version of this chord is C, E, G, B. On the guitar, this chord would be played:

(If you don’t know how to read chord charts like this one, you can do some Internet searching and find out. It’s pretty easy.)

Okay, so there is a CMaj7 chord. Simple enough, right? Well, what happens if you want to play an F#m7 to C#7 progression?

This is a bit difficult, don’t you think? Especially at fast tempos.

So, the solution is to use chord inversions to make the fingerings more accessible. But, we don’t just want to put the root of the chord on the top and try to stack the rest; you’d end up with the same problem. What we want to do is figure out the easiest (and best-sounding) way to voice the chords on the guitar. Going back to our CMaj7 example (C, E, G, B) we can voice the chord this way:

From lowest string to highest the notes are C, G, B, and E. By simply changing around the order the notes of the chord are positioned, you get an easy-to-play chord with the interval of a fifth from the bottom, which as I said in my last article is a very strong sound to the listener.

Cool, so play this chord a few times and get used to the sound.

Okay, that’s enough. Now what we want to do is figure out how to play the inversions of this chord using the 2345 string group. To do this, you take the first note (in this case we’ll start on the ‘C’ note on the A string) and find the closest chord tone. The closest chord tone from C is ‘E’. Since we have to stay on the A string, the logical answer would be to play this ‘E’ on the 9th fret. Continuing with this method for the other three notes, you end up with this voicing:

You may have to switch your fingers around so it’s more comfortable, but what we have now is the first inversion of a CMaj7 chord (since the first chord we played had the ‘C’ as the lowest/root note, going to the next note of ‘E’ makes it first inversion). The order of notes is now E, B, C, and G.

Continuing on to the next inversion we get:

And finishing up with the last inversion:

Since the last inversion (7th in the bass) starts at the twelfth fret, you can technically move this down an octave – using the open G string – and play the same chord an octave lower.

There you have it; a CMaj7 chord in all inversions using the 2345 string group. It’s quite simple, actually. The hard part is committing these voicings to memory so you don’t really have to think about where they are on the fretboard. The reason these voicings are so important is that it allows you to not only introduce fresh sounds into your playing, but it also allows you to play in position so you don’t have to continuously shift up and down the neck to play chords.

If I may be so inclined as to assign homework, what I would like for you to do now is apply the same principles for the CMaj7 chord to the following string groups:

3456
1234
1235
2346

These are the ‘major’ string groups, and if you can master them you’ll have no problem playing most styles of music. I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve already mastered the power chord. One thing to remember is that every chord and string group is not going to necessarily start on the root of the chord. We were lucky (coincidence?) that the lowest chord tone of a CMaj7 on the 2345 string group family was ‘C’; you won’t be so lucky with the other string groups. I’ll give you a hint, for the 3456 string group, the first CMaj7 chord you’ll be figuring out is the first inversion (‘E’ is the lowest note), which starts on the second fret of the D string.

To be honest, this will take you quite a while. It’s certainly not easy, but the payoff is tremendous. Once you have a firm grasp of the CMaj7 chord, you need to then figure out ALL of the Maj7 chords (C#Maj7, F#Maj7, BMaj7, EMaj7, AMaj7, etc…). This will be significantly easier once you have the chord structures for the Maj7 chord committed to memory, but it will take some time to remember which note each chord starts on. Hey… no one said this stuff was going to be a cake walk (on Easy Street…).

Great, so it’s now a year later, and you can finally play the Maj7 chord in all keys and inversions using the five major string group families. Think you’re done? Um… no. You need to apply the same principles to min7, dom7, min7b5, and diminished chords next. This should be a bit easier, as you only have to change one or two notes from one chord to the next to get the different tonalities.

Some Thought Nuggets

I know this is a lot of work. Believe me, I still struggle with these chords and inversions every day myself; not to mention having to deal with altered dominant chords like dom7#5#9 or min11 chords. It’s a lifelong process. The good news is that after a while this work actually becomes fun. Trying to figure out what voicings sound good together is a matter of personal taste, and helps to give you an original voice. All of the great players (jazz or otherwise) have certain harmonic devices that they use which makes them sound unique. What will your devices be?

There are two more important points that I want to make. I want you to let these thoughts percolate for a while, and then next time you play/jam try to see how you can apply them. Firstly, keep in mind that you don’t always have to play all of the notes of the chord. Quite often jazz players, for example, will only play the 3rd and 7ths of each chord. Other times they may leave the 5th of the chord out. In the cases of extended voice chords (13ths, #11 chords, etc…) you won’t be able to play all of the chord tones using the four-finger method. In these cases you need to think about what chord tones are the most important. For example, when I play the blues I often like to play a Bb13 chord instead of the stock Bb7 chord. The common voicing for the Bb13 chord in root position is this:

It’s an easy chord to play, and it sounds great. The notes of this voicing from lowest to highest are Bb (the root), Ab (the 7th), D (the 3rd), and E (the 13th). The fifth isn’t really necessary in this case, and most of the time when playing a 13th chord you would substitute the 13th for the 5th anyway. That being said, however – and coming into the second point I want to address – why do I need to play the Bb note? I mean, most of the time I’m playing with a bass player, and if he’s doing his job correctly he’s walking through that Bb enough for the both of us. In that particular situation, is it really necessary to ALSO play the Bb? Probably not. In fact, by NOT playing the Bb you actually open up the sound quite a bit and prevent the sound from becoming too “bottomy.”

So by taking out the root we arrive at this voicing:

It’s very “hip” sounding, and in conjunction with a bass player walking through Bb7 (or a bass player even just riding the Bb note) it leaves a lot of open space for everyone else.

With this method now you can go back to all of the original chord structure work you just did and try playing chords by taking out certain notes. Also try exchanging extended range chord tones with others. So, replace the 3rd of a chord with the #11th, or replace the root with the 9th, etc… You will see your chord vocabulary grow exponentially, and your musicality will also increase tenfold in no time!

One last thing and I’ll give your brains a rest. Let’s go back to the last chord example we used – the Bb13 with the root taken out:

As you work through your chords, you may (hopefully) notice that this particular voicing is the same as playing an E7#9 chord without its root. The E7#9 chord looks like this:

Take out the root (in this case the ‘E’ on the A string) and you have the same exact chord as the Bb13 with no root. The “killing two birds with one stone” mantra applies greatly here, as you now have access to two chords using the same voicing – both with no root and therefore more open for the rest of the band to play with. You should go through all of your chords with this idea in mind and see how many you can come up with.

That’s about it for this lesson. The more I work on these ideas and commit them to paper, the more ideas I have for future articles. As always, please honor me with feedback and suggestions so I know if this information is helping and what else you would like to see.

Enjoy!

Chord Hacks: Chord Structures for Guitar is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

I thought it would be fun to share a few of my favorites with you and, hopefully, get you to share a few of your favorites with me.

So, here they are, in no particular order; my 5 favorite chords:

1. F#Maj7#11

For me, at least, this was the chord heard ’round the world. It’s the opening chord of Rush’s “Hemispheres” and completely knocked me on my ass the first time I heard it. There’s nothing overly special about it, but the added #11 from the open B string just locks this chord into sexyville for me.


2. Am7add11

One of my new favorites, I’ve been using this chord a lot in writing material for the new Din Within CD. This is a great chord to vamp with and move up and down the neck for different sounds.


3. CMaj9#11

I call this the “Wayne Krantz” chord. It’s the only chord I’ve heard him play that I can figure out. Put
just a little bit of gain on your amp, turn your volume pot down a smidge, and let this chord rip!


4. Min9/Maj7

This is a general-utility comping chord. If you play it with your pinky on the 9th scale degree, it’s a great minor 9th chord voicing (pinky on the ‘B’ note sounds great as an Am9 chord). If it’s played on the 7th scale degree, it’s also a great Maj7 chord (pinky on the ‘B’ note sounds great as a CMaj7 chord).


5. Ab 6/9

Not sure why I like the sound of this chord in Ab more than any other key, but that’s how I roll.

Chord Hacks: My 5 Favorite Chords is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

Chord Hacks: Multi-Use Chord Voicings is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

Chord Hacks: Blues Chord Comping from Fretterverse on Vimeo.

Chord Hacks: Intermediate Blues Chord Comping is a post from: Fretterverse.com: Guitar Blog | guitar news & reviews, amps, effects, guitars, music theory, guitar lessons. If you are reading this on a site that is not Fretterverse.com, it's been ripped. Please come to the real Fretterverse.com.

Let’s start with the most basic of four-string chords, the CMaj7 chord from the 2345 string group. You’ve all seen it before, but for the sake of completeness I’ll show it again:

We’re changing the order of tones around to facilitate the guitar’s tuning – instead of playing C E G B we’re playing C G B E. Same notes, just a different order.

Chord Inversions

And so where do we go from here? If we are playing a piece of music that has a CMaj7 chord for 8 bars, just playing your one stock voicing is going to get very boring, very quickly. To keep the music alive you should probably think about playing different kinds of CMaj7 chords. The easiest way to do that is to play an inversion of the chord you’re currently playing.

To do this, simply start on each note in the chord you’re playing and move that finger up to the next note in the chord:

• C moves up to E
• G moves up to B
• B moves up to C
• E moves up to G

It’s the same exact chord, just played in a different note order and in the 5th position instead of the 3rd. Here is the new CMaj7 chord:

There are two more inversions we can do with this chord on the 2345 string group:

Now, just with the 2345 string group alone, there are four chords you can play instead of just the original CMaj7.

Vary the String Groups

This can be easily repeated with both the 1234 and 3456 string groups. 3456 will most likely sound a bit too muddy if you are playing with a group (as opposed to playing solo or backing up a singer or solo instrument). The fun, however, is what you come up with when you work through some of the other string groups. Groups 1235 and 2346 start to create more interesting sounds although they are still pretty tame. It’s when you get into string groups such as 1245, 2356, 1346, etc… that things get truly interesting. Here are the CMaj7 chords from the 2356 string group:

Try playing them yourself and see how they sound. You’re probably going to need to use the fingers of your right hand to pluck the chord rather than strumming with a pick, and you may want to try it with a clean tone first to hear all of the notes and their intervallic relationships.

Putting it Into Practice

To go a bit further with the example, I’m going to take the first 8 bars of the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” (which I’ve been exploring more deeply in my own practice) and create a very simple chord melody using the 1245 string group. The goal here is not to create a masterpiece of music, but to explore the different chord voicings and inversions that are available to me. I’m going to put a chord on virtually every melody note, which doesn’t necessarily sound great, but maximizes my tonal possibilities. First, a lead sheet of the first 8 bars:

Now, the simple chord melody of the 1245 string group (click image for larger view):

Notice that in some places I had to shift the chord up or down an octave in order to accommodate the guitar’s range. This can obviously be modified in a “real” setting by simply varying the string groups you use – no one says you have to play everything in just one group, after all!

Move the Melody

To make things even more interesting, take the melody out of the top string (in this case, the high E string) and play it on all of the other strings. In essence you are building four different chord melodies for each string group. We just did the first one with the melody on the E string; now we will do the same thing with the melody on the B, D, and A strings. It may be hard to hear the melody at first, especially on the B and D strings, so it might help to sing along with the melody to help it stand out.

You should also try to see if you can get the melody string to stand out so its not overshadowed by the volume of the higher strings. This is a challenge, but worth the effort.

Without further adieu, here is the second chord melody with the melody on the B string (click image for larger view):

I’ve given you two, and there are two more. I wondering if perhaps you should try to figure them out on your own? (hint, hint)

Experiment, Play, and Have Fun

I have written lots of song ideas using different chord groups, spiced up some monotonous song ideas, and even brought some new life to old cover songs during jam sessions. It’s not just a question of “learning tons of chords” and arbitrarily throwing them into a song just for the sake of variety. It’s about listening to what’s going on around you and trying to fill in the gaps where appropriate.

Homework?

I am allowed to give homework on a blog? Well, I’m going to anyway. Go to the second 8 bars of All The Things You Are and work out a chord melody using the 1245 string group. Put the melody in all voices (so you’ll be working on four chord melodies) and see what you come up with. Here are the next 8 bars:

You can probably stop at bar 7 unless, of course, you want to do more than just the next 8 bars. I don’t grade on a curve, and extra credit is always acceptable.

Have Fun!

I’ll be honest, this stuff isn’t easy, at least not for me. Sometimes it takes me a VERY long time to get them down. I’ll give you a piece of advice: Don’t spend all of your time writing these out in hopes to be able to sightread them later. If you want to write them out, fine, but you should spend the majority of your time learning them on your guitar and not notating them on paper; that method tends to distract from the learning process.

Most importantly, have fun with it! This is guitar playing after all, the greatest hobby around, so enjoy the time you spend learning and jamming!

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