This one is a harmonized line, like you would find at the end of the tune "All of Me". In fact, it's exactly what I would play at the end of "All of Me"

The concept is simple, keep your melody note on the top, and put notes that sound the chord below it. Knowing a lot of chord voicings helps, but isn't completely necessary. You can get by if you know all of you drop 2 voicings in all of the inversions. The first bar are comprised entirely of Dm7 drop 2 voicings. I'm lucky that the melody only uses chord tones, so I didn't have to use any wonky voicings.

The next interesting thing I did happens over the first chord I play on bar 2. I decided to play a rootless Dm9 voicing, even though the chord is G7. This is a technique I use all the time when I'm soloing. I'm essentially substituting the ii chord for the V chord over the first half of the bar. The sounds are closely related. I look at Dm7 as a sort of G7sus4 sound. With that in mind, I can delay the resolution to that G7 sound for as long as I want. This helps with creating ideas that move across barlines.

The second chord in bar 2, is a rootles G13 voicing. If we're in the key of C, like we are here, I use this voicing all of the time if the top note is E over a G7 sound. You can do this over any V chord if the melody note sits on the 3rd. Quick sidebar, you should practice playing all of the common chords each note of the scale as the top note. This would be like playing a C major with C, D, E, F, G, A, and B as the top notes. Get used to those sounds, and find some shapes that are easy to grab. Then move on to D minor, and then E minor, then the rest of the common chords. This helps greatly when coming up with chord melody ideas. Having each note in the scale available with most of the common chord sounds.

The final chord is an Em11 voicing. I like quartal voicings, I like their open sound. To me, Em7 can function as a tonic chord in the key of C, and Em11 happens to contain a G note, so if we put that on top, we have the note we need. And it's an easy chord to grab. To quote the great Joe Pass, "I don't believe in playing anything that's real hard. If it's real hard, forget it."

This is a nice line to learn as an introduction to chord melody playing. Get familiar. Happy practicing.

Okay! This one has some interesting choices in it! The first four notes are all contained in the D minor triad. The spice here comes from string skipping. I'll jump at any chance I get to add some larger intervals into my lines, and triads while skipping notes is an easy way to do that.

The next four notes are essentially to set up the resolution to the first beat of the G7 chord. To me, D C# and C are all consonant notes over the D minor sound. When played in succession, that chromatic sound is something you hear all the time in jazz. The odd note out here is that Bb. It's found in the D minor or D harmonic minor scales, not D dorian or D melodic minor, which I would typically use over a minor chord with a ii function. So you can justify the note as fine over the D minor sound, but in my mind, it's just voice leading to the 3rd of the G7 chord, on beat 1 of bar 2. You could almost look at this four note grouping as one long enclosure. Side note, I try to explain my choices in multiple ways, in the hopes that one of them makes the concept click for you.

The line I played over the G7 chord starts on the 3rd, B, as the first note of a descending augmented triad (B G Eb). The Eb leads to a C#, which could change the chord to Ebaug7 or G7#5#11, but that's just semantics. Really, the 3rd and 4th notes of bar 2 are an enclosure to the D note. I like enclosures. I like to think less about where I am, and more about where I'm going.

From there it's just a simple diatonic line that resolves nicely on the 3rd of C major. As we saw with the lick from today, there are many of ways you can name the chords, chord sounds or scales you're using in your lines. Explore this when you're coming up with your own lines.

Get familiar. Happy Practicing.

Another simple line. However, there's still some hidden information in this lick, if you're looking for it. Over the C chord, I play straight C major pentatonic. This is a line you could use over any C major or A minor sound. It's not straight up or down the scale, there's a skip or two in there, so it's less predictable. There's also a stretch from the 5th fret to the 9th fret on the G-string. Not your typical pentatonic box.

The real spice of the lick is how you transition from the C major to the A7 chord. I set up the line so the last note I played over C major was a D. That resolves nicely to C-sharp, the 3rd of A7. We go from being clearly in a C-major tonality, to some sort of A dominant tonality. There are other lines I've played over these changes where I would wait until beat 3 to really signal that I'm playing A7, in which case, I could be substituting Em7 over the first half of the bar (which is the same as C-major, to me anyway), or substituting Em7b5 over the first half. That's pretty much just creating a minor ii-V in the key of D minor, which is where this line resolves to.

Melodically, over the A7, I'm just playing D harmonic minor scale(The same thing as A phrygian dominant, or A phrygian major, if you're a stickler about it), descending a diatonic 3rd, followed by an ascending diatonic 2nd. That's a device I use all the time. This pattern spits me out right on the 3rd of the D minor chord.

This line sounds like jazz to me because of how I'm transitioning over the chord sounds with my lines. Jazz doesn't have to be all chromatic and enclosure stuff. You can play a great line using just the diatonic pitches available over the chord sounds you're improvising over.

Get familiar. Happy practicing!

This one has a few things to unpack.

I feel like a broken record every time I say this, but this one, harmonically, is relatively simple. Over the Dm7b5 chord, I'm playing a line that I would have no problems playing over a static Fm. One thing you could take away, is when you see a half-diminished chord, think of it as a regular minor chord (or a m6 chord) a minor 3rd up. That is a less confusing concept for me to formulate ideas on.

The next thing I want to take a look is the directional groupings of notes. This is something I'm trying to be more mindful of. The groupings I see in this line are 2-2-3-2-3-5. That last grouping could be looked at as a 4 and a 1, but either way is fine for this experiment.

I encourage you to try clapping on the first note of each group. This creates a figure that I think would be nice as a comping rhythm. I'm always trying to hack different ways of creating lines. An interesting exercises would be to take your favorite comping rhythms and use that as the basis for creating a line with interesting groupings. They don't have to all be played in the same direction. If you look at what I played, the first three groupings are descending, the fourth grouping is ascending, and the final groupings are descending.

As always, experiment, find sounds you like, and explore those sounds thoroughly enough to incorporate them into your playing in a way.

Happy practicing!

This line is a prime example of how turns are used in the bebop language. At this lick's core, it's mostly just descending 3rds in F major, and a little bit of C7#9b9 a the end of the second bar. If you omit the first and second notes from the line, and play them as 8th notes, rather than 16th notes and you'll get the important notes.

You'll notice that the first note of each 16th note passage is always the same as the third note. The note in-between is what makes the turn happen. In this line, each in-between note is one scale degree higher. I choose my notes based on the chord sound I'm trying to convey. For the first two turns, that chord sound was G minor. You could think G dorian if you wanted, but I usually just think F major. (Side note, I don't particularly like to assign major scale modes to their related chords, I'd much rather just call it the ii sound in F major. I'll write a blog on how I conceptualize modes sometime soon, I promise). The last 16th note turn, I'm thinking C altered, which could come out of Db melodic minor, or C7#9b9.

Now, turns don't always follow this rule. You can pretty much do whatever you want. Experiment with different scale degrees, ascending, descending, 16th notes, 8th note triplets, really, anything you can come up with to create a sequence. You'll hear these sorts of things all the time when you listen to bebop players like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Familiarize yourself with turns.

Happy Practicing!

Hello, Friends

If you know me at all, as a musician, you know that I think a strong sense of rhythm and time is either close to, or at the very top of the list of most important things as to have as a musician. And the most effective way to develop this skill, is with a metronome. 

It's not interesting, glamorous, or even any fun at all, but it is extremely effective. I was doing a lesson with a student, and the subject of metronome came up again (as it often does, in any lesson with me), and something clicked. When I would practice for my own personal study, I used the metronome a lot, but I would also create drum loops to play a long with. 

This gave me the feel of actually making a little bit of music when I would practice. Now, I'm not saying that you should throw your metronome in the trash (or delete the app from your phone), not at all. I think that at least 20 percent of your practice with rhythm and time (and nearly all music has rhythm and time, so this means every single time you practice), you should use the metronome. I'm not basing this on any facts or statistics, but I think there's something to be said about being able to play accurately with a metronome. However, playing with some drums can be interesting and a fun way to stay engaged during your practice sessions.

I've included a link to some simple drum loops at varying tempi (the correct Italian pluralization of the word 'tempo', as far as I've discovered) for you to play along with. All 100% free. 

I sincerely hope this helps make your practice time a little bit more enjoyable. 

Drum Tracks

-Lyman