Melodic Transitions Over Chord Sounds (Jazz and Grass Lick Breakdown)

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!