The RIGHT Way to Improvise with CHORD TONES for Better Solos

Everybody, Jeff Schneider, here, you know, when they

improvise

the solo and hit that note that makes everyone cringe. What if when you listen to your recordings it ever sounds like a random, sloppy mess of note noodles? Believe me, I've been there and I want to tell you how I improved and how I've helped my students improve too. The short answer is to practice improvising with

chord

tones

only now. If you've heard this before, keep watching because I'm not just going to do it. To explain the reasons why improvising with

chord

tones

is beneficial, but I'll also show you how to do it

right

because unfortunately, when many

improvise

rs are given this advice, they end up sounding a little basic, so let's get into it.

Many jazz programs in schools and camps and almost all of them put a huge emphasis on learning scales and modes, but for some reason the teachers completely overlooked the pedagogical method of improvising only with chord tones and just to be clear with chord tones. I am referring to the root, third, fifth and seventh of the chords within any given progression. Now I'm not going to say that all scales are bad, they have their ways in learning to improvise, but if you focus on the chord tones first, you will have a It is much easier to play notes that line up with the chord changes, for example.

For example, if we take a basic C major seven chord and play a C major scale over it, you will see here that not all degrees of the scale are equally stable, there is a spectrum of consonants and dissonance the most consonant note is the root followed of the fifth third and seventh the second and sixth don't sound bad but they are not as fundamental to the sound of the chord as one three five and seven and then there is that annoying little fourth it is often known as the note to avoid because it clashes with the third, which is only half a tone away.

My point is that some notes will

better

represent the chord in question than others, don't get me wrong, those non-chord tones can still sound good. The truth is that any note can sound good played over any chord, some are less user friendly than others, it's like taking a photo with your phone versus a fancy DSLR camera if you don't know anything about shutter speed, aperture and ISO. You're much more likely to get the image you want by simply using your camera app to make an analogy with the analogy. Buying a fancy camera before learning the fundamentals of photography is like getting into a Ferrari without knowing how to drive, but again, there's nothing wrong with scales.

It's just that when you're a beginning improviser or even a more experienced improviser, learning a difficult melody and worrying about scales can be counterproductive, especially when you consider how many scale options there are - it's a ridiculous amount of notes to remember when you're trying to improvise a solo. , I recommend not overloading your circuits and instead focusing on the four nodes that really capture the sound of the chord root, third, fifth and seventh. Another great benefit of sticking to those chord tones is that by clearly outlining each chord, you'll

better

internalize the sound of the changes.

It's one thing to understand the theory behind a series of chords on an intellectual level, but having the sound of a progression ingrained in your ear is what will help you think better about a solo. Listening to your way through a solo is the difference between having an effortless conversation with your best friend and a stilted conversation with that guy you see once every six years, but like I said before, even if you learn to improvise on a melody by limiting yourself to chords The tones make a lot of sense, most people don't sound that good when they try to do it, why?

Well, there are a couple of reasons when you remove all those extra notes, which exposes many people's lack of phrasing, timing and rhythm. taken my courses knows my spiel about how you can play all the latest note combinations you want if your timing and phrasing rhythm aren't

right

everything falls apart my favorite reason to limit yourself to chord tones is that limitations breed creativity look, I know. It's a challenge to come up with something with only four notes, but I promise you that if you accept that challenge and succeed, your playing will be much better when you reduce non-chord tones.

You know who I think would agree with me. Ernest Hemingway. in the 1920s the author was rumored to have taken on a similar challenge. The story goes that Hemingway's colleagues bet him that he couldn't write a complete story in just six words, to which he responded that they were selling never-worn baby shoes, fortunately improvising with chord tones. It's much less depressing than Hemingway's flash fiction exercise, but many improvisers still sound a little sad when they play

solos

with just chord tones. One of the main reasons is that when most improvisers think about chord tones they end up playing this kind of thing, it's a boring arpeggio. increase the voice of the root position of the chord, so what should you do instead?

Here are some tips. Be comfortable not starting your lines at the root of the chord. It is predictable and provides less color than chord tones such as the third and seventh, both of which are literally referred to. as color tones you can also practice chord inversions a triad is usually played like this one three five which is called root position but you can also play the same three notes like this three five one which is the first inversion or like this five one three seconds investment to summarize, don't start your sentences on that one. The same rule applies to rhythm.

Starting your sentences on beat one is also predictable. Get comfortable with the other beats to the extent that you could start on beat two, three or four, how about the ending? of two, at the end of three or at the end of four, there are many more possibilities, but those options I mentioned are a good place to start, no pun intended, now here is another tactic, change direction and jump in the examples that I played before, the lines go up linearly. a series of consecutive ascending chord tones, but when you start zig-zagging and skipping adjacent chord tones, you open yourself up to many more possibilities.

Also, you don't need to play all four chord tones on each chord. It's a simple reminder, but sometimes we forget. that it's okay to use a subset of the few options available Finally, the most important tip of all is to think and play compositionally, how do you come up with a solo that is melodic and not one that ends up sounding like that sloppy mess of noodles my answer is always the same repetition and variation. I go deeper into this concept in my course making the changes, but in this video I want to do a breakdown of the composition, if you will, of a chord tone solo that I wrote about the jazz standard, there will never be one.

Be another, let's look at examples of repetition and variation, as well as examples of other strategies and techniques I've covered so far. By the way, this piece is from a new studio collection I just published called Chord Tone Magic 12 Chord Tone. Studies on popular chord progressions, we'll help you internalize the sound of progressions and give you lots of ideas on how to create chord tone lines that are really melodic and interesting, so here's the study. There will never be another. Let's start with it. listening to the first 16 bars, that's the first half of the form, bye, okay, so let's do a little analysis, let's take a look at some of the compositional devices that I've used here specifically related to repetition and variation.

So we'll start with seven and then we'll go down to three and then we'll repeat it several times, so seven up to three, seven up to three and then it's a little bit different here if you take a look at rhythmic variation between this this and this the three are a little different rhythmically but because the pitches are the same there is enough repetition to keep it in a group or a coherent idea so it sounds like this one one two three four one and then in D minor seven flat five that D half diminished right here we vary the phrase and we go like this, so we go from this to this the pitches start to vary at this point, but the general shape of the line is intact, we're We're still making that pretty big jump down there.

Okay, so we have the five flat D minor seven flat five that D half diminished and then we're going to hang on the G a little bit one one one one seven flat remember these. are all chord tones and then look at this, we go back to that original shape by going down a fifth, so from D to G that we had here, that's a fifth and now we have the same interval from G to C, which is also a fifth i . I'm really trying to use repetition here to make this feel like a coherent solo and not just a random mess of notes.

Now the rhythm is altered again. We have this slight variation, this eighth note here followed by the fourth and then another octave. a pretty common rhythm sounds like this one two three four very good now we're going to build off of that idea and do it again here adding this little catcher note which is the flat third of the chord again just chord tones, but we're going to repeat that same one rhythm and I feel like this one echoes what we just heard, so let me change the colors here so you can see what I'm talking about, so doubt, what's so similar about those two lines?

Well, specifically it's the endings. of the lines these lines rhyme I like to talk about lines that rhyme I will make another video on that in the future on how to rhyme your lines just like the lyrics rhyme but we have this full step down here and then the same full step down Come on we have this pickup here sounds like this, okay, we're anticipating the three of a flat major seven, but what I think is interesting about this pickup here is that it's the same rhythm that we had in this line and in this line. here, but instead of the line going down like it does here and here we go up, so we have a little bit of contrast, some balance in the direction of the phrases and another thing I'm thinking about here with this. c which is held for three beats, this flat major seven is a kind of arrival chord, it is a resolved chord, especially compared to the B flat minor seven and the E flat seven, both chords have some tension because they essentially lead to this.

The destination is a flat major seven, so the fact that we hold the note with that C we hold it for a little longer, which adds to that feeling of arrival, the next notes are similar to the ones we started with that downward jump that The interval going down also balances what we just heard, the line goes up here and then down here, now to E flat major 7, we have this G repeated again, which will set up this dramatic up octave jump by the The way these repeated g's are not very different from what we had here.

I don't think I was consciously thinking about relating those two bars, but it's related anyway, but yeah, we have this dramatic jump into the octave, this thing here lands on the floor. C minor 3 7. and if I play all of this from behind or at least from this point here, you'll hear each of these phrases build up to this point here, so I know I've written a lot about music here, but I'm going Let's play starting at this point and try to hear the relationship between each of these little melodic cells, starting from the pickup to the B flat minor seven one. two three each of these lines is born out of what came before and then we'll continue with this idea in a moment, but we're going to do some more elegant things here because we've done a lot of slower melodic movements. the rhythm has been a little less active in the previous four bars or so, when we move on to the next line that comes here, there's a lot of activity there and what that's going to do, I hate to blurt out here, but what is it? ?

What we're going to do is set this resolution up very, very well, so just as we had that dramatic change right here, that dramatic arrival, we're going to have an even more dramatic arrival when we resolve the G in E flat major 7. which is measure 17 in the middle of the melody, but let's look at this line here, it's all chord tones, but I'm trying to change the chord inversions, I'm zigzagging like I was talking about before, uh, let's look at it, it sounds like This I'll play from the pickup starting right here a one two three so that the final resolution is very satisfying after all that rhythmic tension that built up in the previous four bars, so we have some really interesting rhythmic activity right here.

I have this phrase here and then it starts at the end of four so here it starts on beat one then it starts at the end of four da da then it starts on the descending beat of four ba ba do da de ba du da du du da du de da, it's Well, it sounds crazy when I sing it like that, but the fact that we're starting with that little five-note or four- or five-note cell here and then starting again in different parts of the measure than I was talking about this before about not always start your lines in the one I'm starting in the one I'm starting at the end of four I'm starting in timefour if you vary those starting points you can really introduce some creativity into your playing.

Also, in the middle of this line we have this classic bebop type vocabulary where you have that perfect voice that leads from the flat seventh of the F minor chord seven resolving to the three of B flat seven and then when we complete this line we reach our climax, we get to the highest note we've heard so far, the A flat, and I think that's well positioned because when we get to measure 17 here, you know, this is where we go back to the repetition of the chord progression, so the way of this melody is kind of a and then there are some different chords at the end, but at least at the beginning of these two a sections.

We have the same chord progression that you have in E flat major 7 d half diminished g7 when we get to measure 17 it really feels like the arrival point we were waiting for and we set it to the high pitch. a flat and we get a nice climax there with the highest note as we land on the second half of the shape again keeping the G just like we did before to accentuate that sense of arrival. Okay, this video is getting a little long, so I'm going to make the second half of my analysis available as a free video download along with transposed sheet music for all instruments and a backing track for you to practice on.

Click the link on the screen or the description below to get it all. of that free and happy spilling thanks for watching and see you next time