Melody from chords - II

Hello. I’m back with yet another article about my favorite subject: the chord of the moment.

At it’s barest, music can be seen to be a series of chords – a chord progression – and each chord sets the rules for its duration in the time-line. Each chord, in turn, becomes the “chord of the moment”. I have made it my business over the years to keep very careful track of the chord of the moment. Scales? I couldn’t care less about scales. Scales just irk me, as you well know by now. Way too much information to keep crunching if you’re in the midst of it all, improvising a solo or creating a rhythm part. Chords condense the information into workable chunks, and they come one at a time.

Many players dipping their toes into the world of improvisation turn to scales. This is natural I suppose: just about every teaching site on the internet adheres to this approach; the forums are full of advice as to which scale or mode to use over which chord. The Pentatonic certainly gets a lot of attention. The trouble is I’ve yet to see any real advice on HOW to use them. How do you think about them? Where on the scale do you start and finish melodic lines? What mind set should you have? What happens when chords change? Do you switch scales? If so, when? And how do you project a scale the whole length of the fretboard? Never have I read any answers to these questions.

Many songs/tunes consist solely of related chords – chords from the same key. It’s certainly much easier to improvise melodic lines when that’s the case, no doubt about it, in fact there probably isn’t a player alive who hasn’t started learning the art of improvisation by playing the scale of the I chord relentlessly over every change in the piece. And, yes, it can sound pretty good sometimes, when just the right combination of notes accompanies a certain section of the tune. However, it will never be music. Music is melody, and melody MUST adhere to the rules to sound strong. The key might set the basic rules of a piece of music, but it’s the chords that take care of the details.

I’ve created a little movie/midi/tab lesson which attempts to clear the cobwebs on this tricky subject. I’ve chosen a common chord progression, but one of the chords is from outside the key. This prevents any “I’ll just play the major scale over the whole thing” approach. Enough said here.

Click to go to the lesson.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve recently switched to PC (from Mac) and I now create the movies in Windows Media Player, not Quicktime.

In other news:

I’m about to start putting the Slide Guitar In Standard Tuning (and dropped D) video together. Open tunings are well covered in the world of guitar videos, standard isn’t. I think some may see slide in standard tuning as not being permitted or some silly thing like that. I’ve been chastened over the years for not being “traditional” in my slide playing. Well, no, I’m not. I don’t want to be. I love the sound of slide and I don’t want to re-learn the fretboard, so I play in standard. Check my site for news if you’re interested. I’d say a couple of months should do it.

You can stream some of my slide here if you’re interested. This was a collaboration with another player in the US, Jim Heidinger, who posted the backing track at a forum. I then downloaded it and recorded the slide solo on my Stratocaster. This is played in dropped D, almost standard.

Guitar for Beginners dot com continues to build. There’s a new lesson there also, accessible from the home page.

And finally, my usual plug for my book PlaneTalk which is going out to the English speaking world at an ever increasing rate, revealing the simple but all-powerful visualization technique which is the TRICK to “seeing” the music laid out the length of the fretboard. If you’re at that stage where you just KNOW there’s an underlying pattern, a reliable and consistent template against which to measure all things musical … save yourself years of poking around and experimenting. I found it years ago and wrote the book about it.

Check it out here.

All the best from Tamborine Mountain, Australia.

Kirk
http://kirklorange.com
http://thatllteachyou.com
http://bottleneckguitar.com