1. Understand chord progressions
2. Play thru chord changes with common tones and leading tones
3. Familiarize yourself with common chord progressions
4. Improvise across chord progression
- If all you do in a solo is play notes that fit within the individual chords of a song, you are only halfway there, cuz you are only playing to the chords, not to the song itself.
- a song is made up of multiple chords, in a set progression. It take all those chords, played one after another, to define the song’s harmony. It’s on this chord progression, after all, that the song’s melody is based. The song is more than just the sum of its chords; it’s the sound that arises from the changes from one chord to another.
The chords in a song dno’t xist independent of one another.
They exist in relationship to one another.
Your solos should explore not only the chords themselves but also the relationships between the chords.
Your solos, to be complete musical ideas, must flow thru and betweeen and across all of a song’s chord changes, just as the snog’s melody does.
Your solo should not start and stop at each chord change; it should bridge the chods with a smooth melodic line.
To play thru a series of chord changes:
- you need to know the relationships between the chords, which notes they have in common, how one chord leads to another, where the tension builds and where it is released
- you can then pick those chord tones for your solo that best lead from one chord to another, and that help create a uniform melodic idea.
This section — examines how chord progressions are put together, details some of the more common chord progressions and shows how to build a solo across all these changing chords.
Tags: chord progression