(gentle guitar music)
- Voice leading is a great tool,
but the strongest musical principle is probably melody.
And that's also true when you're comping.
Melody will tie things together and overrule voice leading
just as it does
when you're making a chord melody arrangement.
I get asked a lot about how I think about
the different extensions and alterations
that are used when I'm comping.
In this video I'll show you some examples of how I comp,
thinking of the melody and harmonizing at the same time.
I think this approach is really similar to
how you also play chord solos,
but it's a very a nice way to sort of
tie everything together
and make your comping a complete musical statement
rather than just a bunch of chords next to each other.
In this video I'm gonna take a turn around
in the key of G Major, so A minor 7,
D7, G Major, E7.
And then I'm gonna get you some exercises so that you can
play melodies with all those chords.
And I'm gonna give you some examples of some simple melodies
that I wrote on that progression.
So the first thing we need to do
is just to have some exercises
to be able to play melodies with these chords.
And the first chord is A minor.
In this exercise, I'm actually just playing
the G Major scale on the high E string.
So.
And then harmonizing that with A minor chords.
And I'm only using the drop2 chords in this lesson.
And that's because if you know where you drop2 inversions
then you already have most of the notes covered.
And if you wanna change a melody note on a drop two voicing,
then they are quite flexible for that.
So they are easy to use for this.
The only chord voicing that really needs explanation
in the A minor set is probably this one,
which is an A minor 13th.
The F sharp is a melody note
that you probably won't be using that much
when you're trying to comp a II Valt I in the key of G,
because the whole point of the A minor
is actually to delay the F# for the D7.
But just to have it in there,
I just put it in like this,
which is an okay voicing to use.
But chances are you won't be using it that much.
Let's go to the D7 voicings.
The D7 voicings don't really ask for much of an explanation.
What I'm using for the D7
is these F sharp half diminished voicings.
Because that gives us a D7 with a 9.
If you wanna check more out
on how to add extensions in drop2 voicings
and how that works, then you can check out
some of my drop2 lessons.
I have three of them and they cover this quite thoroughly.
So the only thing
that probably needs a little bit of explanation
is that I have the 2nd chord is this,
which is actually an A minor chord.
The reason why I'm using this
is because when we have the G in the melody,
then it's better to change the chord to a sus chord.
So essentially this is just a D7 sus with a 9.
And that's a better option than having this interval
in your chord.
The G Major 7 voicings sound like this.
So there are two places
that I need to explain a little bit here.
And the first one is when we have the root in the melody.
When you have the root in the melody,
you don't necessarily wanna have the Major 7 under it,
because then again you get this sound.
And since we're probably gonna be playing
sort of really slow melodies with sustained chords,
then it's probably better to do something about that.
And what I did was I changed the 7th here into a 6.
So this is actually a G6 voicing.
That's a very common thing to do
when you come across a Major 7 chord
with the root in the melody, that you change the
Major 7 into a 6.
And then for the rest, when we come up to the melody note C,
this is a similar thing because the C melody note
doesn't actually sound nice on a G Major 7.
If I play it, a G Major 7 with a C in the melody,
it sounds like this.
So it's better to just change the chord again,
like the D7.
And what I changed to here is actually an A minor 7,
because that's just sort of a diatonic passing chord
that we can put in there.
You will probably not have to sort of comp
a G Major 7 with a C in the melody
for any sort of longer period of time.
So it's always gonna be a passing chord, a passing note.
And therefore you can always just use a passing chord,
which is here why I'm using the A minor 7.
The last chord is an E7.
And of course there is no real E7 in G Major.
But the point of the E7 is to take us back to A minor
so the scale we would use on it
is an A harmonic minor scale.
And that will be this.
So all the G7 voicings are sort of based on this
diminished type voicing, which gives us an E7
with a flat 9.
And I think the only one that really needs any mention
is when we have A in the melody.
So again, when we have A in the melody,
it's gonna clash with the 3rd, so I change the chording
to a sus chord.
And in this case that actually turns into an E7 sus4 flat 9,
which you can also think of as being B half diminished
with an E in the bass.
So now we have the chord voicings
so that we can play some melodies through the duration.
The first example of that, it sounds like this.
The kind of melody you wanna use for something like this
is probably gonna be mostly step wise
or maybe using the occasional 3rd.
And there's not gonna be a lot of movement
because the point of this
is that it has to sit behind somebody playing a solo
or somebody playing the theme.
And it shouldn't take all the attention.
So when you practice this, you wanna make it
make some small melodies that have one or two notes per bar
or one note per chord.
And we're gonna let that, that's gonna make the most sense.
And that's also gonna help you develop something
that you can actually use when you're comping.
And that's what I'm doing here.
So I'm using two notes per chord.
The first one is just using this melody, so.
And that's then harmonized with A minor,
F sharp half diminished, which is D7.
And then G Major.
And then the E7, which is just two voicings.
The next example sounds like this.
So here's a good example of how you can use a motif
when you're doing this.
So the motif is essentially just moving stepwise
up the scale, so.
And the same thing up here.
And then a variation where we're moving down.
And on the A minor 7, that's fairly obvious
that it's just.
And the D7's otherwise simple.
Here you can also tell that I can easily,
because I'm using this sort of melodic idea,
I can easily skip up to the G Major 7 up here
without having to worry about the voice leading.
And then this variation with the E7
kind of fits with the voicing as well
so that doesn't really matter.
And then of course also this A minor 7 with a 9.
But of course you can also use great passing notes
in your melodies.
And most of the time they're gonna end up as passing chords
or as alterations.
And that's what's happening in the last example.
So in this example, the melody that I'm playing
is this, so.
And that's then harmonized with A minor voicings,
fairly straight forward.
D7 voicing and then we get the passing note,
which is this E flat.
And this is harmonized with a D7 altered voicing.
Then up to G6.
And then we get this E7 altered,
that's then resolved to this A minor with a 9.
That was three examples of how I might apply this
to a turnaround in the key of G.
I think that if you wanna work on this,
then you probably want to try it
just on the turnaround first,
and then quickly move it to an entire standard
and maybe do it so that it play first
one note per chord.
So whole notes first and then move it to half notes.
And once you've done that a few times,
then find apply it to a real playing situation
where you can change the rhythm as well.
I think that's gonna help get that kinda thinking
into your playing.
If you wanna download a PDF of the examples and exercises
I went over in this video, then go to the article
on my website, there's a PDF download on that.
And there you can of course also subscribe to my newsletter
and if you do that you will get a free ebook
with 15 II Valt I licks with some altered dominants
and some other interesting melodic ideas.
If you have any questions or suggestions
for my videos, then leave a comment on this video
or connect with me on social media.
I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram.
So there are a lotta places you can reach out to me
and it's always nice to get some feedback from you guys.
If you wanna check out some of this stuff
that I went over in this lesson a little bit further,
then you could also consider signing up for supporting me
on Patreon.
If you do that, then it's not the lowest tier,
I think it's the 2nd lowest tier already.
You get some of the extra information
that's connected to these lessons.
And with this lesson, that's going to be
how to comp through Lady bird, a whole chorus of Lady bird,
using this principle.
But you can check that out on Patreon.
That's about it for this week.
Thank you for watching and untill next week.
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