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Originally Posted by scotty_b
Any good player will target chord tones in their playing, I am curious to know how you would approach playing over a progression such as Cmaj7#11 to Abmaj7#11? How would you determine what 'colour' or 'passing' tones you may add if you wished tio stay true to the key? How do you determine if the 6th degree should be natural or flattened?
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I'd really have to hear the piece of music that had those chords written into it to say, but for me me it's always
the evolving melody that is calling the shots, and it would be firmly attached to the 'chord of the moment' ... each of those chords simply becomes 1-3-5-7-#4. I can any or all of them, and if I want to use any other notes, they become painfully obvious when you see them occupying the spaces between the chord tones, but if I were in doubt I would probably 'dip my toe' and test the waters with a chromatic run linking those chord tones. But, as I say, once you instigate a melody,
it needs to be nourished and led along by the player. I think the difference is (judging by your question about the 6th degree) that thinking scales makes you think of 7 notes in a row, and that you need to know all of them to be able to create melody; thinking chord tones is the opposite: you literally see an array, a matrix of notes, that are
already the good notes, the chord itself has selected them as being the strongest notes of the moment. So you use them to outline the melody, from time to time dipping into the spaces between them, as linking notes, approach notes, decoration. Again, they become painfully obvious, to the ear, to the eye (looking down at the fretboard), to the melody as a whole.
I had a listen to your blues in C. Very nicely done, great sound and fluid lines, and I can hear that you are thinking of scales/modes. From time to time I hear that you've switched to thinking melody and stopped worrying about the 'notes in a line' approach. Those are my favorite parts of your take. I'm afraid that once my ear hears a lot of notes in a line, it shuts down. To my ear, melody is a series of phrases, hopefully building toward some kind of climax. Notes in a line make it very difficult to create phrases, I find, and so you're stuck with a solo that
is the scale(s) ... and a solo that
is the scale isn't a solo anymore. It's just a scale.
But that's just me. We all have different ways of approaching the art of improvisation. Vive la Difference!