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Sinmple ways to play altered scale phrases in jazz


Terje

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Posted

It's been a while since I did this one so let's do it again. Over the so well known ii-V-I progression there are a few simple yet effective pentatonic tricks that you can play.

 

For ease of understanding let's say we're in the key of C. The chords would then be Dm7, G7 (alt) and Cmaj7.

 

First "the magic bullet"... you can play the G major pentatonic scale over all three chords and all notes will be "good". Over the Dm7 and Cmaj7 the notes in the G major penatonic scale are really pretty and interesting. Over G7 they're nothing special but they're not "bad" or "wrong".

 

If you want to spice that up play the Ab altered pentatonic scale (Ab Bb B Eb F) over G7. It has the tritone of the G7 chord but the rest are altered notes. It's called the altered pentatonic becasue it is derived from the altered scale with the same root.

 

Another way to nail a lot of the altered notes over G7 is to play the tritone substitute, the C# major pentatonic scale over it. This open for lots of options but perhaps the most interesting, and easy to play, is to play C major pentatonic over Dm7, C# major pentatonic over G7 and D major pentatonic over Cmaj7 (which will give you a #4 over Cmaj7, which sounds really cool). Doing this makes it easy to create sequences, playing the same phrase, just a half step higher each time, over each chord, and that makes it easy to hear and tolerate the altered notes.

 

You can combine all over this of course.

 

One thing to think about when playing altered notes... they are tension builders and are only as good as what they resovle to. Think of them as going somehwere. The Ab over G7 is moving towards G in Cmaj7 and so on. Hear the direction in your phrases and the altered notes will start to make more sense.

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Posted

Originally posted by red|dragon

booooo. pentatonics? booooooo.


melodic minor and the whole tone scale for alts you noob.
:thu:

 

Terje said "SIMPLE WAYS" to play altered scale phrases .....

 

YOU nOOb ...... :D;):rolleyes::):thu:

 

:wave:

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Posted

Originally posted by red|dragon

booooo. pentatonics? booooooo.

 

Got it from Mark Levine's The Jazz Theory Book. Using the C# major pentatonic over a G7 hits all the altered tones you will ever need. From the bottom... C# is the b5, D# is the b6, F is the b7 and a chord tone, G# is the b9 and A# is the b3.

 

What more do you want? :D

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Posted

You should check out two of my tutorials:

 

Learn Common Sounds Found in Jazz

 

and

 

Melodic Minor Primer (now with audio)

 

The Melodic Minor tute will show the simple "sound" of playing it over any V-I.

 

The LCSFiJ tute will show you a ground up approach to my cool sounds and concepts in jazz. It'll show you simple Whole-tone, H-W tone scales over these chords...

 

but more importantly it'll exaplin "what's going on harmonically"...so you're NOT just playing "this scale an that scale".

 

The key is to burn these "sounds" into you head, not so much the patterns. There's movement (cadences) in music...these are the sounds to latch onto.

 

That Melodic Minor Primer' first example will show you the Altered Scale against a Dominant chord...it ain't pretty at first.

 

But, once you work through the other examples, the last example goes back to the first...NOW when you here that altered scale again...it'll "sound" like a canvas of tones, and you'll "hear it".

 

Check them out, it'll save you a lot of time trying to get close to the "sound".

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Posted

i'm a fan of the scofield method:

jump off a cliff,

just land on your feet

 

i like the chromatic motion and hip tones from that pent thing though...imma try it

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