One of the most commonly addressed topics with my students is how one goes about connecting scale positions while playing an improvised solo.
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Many guitarists learn licks that are played on certain
One of the most commonly addressed topics with my students is how one goes about connecting scale positions while playing an improvised solo.
Many guitarists learn licks that are played on certain strings in specific areas of the fretboard. As great as these licks may be, connecting them into a unified solo statement remains, for many players, a mystery, or at least a challenge. In this lesson, I’ll demonstrate how to use chromatic passing tones to connect scale positions up and down the fretboard and how to introduce some unusual and unexpected melodic twists and turns.
Last month, our focus was on how to build rhythm patterns over a static, unchanging harmonic environment, such as Am or Am7. Using the A Dorian mode (A B C D E F# G) as our basis, we formed chord voicings built from stacked fourths and moved up and down the fretboard, all the while remaining diatonic to (within the scale structure of) A Dorian. FIGURE 1 illustrates a 10-bar rhythm part built from shifting stacked-fourths voicings derived from A Dorian.
While playing through this figure, notice how all the notes in each voicing are fourths apart within the structure of A Dorian, and be sure to memorize each of these distinct chord shapes, or “grips.” If you were to traverse the entire fretboard with these types of voicings, you’d discover that there are only four different physical shapes used, and it is helpful to bear this in mind. A serious improviser needs to memorize every scale and mode in every position and key, which is a lot of work!
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to gaining a complete understanding and mastery of this. But no matter one’s familiarity with scales and modes all over the fretboard, employing chromatic passing tones is