Improvisation Techniques for "Fly Me to the Moon"

Now that you've gotten used to playing Fly Me to the Moon, whether you're playing the left hand chords or not, hopefully you've got your head around the melody.

Using the Track for Improvisation

Let's talk about how you can use this track to improvise.

• Toggle between Performance and Backing Track

  • If you're playing with the backing track, it'll just have bass and drums.

• Left Hand Chords

  • You can play left hand chords.
  • Practice the left hand chords by themselves.
    • These are the same chords as in bossa nova comping, but different inversions because they've been moved lower down for the left hand.

Right Hand Options

What are you going to do in the right hand?

• Playing White Notes

  • Of course, you could just play white notes.
  • That would be a little bit unadventurous though.

• Playing Chord Notes

  • An alternative to playing horizontally with just the notes of the key is to try playing notes of the chords.
  • For example, you could play A.

Practicing Arpeggios

I would practice the arpeggios of the following chords:

• A minor 7
• D minor 7
• G7
• C major
• F major
• B half diminished

You could string those together something like this.

Tip: Notice on the E7, if it gets a bit high, you can always go down.

This is a really important way of getting your head and fingers around some changes to develop ideas for your solo.

Exploring Other Improvisation Methods

We'll be looking at this a bit later in the track 2-5-1 arpeggio workout. There are other ways of improvising around these chords.

Example: 2-5-1 in A Minor

For instance, if you have a 2-5-1 in a minor (B half diminished - E7 - A minor), a really nice scale you could use is the harmonic minor scale in A minor, the key you're going to.

• This makes a change from using C major all the time.
• It has the F, which fits the B half diminished, and it has the G sharp, which fits the E7.

Practical Application

You could try:

• Playing the left hand shells.
• Playing the A harmonic minor scale.

Note: See how it has a slightly more exotic sound than just using white notes all the time, while still playing horizontally over those three chords.

Conclusion

So these two approaches, horizontal and vertical, have been seen before in part one of the course. We'll be coming back to that several times in the rest of the course.