Music Lesson: Chord Progression and Improvisation

Okay. If you listen to any popular song, you're likely to hear that there is more than one chord featured underneath a melody or an improvised section. This is really important; we need to be comfortable playing over more than one chord, not just one chord at a time.

The Chord Tone Idea

We're going to tackle that now using the chord tone idea. Let's take a look at Example 1 on the PDF. This is a four-chord, four-bar chord progression in the key of C major, featuring the chords:

• C
• A minor
• F
• G

We'll just loop that round.

Starting with the C Major Scale

To start with, I'll play the C major scale over that chord progression so you can hear how the scale works at certain points and not at others. Then, I'll play a melody that targets specific chord tones in those chords. This is a great exercise that you can do.

Let's have a go at it now.

Chords Loop: 2, 3, 4...

Okay, there's our loop going. Now, I'll play the C major scale for you.

C Major Scale Demonstration: 1, 2, 3...

Here's chord one. We can definitely hear that the scale is the correct choice for this particular progression.

Targeting Chord Tones

Now, let's play a little melody where we target the specific notes of the chord. If you remember, we have three notes in each chord:

• For the C major chord: root, third, and fifth
• For the A minor chord: root, flattened third, and fifth

I'm going to play some really simple melodies here.

So, I've improvised a really simple melody using arpeggios.

Note: An arpeggio means the notes of a chord played individually. Joining chord tones together creates arpeggios, so it's a great way to approach improvisation. You can't fail but play fantastic notes over the chord at that point in time since you're only playing notes that feature in that chord.

Exploring Arpeggios

Arpeggios are a tool that is extremely useful. At the early grades, you might not have access to arpeggio shapes in your curriculum, but exploring these tools is valuable, just as much as scales.

Try playing arpeggio shapes over each bar to reflect the chord you're playing over; it'll sound fantastic.

Let's pop that one back on and have a little jam.

Another Jam Session:

Towards the end, I want to demonstrate that you don't need to come up with new ideas for every single bar. Many of these chords, when they belong to a diatonic progression (that is to say, they come from the same scale), will feature similar notes.

We can actually play the same notes over different chords, and that note will have a different relationship to the chord when it changes.

Demonstration of Relationships

Let's demonstrate this. I'll play a C note over this chord progression, and you'll see how the sound of that C has a different relationship as the chords go by.

Playing the C Note: 3, 4...

Hopefully, you heard that I played the C over every single chord.

• For the C major chord, it's the root note.
• For the A minor chord, it's the flattened third.
• For the F major chord, it's the fifth.

So, it had a different relationship to each of those chords, but it worked because it's a chord tone for each.

Over the G chord, it didn't necessarily sound bad, but it had more of a tense sound since it's not a chord tone of G; it's the fourth degree of G. I thought it sounded cool!

On the repeat, I lowered that C note to a B, which is a chord tone of G (the third). This maintains a resolved sound throughout.

Simplifying Improvisation

This is another good example of not needing to get too technical with improvisation.

If we had a bit of distortion, we could improvise using octave chords over that progression.

Let's try that.

Octave Chord Jam: Demonstration of technique...

A few fluffs in there, but that's part of improvisation, you just keep going.

Playing on a Single String

Now, I'd like to talk about playing in this manner on a single string. If you're new to the theory behind scales, it can be tricky to visualize where the notes are within a scale shape across the strings.

A good approach is to pick any string on the guitar and play along that string rather than across it. This gives a better sense of the distances between the notes in the scale.

I'll pop that loop back on, and we'll play the C major scale up the B string. We'll start down here on C, and if we do it right, we'll end up an octave higher on the 13th fret of the B string.

C Major Scale on the B String Demonstration: Visualize and play...

Let's try that out. We can start to play with slidy melodies, which is another way of creating melodies along a single string.

You have the added bonus of being able to slide in and out of those notes, exaggerating some of them. It sounds really cool!

I hope that was useful. Let's check out another idea.