Professional Documents
Culture Documents
nl/the-most-important-solo-tools-for-a-maj7-chord/
The Most Important Solo Tools For A Maj7 Chord
You should have a lot of things to start working with at the end of this video, and most of it is really just a new way to use the things you already know.
Focus on how it sounds because I think that is how you are going to be inspired by it, and I will also give you some other tips on getting new ideas that are not only
about what notes to play.
The example below has two short lines using different chromatic enclosures and a melody build around a Cmaj7 chord. You can check out more information on
different types of chromatic enclosures here: 5 chromatic enclosures
There are more examples in this lesson: 10 Great Chromatic Ideas in Jazz Licks (Easy to Weird)
You can also experiment with inventing melodies playing patterns with a one octave arpeggio. Try to mess around and see if you find something that sounds like an
interesting melody.
If you look at the notes of Cmaj7: C E G B – and look at the notes of Em7: E G B D you can see that they share most of the notes and the Em7 adds a D, the 9th of C.
That makes it a great arpeggio to use on a Cmaj7.
In fact the arpeggio found on the 3rd of the chord works great for most chords.
Sometimes you miss great melodies because the focus is on learning in a position, in a scale or in some other shape. This example using an Em7 arpeggio is
branching out of the regular patterns and making specific melodies a lot easier to play.
Gsus4 – Not Obivous and Very Cool
The thing with the sus triads is that they sound a little less obvious and that is why they are great to use once in a while. In this first example I am using the Gsus4 triad
to make a 5-note group that I can repeat before continuing, another way to change things up in a solo: odd-note groupings.
Another way to play the notes of the Gsus4 triad is this beautiful C quintal arpeggio that is the perfect way to add some larger intervals to your lines. In this case, I am
combining it with a sus4 triad which is another great tool on a Cmaj7.
The Esus4 triad is really useful (leave this clip out?)
Triad Pairs
This triad pair works fantastic for Cmaj7, besides that they are also what I used to make the most annoying picking exercise I ever cam up with…. (B-roll) and the way I
usually improvise with triad pairs is by chaining together inversions to get different colors on top of the chords. This has a sound that is different from other types of
melodies and still produces very strong melodies.