[7 Strings of Hate]

andy summers in the police does some crazy ass chords, i think it would be educational

[Metal Ken]

Ive heard of the Joe Pass one but i've never been able to locate a copy.

[Luan]

What does he teachs at that instructional? (the joe pass one..)

[DDDorian]

The Joe Pass one is (was? haven't checked in a while) up on youtube in its entirety if you want a preview. It's more about playing lines than chord melodies though, so it's probably not what you're looking for. He put out an instructional book/CD that was more based on chord melodies, from memory, so you might wanna check that out.

Honestly, learning an transcribed chord-melody piece won't really help you all that much. It will probably help you get it together technique-wise, but when it comes to this style of playing the technique will probably be the least of your concerns. I find fake-book arrangements are in the long run more beneficial; they notate the melody but give you only chord names, leaving the fingerings and inversions up to you. Learning standards in this fashion is the quickest way to learn which fingerings are most conducive to chord melodies and forces you to work through different inversions of your favourite chords. If you couple this approach with study of stuff like secondary dominants, tritone substitution and other subjects related to chord relationships then you 'll end up with a far greater ability to construct and even improvise chord-melody pieces than rote learning of an exact transcription is ever likely to give you.

[Luan]

I'm learning chord melody in a similar way like you described.
You pick a standard, you learn the progression first, and then start to use inversions, tensions and so on to create melodies. It is a great idea to play a song that way, the guitar does the chords and a new melody, and then the melody from the songs starts, when the chords progression cycle ends.

[distressed_romeo]

I'd mix up the two schools...

Study up on all the theory (harmony, basslines, etc.), but check out some transcriptions and CDs, and practice playing your own arrangements out of a fakebook (this is much easier than it sounds) to see how all this stuff works in practice.

Theory is important, but I'd place just as much value on doing things instinctively and by experimentation (the old 'music as language' analogy.

Oh, Ken, Ron Eschete has a really good book of chord melody licks ('Chord Melody Phrases for Guitar') that MI press publish. It's a typical sort of 'licks' instructional, but it's a fun one to dip into for ideas.

[distressed_romeo]

In terms of songs, try learning 'Autumn Leaves'; that's a great one to start with.

[Garry Goodman]

There are some very effective ways to create chord melody. I have the Joe Pass book. Also Ted Green's books are a good resource.

[telecaster90]

Originally Posted by distressed_romeo

In terms of songs, try learning 'Autumn Leaves'; that's a great one to start with.

My guitar teacher taught me a really cool chord melody arrangement of it. I think I'll post a vid up at some point.

[cvinos]

On a side note related more to the first page of the thread, I think when you have a chord, it is important to know where the tonic, the third, the fifth and the seventh are located. This way you can always lower or raise the third, fifth or the seventh to switch between major/minor, b5/5/#5 or 7/maj7.

It is also good to know for any particular voicing which note is in the bass and which one is the treble note.

Further more, it is useful to know what chord you get if you relate a chord of four notes to another tonic. This way you can save fingerings and still have more vocabulary.

Yet more memory hooks so to say, with cycles or just interval structures, work like the following, used for example by Pat Martino: if you lower any one tone of a diminished 7th chord (which can be thought of as a cycle of minor thirds), you get a dominant 7th chord, where the root is the tone you just lowered. In other words, using the way described above in the second paragraph, if you play a full diminished chord over a tonic located a half step below any of the four tones, you are playing a dominant 7th chord plus the option b9.