# Chord Melody stuff.



## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

Okay, heres the deal:

I want to get into some chord melody stuff and expand my chord vocabulary. What are some good songs to look for? if possible, powertab?


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## Luan (Jun 1, 2007)

Learn chords, tons of chords.
Learn all the possible ways of chords in root position, without open strings.
Major, minor, minor7(b5)
Then learn the same chord but adding 9, 11, 13, #11, by using major 7ths and minor 7ths, for example, Gmajor 7 (9 13) and G7 (9 13).
Learn that you should not use the 11 over major chords, the 11 is an avoid note on any major chord, but you can use #11.
The 13 is the avoid notes of minor chords.
Then start to learn inversions, 1st inversion, 2nd inversion, 3rd inversion, on all the neck, firt with major chords, then minor, then add a 7, then a 9 and so on.

If it were easy Joe Pass have should find another job .


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## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

I was looking for songs man ;p 
I can figure out all that stuff pretty quick, but i figure practicing songs would make more sense. Like the great Yng said "Why bother with boring exercises when theres great music that you can practice that employs the principles already"


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## Luan (Jun 1, 2007)

Uh, I think that you should not try to figure when you need it, but learn every chord you figure out, so when you need it you already have it.
I put in front of you a sheet, and you should be able to play it without stop, using tensions, inversions, melodies over the chords and everything like that.
Is what I'm studying right now in school.
You are not trying to shred, to play a cooley or petrucci lick, you are trying to learn chord melody, something you are borrowing from jazz players.
What does jazz players do to practice chord melody?
They grab a sheet and start playing so awesome just because they are playing music?


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## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

I am a fan of the school practical application, man ;p


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## Luan (Jun 1, 2007)

I don't share that way of thinking.


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## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

Thats cool. When i want to figure something out, im the kind of person that sits there and fucks with it till i can play it. So it works for me.


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## Drew (Jun 1, 2007)

Um, Luan, despite his name Metal Ken has a pretty good grasp of chord theory and music theory in general. Telling him to "learn lots of chords," while generally good advice, isn't really what's needed here.  

There are two things you need to know to play chord melody, near as I can tell - a ton of chords, true, but you also need to know how to build arrangements. Knowing 15 million chords won't turn you into Joe Pass; knowing how to _use_ those chords will. And the best way to do this is to study other people's arrangements.


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## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

Drew said:


> but you also need to know how to build arrangements. Knowing 15 million chords won't turn you into Joe Pass; knowing how to _use_ those chords will. And the best way to do this is to study other people's arrangements.



THats what i was getting at


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## MetalMike (Jun 1, 2007)

Ken, you should check out Joe Pass' instructional video. Ted Greene also has some nice chord melody ideas, but it's difficult to get a hold of anything he has done besides Chord Chemistry.


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## 7 Strings of Hate (Jun 1, 2007)

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


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## Metal Ken (Jun 1, 2007)

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


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## Luan (Jun 1, 2007)

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


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## DDDorian (Jun 1, 2007)

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.


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## Luan (Jun 1, 2007)

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.


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## distressed_romeo (Jun 2, 2007)

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.


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## distressed_romeo (Jun 2, 2007)

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


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## Garry Goodman (Jun 12, 2007)

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.


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## telecaster90 (Jun 12, 2007)

distressed_romeo said:


> 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.


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## cvinos (Jun 12, 2007)

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.


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## Jongpil Yun (Jun 15, 2007)

You know people always talk about Joe Pass as like the super chord guru, which is kind of true I guess, but if you watch his instructional videos, he basically just groups chords into 3 groups - major, minor, and 7ths, and goes off that.

Simplicity.


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