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- Hi guys.
Welcome to Technique of the Week with Fender.
My name is Shirley Tetteh.
My background is in jazz,
and so I play a lot of music that's influenced by jazz.
A lot of groove-based music that also has improvisation
as a big part of it.
And today I'm gonna go over some of the things
I was taught when it comes to playing over one chord
in this case, a D minor seven chord.
So yeah, let's get into it.
So you might know that when playing over a minor chord
you can use something called a Dorian Mode.
D Dorian goes like this.
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Right.
But perhaps you're thinking you'd like to start suggesting
other kinds of harmony over a D minor seven as well
and you don't know where to start.
Well, a common thing to do in this scenario
is to kind of super impose melodic lines in G seven
over the D minor seven chord.
And we'll base our improvisations when superimposing this
G seven on the G Mixolydian mode, which goes like this.
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Right.
So if you need to take your time learning those two modes,
getting comfortable with them,
go ahead and pause the video,
practice, practice, those modes,
take as long as you need a couple of weeks, a little longer
and come back when you're ready.
So great.
Now that's actually quite a lot of notes to try
and fit into your improvisation.
So what we're gonna do is single out some these notes
to leave us with what might arguably be described
as some of the kind of colorful ones
or the ones that really describe that color palette.
And you might disagree with me about
whether some of these notes are
the kind of most important ones or not
and you'll see why in a little bit,
but yeah, let's, I'll just show you what I mean.
So we're gonna use the first, third, fifth, seventh
and ninth degrees of both
the both D Dorian and G Mixolydian.
So it goes like this.
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So, one octave, one octave for G Mixolydian.
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So that's over one octave,
just to show you what the notes are.
You can go ahead and practice them across two octaves,
just like I did with the full-on kind of D Dorian
and G Mixolydian modes.
Okay.
I'm also aware that for the, that the sixth,
for the sixth degree of D Dorian.
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Is considered a really important part of the character
of that mode, but we're gonna leave that out for now.
Okay, great.
So what we're gonna do is use the first, third, fifth,
seventh, and ninth degrees of D Dorian and G Mixolydian
to improvise over a D minor seven chord.
And we're gonna do so over groupings of eight bars,
eight bars at a time.
But what we're gonna do is we're gonna play six bars
using that slightly shorter version of D Dorian,
the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth notes,
and the final two bars of those eight bar phrases
using the slightly shorter version of G Mixolydian.
So it goes something like this,
One.
And two.
One, two, three.
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Right.
So groupings of six bars and two bars.
Great.
Okay, so the important thing here is to think rhythm first.
Focus on developing and having a clear rhythmic intent.
So start with a simple phrases,
also focused on making sure
just for the sake of the exercise
that for successive groupings of eight bar phrases,
you're playing that shorter version of G Mixolydian
for the last two bars just to kickstart you
beginning to think about structure and phrasing.
How and when you decide to superimpose something else
on top of whatever chord it is you're playing over.
It also helps if you want to clarify
that you're playing G seven specifically
to be mindful of how you resolve a phrase.
So landing on a G for example,
can be a really obvious way to say I'm playing G seven,
depending on what you've played prior to landing.
Depending on the notes that you've used before landing on G.
But perhaps you can experiment with other ways
of how to resolve your phrases
to make it clear what harmony you are using.
Okay, great.
Well, I hope that's useful.
Have fun giving it a go
and hopefully see you at another
Technique of the Week with Fender.
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