If you're a guitar or piano player one important thing to be able to do is
chord melody playing the chords and the melody of a jazz standard at the same time but this presents
a particular challenge especially for jazz guitar players so what are the basics of chord melody
and how do you do it let's talk about it so i'm gonna walk you through some strategies that i
use to play chord melody on my guitar but if you're a piano player or even a non-chordal
instrument there's still things that you can learn here from walking through my process so what i'm
going to do is i'm going to start creating a chord melody to the tune polka dots and moonbeams
it's a beautiful jazz ballad so this is a great opportunity now the basics of
chord melody are we need to find the melody notes and match them with the chords so it
goes out saying that you need to know the melody just by itself really well
right so know it super well by itself before even attempting chord melody because if you
don't know that melody very well it's going to be very difficult to start adding chords so what
we always want to be thinking about is what is the melody note and what chord can we fit
under it so that that melody note is the top note so the first note is this note
and what i want to do is find the nearest f major chord because this is the first
chord of the tune it's f major seven so that's our melody note this is one place
i can play it on the neck of the guitar so i'm gonna choose this one and we can just play a basic
f major seven voicing just like this to start or here's another one that i like where we have an
open string right there that could be a going so let's do that and then another thing that i
want you to know is that you don't have to play a chord for every single note so check this out
basically i want to choose notes that i really want to emphasize with the chords
right now that chord is the sixth chord it's the second chord of the tune it goes f major seven to
d7 and when i look at the melody note it's actually the sharp nine of that six okay
so a little music theory goes a long way as well and the most basic voicing i can play that would
put that sharp nine on top the melody note would be this basic dominant 7 sharp 9 voicing now we
could explore other opportunities but i just want to walk through the basics right now so
okay now we have that nice sharp 9 voicing there important to know that you can play a chord for
every single note i personally don't prefer that style i think it just sounds a little bit clunky
and i would just say find the chords that are most important to emphasize in your chord melody so
right so once again i didn't play a chord for every note
okay i wanted to emphasize the two chord because it goes f major seven d seven to g minor seven
that's the two chord and the melody note is the ninth of that two chord and this is just a very
basic minor nine voicing over top of this g minor so perfectly good choice to use so so far we have
okay
okay there's our five chords so i'm really nailing all those chords i'm adding a flat nine in the
melody and that's a lesson you can do as well is if you want to add tension into a voicing
like adding a flat nine then you can sometimes fudge the melody a little bit and change it up so
or if i want to play the actual mode you know
that would just be the regular nine and here's a great nine voicing that you can use right so
back at the top of the melody again we can use this same voicing or we could even change it up
so i'm really trying to find voicings that fit nicely underneath that top note which should
be the melody note okay let's keep going through so let's do something similar again
okay now we have this as our melody note and there's a lot of different choices we
could do but the one i think i want to choose today is this voicing like this
for the minor 7 the g minor 7 but i'm going to add the b
flat and the bass so it has that nice kind of almost pedally sound to it so we have
now the next chords that we have going on are
e minor 7 flat 5 a7 to d minor 7 so it's a 2 5 1 to d minor again the melody is
all right that's what we're trying to go to the d
minor seven so what voicings can i play underneath that so
here's an option right this is our e minor seven flat five basic voicing
if i extend it here then i have this melody note at top
okay and the melody note here i could play right here this is the a7 the five
this works really well and then i can resolve it to this kind of fourthy d
minor seventh voicing so far this is what we have in the chord melody
right let's try a different approach and see if it works so let's go
okay so this strategy that i'm using is basically adding what i would call ornaments so
again i'm deviating a bit away from the melody in order to add some different flavors so
that's a nice seven sus4 voicing
i'm moving the melody note up to the actual melody note right there
right so that could be a good approach now the next part of the melody is
there's a bass note movement there and something we could do here that
would be really cool is to add some single note baseline movement so
right so we could do something like that
now what i did right there is actually just a two note voicing so if you can't find a big fat
full voicing to put underneath it then just do two notes right
right
so we go i did a chromatic movement down with that minor seventh
to the two chord so really what it comes down to is me experimenting and creating and
allowing different things to happen so let's kind of speed up the process here and get
to the bridge because i think there will be some other lessons we can learn there so so far we have
right that's one option to finish off the a section then for the b
section we go to concert a major so two five a major and the melody goes
so let's find some notes some chords to put underneath those notes so
let's start with this basic voicing for an a major seven
now what can we play here so the chord is the sixth chord of a major okay that's f sharp so
let's play this diminished seventh voicing because actually this diminished seventh voicing we put
the bass here is basically like we're playing an f sharp flat nine chord so again i'm looking at what
the top note is and then seeing you know what kind of notes can we add underneath it to add color so
right now let's play this ii chord because that's another important quartal moment
right so this is just an e7 dominant seventh chord
okay we played that before that's a sharp nine
okay now we're at the five chord let's do
maybe a sus thing because again on the fretboard i got all the way up here so
there's a nice sharp 11 voicing there that we can play
then we go to a dominant 7th a well that's the melody note on top so
here's a good voicing that i could use for the dominant seven
okay now this is the two chord here here's one voicing that we could play okay this
is a really fun cool voicing we could play okay but we could play something else too like again
we could play this voicing here's our g note
but i really like this one i like this is a good voicing so again if you don't know that voicing
that's okay too it's just again about trying to figure it out like this is the uh 11th right so
this is one eleventh voicing this is one minor eleventh voicing we could find others right
okay there's our five chord and now we're back
at the top of the a section okay so always making those choices after talking about some of
my thought process as i go through this and some concepts let's go ahead and i'm just going to play
my own rendition here of chord melody of polka dots and moonbeams
do
so
do
so
now by the way another concept that guitar and piano players really need to deal with is the
concept of comping and accompanying soloists so i have on the screen a video that will help you do
exactly that give you the basics of how to start comping in jazz so check out that video right
now alright so that's all for today's video make sure you like this video if you found it helpful
make sure you subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next one cheers