Dream On - A Blues Lick using Chord Tones
Here's a neat little riffy thing I played on a friend's gorgeous old Telecaster. This is one of those guitars that plays itself. Perfect neck, beautiful natural resonance and tone to die for. I'd love to own her but, as my title says, I can dream on. A Telecaster of this vintage are worth a fortune even if it were for sale.
I decided to turn this little piece into a lesson because it teaches a couple of neat things about improvisation, which is how it came about. I was noodling around, coming up with lines over a familiar chord progression I was hearing in my head. If there's one thing I love doing it's 'playing the changes', coming up with lines that make the listener hear the underlying chord without it being played. There's always that one note that will do the trick.
In this case, you'll hear me start with a two note run up to A. That establishes the root. I then play a simple little line that then establishes to the listener that it's Am7. Why? Because in the context of that A played at the beginning, the notes are b7s, 1s, b3s and 5s. There's a single 4 in there as well, but the context is pure Am7.
I end the line on an D. This implies a new chord,since there's no D in Am7, so chances are it's going to be a D chord. The next note is F#. Bingo! It's a D major of some sort. I then play exactly the same line as over the Am7 except I use F# instead of G. Now those very same notes become 1s, 3s, 5s, b7s and 9s of D9. So we can hear that that one note has completely changed the context of the rest of them.
I then end that bit on a low F. Again, we, the listeners are aware that a new chord is in play, an F of some sort because we've now become aware that new chords come on that beat. I then play the very same notes as the other two time except I use an F instead of the F#. The context of those notes is 1,s, 3s, 5s and 7 which spell out Fmaj7.
The tab shows the repeating melody line in green and those salient chord changing notes circled in purple. You can also see that those purple notes drop by a semitone each time -- G, F#, F -- which tells us, before we even get there, that there's going to a resolve to an E chord. Sure enough, the next bit spells out the 1s, 3s and #5s of an E augmented chord, which is a V chord of Am, and, yes, we arrive back to Am.
So this is one way of coming up with lines on the fly. Establish a melodic motif -- the green notes -- and track the changes with the least number of differences to the motif as possible. Repetition is something we like in music. When we hear it we feel that we've learned something about the tune and if we hear it yet again, that feeling is confirmed. We feel smart. You'll notice that all the lines -- chords, they're the same thing -- use the C and E notes, and it's that C in the E chord that makes it augmented. Again, this all happened on the fly the first time I played it. I didn't plan it out, but I did hear it in my head just before I played it. I saw the potential of those purple notes dropping down by a semitone each time and knew how they'd turn the Am7 into a D9, the D9 into Fmaj7 and the Fmaj7 into an E#5 (aug).
It's all numbers in the end. The same notes change context, and that context is measured as numbers. That G note went from a b7 to a 3 to a root; the C note started out as a 3, turned into a b7, then a 5, finally a #5; the E started out as a 5, then became a 9, then a 7 then a root ...
If none of this makes sense to you, don't worry. You don't need to know any of it to learn the lines with the tab, or by ear, play the little piece and enjoy the sound of it. If you do want to learn about the numbers, the context and how to be able to look down and see it all there waiting to be noodled with, have a look at PlaneTalk Online. This is what it teaches.
