Let’s cut right to the chase: scales have a bad rap. A lot of beginner and intermediate players do not like scales—when you’re starting out they can be kind of confusing. Maybe you had a very by-the-book music teacher who was obsessed with drilling scales into you, and that kind of turned you off to scales.
There are a bunch of techniques and exercises you can apply to playing standards, but it’s easy to get lost on the the most important thing—keeping the fundamentals of a standard (i.e. the changes) in mind as well as the corresponding scales for each chord. Remember—harmony and melody are two parts of the same thing. You can think of melody as horizontal harmony, or harmony as vertical melody (thinking in reference to sheet music, that is). So if you want to play a melody, it’s important to understand the harmony and vice versa.
But some of this bad rap can come from people using scales ineffectively—maybe you’ve tried playing with scales and felt like you were just pushing buttons trying to find something that sounded good.
Usually as a beginner, you’ll learn that a tune is in F, then spend the entire tune moseying around the F major scale, sometimes hitting some really awesome notes, and other times hitting some less exciting notes. But eventually, you feel like you want to break out and play something else. And if there are chromatic notes or altered chords, you’ll need to break out of that single-scale approach and look more to chord scales, or the diatonic scales that correspond to each chord.
So today we’re going to talk about some of the elements that can make chord scales sound really good. But before we get going, you’ll definitely want to check out our new PDF package called 20 Chord Scale Etudes on Jazz Standards. Chad LB wrote out 20 etudes on standard chord progressions where he only used the chord scales so they could be as melodic and fundamentally sound as possible. That’s up on our website now, along with backing tracks and recordings of Chad playing through the tunes.
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
Making scales work for you
Alright, so our whole point of playing a scale that matches with a chord is actually to embellish the chord. And when you move fluidly from one chord to another, and you’re actually playing scales effectively from one chord to another, by nature it will sound very melodic.
We’re going to check out one of the etudes from our new PDF as a reference point for how you can do this effectively. We’ll start off on our etude “Days of Soda and Tulips.” We’re going to check out the first 16 bars of the etude and listen and analyze it a bit.
So make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video to get a better feel for how Chad plays it.
What we’re going to do first with every standard is just make sure we know every scale that matches with each chord. Now this gets into some light theory, but stay with us—it’s worth it. And just because you don’t understand the theory doesn’t mean you can’t play along—in fact, that’s the best way to do it, because you’ll start to learn how some of the theory concepts sound. But you’ll see in the PDF that we have a reference chart for each standard, which includes the chord scales for the changes.
For a lot of you, this first bit might be pretty straightforward. But you’ll see that we get into some interesting options as we move through the tune. It’s important to remember that you can play anything you want over any chord—you don’t just need to stick to scale tones or arpeggios. But it’s also important to move with purpose and intention if you want things to sound coherent. Knowing your home base chord and scale relationships will give you a solid foundation to use anytime, or to resolve into if you are playing outside.
Our tune starts on Fmaj7, so that’s pretty easy—that means we’ll play in F major. Next we see an Eb7, which means the home scale of that chord is Eb Mixolydian. But when we have an Eb7 on a tune that’s in F major, that Eb is functioning as a backdoor dominant, or a dominant a whole step below the tonic. Seeing that it’s a backdoor dominant, we could either play regular Mixolydian or we could play what’s called the Lydian Dominant scale—which is a Mixolydian scale with a sharp 4 (or 11, depending on how you look at it).
In measure three we see an Am7, but we have a few options here. We of course have our default m7 scale, which is Dorian. But looking at the placement of this chord in the scale, we see that it’s the iii chord—meaning that its respective tonality is actually from the A Phyrgian scale, which is the same as F major. So we can use either of these options here, the only note is that A Dorian will introduce a natural 6 (in this case F#) versus A Phyrgian, which will retain the flat 6 (F).
Moving into measure four, we see a dominant flat 9 chord. And anytime you have a 7b9 chord, you’re going to have a few options. Chad’s favorites are Phyrgian Dominant and the half-whole diminished scale. Phyrgian Dominant is essentially a Mixolydian scale with a lowered second/ninth and lowered sixth/thirteenth. It’s an awesome choice and is very melodic. But we’re going to choose the half-whole diminished scale—which is exactly what it sounds like. From the root, you’ll move up a half step, then a whole step, then a half step, etc. until you return to the root.
This option is going to give you a natural 6, as opposed to the flat 6 from the Phyrgian Dominant.
Then we come to a Gm7, where we have two different options—we can use Dorian again, or we can use the melodic minor, which is where that F# is coming from in the melody line. It’s important to note that in jazz, the melodic minor scale is a bit different than the classical melodic minor, since that one changes based on whether you’re ascending or descending the scale. In jazz, it’s easier—it’s all the same, whether you’re ascending or descending—it’s the same as Dorian, just with a raised seventh.
From there, we’re back to the Eb7, our backdoor dominant. What we’ll do here is just the regular Mixolydian, but again, we could raise that fourth in the Mixolydian, too, for the Lydian Dominant sound.
Here we get into a iii chord again, so we can either do Dorian or Phrygian, but it doesn’t really matter in this case since we only play a few notes to break up the rhythm anyway.
Then we’re moving into a Dm chord, which is the vi of F, so you can use the natural minor or Dorian if you want.
Again, if you didn’t understand all the theory behind this, that’s totally ok. What’s important is practicing these scales and seeing if you can get through the standard fluently, like what we have here.
Continuing on, we’ve got a Gm, which is the ii. Then it’s over to Gm7/F, which is just changing the bass note to walk down to the next harmonic device. And you’ll see we have a nice thing going, starting with a triplet to mix up the rhythm a bit, we got up from the seven to the root on the triplet, back down and arpeggio back to the root, where we step up diatonically into the second, which is going to be that A on the Gm7/F, and we arpeggiate.
Again, the Bb, D, F, and A is just an arpeggio going up the 3, 5, 7, and 9, and we step down diatonically into the root of the next chord, which is an Eø7. The E