Soling With Chords - Part 1 With Jens Larsen
Voicings in a Scale
Often when I give exercises for chords within scales I use diatonic chords, but in this case the goal is to play melodies over one chord and have that melody harmonized. Therefore I have made 4 exercises harmonizing a scale with different chords, so that we have material that will cover melodies with these notes over 4 different chords. There are of course more chords in a key than four, but making exercises for those is fairly easy when you already have these. All the exercises harmonizing the scale on the B and E string. I find it practical to use 3 note voicings on the B string and 4 note voicings on the E string, but that is mostly a preference, and certainly not a rule. If you find the voicings in the exercises hard to recognize or place then you could check my lessons on Drop2, Quartal or triad voicings in jazz. That should give you a better understanding of where I got them from. The first exercise is to harmonize the F major scale with an Fmaj7 chord. You will notice that I am quite liberal in my choice of voicing so I will use F triad, Fmaj7 and F6 voicings in order to make things easy to play or because I think it sounds better. This is in fact how it is common to interpret an Fmaj7 chord in jazz.



Chord Solos Over Turnarounds
If we use the progression Gm7 C7 Fmaj7 D7b9 we now have a way to play any note with a chord under it at any time, which should make it possible to make chord solos. Of course the same rules apply to the melody as it does if we don't harmonize it so it still has to be somehow related to the chord and will have chord notes on the strong beats of the bar.

