(plays guitar)
- Hi everybody.
My name is Jens Larsen.
The melodic minor sound is probably
the most characteristic scale sound in modern jazz.
In this video, I'm going to take a melodic minor scale
and then I'm quickly gonna cover
some of the basic things you need to know
and be able to play in that scale.
And then I'm gonna give you three less common structures
and show you how you can tap into some more
refreshing, melodic use
using those things in some licks.
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To keep it simple all these examples
in this video are using the A melodic minor scale
which you can play like this.
(plays guitar)
If you wanna use this scale when you're improvising
you probably want to check it out
in more positions than one
but I'm going to leave that out now
because otherwise the video is gonna get really long.
Another thing you wanna check out
is actually to know what kind of harmony
is contained in the scale.
And there are two things you want
to check out with that.
The first one would be to learn
the diatonic triads, so that could be this.
(plays guitar)
Keep in mind that it's not enough
to be able to play the triads like this
because most of us can do that by ear
when we're playing in a position.
But you also want to know what triads are in there
because that's gonna be very useful
if you later want to superimpose them on other chords.
So be aware that you're playing like A minor triad.
B minor.
C augmented.
D major.
E major.
F# diminished.
G# diminished.
And then A minor, so on and so forth.
This is important information
because you really need that
when you're relating everything that you play in here
to another chord that you might be using it on.
The same goes for learning
the diatonic seventh chord arpeggios.
That would be this.
(plays guitar)
Besides knowing the basics
like the notes of the scale,
the diatonic triads and seventh chords,
you can also start to look for some structures
that are gonna give you some more interesting melodies.
One of the first places you want to look
is probably quartal harmony.
So just to make it a little more playable
I'm gonna show the quartal harmony
of the A minor melodic,
but then I'm gonna do it along the neck
and not in a position
because it'll be easier to play.
That would be this.
(plays guitar)
quartal harmony is really what you get
if you start stacking fourth intervals in the scale.
And if you do that in the position,
then you would go up four notes.
So that means you would go from,
if you start on the A, the fourth note up is a D,
and then four more notes up would be a G#,
and you would have (plays guitar).
Of course if I play that on the string set here
then it's a little bit easier
because if I know how to play my scales on each string
then I can just move the structure up note for note,
thinking of the scale of each string.
And what you will notice here
is that some of the structures are gonna be
just stacks of perfect fourths, like this one and this one.
Some of them are gonna be a little bit more strange
because we have some other intervals in melodic minor.
So the one found on G# is actually
a G#7 shell voicing.
And the one on A is gonna be a fourth
and then an augmented fourth
giving us this sort of minor 13th type sound.
Of course, you can play these in position as well.
That would be something like this.
(plays guitar)
The sus4 triad is another structure
with a very specific sound that's worthwhile checking out.
You can get some really interesting
sort of sounding lines with just an arpeggio really.
(plays guitar)
And if you want to check that out,
essentially, what we're doing here is
we are taking the scale
then we are playing one, four, and five.
And that way you get a certain sound structure
and then we're gonna take that through the scale.
And I'm gonna do that on the G and B strings.
That sounds like this.
(plays guitar)
With the sus4 triads,
it can also be very useful
to check out how they sound as chords.
That would be this.
(plays guitar)
Besides playing the triads
just as diatonic triads and inversions of triads
it can also be really useful to check out
the open-voiced or spread triads.
The great thing about those is that
they contain two large intervals
because you have a diatonic fifth
and a diatonic sixth involved.
If I play the diatonic spread triads
through the scale that sounds like this.
(plays guitar)
Of course these are the root position.
You can also check them out in inversions.
The first inversion would be this one.
(plays guitar)
And the second inversion would be this one.
(plays guitar)
And of course I'm checking out
the spread triads along the neck,
but it's also a really good exercise
to check them out in position if for no other reason
than just learning the notes of all the triads.
Like it would be something like this.
(plays guitar)
The first example is starting with two sus4 triads.
So I'm really just using the exercise that I went over.
So I would start with an Esus4.
(plays guitar)
Then I move down one degree in the scale to the D.
So shuffle.
From here I go into some diatonic seventh chord arpeggios
so I take an AmMaj7.
And then a CMaj7#5.
And then I'm skipping up to the F#
and ending on the major seven.
(plays guitar)
The opening of the second example
is using an A minor triad as a spread first inversion triad.
That's this.
(plays guitar)
From here I go into an E major triad,
and I'm using an E major, D major triad pair.
So that's E major first inversion,
D major root position,
and then another E major in first inversion.
and then a smaller scale one,
and then ending on the nine.
(plays guitar)
The third example is using some quartal arpeggios.
The first one is the one from G#
which in A melodic minor is the same
as a G#7 shell voicing.
From here I continue with the quartal arpeggio from E
but now I'm playing it on two strings,
so with a bit of a stretch.
Then I'm running down the scale,
skipping down to the fifth, B.
And then encircling the G#.
Then on the G# I'm adding
an open-voiced E major triad
and then resolving and ending the line
on the sixth so the F#.
Besides being great for making
some more interesting melodies with the melodic minor scale
these exercises are also a very good workout
for your right hand technique
because there's a lot of one note per string happening
and that can be quite difficult
if you're relying a lot on also picking.
It's also useful to get a bit of overview
of not only the melodic minor scale,
but just the fret board
and what notes are on there as a whole.
If you want to learn more about jazz guitar
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That's about it for this week.
Thank you for watching and until next week.
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