This is the most clear explanation of chord melody, the bass and chord note technique. Bravo professor 👏👏👏

What an excellent job of presenting chord melody .... I truly love your technique and the sharing of your knowledge. Thanks so much!!! LaMar Kemp

I just received my hard cover of Improvise for Real ..I can see already from the different direction this was a great decision..great lesson🙏

Straight to the bone, clear and rich explanation. WONDERFUL. Thank you very much! I'll get this course right now

By FAR the best ! Thanks

I really appreciate your approach toward music. And you have a great way of communicating your method.

Amazing video, i love every video and always learn something new in each lesson.

Thank you for my first lesson

Beautifully and wisely presented. P.x

Amazing clarity.

Great video!

Great video

Wow I love this! Such a nice approach to improvisation. This helps alot. Thank you! Considering getting the improvise for real course. I'm so glad I found this.

@ImproviseForReal

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the kind words! I hope you do take my course! You'll find all of them here, with the guitar video courses at the bottom of the page: improviseforreal.com/learning-materials If you have any questions or need help in any way, don't hesitate to write. Thanks for watching and for your comment! - David

Very interesting 🥰

Hi, wasn't sure where to ask this question. But I was wondering what course I should start with for learning to play entirely on my own. Should I choose the IFR course or this one? I already have a decent theory knowledge and just want to begin being able to improvise entirely on my own. I'm assuming I should go with the chord melody course for this purpose?

@ImproviseForReal

4 ай бұрын

When you say that you want to play entirely on your own, do you mean unaccompanied solo guitar? If that's what you mean, then yes, absolutely, my series Chord Melody Guitar 1 & 2 is the very best way that I know how to teach that ability. You'll learn a way of practicing that allows you to control melody, chords and rhythm together, but in a way that allows the music to breathe and allows you to improvise melodically with complete freedom. Especially if you liked this first video from that course, I think you'll be very surprised and pleased at how far that course takes you. The concepts seem simple in the beginning but they stack up to a pretty awesome ability in just a few steps. So I would encourage you to take that course slowly and really enjoy each step, and I think it will take you exactly where you're describing. But if you have any other questions about it, please let me know and I'll be happy to answer them. Here's a link to the full description of the first level, Chord Melody Guitar 1: improviseforreal.com/products/chord-melody-guitar-1

Very interesting and you seem excellent teacher , just two queries , what is difference between this and learning classical guitar where you play guitar as a solo instrument and when you buy this course is there any course material s to print off ?

@ImproviseForReal

4 ай бұрын

Hi Alan, thanks for the kind words. Classical guitar is a great reference point for understanding the freedom of chord melody playing. Here's how to think about it. This course will allow you to play in the totally self-sufficient unaccompanied way that you associate with classical guitar, but with two other important advances. First, you'll be able to improvise both your melodies and your chord voicings. This is a total game changer because it turns your guitar practice into an unlimited creative exploration of the possibilities of melody and harmony. And second, you're also free to expand your sound palette far beyond what you associate with classical guitar. So you're free to express sounds that you associate with blues, jazz, flamenco, bossa nova, or any other style of music that touches you. What I'm really focusing on in this course is the methodology that enables you to combine bass, chords and melody in a way that is totally free creatively. It's not hard to do, but it does require some rewiring of how you think about chords and arrangements. We need to put our focus on the melody so that we can improvise with the same freedom we have when we are soloing with a band, and then we need to learn how to wrap those melodies notes with chords whenever we want to. To answer your other question, there are no printed materials with the course because they aren't necessary. This isn't the kind of course where someone gives you a thousand things to memorize. There are actually very few things to memorize in this course. All of the power comes from the practice itself, and we build that up together over the course of the 18 video lessons. I hope this helps! Here's a direct link to the course page for more info: improviseforreal.com/products/chord-melody-guitar-1

Hey there David, may I ask a question re IFR's jam tracks?? When I'm improv-ing a melody along with them, I realize I oftentimes am not simultaneously audiating the main bass movement of the progression. Whereas If I'm just listening to the jam track, w/o soloing, this's easy and obvious. When you're soloing, is this something easy to you? If so, any suggestions?? Worded differently, I guess this's a question of being able to audiate very simple harmony/counterpoint.

@ImproviseForReal

2 жыл бұрын

Hi Jeff, that's an interesting question. I think it's normal for your conscious attention to be focused on your solo when you're improvising. You're still feeling both the harmony and the rhythm, but you're not consciously naming those things because your attention is on listening to your own imagination and playing the sounds you imagine. As far as my own experience, it varies quite a lot by instrument. When I improvise on the guitar, I'm very conscious of both the melody note and the chord because the guitar is a polyphonic instrument so I'm always playing with both elements together. But this doesn't mean that I'm consciously audiating every note that the bassist plays. I certainly hear those notes and respond to them, but I don't really stop to label them because I can already hear their effect, and so my attention is on what I want to play in response to those sounds. On the trumpet, I don't even consciously label the chords going by. My attention is so focused on playing the sounds I imagine that it no longer even matters why I'm imagining them. So for example, if I'm improvising a simple diatonic melody in the key of the music and then suddenly feel the need to play b7, it really makes no difference WHY I'm being pulled to this note. Is it because the song just went to a chord that introduces this note (1D, 5-, 3-b5, 6Db9, b7D, b6D, etc.)? Or is it just an outside tension that I hear in my mind and want to add to the music myself? It literally makes no difference. All that matters is hearing the sound I want to express and knowing where to find it on my tonal map. So during a trumpet solo, if you were to stop me and ask what chord we're in, it might take me a second to snap out of that trance and remember the name of the chord for you. So even with the very same song, I find myself focusing in different places depending on whether I'm playing the trumpet or the guitar. And consciously naming what the bassist plays isn't part of my experience on either instrument. But I'm not sure if I understand your use of the term "audiating". Am I correct in understanding this to mean consciously transcribing and naming what the bassist plays? Or do you just mean listening actively and fully hearing those beautiful SOUNDS? If you mean listening actively, then that's definitely something I couldn't play without doing. The whole point of the improvisation is the conversation with the other musicians, so I definitely hear every note the bassist plays. But I'm not simultaneously taking the time to say the tonal number of each of those notes in my mind. That translation to tonal numbers is something I'm only doing with my melody notes, because I need to do that in order to play them. Does this answer your question? - David

@cyomara89

2 жыл бұрын

@@ImproviseForReal Hey David, as always- big thank you. both for the wisdom, and for taking the time to answer questions. And your breakdown of your mental framing, between two different instruments, is utterly fascinating, and helpful. I realize I shouldn't have framed it so much as the bass notes, but more just the general ability to hear/audiate two things at same time in one's mind. I don't think I have the ability to do that yet, and I was just wondering to what extent competent jazz people are able to hear and anticipate chords- while at the same time doing it for the melodies they'll play, in juxtaposition to those chords. Fwiw, I do think that's one benefit to ya'll's method of "just playing one note per chord, then playing a neighboring note for the next one" during jam tracks. That slow practice, of only one note, seems to let me anticipate/hear the chords in a way that more frenetic stuff would elide. Hope that makes sense. Again, thank you for everything. Jeff

Hi David, I’m not really sure where to ask this question but I hope you see it and you can help me. I’m curious about how to study altered chords. I know what the notes of the scale are based on the melodic minor of a half step above the root of the dominant chord but when drawing the diagram(where you write the 7 notes and circle the chord tones) it seems that I have too many notes in certain places. For example because it has the b9 and the #9 of the chord the second chord tone(note 7 on the 5 chord for example) is after 2 notes of the scale. I’m also a bit confused as to what to call the other notes in the scale. I hope this question wasn’t too confusing, thanks for everything

@ImproviseForReal

Жыл бұрын

Hi Jaden, thanks for your question. It sounds like you're just unsure about what notes make up the scale you want to study. So that's the first thing to get clear about. There can't be "too many notes" in a scale. A scale is just an arbitrary definition. Whatever the scale is defined to be, that's what it is. So if you want to study the "altered scale", you just need to start with a precise definition of what that is. Then if you want to bring this concept into the IFR paradigm, we would just do three things: 1) Once you have the scale clearly defined, the next step is to identify each one of these notes relative to the key of the music. For example, imagine that you want to study the G altered scale (G, Ab, Bb, B, etc.) and the song is in the key of C. What we want to do is label all of the notes of the G altered scale relative to the key of C so that we can see which notes on the musical landscape actually create this particular "altered scale". So we would name the notes 5, b6, b7, 7, etc. 2) The spend lots of time improvising with these sounds, staying conscious of the tonal numbers the whole time. We do this in order to learn the sounds and emotional effects produced by each note of the scale. This personal experience with the sounds is the most important learning about them. 3) Then finally, the only other part of our philosophy that is worth mentioning here is that we would then let go of all of this information whenever we're improvising a solo. If you've done the work to study and internalize the sounds of the altered scale, then these sounds will be available to you in your own musical imagination. That is to say, these sounds will occur to you naturally while you're improvising and you'll know how to play them. This is how I would encourage you to study any new musical concept. But I think it starts with having a clear definition of the concept you want to study, and maybe that's where you're not sure?

@jojotheworld

Жыл бұрын

@@ImproviseForReal thanks for the answer! That definitely cleared things up for me. I think i was just really attached to the idea that the 5 chord included note 2 when the scale doesn’t include note 2 so that was confusing me. Thanks for everything I study jazz in college and your method has helped me tremendously

This is very similar to what I do. Except I look at the fourth scale degree as my new one position And then count up from there 1357 etc.. Or does that take a left turn in you’re thinking for your next step in The way you visualize it.

@ImproviseForReal

2 жыл бұрын

Hi GUITARATORY, that's a great start and it's an important vision of things. Definitely it's important to be able to see each note relative to the chord root you're playing, and the way you're numbering the notes prioritizes this vision. That vision will never go away or become unimportant, so the more you practice it the better. Then the next vision that I encourage you to learn is the one I'm teaching in this video. Numbering all of the notes relative to the overall key of the music is what allows you to manage multiple chords on a single musical landscape. If you have to move your note 1 every time the chord changes, then a simple chord progression with four chords becomes a ridiculous mental exercise with four key changes in every line! This tonal vision of the chord notes is one of the central principles of Improvise for Real. Here are some videos that I think you'll enjoy which demonstrate what we can do with this vision: improviseforreal.com/ifr-blog/practice-tips/getting-past-the-theory/melody-paths improviseforreal.com/ifr-blog/practice-tips/developing-your-ear/qa-hear-notes-relative-chord-or-key improviseforreal.com/ifr-blog/practice-tips/developing-your-ear/qa-intervals-vs-tonal-ear-training I hope you like them! Thanks for the great question. - David

Lost me on those intervals for the 4 chord. I know a major chord is a 1, 3, 5 - which explains the 1, 3, 5 (and 7? not sure) from the 1 chord. The 4 chord choice of notes threw me. The 4, 6, 1, 3 choices for the 4 chord doesn't make sense to me. What's driving those choices? They don't line up with the notes of a 4 (major) chord.

@scrowe26

2 жыл бұрын

I think I figured this out. You were calling out note numbers relative to the 1 chord. So the note 6 is relative to the 1 chord. That same note would be note 3 relative to the 4 chord's root. The 4,6,1,3 relative to the 1 chord is the same as 1,3,5,7 relative to the 4 chord.

@ImproviseForReal

2 жыл бұрын

That's exactly right, Shane. But instead of thinking of those numbers as being "relative to the 1 chord", a better way to say it is that we're simply talking about the notes relative to the overall key of the music. We're seeing both the melody notes and the chord notes on a single musical landscape that we call the IFR Tonal Map. Learning to visualize the chord notes relative to the overall key of the music in this way allows you to see how everything fits together, which is essential if you want to be able to improvise freely in chord melody style. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. There's a great preparatory video for this course which I think you would really enjoy because it allows you to practice precisely this skill of learning to pull the chord notes out of the underlying scale. The exercise comes with free backing tracks to make your soloing more enjoyable and meaningful. Here's a direct link to this exercise: improviseforreal.com/ifr-blog/instrument-blogs/guitar-blog/get-ready-my-chord-melody-video-course