5 Ways to Improvise Over Basic Chords

in this lesson video i'm going to show you some techniques for improvising over the bill withers classic tune ain't no sunshine including a really cool trick to make the pentatonic scale sound even cooler j madque here from bettersacks.com and before we get started if you like free saxophone lesson videos like the one you're about to watch do me a favor and drop me one of these right now and make sure you're subscribed to the channel in case somehow you aren't already throughout this lesson i'm gonna be using the great backing track for eight no sunshine that comes from bettertracks.com it's part of the new collection of backing tracks called groove and soul standards volume one with this lesson there is a free pdf to download and that you will find in the better sex shed i've linked to both of those things in the description below now before we get into the improvisation i have to reiterate because it's so important whenever you're learning a new tune you got to start with the melody and i strongly suggest you start by listening to recordings of that melody first a lot of people will skip over that and try to find the sheet music to learn the melody you're never really gonna learn a melody properly just from the sheet music even if you've heard ain't no sunshine a million times it's a good idea to go listen to bill withers sing it to get some ideas for phrasing and you know where to place the melody notes rhythmically now this is a great melody to learn by ear because it's entirely made up of the minor pentatonic scale with one extra note i've made a bunch of videos about learning melodies by ear and i've even created an entire free course about it it's called the play sax by ear crash course so if you want to learn how to learn melodies similar to this one by ear i strongly suggest you take that course it's free linked in the description below as well now once you got the melody learned your next step can be to figure out how to improvise over the chord changes ain't no sunshine is a great song for beginning improvisers to work on because the harmony is so simple there's only three chords and they're all minor chords now speaking in concert key here the chord progression to ain't no sunshine is four bars of a minor then one bar of e minor one bar of d minor and then two bars of a minor that gets you this eight bar phrase that makes up most of the song now let's go over a few tools you can use for improvising over this chord progression the first one is very simple it's just using the a minor pentatonic scale over the whole thing listen to me play over that eight bar progression just using the a minor pentatonic scale [Music] now there's nothing wrong with improvising over this chord progression just using that one minor pentatonic scale but you might start to feel a little bit limited in your ability to express yourself after a while we can upgrade that minor pentatonic scale to the blues scale by adding one note the flatted fifth here's an example of improvising over those eight bars with the blues scale only [Music] [Music] again there's nothing at all wrong with that but it can start to feel a little bit limiting and restrictive after a while so let's explore what happens when we add some more note possibilities what we're going to do now is we're going to apply different modes to the chords so the first chord is a minor and we can play the a dorian scale over that chord now when we get to the next chord which is e minor you might logically think oh let's play the e dorian mode over that chord as well but no we're not going to do that because of the harmonic context of the song when we get to that e minor chord we're going to play e aeolian the reason is we want to keep that c natural going we want a flat 6 on this v chord it's going to sound better overall now you may notice that e aeolian has the exact same notes as a dorian so we haven't changed any notes we're using the same collection of seven notes for the first five measures of the progression when we get to the next chord which is a d minor chord you might say to yourself can we play the dorian mode here and yes we can we're going to play dorian over the d minor chord you will now notice that there is one note different there is one note that is not the same between d dorian and the other two scales we've already used and since the next two bars are the same as the beginning a minor there is really only one measure in this eight bar progression where we need to adjust our note choices so one way to think of playing modally over this chord progression is to play your notes from that a dorian scale over all of it except for when you get to the four chord that d minor at that point you've got to make sure that you're playing an f natural that's the only note that changes and just for that one bar here's an example of me improvising over the chord progression just using those modes i mentioned [Music] oh [Music] now we're getting some more options for notes and colors and things are starting to sound a little bit more interesting if any of this stuff about modes or chords is going over your head and you'd like to really learn it properly i strongly suggest you check out my harmonic foundation course which you will find over at bettersacks.com it covers all of the music theory and chords and scales that we need to improvise in all popular styles of music now the next technique we can use for improvising over these chords is again pentatonic scales but this time we're going to use a different pentatonic scale for each chord so we're going to stick with the a minor pentatonic scale for all the a minor chords on the e minor chord we're going to play e minor pentatonic and on the d minor chord we're going to play d minor pentatonic here's an example of what that might sound like [Music] and finally here's the cool trick i told you about in the beginning that's going to make your pentatonic scale sound even more cool and hip let's say what we're going to do is play the minor pentatonic scale starting on the fifth of each chord this time so for a minor we're going to play an e minor pentatonic scale and for e minor we're going to play a b minor pentatonic scale and for the d minor chord we're going to play an a minor pentatonic scale have a listen to what that sounds like [Music] food now you might think oh that sounds a little bit out and angular and i'm not sure if i like that um that's fine you don't have to use that one if you're not really ready for that color but it's a great way to kind of push the boundaries of what you've been playing and none of those notes are outside of the harmony by the way um it's just kind of grouping the notes differently creates this effect there's more tension but everything is still diatonic to the chords now things really get interesting when you start mixing up all of these techniques there's really not a lot of noteiness going on here we're just playing notes that come out of the scales that go with those chords but we're organizing them differently we're thinking about these groups of notes in different ways so now i'm going to leave you with a longer solo where i'm just kind of improvising freely but i'm using all of these techniques here and there mixing it up according to what i'm feeling and hearing in my head at the moment remember the backing track that you're hearing me play over comes from bettertracks.com go check that out if you're looking for some great backing tracks and also don't forget to download the free pdf of this lesson which has all these all of these different techniques written out for you so you can go practice them along with some backing tracks thanks for watching and i'll see you again very soon [Music] hey [Music] uh [Music] oh [Music] be [Music] hey [Music] oh [Music] food [Music] uh [Music] [Music] two [Music] huh [Music] ah [Music] uh

Channel: Better Sax

Views: 162,023

Keywords: bettersax, better sax, jay metcalf, saxophone, sax, sax lessons, learn saxophone, how to play sax, alto sax, tenor sax, sax player, sax teacher, ain't no sunshine, bill withers, groove and soul standards, better trax, improvisation lesson, how to improvise, 5 levels of improvising, soloing over pop tunes, modal improvisation, pentatonic scale, blues scale, jazz saxophone lesson, ain't no sunshine when she's gone, backing tracks, free saxophone lesson

Id: r4P0DY97FYU

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021