6 Ways To Solo Over 4 "Simple" Chords [Dorian + Minor Modal Mixture]

hey it's me Jake and in this lesson I want to take a look at four seemingly simple chords and analyze them through the lens of music theory to help us develop six different strategies we can use to compose melodies or lead lines on top of those chords and like I said the chords are pretty simple we're just gonna have an E minor a G major and a major and a C major further I do recommend you just take a quick pause write those chords down and try to figure out on your own what key is that in how would you approach this as a guitar player or a lead player what scales are you thinking of and really how would you just generally parse this simple progression now I'd like to start with the simplest approach and that is to just recognize that everything revolves around this chord D minor E minor is where things start Imai neurs were things and and the simplest thing you can do if you don't have a lot of music theory is just rock out pentatonic minor this is a classic guitar player to answer to everything the pentatonic minor scale works in almost every kind of scenario where there is a tonal center and I went through several examples of that in my video pentatonic possibilities so one of the lessons in that video was that pentatonic minor works almost anywhere so over this chord progression just by recognizing that we have a tonal center and an E minor it enables me to think okay I could get away with playing a pentatonic minor on top of this entire four chord progression and it should sound pretty good let's take a listen [Music] [Music] [Music] now the backing track I was playing there is one that I produced myself and I actually live streamed the whole process of me recording and producing that because I have been getting more requests about production lessons so instead of uploading them here on to this channel I am going to be uploading those videos onto a new channel aptly titled Jake Lizzie oh and that video is linked below in the description so obviously noodling up-and-down pentatonic minor works just fine in this scenario but what if we wanted to take things a step further and we wanted to noodle up and down the natural minor scale well we are gonna run into some problems and here's the deal the E minor scale has an e f-sharp and if we look at those chords we have an E minor or do we have an F sharp half-diminished chord we have the G major and hopefully you see that in our original progression three of those chords come straight from the key the C is the sixth chord the odd man out here is this a major a major is not in the key of E minor a major has a C sharp note it and there is no C sharp note in my key of E minor so we have a little bit of conflict here to resolve that I want to think about what happens to an E minor scale if I just take all of my C naturals and turn them into C sharps instead what I get is a scale of e F sharp G a B C sharp D and E and that scale is Dorian Dorian would be an excellent choice for scales over that a major chord that a major chord can be thought of as being borrowed from e Dorian so over that a major chord what will experiment with doing is exclusively over that a major chord we will play E Dorian but for the rest of the chord progression over those other three chords we will play the E minor scale basically we're playing with modal mixer or modal interchanging [Music] [Music] now I know that was a big step up in complexity going from pentatonic minor to modal mixture so let's take it back and step down make things a lot easier one thing we can do is just add in a single note to our Panasonic minor scale to give it a little bit of Dorian flavor so if we're playing a pentatonic minor and if we just add in the natural six c-sharp we have this little abbreviated Dorian scale which I really like to use as a soloing device because it's so familiar to my fingers and it's so close to being just regular pentatonic minor so instead of thinking modal mixter and stuff like that instead this time what I'm gonna do is go back to just spamming pentatonic minor I'm gonna be noodling pentatonic minor but every time that a major chord comes up I will make it a point to really accent that C sharp right here and right there as well to really kind of indicate to the listener that we're highlighting that a major chord we're getting a little bit of Dorian flavor in there [Music] so up until this point we've really been interpreting everything as being the key of E minor and then we're grabbing from a little bit of a Dorian but let's flip everything on his head let's pretend we're in the key of E Dorian because three of these chords are in the key of E Dorian a minor is an adoring and teenagers in the Dorian a major city buried C is the odd man out in a Dorian so let's really focus let's really promote this Dorian flavor the really minor over the P over the hey and then when he comes up we'll slip into E minor instead and that'll give us a really different effect than what we had before now it's going to be mostly Dorian with a little bit of minor instead of mostly minor with a little bit of Dorian [Music] and if this kind of thing was going on throughout the song I would actually write this in a different key signature I would really write this with the key signature of D major which is the same as e Dorian and that's less accidentals and it really helps us understand what the lead player should be doing they should be playing lots of C sharps over the E minor chord over the G chord over the a chord and it's only when the C chord comes around where the C natural starts coming back now let's put the scales aside a bit and let's instead just focus on the chords themselves the core tones and the arpeggios every one of these chords we play it only has three notes so like II minor only has the three notes the G major is just a the C major chord I'm sorry a major is just an a C sharp e AC sharp E and the C major chord was just a CPC so even by just doing this just by playing those arpeggios you can hear the the chord progression start to develop in your here because I'm playing the notes in the chord so as a solo or if I'm writing melodies or if I'm playing solos in improvising obviously I want to be thinking about those arpeggios they're really really great sounding and we can string them together very very easily and as a lead player I love stringing together arpeggio passages so let's find a way to do that in a very simple fashion and that way we have a fun little arpeggio lick we can throw in to the middle of our pentatonic playing or our Dorian playing E minor for example could just be played like this we have an E and a G and a B so here's a simple arpeggio shape and we could play it a million ways you could just do pull offs like this 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 you could do a pull off like that and then it returns like 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 you could tap this you could do tap here and then a you know pull off all the way so any way you want to play these three notes I really don't care I just think it's fun to be hanging out on these three notes for the E minor chord when that E minor chord comes up instead of thinking of a full scale maybe just hang out on three little notes of the E minor arpeggio then when G major comes around look at this we've got the simple little G major shape right here we've got a GED and so that'll be my shape that I'm gonna go to I'm just gonna land on that when g-major comes around when the a major chord pops up here's a very simple way to play an a major arpeggio I've got an e I've got a c-sharp and an egg those are the three notes of a major and then lastly when the C major chord comes up well here's an E and a G and a C UGC so you can hear the chord progression now [Music] coming out of just that simple arpeggio pattern so I'd like to try to slip some of that into our scale playing hear how that actually affects our solo [Music] now our last strategy is going to rely on us going deep into our chord progression to try to discover some inherent properties within it that we can help promote and highlight as a lead player or composer and specifically what I'd like to take a look at is some chromatic passage that already occurs within this chord progression in the dqo in the G major chord which is our second chord in the progression inside that G major chord there's a D note and then inside the a major chord there's a C sharp note and then inside the C major chord there's a CD and then when it resolves back to E minor so did you hear we have this chromatic passage starting on our second chord we have a d e to a C sharp to a C to a B and if we kind of accent that here if we sing the shots [Music] that's a cool little line that already exists within the voicings of the chords themselves now that I've recognized that I feel like that is a potent little line that I can borrow from and start injecting into my solos at the simplest level you could just play those four notes and highlight them as those chords come up [Music] but what I would rather do is kind of embed that descending passage in the middle of a lick somehow so think of a repeating pattern that keeps repeating itself but the only thing that changes is that one note that'll really catch the listeners ear something very simple like this imagine if I'm on they start on the note B and I go kind of up and down my pen atomic-scale alright so I'm going B de GE and let's just modify that now so it starts on a D and now let's modify it so it starts on a C sharp and let's modify it so it starts on the C so now I've got this bond 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 right so you can hear that descending passage creeping along its way in there and if I can incorporate that over the chords that should sound pretty interesting [Music] now this entire question came about because one of my wonderful patreon subscribers had sent the question to me asking how am I supposed to solo over this chord progression and as you can see there's not one answer to that there's and this isn't even all the answers we could keep going with this kind of stuff all day but I wanted to just really kind of briefly describe to you the big areas that I'd be thinking about if I had time to compose I mean obviously if you're just throwing the chord progression on stage you know you're gonna have to think on your feet but if you do have time to analyze things and really look at the connections between things you can come up with some some really good music and some good options that's why I like this stuff is every one of these sounded different to me and the whole idea of being a good composer is having different options you don't want everything to be one-dimensional and always sound the same you want to have choices you want to be able to say I need to ramp this up to sound more aggressive or less aggressive and you know if you don't have choices how are you supposed to compose so for me as somebody to look at this chord progression and have kind of six different areas you know six different choices that to me is is confidence that is empowering um it's fun too it means that you know I can play around something new it's not gonna get stale I can play around with arpeggios or chromatics you can see we talked about those embedded chromatics there's a lot of richness embedded into those simple four little chords so it's very easy to just you know draw the conclusion right away when you see a simple set of major chords and minor chords be like uh yeah it's pop music it's four forward Rock yeah you know take another look because there's there's sometimes a lot going on in there so I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned something and if you did please thank my patreon supporters for making these videos possible they're the only sponsors I would like to work with at this point and without them these videos would not exist so thanks for watching and I will see you next time you [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 172,153

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: m0zLzVhTPYU

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020