Selecting Scales & Modes for your Improvisation

[Music] hi guys so i wanted to make a video on how i go about selecting scales and modes to use in my improvisation of all the different scales why do i choose to use the ones i do but first let's briefly cover a few different approaches or ways of thinking about improvisation and when you use them so jazz musicians generally talk about two different approaches to improvisation the horizontal approach where you think in terms of scales and the vertical approach where you think in terms of chords and when improvising horizontally you can either think in terms of a key or a common scale where you allocate one scale to multiple chords or in terms of modes where you allocate one scale per chord now if you have a song that uses lots of chords from different keys and each chord only lasts a short period of time say half a bar then i would generally approach the improvisation vertically by mostly just arpeggiating each chord and then adding in a few passing notes in between your arpeggios or by using a common scale that fits over all or most of the chords now i've got a video on chord mapping where i discuss how to find and apply these common scales in just such a situation which i'll link in the description now this is generally because practically it's quite hard to remember and play a separate mode for each chord if the chords are changing every half bar right you don't really have the mental capacity or the time to execute and play a new mode every two beats but if you have a song that doesn't use too many chords and the chords last a relatively long time say one to two bars each then i would generally use the key or common scale approach where again you allocate a single scale to multiple chords or the mode approach where you allocate one scale per chord again simply because you have fewer modes to remember and more time to play each mode so now let's demonstrate this with an example now i recently published a video of me playing the jazz standard song for my father which again i will also link in the description now this is a good example of a song where you can use the mode approach because the entire song only has four chords and each chord generally lasts about two bars so you have enough time to think and play different scales for each chord so this song is a boss anova and i'll just play the first section a for you so you get a feel for the song [Music] right so that's its general vibe great so now which modes do we actually choose well here's a list of modes and scales you can use over each chord type as a generalization we want to make sure that the root third fifth and seventh of each chord are in the scale so so that the scale fits over that particular chord so in principle you could pick any of these modes for each chord type but in practice i have two main considerations one i want to minimize the number of avoid notes in the scale and two i want to introduce a small change each time i play a new mode so when i move from one mode to the next i only want one or two notes to change now i've got a few other videos where i talk about avoid notes which i'll also link in the description but essentially these are notes in a scale that sounds dissonant against a particular chord and this is because they form a dissonant interval with one of the chord tones now generally this means that there is a scale note that is one semitone above a chord tone so for example we could use the f phrygian mode over the f minor seven chord but that has a flat two and a flat six which are both a semitone above the root and the fifth of the chord respectively so the root and the fifth of the chord are f and c and the scale has a g flat and a d flat in it which are going to sound really really dissonant because they're going to clash with those two notes in the chords thus they are avoid notes and because these notes sound unpleasant they are generally avoided whereas the f dorian mode does not have any avoid notes over an f minor 7 chord so you'll find that most musicians use the dorian mode over -7 chords rather than say the phrygian so you could do this kind of mapping for all the modes as they relate to each chord type and figure out which ones have fewer avoid notes so in this way we have a preference for scales that minimize the number of avoid notes against a particular chord but the second consideration is that you want a couple of notes to change as you move from one mode to the next so for example in song for my father it starts on an f minor seven chord and then goes to an e flat seven chord now when improvising i could use f aeolian going to e flat mixolydian but these are actually both the same scale a flat major so nothing changes when you move from one chord to the next which to me kind of defeats the purpose of thinking in modes you may as well just think in terms of keys and use the a flat major scale to improvise over the entire chord progression and not over complicate matters by thinking in terms of modes ultimately i could use f dorian followed by a flat whole tone but now we are changing almost half the notes in the scale and in fact dropping one note all together so it's going to sound like quite a big change and thus quite disjointed now sometimes you might want that kind of disjointed and disconnected sound but as a general rule we generally don't want such a dramatic change the transition between one node to the next sounds much smoother if only one or two notes change between them so in my rendition of song for my father i used f dorian over f minor seven e flat mixolydian over e flat seven d flat lydian dominant over d flat seven and then c mixolydian flat six over c7 now from the f to the e flat only one note changes from the e flat to the d flat only one note changes then from the d flat to the c three notes change and so i kind of did that on purpose my first two transitions from the f to the e flat and e flat to the d flat were quite smooth only one note changing and then i had almost like a you know a 180 turn and had quite a dramatic change by introducing that c mixolydian flat six mode which changes three notes and therefore sounds quite a bit different and removed from the rest of the improvisation but that's because i'm on the final five chord which then resolves back to the one so i'm kind of emphasizing or building up to the tension that's my peak tension the most tension that i develop in my improvisation before then resolving back into that one chord [Music] right but if i wanted a less dramatic change from that d flat to the c i could move to c phrygian dominance where only two notes change rather than three [Music] so that's the mode approach to improvisation the other approach i use is thinking in terms of keys or common scales now here you need to find one scale that more or less fits all the chords which again just means that we want the scale to contain most of the chord tones from all the chords so the ones i used were f blues which fit okay and f harmonic minor which also fit relatively well [Music] and i could have also used f aeolian [Music] but i didn't use that one because it's a little bit too predictable you know the song is in the key of f minor and i just use the f natural minor scale over it you know that's a little bit boring a little bit unimaginative um and possibly a little bit too consonant for me i like a little bit of dissonance and crunchiness in my solos which is why i picked scales that fit relatively well but still have a few of those avoid notes or a few notes missing a few notes that don't quite fit over this particular chord progression and that's it so that was a little bit of a marathon i admit so well done if you've made it to the end but now you know my thought process or my system of selecting scales and modes to use in my improvisation so hopefully you found that interesting and useful and maybe a little bit enlightening and otherwise yes thank you for watching and i will see you next time bye you

Channel: Walk That Bass

Views: 11,362

Keywords: Jazz Piano, Modes, Scales, Jazz Improvisation

Id: o9Hzy1yWUZg

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021