Wes Montgomery's Block Chord Method: Transform Your Playing

W Montgomery's iconic block chord soloing has captivated guitarists as well as music lovers in general for Generations in today's lesson I want to share with you two essential elements that I discovered while transcribing his famous solo Gone With The Wind by the end of this lesson you'll be able to create block or lines that you can use in both your comping and your soloing let's get into [Music] it [Music] okay so the first and most foundational element of West Montgomery's block cord soloing deals with something called passing diminished chords check this out this might sound complex but really only has two elements the first one is chord inversions and the second one is our passing diminish chords once we put these two elements together we can then pretty much harmonize any dionic Melody such as this one [Music] the first element which is Chord inversions is whenever we take a chord in this case let's use the chord C6 and we move each note of that chord up to the next note in the chords arpeggio in this case the notes of C6 in order are c e g and a the guitar voicing that I played arranged these notes in this order we have now to get an inversion each note of this voicing goes up to the next note of the arpeggio so C our first note would go to E then G would go to a a would go to c and e would go to G until we get this we repeat this process until we end up with the chord shape that we start [Music] with now the next step is where the magic happens so Wes thinks about the top note of each one of these voicings and puts a diminish chord on all the notes that are not part of an inversion by just going up the parent scale of whatever uh key we're in so in this case we're playing over C6 so our key is C so we're just going to go up the key of C so on all the notes that are not inv versions of C6 we're going to put a diminished chord on it if you did that it would sound like [Music] this now Wes also often adds a sharp five into our scale so that way each diminished chord resolves into an inversion of C6 and it sounds like this check it [Music] out this concept forms the backbone of Wes's block chord approach because you'll notice that the top note of all our voicings will go through every note in the kyc including that sharp five scale degree so this means that we can harmonize pretty much any dionic Melody now so if we had a Melody like [Music] this we could then harmonize it using Wes's block chords in this kind of way here's another example of harmonizing a dionic Melody much in the style of his solo on Gone With the [Music] Wind to get the most out of this concept you'll need to learn all these chord inversions and diminish chord shapes on different string sets other than just the top four like that last example demonstrated so if you want a written out guide covering how to practice that make sure to sign up for my patreon which you can find Linked In the video description below now Wes also uses this concept with minor set chords as well take this line for example the process to build this line is the same but now we use inversions of a minor 7 chord instead of a major six [Music] chord so you'll notice that he puts a diminish chord not only on the sharp five but also on the natural 7even using these inversions this causes every inversion like before of our diminish chord to resolve into an inversion of C Minor 7 this now could be used to harmonize melodies over minor chords Wes also does this over just dominant chords as well but his approach is a little bit different and he only uses diminished chords so if we had a G7 chord you could put a diminished chord off of every note of our G7 arpeggio and you're going to get a G7 flat kn [Music] sound remember that when you do this we don't play the root as a diminished chord but rather the flat n so instead of a g in the top we're going to do a flat now Wes will take these diminished chord shapes and approach them by half steps so we get something that sounds like this this creates a nice diminish chord sound and works really well to lead into resolving to one chord since this is over a five chord so once you can use passing diminished chords over major chords minor chords and dominant chords the next step is to combine all these Concepts together over some chord progressions most commonly probably a 2 51 here are a couple examples taken directly from Wes's Gone With the Wind [Music] solo so the last part of this equation deals with something called side slipping this is simply when we take a chord shape and either approach it by half step up or half step down so for example if we had this C6 chord we could approach it by a half step up or a half step below it Wes uses this in combination with his passing diminish chords here's a simple line that demonstrates this concept so we start out with the harmonization of our simple dionic Melody that we had earlier in this lesson [Music] and then we use side slipping to side slip into an inversion of C6 and then inversion of our diminished passing chord and then we continue to walk up that West dominant passing chord uh scale until we resolve and with a side slip to our one chord here's another line but this one is from [Music] Wes so you can see he uses the same Concepts but the side slipping happens specifically on this d113 voicing side slipping to our G major chord and then finally uh use a side slipping to resolve into an inversion again of G major 6 [Music] so you can see with just these two concepts of passing diminish chords and Sid slipping we can create pretty much block chord lines that sound like Wes I would highly recommend that you transcribe Wes's solo on Gone With the Wind because to me this really lays out the Bible on how to do this if you're interested in learning that I actually have a transcription with tab available on my website which I'll link below so as always I want to close this lesson with a short Aude over the first a section of the great standard All of Me and demonstrate the block cord Concepts that we used in this lesson if you would like the PDF the XML file and the guitar profile of not only this atude but all the other examples in this lesson then make sure to subscribe to my patreon which you can find linked below [Music] thank you guys so much for watching this video about West Montgomery's block chord concept I did this video as a follow-up to my previous video that talked about Wes's use of his arpeggio guitar shapes that one is the first video that I've ever done to hit 100K so I just really want to say thank you to all the support I received on that also this is my first video with my new camera setup which I have a Sony a7c and then I have my lumx gx7 so if you like this new setup let me know below and if you have any critiques I would also love to hear them also remember that this channel is now partnered with henriksson so if you buy anything off the Henrickson amplifiers website and use code Borton you receive 5% off and support this Channel all right guys thank you so much for watching and remember to always keep [Music] [Music] swinging [Music] n

Channel: Nathan Borton Music

Views: 37,585

Keywords: PDF download, guitar, jazz, jazz backing track, lesson, nathan borton, transcription, wes montgomery, wes montgomery block chords, wes montgomery guitar lesson, George Benson, George Benson Chords, jazz music

Id: EsUXabLSpAM

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023