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Throwing in a surprising altered lick can add tension and a cool outside sound to your
solos, but for many players the altered scale feels confusing and abstract, and I also struggled
to make it sound right in my solos, until my teacher gave me a simple trick that made
everything click.
In this video I'm going to share that trick with you, along with three essential rules
that will make using the altered scale a lot easier.
You don't want to get stuck playing the same safe solos over and over.
Before we get to the rules, let's start with the foundation, because if you skip this,
the altered scale won't make sense and your solos won't work at all.
Not everyone agrees on what altered dominant and altered scale really means, but in this
video I'm going to connect everything to the altered scale as a part of Melodic Minor,
and as you'll see, this scale actually breaks some of the rules you'd expect, so you need
to approach it differently to make it work in your solos.
Hearing the sound of altered dominants in chord progressions will make everything easier
later when we get to soloing, so listen closely to these examples.
Here's an unaltered G7.
And here's the same progression with an altered G7.
What you hear is that there's a lot more tension on the G7 altered, with the sharp 9 and the
flat 5 that moves up to the flat 13, before resolving to the Cmaj7.
The important things to remember for an altered dominant are altered extensions, so sharp
9, flat 13, no perfect 5th, and that it is resolving, so you have G7 altered, moving
down to Cmaj7 in this case.
I know that some people don't like seeing the chord written out as G7 altered, but essentially
that means that it is a dominant from the altered scale, and as you probably already
realized, in jazz, specific and sort of vertical chord symbols don't really describe what
is being played 99% of the time.
For G7, the altered scale is the Ab melodic minor scale played from G to G, so a simple
version of that would be this.
Let's look at what notes are really in there and see if you can spot one thing that's a
bit weird.
You have the root, the flat 9, the sharp 9, the major 3rd, then you have the flat 5 or
sharp 11, the flat 13, and of course a flat 7 also, because it's a dominant scale.
Now, the notes are the same as Ab melodic minor, which you may already know and be able
to play, but did you see that the 3rd, so B, is actually not the 3rd note in the scale?
Which is a bit strange, but since you then have the sharp 9 and the flat 9, it's kinda
nice.
Let's get to rule number 1, which is about tension and how to understand and hear the
altered scale.
Every note except the root wants to resolve.
The first rule is important for getting the altered sound to flow naturally in your solos.
Every note in the altered scale except the root creates tension and wants to resolve
somewhere, and once you understand how these notes resolve, you can start using them in
simple musical ways.
And in a bit, I'm gonna show you how to turn this into 3-note altered licks that actually
sound great.
But first, let's go through how each note resolves.
The G doesn't do anything, it just stays there, so with chords you would just have a sustained
note.
The second note, the Ab, resolves down to the G, so I'm gonna mention these resolutions
relative to the chord that they're resolving on, so that means that the flat 9 is resolving
down to the G, that is the 5th of Cmaj7, so you have these chords.
The sharp 9, Bb, is a little bit special because that also resolves down to the G, up to the
5th, but it does it through the Ab, so...
And I'm sure you've heard this.
The 3rd, B, resolves up to the root, and with chords.
The b5, Db, resolves down to the root, and it sounds like this.
The b13, Eb, resolves up to the 3rd, and that gives you this.
And of course the b7, F, resolves down to the 3rd, so in this case that's F down to
E.
Once you understand how these notes resolve, you can start creating simple but strong 3-note
altered licks, like this.
So really it's just one note per chord, I'm starting on the 5th of Dm7, then moving down
to the b9 on the G7 altered, which of course resolves to the 5th on Cmaj7.
And this...
Kinda introduces something that's important
for rule number two, which we'll get to next,
but let's just hear another example first.
And if you put the chords under that, you get this.
Now we can move on to rule number two,
which tells you about how your altered lines should flow.
Altered lines must have direction.
The altered scale creates tension that wants to resolve,
and that's exactly how your solo lines should work.
They need to move toward that resolution.
You can start doing this in a very simple way
with a line like this.
Here, the altered part of the lick
is really just a descending scale run
that resolves to the fifth of C major seven.
But you can also create more interesting
and complex lines like this one.
And it's important to land on strong chord tones
when you resolve.
A great way to practice this is really just
by targeting the third of the chord that you resolve to.
In this case, of course, that's E over C major seven.
Here's how you can approach it from above.
And here's how you can approach it from below.
These examples are fairly simple scale-based melodies,
but the main thing is to take your time
and experiment with different ways to resolve
and end your line on the third E in a natural way.
Now, if you still find it difficult to get used to thinking
about all these different notes
with the flat thirteens and the sharp nines,
there is a shortcut for that too,
and I'll get back to that later.
But first, these lines are mostly based on scale movement,
and that brings us to rule number three,
where we explore a few more options.
There is no G7 altered arpeggio.
Now, this might sound like a pretty useless rule,
but it's actually the key to playing great altered lines
without getting stuck in boring scale runs.
As you already know, G7 altered uses the same notes
as Ab melodic minor,
and that means that we can actually use
the diatonic arpeggios to build strong altered lines,
except for the one that's on G,
because that's not really useful.
I'll get to that.
Here are the arpeggios from Ab melodic minor,
and I'm writing them out with a B instead of a Cb,
because that just makes more sense in the context of G7,
and there is really no 100% correct way
to write this out anyway.
The arpeggio on G is G half-diminished,
and that doesn't really give us
a strong altered dominant sound,
because it's a G half-diminished.
It sounds like a G half-diminished chord,
so we need something that's a little bit stronger,
and to get closer to a real altered sound,
you want to focus on the arpeggios
that contain the third of the altered dominant, B,
and that gives you these arpeggios,
Ab minor major,
Bmaj7 sharp 5,
Bb7,
and F half-diminished.
Let's explore what they give us,
and see how that works in real solos.
F half-diminished is probably the easiest to use,
because it really is just a G7 with a b9 and a b13.
Let me show you.
So you have the b7, you have the b9,
then you have the third, and then you have the b13,
and if you look at an F half-diminished voicing,
that could be something like this,
and of course, with a G in the bass,
you have your b9, b13 dominant,
and a bonus is that if you use the arpeggio
from the third of Dm7, Fmaj7,
then you can voice lead that,
and create a more melodic flow in your 2-5-1 line.
And here you can see how the Fmaj7 on the Dm7 chord
is sort of voice leading,
or transforming into an F half-diminished,
on the G7 altered,
and then actually also going to an Em7
over the Cmaj7 chord.
And this is a great way to make the 2-5-1 line
make more sense as a melody, or as a story.
Now, a similar strategy works well for Db7,
but here I use it so that it sounds a little bit more
like a call-response statement,
because of the direction of the melody.
Another great option is the Bmaj7 sharp 5,
which also has that augmented triad in there,
which is really a great sound to use
for also dominants as well.
The Dm7 line starts with an Fmaj7 pivot arpeggio
with a leading note,
and then transitions to the Bmaj7 sharp 5 arpeggio,
targeting the Eb,
which really gives us that clear b13 on the G7.
Now, the arpeggio also adds the sharp 9,
the Bb,
and in resolving that, I'm also introducing the b9,
which really makes the resolution stronger.
more natural sounding.
The final go-to altered arpeggio
is the A-flat minor major seven.
And this one is perfect for arpeggio combination melodies.
Check this out.
So here you have the A-flat minor major seven arpeggio
chained together with the F half-diminished arpeggio.
And this type of melody works really well
for several types of chords.
Just check out Kurt Rostwinkel and Charlie Parker
because they both use this quite a lot.
If you've ever struggled to make
altered lines sound like music,
then I know exactly how that feels
because I had that same problem.
I was practicing arpeggios and triads from the alto scale,
but it was hard to actually hear melodies with that
and thinking all these sharp nines and flat thirteens.
And that's when my teacher at the time,
Bjarne Ruppe, gave me a trick
that instantly made it a lot easier.
Now, instead of thinking in terms of the altered dominant,
he told me to use tritone substitution and think that.
Now, at the time I was working on Stella by Starlight
and on the two bars of G7 altered in the bridge,
he suggested that I approach it as D-flat seven
with a sharp 11, so a Lydian dominant instead of G7.
This was a game changer
because I knew the sound of a D-flat seven chord
and I could use familiar D-flat seven lines
and still resolve smoothly to C minor seven
while the comping was still playing G7 altered.
And you can lean even more into the D-flat seven sound
like this.
The note D-flat is probably the hardest note to hear
in the context of a G7 altered sound.
But thinking of it as a D-flat seven Lydian dominant
or sharp 11, made that a lot easier
and you can also easily play strong melodic lines.
Now, what we're relying on here is of course
that G altered is the same as A-flat melodic minor
which is of course also the same as D-flat Lydian dominant.
So it's really the same scale,
you're just thinking about it a little bit different.
And later on, I switched back to thinking
in terms of G7 altered,
but this approach really helped me internalize
the sound first.
The way you think about a concept opens up new possibilities
and that applies to chords just as much as solos.
If you think getting better at jazz chords
is just about learning new grips,
you're missing a huge part of the picture.
The real skill is making basic chords sound amazing
in a real piece of music.
In this video, I'm gonna show you three exercises
that will completely change how you comp,
helping you develop the real skills that you need,
not just a bunch of shapes.
Check it out, learn jazz, make music.
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