Chord Melody Guitar Guide

Creating chord melodies and playing solo arrangements is one of the most fun things about playing
jazz guitar, so this this lesson will focus on how to play chord melody guitar by looking into 5 ways
you can harmonize and embelish a melody with chords.

Although the series has already featured an article about how to take jazz guitar solos’ no series in
jazz guitar comping would be complete without a dedicated chord melody article.

Creating a chord melody is simply just adding harmony to single line melodies, but a good solo
guitar arrangement include techniques such walking bass lines, keeping good time, combing single
lines with chords and taking chord solos.

Guitarists such as George Van Eps, Joe Pass and Martin Taylor have made names for themselves for
this style of playing alone. In this lesson I will be teaching you how to create and arrange chord
melodies for guitar.

Harmonizing notes has already being discussed in the jazz guitar chord solo article from the series so
today’s lesson will be concentrating on some practical tips and exercises to bring these arrangements
to life.

Adding Chords to a Melody Exercise

One exercise to ensure a thorough chord vocabulary for chord solos and chord melody arranging is to
open the real book and then pick out any standard at random to see if you work out the chords with
the melody note on top right away.

Although you usually wouldn’t play every note with a chord in a performance situation, being aware
of chords around the melody is useful so that you can pick and choose which chords to add and leave
out.

When you can pick out any standards and instantly see the chord with the melody on top of the
voicing instantly you will have the basics of solo jazz guitar arranging down.

To demonstrate this in practice I have written out one of the chord licks from an earlier chapter with
the harmony or chord added to every single note.
 A Balanced Approach

Once you can see what chords fit over melody notes you can then start to mix things up by replacing
chords with single notes, and diads.

Using chords for every melody note can create unnecessary hard work as well as potentially sound
clunky, so mixing single lines and chord keeps the arrangements free flowing and interesting.

Play through this example of the same lick and notice that only some notes have been harmonized
making it easier and smoother to play the lick
 Create Motion at Static Points

Solo jazz guitar arrangements can sound a little dry when they’re played exactly like they are written
out in fake books. One way this can be fixed is by adding motion at static points within a piece.

This technique is particularly effective at points where there is a long held over one or two chord
within a piece.

One way that motion can be added to the example V-I lick, is to create some movement over the last
C major 7 chord.
th

Motion is created here by ascending up the harmonized C major scale in chords.

Add Passing Chords

A great little trick that can add interest to chord melodies and comping in general is sliding into
chords from either a half step above or below.

For example if you wanted to slide into a C7 chord you could either slide from a B7 which is a half
step below or a Db7, a half step above.

This is a common technique used by jazz guitarists and I’ve included it at the very beginning before
the D-7 chord in the V-I example.
 Experiment with Reharmonization

Although most of us play the great jazz standards that have been covered by countless musicians
over the years there are still ways that can make the tunes our own.

Some ways that you can give a progression a new sound are reharmonization, countrary motion, and
substitutions.

When you consider how many inversions there are for one chord and all the different ways that you
can harmonize them there are endless possibilites for this guitar style.

If you haven’t already begun learning tunes and making them solo jazz guitar arrangements you
should have a go.

Remember this style of guitar can still be improvised Not only will making solo guitar pieces give
you complete tunes to play in front of people it is great fun will also help you see and understand the
guitar more.

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What are some of your favorite tricks and tips to do when creating solo jazz guitar arrangements?
Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Putting Chords to an Existing Melody

What you should get from this section:

After completing this section, you should be able to take an existing melody and put chords,
and a bass line to it to create a strong structure.

There are several things you can do to help you put a chord progression to an existing melody
that will make your life a lot easier. Here are a few of them:

 The first thing you should try to do is work out what key it’s in. This will make it a lot
easier, as if you know what key you’re playing in, you can pick chords from that key (see
section on theory). How do you do this?

 Well, first of all, play the melody. Are there lots of sharps or flats in there? If so, look at
the key signatures in the theory section and see what ones match the notes you’re
playing. Do they match any particular key? If there are F#’s in the melody, but C
naturals, then it might be in G. If there are lots of Bb’s and Eb’s but natural A’s it may be
in Bb major.

 If that hasn’t helped, then see what note the melody starts and finishes on. Quite often
a melody will start and/or end on the note of the dominant chord in the key. So if it’s in
A for example, it will quite often start on that note and/or end on that note.

 It could be in the relative minor key. Every Major key has a relative minor key, which
contains the same notes, and the same chords as the Major; it simply starts on a
different note. For example, in the Key of C Major, the relative minor is Am. So if the
piece looks like it’s in C, but starts and/or finishes on A, it’s probably in A minor. The way
to find the relative minor key from each Major key is to simply count up 6 notes from
the root. For example in C Major: C=1, D=2, E=3, F=4, G=5, A=6 (And this is the minor
key). Note how it’s different from the A Major key.

 Try putting a simple bass line to the melody. As bass lines are fairly easy to write, you
should have no problem with this. Once you’ve got the bass line, take the root notes
and use the chords that they correspond to. See if it fits.

 Try putting a standard chord progression to the melody. For example, I, IV, I, V (In C this
would be C, F, C, G). The reason this might work is that the way our Western musical
ears are “tuned”, we automatically follow certain musical patterns without even
thinking about it, subconsciously creating melodies that fit in with the “norm”.

 Strip the melody down to its bare essentials. Take out all the notes that aren’t totally
necessary to the overall feel of the melody, and see if that makes it easier once you’ve
got down to the core of the melody.
Here is an Example of how I’d put chords to a melody. Let’s start with a melody that everybody
knows. Amazing grace:

Well it’s in the Key of C Major for a start (it’s easy as I wrote it down in that key, but I DID work
it out...honest)

So the notes in the 2nd bar are C and E. So it’s in C Major, the first accented note is a C, and the
notes in the bar are a C, and an E which are the root and third of the C Major chord. Do you
think a C chord might work here? Let’s try it…Ok, that works!

Next bar. The notes are an E and a D. The E lasts for the majority of the bar however, so let’s
concentrate on that note. We’ll try an Em as it’s the obvious choice, but if you play it, it doesn’t
sound very good so let’s discard that chord. Am also has an E in it, so let’s try that chord.
Ahhhhh much nicer, so we’ll stick with that!

The next bar contains a C and an A so Am could work again here, but I have a hunch that we
should go back to C. Ok that works well.

Where did my hunch come from? I thought it was an appropriate place to change the chord,
and we’d just been on Am so I assumed that C would work, and as the main note in the bar is a
C it stood to reason that it would fit.

Next bar only contains the note G. As the chord G is in our key, and it seems obvious, let’s try it.
. . Bingo! It works.

The next bar is the same as the 2 nd bar so I think it’s safe to try a C there.. Yep, it fits.

Next bar again, same as the third so we’ll stick an Am in there and it works a treat.

The next TWO bars seem to stay on G, so let’s try a G chord holding it for two bars. Do you think
that worked? Yes it did, so it seems we have a chord progression here that’s working. If we play
the second half of the song using exactly the same chords, it works fine.
The only difference is the last two bars where we need to finish up with two bars of C Major,
instead of two bars of G Major.

So this is what it looks like with the chords added:

So what guidelines did this melody follow??

 We ascertained the key as C Major.

 All the notes were in the key, which made it easy. No accidental sharps or flats.
 The first AND last chords were C Major, so it followed that basic rule.
 All the chords were within the key.
 By taking the main notes of the melody, we were able to attribute chords to them pretty
easily.

So what did you learn in this section?

 How to take a basic melody and break it down bar by bar to find out what chords would
fit.
 Different methods of working out the chords within a melody.
 How to ascertain the key a melody is being played in.
 How to work out the relative minor keys of the Major key.

Exercise:

 Take a couple of melodies, either well known ones, or ones of your own creation, and
using the techniques above, work out what chords would fit with the melody. Then
using your composing skills, add nuances to it to make it a little more interesting.