The Secret to Melodic Soloing

Video Cliffs:

0:00 – Explanation of the “Secret”

8:08 – Musical Demonstration

Relevant Lessons:

Extra Stuff for Full Access Members! In addition to everything else that is included with a Full Access Membership, many lessons include “Full Access Extras”.

Full Access Member “Video Backing Tracks” for this lesson: One 9 1/2 minute Video Backing Track using the same rhythm track as in the demo from this lesson

The video contains a full fretboard diagram displaying the F major scale spanned across the entire neck, and as the chords change in the rhythm the chord tones “light up”.

This video will help you with practicing the “chord-scale” connection.

Connecting the Chord Tones to the Key-Scale

I’ve talked about the importance of this many times on this site. Most of the lessons about this concept can be found on the soloing with chords page.

However, knowing the theory behind connecting the chord tones within the scale to the actual scale is one thing. How to actually APPLY this theory is where the true art comes into play.

In my opinion, the big “secret” is to simply study VOCALISTS.

That’s right, vocalists!

Why?

When you hear a song that gets stuck in your head, chances are you are singing the vocal line of the song. This is also known as the melody.

One excellent definition of melody is:

Melody: The principal part in harmonized music

And the definition of harmony is:

Harmony: the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce chords and chord progressions having a pleasing effect

In other words, the melody line is a direct connection between the underlying chords and the key-scale.

When a good vocalist sings, he/she is hitting notes with their voice that is part of the underlying chord that is occurring within the chord progression. Only they are doing with their vocal chords instead of with a guitar.

Therefore, a very good exercise would be to listen to catchy vocal lines and learn to play those lines on the guitar. There’s a guy on YouTube named Kfir Ochaion that does an excellent job of this. Check him out!

There are other guitarists out there that masterfully create melody lines on the guitar. One of my personal favorites is Mark Knopfler.

However, a lot of guitarists tend to sound very “scaly” in their playing. Not that it’s a bad thing to have the ability to rip through scales. In fact, that’s one of the coolest things about the guitar! It’s just that “ripping through scales” is a completely different concept then creating a nice, flowing, catchy melody line.

Therefore, if your goal is to learn how to play like this on the guitar, it makes sense to study those who are master melody line creators – singers!

99.9% of the time, the vocal line will flow with the chords of the underlying progression, and as the chords change in the rhythm section, so will the notes of the vocal melody line; they will often change to achieve a chord tone of the new underlying chord.

Applying a “Process” to the Study of Vocalists

In this lesson, I use the chorus of the song “Rock n Roll Fantasy” by the Kinks to illustrate an example.

The chords that take place in the rhythm section are:

C major – Bb major – F major

There is also a D minor that occurs as well.

These chords put you directly into the key of F major:

Therefore, your first step would be to understand the key-scale that the song takes place in. In this case it is the key of F major.

Step 1:

You can locate the home box for your F major scale, by putting your pinky on the scale root ‘F’ on the 13th fret of the low E-string, and applying this pattern:

This is your overall ‘scalar framework’ (in just one fretboard position) for this particular song/chord progression.

The next step would be to locate the chord tones of the underlying chords.

Step 2:

F Major (in the “G-Shape”):

C Major (in the “D-Shape”):

Bb Major (in the “C-Shape”):

D Minor (in the “Em-Shape”):

Step 3:

Within this one position, you have now found the key-scale and the chord tones of the underlying chords. Now it is time to make the connection.

How do you do that?

You simply listen to what the singer is doing, and you figure that out by ear. I can’t necessarily write a blog post about how you would go about doing that, but you can listen to me do it in the video above. The only advice I can give is to just try it, and just keep practicing!

By figuring out what the singer is singing and translating it to the guitar (try to confine yourself to this little 5-fret area in order to keep things consistent with the rest of the lesson), you can then verify that the notes they are hitting with their voice are usually chord tones.

Listen to the actual syllables of each word, and observe the chord shape from which the specific note is coming from. If a particular note of a the vocal line is not a chord tone, than usually it is a scale tone that is used as a temporary means to “walk” to a nearby chord tone.

The scale is the “path”, the chord tones are the “destination”

The more vocal melody lines that you study, the more clear the above quote will become to you.

Check out the video, and give it a shot for yourself.

Have fun!