The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #144039   Message #3334883
Posted By: GUEST,josepp
07-Apr-12 - 08:09 AM
Thread Name: More stuff about the circle of 5ths
Subject: RE: More stuff about the circle of 5ths
//////Now that you have the hang of the root notes, let's fill it out. Since this song is ii-V7, that means the ii is a minor chord and V is a major chord. Do the first bar as a D minor chord: D-F-A-D. And the second bar as G-B-D-G. Third bar--E-G-B-E. Fourth bar--A-C#-E-A.//////

I forgot to add that after this you would play D-F#-A-D for one bar then Db-F-Ab-Db for one bar and THEN go into the turnaround.

Another thing that adds some pizzazz to the mix is to invert chords. So if you're working your way higher and higher, you don't want to go too high or it sounds ridiculous, so you invert a chord to get it back down into the low registers. So you'd hit the root up high, drop down to an octave lower for the 3rd and 5th and then hit the root again only an octave lower. This would work well with starting E minor at E2 then inverting the chord so that you can play the A major starting at A1. But it's up to you how you want to do it. Again, it takes practice to get used to it but it comes pretty intuitively once you understand why you're doing it.

The point is when you hear a guy walking, he's not just guessing intuitively what note to play next; he's mapping it out in his head just before he plays it--note by note. So when you hear him cycle back through a part a second time and it was different than the first time and you wonder how he did that, all he did was vary between root-5th, root-3rd, root-7th or root-root. Or maybe he played a full 7th chord but inverted it. IOW, he knew what notes were available to him and chose which ones to use and consciously chose different ones than he played the first time. But he wasn't just guessing. It takes experimenting though because certain combinations don't sound that good and you learn to avoid those. But that is basically how it is done.