Three Steps To Playing The Changes

There were a lot of questions after last month's theory workshop about, well, how do you use these scales we're talking about, to play over a chord progression? And as I've been working on the material for this Saturday's workshop on playing the changes, I've had to really put on my thinking cap to put that process into words. Improvisation is always an ongoing balance between using the navigational tools and flying by the seat of one's pantaloons. Improvisation is where best laid plans and caveman intuition come together, so the goal of any improvisation workshop is to provide enough navigational tools that your own intuition has a chance to come out and party.

It does help to have a little knowledge about a few basic scales humming in the background, but improvising over chord progressions mostly has to do with understanding the chords themselves. "Playing the changes" is essentially playing licks and phrases that sound good because they help spell out the chord changes you're moving through. So one key to improvising is simply being able to know and locate where the notes of each chord are as they go by. And not anything exotic, like 9ths or 13ths. Just the root, the third and fifth – what the theory cats call the triad –  and maybe the seventh. The basic building blocks of each chord.

You don't have to play those notes all over the neck, or even in more than one octave. If you're playing fingerstyle, you're going to be using the bottom three strings for bass notes anyway. So the best thing you can do is find those three triad notes for each chord using the top three strings of the guitar. Which means, basically just finding one note on each string. And while there might be more chords in a standard than in a twelve-bar blues, there aren't that many more. So if you put a song like "Sweet Georgia Brown" or "Indiana" in a guitar-friendly key like C, nearly all the chords will be ones that are already familiar to you – C, A7, F, D7, A minor. So all we're really talking about is finding the root, third and fifth of a chord like A, in open position, on the top three strings. Even better, once you figure that out for A, it's never going to change. And you can play a lot of fingerstyle music without ever leaving the open position.

You are going to want to play more than just chord tones, so that's where a little know-how regarding scales comes in. But just like sticking to triad notes on the top three strings, there's a way to keep all that scale showbiz to a simple minimum as well. Instead of thinking of scales as these big two-octave fingerings to learn all over the neck, you can think of scales as the notes that connect up the chord tones. And you can practically find those by ear. Just pick a note that lies between the root and the third, and you've got a pretty good shot at playing the right one. If you don't, your ears will tell you right away. Do the same to pick a note in between the third and the fifth, and between the fifth and the seventh. Done! You've just played a scale that will probably sound pretty cool over that chord. More importantly, you've found a way to both emphasis the notes of the chord (the chord tones) while connecting them together in a cool way (the scale steps in between).

Now, besides having more chords than a blues, a standard also has more bars – generally thirty-two of them, as opposed to the eight or twelve bars in a typical blues. But we can cut that down to size by looking at the form of the tune. The form of a twelve-bar blues is AAB: a four-bar line, which is then repeated, followed by a contrasting final line. You can hear it when you think about the lyrics to a song like "Stormy Monday:"

So – how to play the changes in three simple steps: