Improvising over chords - bit of help needed!

[Walker]

I've been asked to join a friend and have a bit of fun improvising over some blues stuff. I've never done this before. I can't read music, so I always learnt songs from tab.

So using Little Black Submarines by the Black Keys as an example, in verse 1 we have:

Am / G / D / A / Am / G / A

Could I just use the minor pentatonic or blues scale with each chord change?

Or is there a better way to improv simply?

Sorry if this is a dull question, but I'm really excited about moving on from tab and being able to loosen things up a bit!

[PaulWarning]

copied from @leschirons post in 'Quotes to Live by' thread 

 heard, two nights ago, one of the greatest musical statements ever. Chatting to a Brit EUB player after his gig, I told him that I'd just started learning (he'd been playing jazz standards at the gig) and that I needed to put in a lot of work to get his level.

His reply.

"It's  not as hard as it looks. If I have a chart with the chord changes, I usually play the root of those chords in the right place and hit any old bo ll ocks in between"

I'm thinking that I could probably apply this method to every situation in life😆

 

[Bogdan]

My tip would be start with triads on bass. That's your safe bet and just improvise cool grooves and simple lines over the progression.

What this means is that you'll just primarily use chord tones of each chord in the backing track to come up with fills and have some notes to start off with. Cool thing is that all of those notes will sound just great as they are the strongest ones you can play (literally notes from which the chord is built). So if you''ve never looked into it, search for triads on bass, intervals and how to build chords to get started. Also arpeggios will work too (same notes actually as chords just not played all at the same time). 

Hope this helps a bit. 

[Walker]

On 23/09/2019 at 15:41, Bogdan said:

My tip would be start with triads on bass. That's your safe bet and just improvise cool grooves and simple lines over the progression.

What this means is that you'll just primarily use chord tones of each chord in the backing track to come up with fills and have some notes to start off with. Cool thing is that all of those notes will sound just great as they are the strongest ones you can play (literally notes from which the chord is built). So if you''ve never looked into it, search for triads on bass, intervals and how to build chords to get started. Also arpeggios will work too (same notes actually as chords just not played all at the same time). 

Hope this helps a bit. 

Thanks very much indeed, that's appreciated.

[Scotchman]

Learn the melody.

[Crawford13]

On 30/08/2019 at 11:38, Walker said:

So using Little Black Submarines by the Black Keys as an example, in verse 1 we have:

Am / G / D / A / Am / G / A

Could I just use the minor pentatonic or blues scale with each chord change?

So this song is in the key of D major. You can tell this because the  D(I), G(IV)& A(V)chords are major.

If you are comfortable with the blues scale  and want to use this to solo in, use the B minor  blues scale as B minor is the relative scale to D major.

Edited May 13, 2020 by Crawford13

[Geek99]

On 23/09/2019 at 15:41, Bogdan said:

My tip would be start with triads on bass. That's your safe bet and just improvise cool grooves and simple lines over the progression.

What this means is that you'll just primarily use chord tones of each chord in the backing track to come up with fills and have some notes to start off with. Cool thing is that all of those notes will sound just great as they are the strongest ones you can play (literally notes from which the chord is built). So if you''ve never looked into it, search for triads on bass, intervals and how to build chords to get started. Also arpeggios will work too (same notes actually as chords just not played all at the same time). 

Hope this helps a bit. 

@Walker throw in some ghost notes and some seconds as passing notes

[Walker]

Crawford13 and Geek99... thanks very much for this, I'll have play around with these ideas. I have a bit of time on my hands at the moment 😬

[Geek99]

I wish I could say the same 

chores and kids mean zero practice time for daddy 

[dodge_bass]

On 13/05/2020 at 18:39, Crawford13 said:

So this song is in the key of D major. You can tell this because the  D(I), G(IV)& A(V)chords are major.

If you are comfortable with the blues scale  and want to use this to solo in, use the B minor  blues scale as B minor is the relative scale to D major.

It's a bit cheeky because of the Am that's in there - means it's not entirely diatonic to the key of D..

Anyway....another approach is to think minor pentatonics - in this case you''ll find Em pent fits very well over the Am and the G (so you don't need to change scale there) and F#minor pent fits well over the D and the A - so actually you can just move between two scales...rather than trying to change scale per chord (that's hard work) you can reduce the number of scales you need....

There's loads of different approaches to improvising - you'll need to try and find a 'foot in the door' that you can start off with and then you can take it from there. 

Good luck.