Chord Melody Masterclass
Thinking Outside the Box - Part III
“This is another marvelous class from an amazing musician and a genuinely nice person. The material is not wholly different from other learning material John has produced, but it go…”
About this masterclass
In this advanced jazz guitar class, John Stowell focuses on the harmonic minor scale — and how it pairs with melodic minor — to generate extensions and new solo lines over major, dominant, and minor chords. It's the third installment of his Thinking Outside the Box series on adding tension and color beyond the written changes.
What's covered
- Melodic minor vs. harmonic minor — how jazz players treat these scales, with basic arpeggios for each
- Harmonic minor possibilities over a minor chord, worked through in C minor
- Juxtaposing C Dorian and C harmonic minor to hear the flat 7/major 7 and 5/sharp 5 contrasts
- Hearing harmonic minor as an implied V7 — the altered dominant sound with flat 9 it creates
- How context shapes your tension choices: other chordal instruments, bars available, and what your bandmates respond to
- Slow practice exercises — alternating any four notes of Dorian with four notes of harmonic minor to build muscle memory and ear training
Included with this class are two original compositions of John's that use these techniques, written in standard notation as well as TAB.
Other guitar lessons from this series
Lessons in this masterclass
Lessons
- 1Thinking Outside the Box - Part III1h 31m
Reviews & Ratings
This is another marvelous class from an amazing musician and a genuinely nice person. The material is not wholly different from other learning material John has produced, but it goes into much more depth than the prior classes do on how to turn 2 very useful types of scales into actual original tunes; YOUR tunes, not someone else's. It is not easy material to grasp or absorb, but if you really want to come up with innovative ways to write and play very modern sounding, "unorthodox" music, then this class may give you the key. It is NOT easy, but is an essential extension of what John has presented before.
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