Melody Is Your Pilot

Just like every other brother, I'd like my improvisations to sound more mellow and melodic and less like a clockwork kangaroo hopping up a metal staircase before turning back to fetch something he's forgotten. Unfortunately, soliciting advice on how to play melodically is a bit like asking for a tape recording of one hand clapping. You always get the same response: to sound more melodic, you have to play more melodically. No shit.

It comes as no surprise that taste is much, much harder to acquire than facility -- consider all those shredders on YouTube -- but there is something you can do to give yourself a little melodic push. Dave Woods gave me this excellent tip the other day: pick a tune and look at which melody notes fall on beat one of every second bar. Familiarize yourself with them and play them against the chords while singing the rest of the melody in your head. When you come to improvise, keep these notes in their appropriate place while building a solo around them. The melody notes are your reference notes, or (using a possibly more familiar term) "target" notes, serving to remind the listener of the relationship of your solo to the original melody.

Using "Summertime" as an example, here's a clip of just the reference notes: Summertime Reference Tones. Now put a solo in the gaps: Summertime Reference Tones Solo. (If you have a chart in front of you, you'll see that I haven't strictly followed the rules regarding hitting the note on the "one" of every other bar, but have rather chosen those notes that most distinctively describe the overall shape of the melody. This is really the point of Dave's tip).

Once you've practiced with one note every two bars, try one note every four bars, with the aim always to know where the melody is at any place in the form so that your solo can dip in and out of it at any time, regardless of how many choruses you've doing.

I have a long, long, long way to go with this, but think it an excellent little method to induce thinking about building solos that bear some relevance to the initial tune. Now I have to start playing fewer notes but better ones. Oh, and you also have to learn every melody in the fake book.