Melodic Minor Scale in Jazz Guitar Playing

The Melodic minor scale is one of the most useful scales to learn, it adds so much color to the intended chords.Most of the great bebop saxophone, piano, horn, guitar players created their solos around this fabulous scale.

Personally I have found that in a 1minor triad e.g. Cm or when a 9th is added to the triad or when there is a minor6th chord, or when there is a minMaj7 chord all these go very well with this scale.

Now! please note that a Dorian 1m7 chord is of a different nature, it takes on the function as a two minor of the root chord, e.g.Am7-Dorian it takes its notes from the GMaj scale. In the CminMaj7 chord or even a Cm triad this scale does sound great over these changes.

The scale:

C,D,Eb,F,G,A,B,C,

Tensions in the scale:

C=1

Eb=b3

G=5

B=7

D=9

F=11

A=13

Diatonic Triads in the scale:

* Cm=1

*Eb+=b3

*G=5

*Bdim=7

*Dm=9

*F=11

*Adim=13

Combining triads for jazz sounding chords:

Remember to use the basic chords or its inversions. to get the basic chord tonality then, use the diatonic triads, to get the desired chord tensions. We will now try to mix the basic chord with the diatonic tensions.

Basic chords + Diatonic Triads

1.Cm= C,Eb,G, + C,Eb,G

2.CmMaj7= C,Eb,G + Eb,G,B

3.CmMaj9= C,Eb,G + G.B.D

4.CmMaj11=C,Eb,G + B,D,F

5.CmMaj13=C,Eb,G + D,F,A

6.CmMaj13=C,Eb,G + F,A,C

7.Cm6 =C,Eb,G + A,C,Eb

Beware of the b9 Intervals and Tritones in the melodic minor scale:

These b9 intervals are C-B and Eb-D, also note that in yhe melodic minor scale there are tritones between Eb-A and A-Eb.These tritones makes the chords unstable and there is an urgency for it to resolve to some other chord.

We have covered quite a bit here for you to get started on your jazz theory. Refer back to the other theory pages to get a better understanding of the approaches that have been used. I will cover some other scales in another section of Music theory.

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