One Chord Vamp Dorian Improvisation

Description

Improvising over a one chord Dm7 vamp might not seem to be most challenging thing to do in the world of music but there are still several different approaches you might want to familiarize yourself with.

In this lesson I am strictly going to talk about the most obvious scale choice for a minor 7 vamp - Dorian, in this case D dorian. There are of course several other scales you can use and play around with but let's keep it simple. D dorian contains the exact same notes as the C major scale or the A natural minor scale, no sharps or flats.

D dorian - D, E, F, G, A, B, C

The cool thing about the dorian scale is that it does not contain any "road apples", or "bad" notes, when played over its corresponding minor 7 chord (D dorian over Dm7). This is because the three notes outside the Dm7 arpeggio (D, F, A, C) which are E, G and B are all either a half step below a chord tone or a whole step above/below one. What usually causes our ears to want to cry and our stomachs to hurl (depending on the situation of course) are notes located a half step over any chord tone of the chord you're playing over.

But simply playing the dorian scale up and down and randomly fetching for notes, that might all sound OK, usually doesn't sound too melodic. You need to play around with certain ideas, skipping certain notes to create more intervalic movements and creating a more interesting sound. I'm going to show you a couple of basic ways of doing this.

The first thing you should try is to break down the D dorian scale into a couple of different pentatonic scales. Go to the key of C major (that of course contains the exact same notes as D dorian) for simplicitys sake, harmonize it and see how many mi7 chords you end up with. The answer is 3 - Dm7, Em7 and Am7, and for each and one of these chord you can play its pentatonic scale, thus Dm pentatonic, Em pentatonic and Am pentatonic. Since D dorian doesn't contain any bad note traps all of these scales work fine over a Dm7 chord!

The D pentatonic gives you the Dm7 arpeggio - the root D, minor 3rd F, 5th A and 7th C, plus an added 4, which is G.

The E pentatonic scale contains the Em7 arpeggio - E, G, B, D, and the 4 of E which is A. In relation to the chord you're playing this over your ear will hear these notes differently than if you would play them over an Em7 chord.

The E will function as the 9 of D, the G as the 4, the A as the 5th, B the major 6th, and D as the root.

The A pentatonic scale contains the notes in the Am7 arpeggio - A, C, E, G and the 4 of A which is D.

A will function as the 5th of D, C the 7, D of course as the root, E the 9, and G as the 4th.

These three different pentatonic scales all work fine over a Dm7 chord but each one brings out a different flavor of the chord, by simply leaving out certain notes of the D dorian scale.