Originally Posted by: Jolly McJollysonWhat key are you in/what ARE the chord tones?

Hi Jolly.

I never really had any luck turning scales/modes into music ... it always just sounds like scales to me. I discovered a long time ago that melody is what I like hearing and playing, not scales, and that melody is built around chord tones.

What are the chord tones? They are simply the notes that make up each chord, so they keep changing, and they don't need names, they have numbers. 1-3-5 is the plain old major chord; 1-3-b5 for minor ... 1-3-5-b7 for 7th ... and so on. There's not all that much to it.

You must of course stop seeing chords as little boxed diagrams and start seeing them for what they really are: a selection of notes (numbers) that scatter themselves the length of the fretboard. Then what you have instead of linear scale/mode patterns, is an array of usable notes that become the anchor notes of your melody. Scales/modes hold too many notes for any given moment, chords focus right in on the moment.

Any other notes I use I see as passing tones, whether they're part of the scale or chromatic 'in-between' notes. So each chord is just a few notes, but in all their fretboard positions, in all octaves. They each have a number, not a name.

It's all a matter of taste I guess ... I love melody, I hate scales.

I loaded up a new slide blues a la Gary Moore today at http://www.soundclick.com/kirklorange ... I called it Blue Moor ... it's 95% chord tones if you pick it apart, with very little else ... a few little connecting passages.

The key is Am.

Check out my PlaneTalk site, you may find it interesting:

http://www.thatllteachyou.com ... it's a book I wrote about how to 'see' the fretboard in this manner.

All the best.

Kirk