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Music

Suggesting substitutions in your melody

I just picked a few notes out of a solo by John Coltrane from If I Were a Bell.  I love when folks play descending watefalls of appregios.  Mr. Coltrane plays a series of descending appregios on probably a bunch of stuff, but I always think about how he does it on Milestones.  On Milestones, he plays arpeggios down the G dorian scale.  Check this out…

I haven’t gotten around to finding out how it fits in the song but here’s one way to look at the progression of implied chords.  Each harmony is played for about a beat.

C major, Bbsus, B, Gmin7 or Bb6, Fmaj7, Bb

If you start analyzing it, you realize how they might mix together…

Anyways, it’s a cool way to start mixing things up a little because you can briefly experiment with different harmonies over chords.  Also, if you have a melody that you want to play, say a simple melody, you can integrate the melody into a series of arpeggios and create some interesting images. There’s all sorts of tonal possibilities.