Take 5: Chord Tone Soloing

Whether you’re composing melodies, crafting a solo, or improvising, targeting chord tones is the most essential melodic device. Chord tones are the very notes that form the chords that you’re playing over. Targeting or resolving your lines to a chord tone is a very powerful approach for playing a melodic solo -- much better than just running scales -- and its melodic solos that really connect a player to their listening audience. 

Rob Garland’s Chord Tone Soloing edition of Take 5 reveals a very simple method for crafting melodic solos by targeting and resolving your lines to a chord tone. Use this approach and you won’t need a backing track or rhythm section to hear the underlying chord changes.

"Emphasizing chord tones is a simple and powerful approach for playing melodic solos and connects the player and the listener in a more effective way than only playing a scale. I’ll show you how quickly identify chord tones, find them on the fretboard and relate them to a position on the neck. I like to combine a CAGED triad, an arpeggio, a pentatonic scale, and a major scale. This gives me a lot of fretboard visualization and I'm able to connect chord tones and create licks based off of what I'm seeing.”

After Rob outlines his chord tone soloing approach, he’ll then guide you through 5 Chord Tone Soloing performance studies from basic to more sophisticated and challenging approaches, across a variety of musical styles.

Rob will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the key examples and performances. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tool to sync the tab and notation to the video and can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are included to work with on your own as well.

Grab your guitar and let's solo melodically with Rob Garland!