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February 11, 2011 at 11:22 pm
How do I determine which chords work best within a given scale? Say I’m doing a blues solo in Am pentatonic and I want to break it up with some chords, which ones work best?
February 11, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Hi Tony. Chords come from scales, basically. The Am chord can be found in 3 different keys: C major – Am is the vi chord, F Major – Am is the iii chord, and G major – Am is the ii chord.
From your question, it seems to me you are ‘noodling’ around with the Am pentatonic scale, correct?
If so, the first logical choice would be the chords from the C Major scale. ie C Dm Em F G Am Bdim.
But try thinking of the C major scale as the A minor scale instead. A minor is the relative minor of C major. It has the same notes as the C major scale just starting on ‘A’ instead. A B C D E F G
It may also be handy to think of 7th chords. So for A minor the chords would be. Am7, Bm7b5, Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7 and G7. Try changing the Em chord to an E7 chord, too.
That’s for a minor blues. For a major blues, you’d generally just use the regular A7, D7 and E7 chords for a 12 bar blues progression. Of course, that can be embellished to include other chords too.
But then, you could try making up a chord sequence from the chords of F major and G major for some interesting sounds.
February 11, 2011 at 11:47 pm
Thanks! That’s very helpful.