Here’s an easy way to begin to introduce some wider intervals into your improvisation while still maintaining melodic and harmonic integrity. This exercise uses a dominant 7th chord, and also includes it’s upperstructure tensions (9, #11, and 13). The melody starts on the 13, leaps down a major 7th to the b7, up a #5 interval to the #11, down a major 7th to the 5th, up a perfect 5th to the 9th, down a b7 to the major 3rd, up a tri-tone to the b7 and lastly down to the root. Sounds a bit complicated in words but it actually sounds much simpler and really outlines the sound of the chord clearly. The material is played as 8th notes starting on the 1st beat of the measure and again as 8th notes starting on the 2nd 8th note of the measure (the “and” of one). After playing the line through the keys the same intervallic sequence is played again in all triplets starting on the 1st, the 2nd and the 3rd triplet of beat one. The PDF below only includes the written melody in 8th notes however.
~Enjoy!
.Here’s an mp3 of the melody:
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