Federico Dantoni here.

On our last video we talked about the bebop scale

And how to use it improvise  over a 2, 5, 1 chord progression

We also played an unusual jazz melodic minor scale

different than the one on the books

Today’s video is about improvising in minor chords

so will go over those melodic minor scales in more detail.

Before we start, I want to thank all of you subscribers

for the nice comments and likes but mostly for remaining engaged

with the videos and asking those wonderful questions

Ok let’s talk about minor scales

We have the natural minor scale

We have the Dorian Scale

We have the Harmonic Minor scale

We have the minor pentatonic scale

We have the minor Blues scale

Then, we have the melodic minor scales

There are several melodic minor scales and that’s why it gets confusing

There is the Classical Melodic Minor Scale

The Jazz Melodic Minor Scale

The Bebop Melodic Minor Scale

and then, there are variations of the scales as well

The  classical melodic minor scale ascends using the major seventh

and descends using the minor seventh

Then there’s jazz melodic minor which uses just the major seventh

ascending and descending

But if we want to improvise fluently we need to move beyond those book scales

and start finding our own solutions

Because when we talk about improvisation those scales form the books

won’t help us very much and I’ll tell you why

When we improvise we need  scales that we can sustain

playing up and down the keyboard without loosing our balance

The problem with the regular jazz melodic minor scale

is just like with the Mixolydian scale they are rhythmically odd,

They work fine within the confines an octave but when we play pass that octave

But when we play pass that octave everything starts falling apart.

To solve this issue we have the  yet another melodic minor scale

The Bebop Melodic Minor Scale

The Bebop melodic minor scale  solves that Rhythmically unevenness

by adding the minor 7th as a passing tone

and it works great for any number of octaves

Let's play it again...

This is nice because we play with both the major and minor 7th

which adds that jazzy flavor

but it does not have the major 3rd passing tone

which is another important jazz color we need to use

This is why we need  to get creative

I’m going to show you a variation of the bebop melodic minor scale

to take advantage of that major and minor 3rd

In this variation the scale ascends

as the bebop melodic minor does but it descends as the dominant bebop scale

in this case the C7 bebop scale

This scale is common  on the bebop language

but we don’t usually find it on books

The great thing about this scale is that it allows us

to go up and down the keyboard with our loosing our balance

The other variation we used on our last video

is a variation of the melodic minor scale

In this variation  the scale ascends as the melodic minor does

and descends as the bebop scale does passing through the minor 7th

and the major 3rd passing tones.

to achieve this we play the scale up to the 9

skipping the root and then descending

from the root down

melodic minor up...

dominant bebop down...

let's play it again...

This scale works wonderful on the way up

and we can also play it  up and down the keyboard

without loosing our balance.

But playing scales is like reciting all the letters of the alphabet

what we need to do is to use those letters to say words

let me show you what I mean by that

let's grab a minor chord progression and improvise over it

let's say Gm and Dm

our first instinct is to analyze the material we have available

we say, OK

we have the Gm pantatonic scale

we have the Dm pentatonic scale

the we have the Gm "blues" scale

and the Dm Blues scale

also we have the G melodic minor scale

and the D melodic minor scale

but really, again... all these scales are like reciting the whole alphabet

G minor pentatonic up...

D minor pentatonic down...

G melodic minor up...

D melodic minor down...

every minor chord shares a relationship by extension

with a minor chord found a 5th above its root

in this case Gm the 5th is "D"

so the related chord is Dm

or even a Dm7 if we keep extending

and same thing for the Dm chord

from Dm the 5th is "A"

so the related chord is Am or Am7

now, look what happens when we play the Dm7 and Am7 arpeggio

over these two chords

Dm7

Am7

Dm7

Am7

Dm7

We are still playing the scale, but we are "wording it" differently

because we are playing chords instead of scales

To make words  we need to break down

the scales into chords

Dm7 broken chord

F Major

Am7

the D minor blues scale

and we can use the scales   to take us from word to word

Dm7

Am7

D minor blues scale take us to Am

Scale again... and it takes us to Bbmaj7

Dm7

scale again...

takes as to Am7

All of this  can also be applied

to a minor blues Let’s play a Dm blues

and apply this elements using the same concept

I hope this video was helpful

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and I’ll see you on the next video.