Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnW63
I've been working with an instructor for a few years, mostly with jazz tunes, but some of you basic 12 bar blues and other songs of interest. I have spent many hours trying to ad-lib solos over backing tracks or when playing along with songs. I can always do better playing with the track, than when I am with the instructor when we may just have a drum track playing. I have figured out that it's because I don't have a melody playing in the back ground to keep me in the groove and feel of the song.
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Well, can you play the melody? If not, why not? If you're given a song to improvise on, why hasn't your instructor started by teaching you the melody?
If he/she hasn't, this is
really bad teaching. I can't emphasise that enough. You
must play the melody first, and ideally learn it by heart. The chords are important, obviously, but they are secondary. (My apologies to your instructor if they have given you the melody, but you still need to know it intimately, not just read it off notation and then dive into the chords.)
(To be fair, blues is a little different, in that blues melodies often consist of generic motifs, riffs and licks anyway. In blues, it's more important to amass a library of licks and phrases than it is to learn specific melodies. Unless the blues song has a really distinctive melody, of course...)
When you begin improvising, you begin by "embellishing the melody". This is standard jazz practice, going back 100 years or more. Play the melody in your way, as if you were a singer phrasing it the way you feel it. Then you expand out from that into the chord tones.
I.e., the melody is your guide through the chords, like a series of stepping stones. The chords then give you alternative stepping stones, but the melody is your prime resource for phrasing and rhythmic ideas.
Don't take my word for it, here's a jazz prof:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NehOx1JsuT4 (The first 30 seconds of ranting is brilliant, but he gets on to practical advice after that.)
Obviously, the better you know the melody, the easier you can have it in your head when you improvise in a much more extensive way. Eventually it becomes a way of feeling the form of the tune, the way the chords "chunk" into 2 or 4 bars at a time, reflecting the melody line.
Moreover, the more melodies you know from lots of other tunes, the more it teaches you how to construct melodic phrasing in general. IOW, a melody is obviously appropriate to its own tune and chord sequence, but has lessons to teach you for other tunes too.