Not Just Arpeggios
At this point, many standard methods would suggest that you practice arpeggios for each chord in the progression. Norgaard advises that you do more than that. “If you practice each chord by itself,” he warns, “you never look at how the chords connect to each other. Instead, you should simply pick one of the chord tones in each chord and make a melody out of them so it becomes a linear thing, and you’re looking at the music horizontally instead of vertically.”

How do you choose the notes for an inner melody? Although there are no strict rules for which chord note to use in your inner melody, the third and seventh are often good choices, because they help define the chord quality, according to Norgaard. In addition, as you write out the chords, you can get a sense of where the oddball notes that don’t fit into the initial scale may lie, and those provide good fodder for your melody. In our example, you’ll realize that in the II7 chord in measures three and four, the F# sticks out; it’s nondiatonic to the key of C.

In this example, Norgaard decides to start with the G in the C-major chord, and he can’t resist that F# in the D7 chord. Next, he chooses the Fn from the two following chords, and resolves the sequence down to E for the final two measures. They’re written out as whole notes in Example 2.

“What we’ve created is a chromatic line that expresses the relationship between the chords,” says Norgaard. “Because by creating a melody from them, you imply that the chords are related to each other.”

The second step is adding rhythms to the inner melody. Example 3 provides one possibility out of many.


Beyond Noodling
Next, to make the melody less monotonous, toss in one or two extra notes from the home key of C major (see Example 4).
“For somebody who has only improvised on one scale, this is a huge breakthrough, because they now improvise on a chord progression as opposed to simply noodling up and down a scale,” says Norgaard.

Of course, this can get more complicated depending on the chord progression. But even with the fairly straightforward progression we’ve been using, you can make your improvised melody more intricate simply by choosing different notes for the inner melody. Example 5 shows a different melody, drawn from the same chord progression, this time with a different note in each measure.

“This one has a bunch of skips in it, which add more variety and possibilities for passing tones,” says Norgaard. The advantage of this will be clear in the next step, but before you get there, don’t forget to add rhythms. “Now,” continues Norgaard, “since we have those skips, we can work on filling in the gaps between each note. This leads into what bebop theory calls ‘target notes.’ You’re shooting for those notes in your inner melody, but adding scales and arpeggios in between (see Example 6), which is what people like Charlie Parker did all the time.”

Notice that you don’t have to wait for the new chord to appear before you play the inner-melody note you’ve pulled from it; it’s perfectly OK, even cool, to anticipate the upcoming chord at the “and” of the fourth beat in the previous measure.

We’ve been concerned mainly with finding good notes, but the step in which you add rhythms is equally important in improvising a melody. “Adding rhythm implies that you’re putting a lot of space in the melody,” says Norgaard. “Think of it like talking; when we talk, we have a lot of spaces between groups of words, so the talk doesn’t get boring to listen to. You need that in a melody, too. String players never have to stop, whereas horn players have to breathe, so they make more natural phrase lengths than we do.

“That’s something we string players need to watch out for.”