Chord melody is the "master ability" on the guitar, unlocking its full potential and allowing you to play with the same freedom as piano players. You'll learn to improvise melodies and chords together on the fretboard, giving you endless creative possibilities in your music.
Learning the skill of Chord Melody Guitar allows you to combine bass, chords and melody in your playing. You can play more interesting solos, create your own arrangements of your favorite songs, and even improvise entire compositions off the top of your head.
When you see guitarists playing in this way, you might think that it's very difficult to control so much music at once. You might even think that these guitarists are simply beyond your level.
But that's not true.
Chord melody playing is one of the EASIEST and most RELAXED ways to play the guitar, because of the total creative freedom that it gives you. You just need a system for learning to combine all of these elements naturally in your playing.
Simply put:
Chord melody is the "master ability" on the guitar.
Chord melody isn’t just a style of playing, like you might have seen in jazz music. Chord melody means being able to play the guitar with the same creative freedom that piano players enjoy, playing melodies and chords at the same time. Chord melody definitely allows you to play jazz, but it also includes everything from blues to flamenco to rock music!
Haven’t you ever seen a guitarist weaving chords effortlessly into a solo, and wished you could do the same?
Haven’t you ever been asked to “just play something” on the guitar and you didn't know what to play?
When you’re accompanying other musicians, wouldn’t you love to go beyond just strumming chords and do something much more creative?
All of these awesome skills come down to one very simple ability:
The ability to see both notes and chords in a single integrated vision of the fretboard.
Here's the critical insight. Chords aren't just those empty shapes that we memorized on the fretboard when we were first starting out. Those "chord shapes" that you know are just ONE way that each chord can be played. They don't allow you to add melody notes of your own choosing. So you are stuck with a dilemma: you can either play the melody you want to express, or you can play the chord of the moment.
The way to break out of these limitations is to understand where chords come from. Chords are nothing more than a selection of notes from the key of the music. We create the different chords of our musical system by playing certain notes and omitting others. What this means is that when you're improvising in a particular scale, you're already playing all of the notes you need to create any chord you want.
To reach the next level as a guitarist, you just need to move beyond the beginner's understanding of "chord shapes" and learn how to build your OWN chords. The great thing is that all of the notes you'll need are already directly under your fingertips, because they come from the same scale that you're already using for your solo.
In Chord Melody Guitar 1, you will learn to see both melody notes and chord notes in a single integrated vision of the fretboard. You'll discover that the notes of any chord are actually all around you, and this is true no matter where you are on the fretboard. You'll learn how to group these notes together effortlessly to create your own chord voicings. And you'll learn how to weave these chords into your melodies with complete creative freedom.
If you've been playing the guitar for a while, you know that this ability to combine notes together is one of the most exciting creative possibilities that come from really mastering the guitar. If you want to unleash these creative possibilities in your own playing, then chord melody is the next level in your guitar evolution.
There is also an important physical methodology that I will teach you, which will allow you to improvise with melody, chords and bass in a way that is relaxed and natural. Chord melody playing should never feel like a complicated acrobatic routine of simultaneously playing multiple parts. Chord melody just means being able to add chord notes and bass notes to your melodies whenever YOU want to, without any pressure or difficulty at all. And through the step-by-step method that I’m going to teach you in my video course, you’ll learn to improvise with melody, chords and bass in a way that is relaxed, easy and creative right from the start.
Fretboard mastery. Improvising with notes and chords together brings the entire fretboard into focus because you’re seeing how each melody note relates to both the chord of the moment and the overall key of the music. So even if you don’t want to actually perform in chord melody style, the personal practice of combining notes and chords together on the fretboard will super charge your guitar playing in every way.
Ear training. Without a doubt, my own greatest advances in ear training came from my chord melody practice on the guitar. Here’s why. When you’re trying to recognize the melody to a song by ear and you’re hearing a particular note, you’re not just hearing that note. What you’re really hearing is that note in the context of a given chord. For example, imagine that the chord in the background is the 6- chord, and the melody is on note 3. You’re not just hearing note 3. You’re hearing note 3 in the 6- chord. This is a very specific sensation, and THIS is what we’re actually recognizing. But how can we learn to recognize that? What would be the ideal way to become deeply familiar with the sound of each note in each chord? Your chord melody practice on the guitar! When you're the one combining the notes and chords yourself, you have all the time in the world to hear and appreciate each one of these beautiful musical relationships. And that's what makes it so easy to recognize all of these sounds in the music all around us.
Enjoyment. My favorite comments from students are about how wonderful it is to be able to pick up the guitar and create a whole musical world off the top of their head. I think that sometimes we forget what a beautiful instrument the guitar is. We get so caught up in trying to “learn” the instrument that we forget about its awesome power to move our emotions. There is something about the resonance of the strings that can make even the simplest playing sound beautiful and haunting. This is what it feels like to practice chord melody. It’s about unlocking and enjoying the full potential of the guitar, expressing beautiful melody notes over lush harmonic backdrops.
Confidence. I never felt entirely complete as a musician until I learned to create music all by myself on the guitar. I love playing with other musicians, but I always felt like a bit of an impostor when friends and family would invite me to play something on the guitar and I honestly couldn’t play anything without other musicians. I’m not saying that you have to share your chord melody ability with anyone else. It's also incredibly rewarding to play the guitar in this way just for our own private enjoyment. But I do think that even in our own private thoughts, learning to make music all by ourselves on the guitar is like a final step that completes our relationship with this instrument that we love so much. And for me personally, this has been one of the most rewarding musical journeys of my life, and it has completely transformed my relationship with the guitar and my confidence as a musician.
This course is divided into 18 video lessons. Each lesson will teach you the next level of our chord melody practice. You'll start by learning to control the bass note while you are improvising melodically, and later we will add chords to this framework. By the end of the course you'll be improvising in full chord melody style over the four most important chords in popular music.
With these chords you can already play hundreds of songs in full chord melody style. But more importantly you will learn the process for adding new chords on your own. So by the end of this course, you will be able to learn any new song or chord progression and add it to your chord melody repertoire. The practice itself is relaxing, fun and totally creative, and you'll be improvising your own music right from the very first day.
"This course was a breakthrough in my guitar practice! I saw other guitarists improvising freely with melody and chords and I had no idea how to get there. This course gave me the answer. I was able to build a practice, very simple at first, that made me connect more deeply with the sounds I was playing. It's such a fun and relaxed process, and my practice grew naturally to a level I couldn't even imagine at the beginning." - Attilio Provenzano (Cambridge, United Kingdom)
"This course taught me how to be creative and play the guitar like an orchestra where all of the musicians can participate independently or together. As you gain experience with this method, you begin to see the guitar in a very clear way that allows you to quickly become very creative. Chord Melody Guitar is a course that I recommend for anyone who wants to understand and play the guitar creatively." - Kelbinson Martinez (Orlando, Florida)
"This course could change your whole way of thinking about harmony on guitar. It is an exploration of basic harmony through a functional exploration of the sounds, with improvisation at the core. The pace of the course is slow enough for beginners but if you are a more advanced player this course is open to your creativity. Thanks, David!" - Jean-Marc Sabourin (Montreal, Canada)
Just click on the “Add to cart” button below to purchase this complete course for $150. You can make your purchase with any major credit card and you can download all of the materials immediately after making your purchase. And if you don't agree that this course is the one of best investments you ever made in your guitar playing, just send us an e-mail within 60 days and we'll give you a full refund.
