If i'm holding an C major chord

and i start soloing over it

what can make it obvious i'm soloing in C major scale instead of A minor scale or D Dorian for example? SInce all have same notes

 

Start on the root note

 

do i also need to keep repeating it also?........i guess? anything else? thanks

 

Not at all, unless you want to sound like you are playing scales.

 

what makes it obvious is:
a)if you focus on the c major triad notes(C E G) then it sounds like C major
b)When you hold a note or chord its called a drone it is not common to drone or hold the ΙΙΙ chord which is what the C major chord is in A minor it is much more common to drone over the tonic which is C major in this case

hope that helps

 

Last edited: Mar 25, 2021

Play these scales:

Bb C D E F F# G
C D E F# G G# A
G G# A Bb C D E

 

Don't listen to Mynock, cause playing those notes in that order will summon Satan (unless you wish to make a pact with him to become a musical legend).

 

Yeah, i did what @Mynock suggested and i am now overcome with a desire to rule the world and fill it with the stench of burning human flesh.

 

Dude, there is no spoon. Are you worried the musical scale police are going to arrest you for impersonating a minor?

 

Hey rEmaker where did you get that C is the VI chord in A min?

 

Thank you for pointing out my mistake. I fixed it

 

Why do you want to hold it?

This is not a smart choice.

Cmaj chord belongs to more than 100 scales or even more. You can select any of them but again, soloing on a single chord is not a good option.

No!

 

ACAS you should hear at least once in your life to Ravi Shankar.

 

Most improvisation and soloing techniques have been formed around false premises and his music is undoubtedly not an exception.

 

I worked with him. Blew. My. Mind.
I had to go outside and lay down at one stage. It was too much. I was saturated and didn't know how to ground it...
Went through some amazing experience with him and the band.
No shoes on the sacred space of the mat! People got fired for such.
I would like to apologise to you sometime soon for my reaction to what you did, rudy.

 

there is a tedency that a melody starts and end with the root note, but it doesnt have to, and the question he asked requires a far more complex answer.

i am dealing with such questions and made softwares releated to this question and still havent found an easy answer on topics like that.

one of the main problems with it is that you can not answer this in regards to the melodies which you already know, and also not in regards to all possible i.e. potentially future melodies, that both would not make much sense.

you would have to answer it for the average melody. but what is that? and no, putting them all into a markov model is neiter the solution nor possible.

p.s.:

i think part of te answer could be to say that "beeing dorian" and "beloging to D major" itself is only a vague interpretation / construct of what actually happens - and you can be sure that music is more often analysed AFTER composing it than before, which puts the questin about "what it IS" on another level.

 

Last edited: Mar 25, 2021

Transcendental. Like most Indian music, but there was something special about Ravi Shankar. And I'm not even religious or spiritual...

 

what can make it obvious i'm soloing in C major scale instead of A minor scale or D Dorian for example? SInce all have same notes

Yes, they are all the same notes but context is the key. What is the relationship/interval of those notes to the root and how does that change when the root changes?

Regardless of the root, yes, all those notes are "technically" correct - but why do some sound better together than others? Is that something you can learn from reading off a page or is it better to find out through discovery?

what can make it obvious i'm soloing in C major scale

Well one place to start would be by emphasising the root, third and fifth - as they are the notes that (in Western music) tend to distinguish how a major (or minor) chord sound.

I would point out, however, that while theory is useful to understanding things to a point, it should not be the end point. For example, what if the idea you're trying to convey sounds better in Am or D?

Just trying to share some of what I've learned, I am by no means knowledgeable in this area - what I learned came (in part) from watching Guthrie Govan videos - I subscribe to his view that this stuff is not black and white (right and wrong notes), instead that there is a continuum of notes, from the ones that work best with the root through to ones that work the least - how you define best and least is entirely up to you and (somewhat) your musical upbringing.

Best of luck!

 

Sigh. Music doesn't work through scales. Forget the damn scales. Music works through keys and scales merely represent most obvious relationships between a key and the tones. Every note that doesn't belong to the scale "C Major" is still part of the key "C major", it's just that most of them do not have as straightforward usage. The bII, as in, Db, for instance, is part of N6 chords and trisubbed V chord as well. The bIII generally is mostly for passing chords. Like for instance; Em - Ebm - Dm kind of passages. Or it can work as a bII/ii (N6) or subV/ii etc etc.

If you solo over C major chord, then that's all you're doing really. Probably will sound pretty terrible, but who cares right? Now if you want to actually do some stuff, learn at least some elementary progression and start playing it and "soloing" over it. Just one chord solos are mostly done as exercises by people who can play fluently music with at least one change per bar and are so used to doing that, that playing over one chord is actually a really hard thing for them to do even on a mental level.