Playing better musical phrases

[Jean-Michel G]

“If it sounds good it is good”…
Sure… But why does it sound good? And what if it doesn’t sound good?

In order to answer these questions, we need to understand what it is that makes a melody sound good (or not). This is part of a domain of music theory called melodic analysis, and it is actually very hard because melodies turn out to be much more difficult to theorise upon than harmony (partly because there is so much subjectivity involved). So we are only going to scratch the surface.

Credit to whom credit is due; I borrowed some of the ideas below from an excellent French guitarist (and teacher) called Martin Gioani (his YouTube channel).

A. Definitions
A musical phrase is simply one statement in a musical composition. It has a starting point and some sort of punctuation mark (an active scale degree or a melodic cadence, that I discussed elsewhere), and is often between one and four measures long (but can be longer). It may or may not contain motives.

Phrases usually build upon each other to form the whole improvisation, but each phrase also needs to stand on its own, and that’s what we are going to discuss here.

So, what are the quality attributes of a musical phrase? There are many, but to keep things simple we will look at five of them:
1. connection to the harmony
2. melodic intervals
3. rhythm
4. relative note weight
5. phrasing

1. Connection to harmony
The phrase should use (rely on) chord tones. Tension notes (non-chord tones) are welcome (and even desirable) as long as they (eventually) resolve to chord tones.

2. Melodic intervals
There are three possible types of melodic intervals: chromatic (a semitone), steps (no more than a major 2nd) and skips or leaps (at least a minor 3rd).
– Too many chromatic movements create an unpleasant acoustic mud.
– Too many step movements may sound Baroque or early Classical and are typically not appropriate in contemporary music.
– Too many leaps make the melody very brittle and pointless.
A good phrase usually offers a nice balance between all those types of intervals and ascending passages should be balanced with descending ones.
Usually, inexperienced improvisers tend to abuse of stepwise movements, largely because they often practice scales by running them up and down (a very bad idea!). If that’s your case, try to limit the number of consecutive step movements to a maximum of 3. That’s not to say you can’t have more than that occasionally, but setting this limit will help you get rid of this problem.

3. Rhythm
Enforcing the strong beats of each bar with the same rhythmic structure makes the music very predictable and even boring. Phrases are much more interesting when they accentuate the off beats and contain syncopation. Very often, all it takes to make a dull phrase more interesting, is to start it on an off beat and/or introduce some syncopation.

4. Note weight
In each phrase there are usually notes that you want to emphasise. For example, you will want a tension note to stand out before resolving it.
You can do that in a variety of ways: play louder, or play staccato, for example. But an extremely effective way to emphasise a note is to NOT play immediately behind it! Listen to B.B. King and you’ll understand what that means.
What you don’t play is as important as what you do play: if you leave a little rest behind a note in the phrase, that note will stand out and stick in the listener’s ears.

5. Phrasing
Phrasing is the physical way in which you play a phrase. The guitar is a very rich instrument from a phrasing perspective: you can slide, you can bend, you can hammer on and pull off, you can play softly or loud, you can play staccato or legato, you can play with or without pick, you can play rest strokes or free strokes, etc.

B. Examples
Let’s apply the criteria above to evaluate some phrases. Let’s say we play over a B7 chord.

Example 1
The first phrase contains E as a (very strong) dissonance; in fact, E over B7 is an avoid note as it clashes severely with D#… Here, the phrase ends on that E note and that sounds terrible. In the “corrected” version, that E is part of an enclosure resolving to D#, which is of course perfectly consonant.
The other criteria are not too bad:
– the rhythm is not very inspired but it’s OK,
– the intervals are ok

Example 2
The second phrase has the chord tones at the right places in the bars and ends on a C#, which makes the B7 sound like a B9. The melodic intervals are OK too. But here again the E note is questionable as it sits on a quarter note and therefore stands out quite a bit. Moreover, the rhythm is a bit repetitive, particularly since the phrase runs over two bars. The way to address this is to use syncopation. Some chromatic notes won’t hurt either. Notice also how the E note has become an approach note in the corrected phrase: it was a quarter note in the original phrase and is now a less intrusive eighth note.

Example 3
The third phrase is ok as such (to me, anyway!). It’s melodically interesting and has some nicely resolved tension notes while remaining connected to the underlying B7 chord.

C. Practice
The ability to consistently improvise nice and fresh phrases doesn’t come naturally (unless you’re a natural born genius): it’s a skill that needs to be acquired through (a lot of) practice.
It’s like learning to speak a foreign language fluently. Generic sentences from a conversation guide are handy for the very basic stuff, but will never get you very far.
Here is how I practice this stuff:
– play a chord (any chord)
– sing, hum or whistle a short musical phrase that seems to fit that chord
– immediately reproduce it on the guitar (and write it down if you know how to)
– evaluate the phrase using the five criteria above and decide whether it’s ok to you, or not. If not, correct it.
I find that using a looper pedal is very useful for this practice.

Doing this exercice often will gradually develop an internal (and somewhat mysterious) mind-to-fingers connection that will surprise you.
Remember: the goal is not to build another repertoire of reusable licks/phrases, but rather to train your musical self.

I hope you found this post useful.
Have fun.

[sunjamr]

This is actually at the core of the August Monthly Challenge due this weekend.

Sunjamr Steve

[Alan L]

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