Mastering Triad Forms on the Guitar

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All right, minor chords, let’s do this.

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Okay, so how’s it going, everyone? Today we’re going to talk about minor chords, and to be more specific, how to improvise over minor chords. What I’m going to do is record a few loops and demonstrate some techniques that you can start using and putting into your improvisations. Hopefully, these will give you some cool ideas.

As always, please make sure to subscribe and like this video, hit that bell so you don’t miss any of my videos, and let’s begin.

The first thing I’m going to do is create this C minor six vamp. You see, this is my root, my six, my flat three, and my five, and it’s going to go like this: one, two, three, four.

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One.

Okay, so we got our loop now. I can demonstrate some stuff. First of all, you’ve got to know your triads, right? We’re talking about C minor here, and this is our C minor triad. Here’s the first inversion.

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One.

And this is the second inversion.

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One.

The first thing is that I’m just going to improvise using those notes.

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Just triads improv.

See, now I’m going to other sets of strings. I can see my second inversion over here. That is by connecting:

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The different sets, which you can check out on my website weissguitar.com inside the Galactic Modern Guitar series.

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Adding rhythm:

You see, since I’m adding rhythm, it’s starting to sound like music.

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Approach notes:

Now these are approach notes. I’m kind of aiming back and forth from my third back to my fourth, and it’s still around the triad, but I’m using some notes to create cool sounds around that triad. These are chromatics, kind of.

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Enclosures/chromatics:

Approaching around the chord tones. I can also do the same kind of enclosures to other chord tones like the flat three.

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And if I connect them, I get this:

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Let’s do the same thing to the root:

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Okay, now the next thing we’re going to do is the same kind of stuff to the other inversions. Here’s the first inversion; let’s do the same kind of enclosure.

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See that kind of stuff:

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Kind of like a cage surrounding that note.

Target tone awareness:

Here’s my target zone.

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Here’s my target tone again.

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Once again:

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Okay.

Now I’m going to introduce another triad that is going to give me another sound, and that is the diminished. The seventh diminished degree—if this is my first degree, this is going to be my seventh diminished degree. Let’s play both of them.

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You see, this is kind of a vamp.

Now let’s do it over here with the root position.

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So this is a root position diminished chord, right? So I’m going between the different root positions: root position of C minor and root position of B diminished.

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Okay, here’s my second inversion C minor, and here’s my second inversion B diminished. Let’s play with those.

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Foreign:

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Triad pairs jazzed up:

Passing tones and chromatics to combine all of those together.

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You see how you’re starting to get some cool sounds. Now it’s a good time to introduce:

Melodic minor:

The element of melodic minor harmony. So we get a minor degree followed by another minor degree, followed by an augmented degree, a major degree, another major degree, and then we have diminished, followed by another diminished.

So all together we have: minor, minor, augmented, major, major, diminished, diminished, and moved back.

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So now it’s time to connect:

Connecting the dots:

These over different sets, different inversions, and combine everything we talked about: three, four.

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So these are kind of like leaves. You see, I can create intervals within my scales. For example, this example was six.

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The sweet sound of 6ths:

And of course, the ideas are endless. Now, in order to be able to improvise over chord changes, one chord vamps, and understand what you’re doing, you need to start seeing all of these elements like the scales, the different triads, and always know where you are. So you play the guitar instead of the guitar playing you. Meaning that harmony and melody need to be understood on the instrument, and it doesn’t really matter what style you play—it can be blues, jazz, new soul, hip-hop—you still need to have very strong fundamentals.

And the best way to approach having those strong fundamentals is going through a very specific system that can guide you and give you resources to really connect all the bits and pieces. Definitely something I wish I had when I was getting into this stuff. That’s why I invite you to check out my Galactic Modern Guitar Series, where I show you all the different steps together in 15 modules, showing you the triads, voice leading, arpeggios, different chromatic approaches, how to connect everything to start creating phrases, how to get into seven chords, and all the different approaches to jazz voicings—packed in 15 modules over 96 videos. So go check that out; the link is in the description below.

Let me show you exactly how you can start mapping out the entire fretboard to not only solidify your fretboard knowledge but also to start unleashing your creativity.

That’s it for today. Now, if you’re interested in checking out a very, very cool arpeggio workout, check out this video over here.

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