Smooth Grooves

Thank you for choosing this Smooth Grooves Jam Track Central package. The underlying harmonic structure of these pieces is designed to create plenty of scope for melodic soloing, without requiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of scales and chord structures.

If you are primarily a ‘shape’ or ‘position’ player, who does everything by ear, all of these will allow you to start out using familiar pentatonic phrases in any of the root key positions. Once you gain familiarity with the changes, you can then think about taking advantage of some of the extended chords that offer opportunities for creating colour and suspense with imaginative note choices. With simple triad chords you can use almost any out-of-scale ‘colour’ notes you want — effectively, the melody note just creates an extension on the basic chord — but some extended chords with a particularly strong aural ‘flavour’, like anything with a flattened fifth in it, for example, will force you to either acknowledge them in your melody notes, or steer well clear of that part of the scale. Let your ear be the judge though — in melodic soloing, the flow of the line is always an important consideration, and if it sounds right, then it is right.