Improvising melodies is one of the most intimidating things a string player can try. Even experienced classical players with superb technique often blanch at the thought of making something up as they go along. Improvising around a melody is scary enough, but you can feel absolutely lost if you’re called upon to improvise merely on chord changes. After all, instead of choosing notes from only one scale, you’re potentially swung through a series of different scales, each related to a different chord. And even if the chord progression allows you to hover in a single scale, you still lack a ready-made tune to work around.

But there’s no reason to freeze up. As jazz violinist Martin Norgaard points out, you can pluck melody notes out of the chords themselves. These are the “inner melodies” lurking within the chords, and Norgaard suggests how to find them in his book Jazz Fiddle Wizard (from Mel Bay Publications) for adult-beginner improvisers and in his Jazz Fiddle Wizard Junior for kids (also with versions for viola and cello). The Junior series includes a lesson with an easy vamp that introduces the concept of playing on chord changes, and volume two, due out this spring, has several easy lessons on inner melodies.

Here’s how Norgaard suggests you get started.

“The easiest way to improvise on chord changes is if there are only two chords, and they appear in symmetrical progression, kind of like a vamp,” says Norgaard. “The next more difficult thing to do is to create an inner melody on a diatonic chord progression. (‘Diatonic’ refers to a seven-note scale, such as the standard major and minor scales.) An inner melody is just a series of chord tones that make a melody.”

Jazz theorists have specific rules about these so-called guide tone lines, but Norgaard suggests that you take a more easygoing approach. “Just make a melody, skipping around in a way that sounds right to you,” he says.

The first several times you try this, Norgaard warns, it’s best to use a diatonic chord progression. If you use a nondiatonic chord progression, you’ll be forced to change scales, which may give you too much to keep track of in the beginning.

Take a look at the chord progression Norgaard has provided in Example 1 on page 27; it begins and ends with two measures of C major, but the four middle measures push off from three different chords. This sequence is inspired by a standard, “Take the A Train,” but the progression or variations on it are found in numerous other melodies.

First, you’ll need to do a little chord analysis, just by analyzing the roots. Write out your analysis. In this case, the sequence would be Imaj7, II7, IIm7, V7, Imaj7 (remembering that some of those chords are repeated).

Now, write out the chords in whole notes, as in the example.

Not Just Arpeggios

At this point, many standard methods would suggest that you practice arpeggios for each chord in the progression. Norgaard advises that you do more than that. “If you practice each chord by itself,” he warns, “you never look at how the chords connect to each other. Instead, you should simply pick one of the chord tones in each chord and make a melody out of them so it becomes a linear thing, and you’re looking at the music horizontally instead of vertically.”

How do you choose the notes for an inner melody? Although there are no strict rules for which chord note to use in your inner melody, the third and seventh are often good choices, because they help define the chord quality, according to Norgaard. In addition, as you write out the chords, you can get a sense of where the oddball notes that don’t fit into the initial scale may lie, and those provide good fodder for your melody. In our example, you’ll realize that in the II7 chord in measures three and four, the F# sticks out; it’s nondiatonic to the key of C.

In this example, Norgaard decides to start with the G in the C-major chord, and he can’t resist that F# in the D7 chord. Next, he chooses the Fn from the two following chords, and resolves the sequence down to E for the final two measures. They’re written out as whole notes in Example 2.

“What we’ve created is a chromatic line that expresses the relationship between the chords,” says Norgaard. “Because by creating a melody from them, you imply that the chords are related to each other.”

The second step is adding rhythms to the inner melody. Example 3 provides one possibility out of many.

Beyond Noodling

Next, to make the melody less monotonous, toss in one or two extra notes from the home key of C major (see Example 4).
“For somebody who has only improvised on one scale, this is a huge breakthrough, because they now improvise on a chord progression as opposed to simply noodling up and down a scale,” says Norgaard.

Of course, this can get more complicated depending on the chord progression. But even with the fairly straightforward progression we’ve been using, you can make your improvised melody more intricate simply by choosing different notes for the inner melody. Example 5 shows a different melody, drawn from the same chord progression, this time with a different note in each measure.

“This one has a bunch of skips in it, which add more variety and possibilities for passing tones,” says Norgaard. The advantage of this will be clear in the next step, but before you get there, don’t forget to add rhythms. “Now,” continues Norgaard, “since we have those skips, we can work on filling in the gaps between each note. This leads into what bebop theory calls ‘target notes.’ You’re shooting for those notes in your inner melody, but adding scales and arpeggios in between (see Example 6), which is what people like Charlie Parker did all the time.”

Notice that you don’t have to wait for the new chord to appear before you play the inner-melody note you’ve pulled from it; it’s perfectly OK, even cool, to anticipate the upcoming chord at the “and” of the fourth beat in the previous measure.

We’ve been concerned mainly with finding good notes, but the step in which you add rhythms is equally important in improvising a melody. “Adding rhythm implies that you’re putting a lot of space in the melody,” says Norgaard. “Think of it like talking; when we talk, we have a lot of spaces between groups of words, so the talk doesn’t get boring to listen to. You need that in a melody, too. String players never have to stop, whereas horn players have to breathe, so they make more natural phrase lengths than we do.

“That’s something we string players need to watch out for.”