Adding Chromaticism to Your Playing
By Matt Wong
This month, I will be discussing how you can use approach notes in your soloing. Adding chromaticism to your improvisation with approach notes is a great way to spice up your playing, and is commonly used by jazz, rock, and fusion guitar players.
There are 12 chromatic approaches as well as 12 diatonic approaches that players can choose from, and many different ways to use them when improvising. As you can probably imagine, becoming proficient in using approach notes will take a bit of time. Thus, for this lesson, we will focus on two simple chromatic approaches, and use them to approach chord tones. If you have not already, I recommend checking out my lesson, "Bring Out the Sound of Each Chord in Your Solos." The exercises from that lesson will provide you with a good technical and theoretical foundation to tackle the ones in this lesson.
For those of you who wish to explore approach notes beyond this lesson, included at the end of this article is a list of all twelve possible chromatic approaches that you can apply the exercises in this lesson to. As always, do not hesitate to get in touch with me with questions.