Tune up

Chord melody is a jazz guitar style that involves playing both the chords and the melody of a song simultaneously. There are many musical techniques associated with this approach. Though most did not originate with the guitar, they have been masterfully adopted and modified by such guitarists as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Gene Bertoncini.

Jazz musicians routinely encounter songs in the form of lead sheets, which consist of the melody line (usually written in treble clef) and chord symbols. For an example of what a lead sheet looks like, see Example 1 (below), a lead sheet for my song "Sho’ Nuff Liz." In this lesson, we’ll look at how to turn a lead sheet like this into a full chord-melody arrangement like the one on page 3.

Lead sheets are intended to be used by any instrumentalist. Since everything written in standard guitar notation sounds one octave lower than written, the first thing guitarists discover upon reading the melody of a lead sheet is that the melody is written in "concert," which means guitarists need to play it one octave higher for the melody to sound as written. If you don’t do this, it will be more difficult to play in the chord-melody style, because you want to highlight the melody by placing it in the top voice of each chord, then hang the remaining notes of the chord below the melody. If the melody is too low, you won’t have enough room on the guitar to place all the chord tones below it. To get a feel for the melody before we start filling in the chords, play through "Sho’ Nuff Liz" transposed up an octave (Example 2).