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Hi guys!
I'm Ciro Manna and welcome to this new video!
Today we're going to talk about chromaticism.
Chromaticism are a very interesting ad useful technique to master.
Because very often chromaticism are notes out of tune
it's important to pair them with strong notes of the scale or the chord we're playing on.
The strong notes are the main notes of the arpeggio.
I'd like to pick the B7 chord to show you what I'm talking about.
In B7 the strong notes are:
B, the root
D#, the 3rd
F#, the 5th
A, the 7th.
Chromaticism will work very well when paired with these notes I just mentioned
we need to play the strong notes downbeat and the chromaticism upbeat.
Thanks to that we'll play the main notes of the arpeggio on the strong beats
and we'll play the chromaticism on the weak beats.
Before introducing this technique in our playing we need to practice hard and listen carefully.
Here's an example.
Once again, slower this time.
Let's break in different parts the phrase I've just played.
In this first part I've played two notes out of tune.
As you can hear the two notes don't fit very well with our B7 chord
when I play in mixolidyan mode.
But if I try to play these two notes upbeat, pairing them with main notes of the arpeggio
they start to sound good even if they're not "grammatically correct".
Personally I really love this kind of sounds.
Back to our lick, we have a G# upbeat on the last sixteenth
Then we play the F# downbeat. F# is the 5th of the B7 chord.
We have another chromaticism that it's paired with the F# as well...
You hear again that if we pair a chromaticism with one of the main notes
it will start to work even when it's not a note of the scale.
That was just an example, useful to introduce such an extended topic
I suggest to practice on different chords and scales
to increase gradually your expertise.