Thinking Outside the Box - Part II

John Stowell continues his advanced jazz guitar series on playing outside the box — introducing dissonance and harmony beyond what's written on the page. Building on Part I, he shows how to take static modal harmony and a tune's existing changes and color them with substitutions, implied dominants, and melodic minor sounds.

What's covered

• What outside playing means, with listening pointers like John Coltrane and Dave Liebman
• Modal playing over static harmony — tunes like So What and Impressions, where you sit on one minor chord for bars at a time
• Introducing an implied V7 over a static minor chord to create tension and release
• Four melodic minor keys to use over a dominant (half step above, whole tone below, a fourth and a fifth above) and the colors each one gives
• Handling sensitive notes — treating F# as a passing tone over D minor
• A practice exercise pairing Dorian minor and melodic minor arpeggios to move between inside and outside sounds

An improvisation class for intermediate to advanced players who want more harmonic color over both modal vamps and standard changes. This high quality video was recorded by Morgan Curtis.

Other guitar lessons from this series

• Thinking Outside the Box part I
• Thinking Outside the Box part III