I hate that thing where you remember the quote but you're not sure if you're attributing it right. And yes, you can look it up on online, but I've seen enough internet tablature to know pinpoint accuracy is not the web's strong suit per se.

So I might have this wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was Fran Lebowitz who said "The opposite of talking isn't listening. It's waiting." In my formative years, I confess I lived by the guitarist's paraphrase of that thought: "The opposite of soloing isn't comping, it's...waiting."

Over time, one reason I've become so enamored of using Freddie Green voicings (and chord substitutions) is that doing so allows you to invest comping with a much greater improvisatory freedom than one typically associates with the phrase "rhythm guitar." 

A conversation that actually took place sometime in the 1990s between a fifteen-year-old student and a young faculty member named Jeff McErlain on the first day of classes at the National Guitar Workshop:

 

Student: Can you play superlocrian arpeggios at 240 beats per minute?

 

Jeff: Well...I'm not exactly into working on speed for speed's sake.

 

Student: So...whaddya, like, a rhythm guitar player?

Now, comping does not have to be this lumpy, repetitive thing. Not only that, using chords does not have to be restricted to playing accompaniment. By taking your chord voicings onto the upper strings, you can use them to harmonize your blues licks, generate riffs like a horn section, and even answer your single-note licks with your own chord hits.

I like to think of all this as the chord-melody approach to playing blues. Jazz guitarists use the phrase "chord melody" to describe a kind of solo arranging, and that's not what I'm talking about here – nothing to do with standards or ballad playing, no finger gymnastics in the name of huge spread-out voicings across the fingerboard.

No, I'm talking about taking a vocabulary of tightly-voiced three- and four-note shapes on the top four strings – primarily 9th and 13th and altered chords – and using those voicings to add depth, color, punctuation and excitement to your existing single-note blues soloing. 

That's what I'll be covering in my upcoming Reliable Source workshop, Chord Melody Blues, live streaming on Saturday, June 29th. You can sign up for the workshop at the link below:

Chord Melody Blues Workshop Registration

Of course, it's one thing to read a description of this process, and quite another to actually see and hear it in action. So in today's Youtube lesson, I introduce an Ed Bickert chord voicing I learned from Emily Remler, and demonstrate one way to riff through the first four bars of a Bb blues using this chord. You can find the lesson here:

Blues Chord Melodies With 9th And 13th Chords

Early next week, I'll post an additional lesson explaining one of Duke Robillard's favorite ways to return from the IV to the I chord, and next Friday, a lesson on one of my own favorite tritone substitution turnarounds. Each of them is a complete chord melody idea you can immediately drop into a twelve-bar blues, and each one illustrates something I'll be covering in much more detail in the upcoming workshop.

Which you can sign up for here:

Chord Melody Blues Workshop Registration

More soon,

David