Melodic minor harmony opens up a world of colour that most guitarists never fully explore. In this masterclass, John Stowell — a guitarist who has spent over 50 years developing his own voice in jazz — shares his approach to using melodic minor modes as keys rather than scales, unlocking a practical framework for both comping and improvisation.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: A clear, practical framework for thinking about melodic minor modes and how to deploy them as dominant, major, and minor sounds. You’ll also gain insight into how John thinks about accompaniment, and why developing your own vocabulary matters as much as learning the theory. Make sure to download the supplemental PDFs linked below — they contain the chord shapes and diagrams John references throughout.
Click here to download the Supplemental PDFs
Thinking of modes as keys
John’s core approach to melodic minor — and to harmonic minor and harmonic major — is to treat each mode as its own key rather than as a derivative scale. This shift in thinking has practical consequences: instead of asking “which mode of melodic minor fits over this chord?”, you ask “which melodic minor key can I treat as home here?” The modes then become a set of available tonal centres you can move between, rather than a sequence of patterns to memorise in relation to a parent scale.
Within this framework, melodic minor chords can function as dominant chords in four keys, as a major chord in one key, and as minor chords in three keys. There is also a natural overlap with diminished harmony, since a diminished chord functions as a dominant chord in most harmonic contexts.
Building the sound from the scale up
John starts with the basic sound of the melodic minor scale itself. In jazz (as opposed to classical practice), the ascending melodic minor is used both ascending and descending — there is no descending natural minor. The quickest way to construct it: flatten the third of a major scale, or raise the seventh of Dorian. Once that sound is in your ears, you can begin harmonising it — building chords from each degree and treating those chords as the raw material for both solo lines and accompaniment voicings.
Melodic minor in comping and voicings
John is equally interested in how melodic minor harmony shapes the way you accompany. He cites influences from piano players — Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock in particular — as much as from guitarists, and points out that thinking about chord voicings the way a pianist would can transform your approach to accompaniment. The chord inversions that grow naturally out of the harmonised melodic minor scale give you voicings that sit unusually well under a soloist and create a sound distinctly your own.
Teaching is a wonderful way to just kind of organise your own thinking as you present it to others, and very rewarding and satisfying to see folks hopefully getting enthusiastic about their own progress and playing.
Taking it further: John encourages students not to panic if the shapes and sounds are unfamiliar at first — the supplemental PDFs contain everything you need to work through at your own pace. His YouTube channel, TrueFire, and Mike’s Master Classes also have free excerpts from his courses that demonstrate many of the concepts visually. The key is to get interested enough to start exploring, then let the material and your own ear guide you deeper.
Your homework: Download the supplemental PDFs and pick one melodic minor key — for instance, C melodic minor. Identify its four dominant applications, its single major application, and its three minor applications. Then, over a simple one-chord vamp, try comping using only inversions of melodic minor chords from that key. The goal this week is familiarity with the sound, not fluency — just get the ear working.