A 2nd is the interval between any 2 ADJACENT scale degrees.

This lesson is on adding chromaticism between and around adjacent scale degrees

This first method of chromaticising is simply adding chromatics between every scale degree.

It sounds simple but there’s a couple of things to think about…

• What stops this from just being the chromatic scale?
• What do we do when the scale degrees are a semitone apart, so there is no chromatic note between them?

The answer to question one is simple, we are going to use some very simple rules to make sure that the scale degrees from the original scale fall on the downbeat. A huge part of adding chromaticism to lines is keeping the chord tones or ‘Inside’ notes on the beat, this helps you keep the key in the listener’s ear and not sound wrong.

What happens when scale degrees are touching and have no note between them, well, if we play eighth notes straight through then we will lose our policy of scale tones on the beat. So we are going to add an extra note at this point to displace the line and get the following chord tones back on the beat.

In the Diagram below the first line is the C major Scale (Green Notes) , the second line is adding Chromatic passing tones between scale degrees (Red Notes) which essentially makes the chromatic scale. Note how in the second line sometimes the green notes land on the beat and sometimes the red notes land on the beat… this makes for a week melody.

The third line shows our rule, adding an extra note between scale degrees that are only a semitone apart. This extra note is a semitone below the second scale degree, making a chromatic enclosure. Notice how the Green notes are now always on the beat, and the red notes are on upbeats.

So here’s what you should do, practice any scale you want, add chromatics between every set of notes that have a tone between them and when you come to two notes that don’t have a tone between them then add a chromatic enclosure around that note. If your line is depending the chromatic in closure will come from below, if your line is ascending, then the chromatic enclosure will come from above.

Now, this was my original approach to chromaticing scales, when I studied Barry Harris’s teaching I found he had better rules for enclosure. Instead of adding chromatic enclosures, he adds diatonic enclosures. My method was simple, you just enclose by going one fret around, but Barry’s method sounds a lot more musical.

Barry Harris adds an Upper Diatonic Neighbour note whenever he comes across two notes that he can’t put a semitone between. It’s always an upper neighbour regardless of if the line is ascending 0r descending

Here you can see the chromatic enclosure method vs the Upper Neighbour Method both are worth practicing on every scale. The Arrows show where the differences occur.