If you've ever watched a great funk or jazz guitarist and wondered how they make their chord playing sound like it's actually singing a melody, this is the technique behind it. It's called the Scale of Chords, and once you understand it, you'll hear it everywhere.
What you'll get out of this lesson
By the end of this lesson you'll understand the Scale of Chords concept as it applies to Dominant chords, and you'll have a set of practical voicings to get you started. More importantly, you'll understand the underlying principle well enough to start building your own.
Where the idea comes from
The phrase "Scale of Chords" comes from legendary jazz pianist Barry Harris, though the approach here was first encountered in Don Mock's instructional video The Blues from Rock to Jazz. The core idea: most guitarists learn a chord and cycle through its inversions, which means they're only ever working with the notes that belong to that chord. The Scale of Chords breaks that limitation entirely — instead of inverting one chord, you find a voicing of that chord to sit underneath every note of the scale.
How it works
The concept is straightforward. Take a chord and a scale that fits it, then learn one voicing of that chord for each note of the scale — so that as you climb the scale in the melody, you have a chord underneath every step. In a Dominant context, we use the Mixolydian scale. In the key of C, that gives us: C, D, E, F, G, A, B♭. So we need a C Dominant voicing with C on top, one with D on top, one with E on top, and so on up through the whole scale. The chord type stays the same (C7, C9, C13, C7sus, and so on) — only the top melody note changes. The only rule is that every voicing must be diatonic to the C Mixolydian scale.
You want to be able to have voicings for every chord — major, minor, and dominant — for every possible melody note on top, so that you can play melodies with your chord playing.
Finding voicings that work for you
This isn't a system where you mechanically move shapes up the neck in stepwise voice leading — that approach tends to produce voicings that sound awkward or are impractical under the fingers. Instead, for each melody note, find an option you genuinely like the sound of. The voicings shown here are a starting point; you are strongly encouraged to explore and create your own. There are no rules beyond keeping everything diatonic to the scale.
Taking it further
Once you have a set of voicings you're happy with in C, move the whole system into different keys. Then bring it into songs — try it on a static dominant vamp first, then on tunes with chord changes. Later lessons in this course will cover the same concept applied to Major and Minor keys, which opens up a huge range of melodic chord playing.
Your homework
This week, learn the Dominant Scale of Chords voicings shown in the chart for C7, making sure you can play them cleanly from the lowest melody note to the highest. Then transpose the whole sequence to one other key of your choice. Play them over a slow backing track on a C7 vamp and focus on hearing the melody in the top notes.