The whole reason I made this course is because I couldn’t find anyone talking about the modern/fusion changes anywhere. I saw loads of people trying to solo over the modern backing track, outling the wrong chords. So here’s the fusion changes.

The following changes where made famous by Greg Howe’s viral video which you can see fully transcribed here …

My guess is that Howe came up with the following changes himself, see what differences you can spot.

Here are the Key differences to listen out for –

• A lot of versions add in a chromatic passing chord between the first two chords, or they’ll at least imply it in the bass part. This is the A-7 to Ab-7 to G – 7. The Ab-7 is typically not outlined by the soloist.
• The Bmin7b5 is replaced with B-11. However, the B minor 11 voicings in the track don’t use the fifth, so we are back to just avoiding the dissonance instead of actually changing the fifth. There’s no natural 5 implying a departure from the b5 sounds until we get all the way to bar 9.
• All the E7 chords are now E7b9 or sometimes swapped for E7#9 (not shown)
• The Bb7 chord is now a BbMaj7#11 chord. This chord might seem even more random than the Bb7, but it makes sense. We have a ii-V-I into the Key of F in bars 10 and 11. The Bb is just a continuation of that cycle of 4ths in the Key of F major.
• We now have a vi* – ii – V – i turnaround at the end.

Notice how the minor 11 chords and maj7#11 chord add to the modern sound.

Lets have a look at scale options next…