Chords for Guitar Lesson - Wes Montgomery Block Chords

_ _ _ _ Hi, this is Ben Shelton and today I'm going to be showing you how to do West Montgomery style block chords.
_ _ Now this is particularly interesting because
you might listen to old West Montgomery recordings and wonder how he's able to be so fluid of an improviser when he's playing whole chords.
Well, there's a system to it.
You put the chords in a scale.
So let's start out with the basic G minor 7 chord and we can make a scale or two different scales
out of the inversions of it.
So we're going to start here.
_ _ [Gm] _ We just bar straight across at the third fret and get the top four notes.
Notice that the
one is on top, the G.
[F] _
Got this flat seventh on the bottom, then your minor third, then your fifth.
So you got all the chords that you need to make a minor seventh or all the notes you need to make a minor seventh
chord. [Gm] So _ _ _
then we're going to invert it.
So we're going to take the minor third and stick it on top.
We end up with this voicing here. _
[Bb] _ _ _ _ _ _ Take a minute and you [Dm] can see how that lays [D] on the guitar.
Try putting your fingers on the shape.
Notice how I have my pinky free.
There's a reason I do that.
So if I want to do this, for example, and put the
different note in there, I can do that.
I have freedom.
So I'll just play that and I'm barring two notes with my middle finger on the top two [Bb] strings.
_ _ _ So then I'm going to do the next inversion of that. _ _ _ _
_ So that's now going to put the fifth on [Eb] top.
Lean over and you can see that a little better.
[Bb] So _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Bm] it's going to be like [Bb] that, where you bar across on the eighth fret and then on the G string,
you put the finger on the tenth fret and on the E string, you put your finger on the tenth fret.
So _ _ now [Gm] we're going to take the same notes and we're going to invert it again.
So we end up with the flat seventh on top. _
_ _ _ _ So [G] notice that here my middle finger is barring across two different strings [D] at the twelfth fret. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ Okay, [Bb]
so now we're going to keep going through the inversion.
_ And just for the heck of it,
_ _ [Gm] _ there's our top chord or we can stick
this ninth on it here.
You on your E string put the finger down on the
_ 17th fret and [Bb] get this. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Fm] _ _ So to recap, [Gm] you have this chord. _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[Bb] _ _ _ _ _ _ So
what can we do with that?
They're all the same chord, but they all have different notes on top.
_ So the first thing we can do is start by sliding each one of the chords up by two frets.
And then we can make a [Ab] scale.
_ [Bb] _ _ [Am] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _
_ [C] _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ [Am] _
_ [Gm] _ _ [Am] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _
_ [Am] _ _ [Gm] _ _ _ _ [C] _
_ [Bb] _ _ _ [C] _ _ [Bb] _ _
_ [Am] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _ So we can do a scale.
_ The scale will go up and down and you might want to practice that as an exercise.
So that's one way to do it.
_ And then the next way to do it is to fill in with diminished chords.
So the chord that we're going to use is going to be an A diminished [C] chord like this.
[F] _ _ _ [C] So what we're going to do is bar across at the fourth fret.
And then we're going to stop the strings on the G string at the fifth fret and on the E string at the fifth fret.
_ [A] _ _ _ So we're going to end up with the diminished chord.
And the cool thing about the diminished chord
is because each note is a minor third apart from the next note,
both on top and below it, you can invert that chord by just moving it up three frets.
So we have
_ [C] _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [A] _ _ _ _
_ So the cool thing about that
_ is that
we can combine the two, right?
The inversions of [Bb] the G minor seven and the [A] inversions of _ _
the A diminished seventh chord, right?
So we [Bb] go like this.
_ [A] _ _ [Gm] _ _ _ _ [Bb] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ [C] _
_ [Bb] _ _ [C] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _
[B] _ _ [Bb] _ _ [C] _ _ [Gm] _ _
_ [Gb] _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _
So then we end up with a scale.
And you can do all kinds of cool things with a scale.
You can play
_ uh, say if we do it in A, we can play the Inspector [Am] Gadget theme.
_ _ [C] _ _
_ [Eb] _ _ _ _ [Cm] _ _ [C] _
_ _ _ _ [Db] _ _ _ _
_ _ And you can just, any melody you can think in your head, you can generally harmonize with some sort of chord like that.
The other cool thing that you can do with those voicings is if you're playing two fives in jazz, you know,
[Gm] this
if you're playing say two five from
G minor seven
to [F] C seven to F major seven, you gotta go
[D] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _
_ [F] _ _ _ and you can play a two five like [N] that just with the patterns.
If you listen to Wes Montgomery, he does a lot of that.
So
_ think of this lesson not as an end but as
a useful tool to have in your bag and something that you might want to play with.
I would suggest that you learn how to do the scale both ways
and then practice with it.
Try harmonizing melodies you come up with in your head.
When you get pretty good at it, try figuring out a couple of Wes Montgomery chord solos.
And you'll find that a lot of what he plays follows patterns like this,
but a lot of what he plays is also different and spontaneous and that you can pick up little tricks and harmonic
curly cues so to speak
_ by figuring out what it is that he's playing and going back in your head and saying, okay,
what was he thinking when he played that?
And then applying the rules that you figure out there
to your own playing to create something new.
Anyway, I hope the lesson was helpful for you.
This is Ben Shelton, and I hope you had a wonderful day. _ _