-
Hey Mike! Great questions and one thing is standing out to me from your line of questioning. Short answer is… IT ALL WORKS! With one exception – you had said ‘So What’ was in B- In the Tenor Key the A Sections are in E- and you would experiment with Improvising and building phrases in E-7 (E-7 Pent) or A7 (A Dom Pent OR E-6 Pent, its the same ‘ii V’ Pentatonic that we talk about in the BBB Unit). When playing ‘out’ to build tension we would use a B7 dom pent (the V of i), F7 dom pent (Tri-tone sub of V of i) or Eb7 dom pent (1/2 step below i, super out sound) to play notes that aren’t in the key center and then resolve them back to E-7. You could also play F-7 pent. or Eb-7 pent… As you can see the options here are INSANE! The key with all these options is to only focus on ONE AT A TIME. Don’t try to play them all at once, don’t even think about the other ones 🙂 It will be improvisational ADHD if you do this lol.
To translate this to Pick up the Pieces, if G7 is the sound we want to have options over. For this you can start buy getting comfortable with the G-7 and G Dom 7 Pentatonics. A G-7 Pentatonic will sound great over a G7 chord bc it just does. In this world of focusing on the key center the song is in the D-6 Pentatonic also works as it is just G7 Dom Pentatonic starting on a different note. Our ii V pentatonic for this sound would be D-6 pent / G7 pent (same pentatonic, different starting note)
FROM THERE, if you want to build tension this is where you would start using D7, Ab7 or for a super ‘out’ sound, F#7. You could also use their respective -7 pentatonic scales but in the world of dominant chords its best to keep it simple and just think about dominant pentatonics and language built off a dominant chord.
I hope this helps – I think you have thoroughly inspired me to do a youtube video on this as a result of this question and the answer I just gave. Hearing all this would be huge…
Let me know if you have any questions – the important part though is always gonna be… you guessed it – practicing 🙂 Lots of info here, work through these things one at a time and see what develops.