social/reddit

Hmm sort of. Let me try to clear up two things:

First, I’m not suggesting you play a different scale for each chord, in fact I’m suggesting that you specifically DO NOT try to do that. I’m suggesting that if you want to noodle around in a scale, you do it for entire sections of a tune that are in a particular key center / tonality.

So for Minor Swing, the entire tune is in an Am tonality so you could noodle in the A Harmonic Minor scale over all the chords (Am, Dm, E7) if you want. Notice how all of the notes of all of those chords are present in that one scale.

The other thing is, just to be clear, over the E7 you would play an Fdim7 arpeggio (i.e. a dim7 starting half a step up from the root of the dominant).

So altogether this is what I’m suggesting for Minor Swing:

• Over Am - Harmonic Minor A scale and/or Am6 arpeggio
• Over Dm - Harmonic Minor A scale and/or Dm6 arpeggio
• Over E7 - Harmonic Minor A scale and/or Fdim7 arpeggio

In fact, if you listen to the famous Django solo over this tune you’ll find a lot of the ideas he uses are exactly these things - in particular the Fdim7 arpeggio over the E7 is a huge component of the sound (play an Fdim7 run, and land on a note in the Am chord). Same is true of Grappelli’s solo.