Jazz soloing key suggestions

Hi!
In jazz, when the band is playing a given chord for a couple bars, say Am7, the soloist can noodle around that chord by choosing notes from other scales, so long as they agree with the underlying chord -like A dorian.
Is there already a way for Scaler to suggest scales to solo within for any selected chord in a pattern? If not, would this feature be feasible at some point in the future? Thanks!
cheers & blessings,
Garrett

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Welcome to the forum @Garrett Are you aware of the keys lock function that locks in chord extensions of the currently played chord? Whilst not as free or as scale definable as you mention we are looking to diversity and expand this area. Thanks for feedback.

Thanks, Davide- and thanks for yesterday’s livestream! Yes, the key lock feature (which I love) is exactly what inspired me to think about it’s application in jazz. You and the team are doing such an amazing job with this app!

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Welcome to the Scaler forum.

If you know what scales you want to use, then you may, for example create a set of chords for the solo and, perhaps, use Keys Locked White Keys to create lines.

One possible workflow involves two Scalers, one for the chords, another for the lines featuring altered scales.

In the basic Scaler, assign your chords for comping, in the second scaler assign chords for altered scales for the lines. For example, if the basic chord is C7, you can assign Dd Melodic Minor in the line-creating instance of Scaler. The chords used for your lines can then drive altered scales.

With this basic workflow, any Scale Scaler knows can be played against any chord Scaler can create. Endless possibilities.

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I like this kind of creative thinking. Scaler has many of these kind of solutions.

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Awesome suggestion! I’ll give it a whirl

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Cool!
this is the explanation of something I found randomly sometimes, but testing things by ear so being unable to reproduce the workflow
I’ll try that, thanks
:grinning:

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If it’s of any use, I have a spreadsheet that takes any of 76 chords and maps them against the diatonic major, harmonic and melodic modes.

Hence if you enter Am7, it will show which modes you can play over Am7 without any clashes. mismatches are shown with an X (these are shown in dark blue). It also shows the notes in the scale and intervals on a chromatic basis.
The light blue highlight shows modes where the any note will work with the chord, so obviously in this simple case it shows that Dorian, Phyrgian and Aeolian will all work. [You could also use Dorian b2 or Dorian #4]
(Of course, you will take the context of the piece as to whether of not you want a flat 2nd in A Phyrgian or not)

Of course, it would be nice if Scaler told you this directly, and as @1stInversion suggests you can power up another Scaler (or two) for lines from the alternates. The sheet is just something I knocked up pending further functions in Scaler.

PS I took a generic approach to this by encoding the values of chords and the intervals of a chromatic into a single number, and ‘folded down’ extensions above a 7th to the chromatic. The actual key then doesn’t matter, and you can just see if the chord number is ‘contained’ in the chromatic intervals. To display the actual notes is simply a matter of rotating the note names around. This works for any Heptatonic, hexatonic or pentatonic mode/scale.

Message me if you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet.

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I wonder if this could be put up as a public Google Docs spreadsheet?

Nice work.

I’m not sure how to do that but I guess it should be easy enough.

I will edit it before I upload it, as it contains some information about Scaler uuids (as in the State File dump) which I don’t wish to place in the public domain.

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Just temporarily, I uploaded it to

http://starcluster.co.uk/scaler/

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Thanks for sharing. I saved a copy and will have a look at it.

Thanks! I’m looking forward to exploring this!