Chromatic approach notes

Everything so far has been notes from a scale. This is the opposite idea, and it is smaller than it sounds: pick a note you want to land on, play the fret a semitone away from it, and then play the note. The in-between note does not have to belong to anything. It is not a note to know. It is the fret before the note you wanted.

The first bar walks down the top string — ♭3, 2, ♭2 — and lands on the root. The 2 belongs to the major pentatonic and the ♭2 to no scale this course has taught you, and neither of them is held: each one is on its way to the next. The second bar falls through the box and then lifts the ♭3 one fret onto C♯, which is A7’s own third, and holds it there.

Every fret in it is inside the first box. You are not learning new positions here, you are using the frets you have been stepping over.

An approach note is only an approach to one chord

Move the same phrase over the IV and nothing about your hand changes — but the arrival does.

The dashed lines have moved, and the C♯ the phrase lifts onto is no longer in the chord. Over D7 that note sits a semitone above the chord’s seventh, which means the phrase now ends by leaning rather than by arriving. Neither version is wrong; they are different sentences, and the difference is the chord rather than the notes.

That is the whole discipline. An approach note works because of what comes after it, so the only question worth asking is which note you are heading for — and in a jazz blues, where the chord changes every bar, the answer changes with it.