Guitar Tactics
Improvisation

Playing the Changes: What It Means and How to Do It

means outlining chords as they happen in your solo

Key Takeaways

  • Playing the changes means outlining chords as they happen in your solo
  • Instead of one scale over everything, break up each chord into single notes
  • These broken-up chords are called arpeggios
  • Follow along with the chord progression, implying each chord melodically

Transcription

If you've ever heard the term "playing the changes" and you're not sure what that means, this video is for you.

We're in the key of C. Here's D minor to G to C. How can we play over this?

In the key of C, we could just play C major pentatonic. But if we want to outline the chords in a more specific way (AKA playing the changes), we do it like this.

What we're doing is breaking up each of the chords into single notes and outlining the chords as they happen, following along with the chords. These broken-up chords are called arpeggios.

That's following the changes.

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