The whole tone scale is one of the most underused scales in improvising, in my opinion. It has revolutionized my approach to improvising on a tune. People always talk about playing “out” and they will spend years and years working on all kinds of complicated ways of doing it, but the answer is right under our noses and its really not all that complicated. Whole steps. That’s it. Just play whole steps. I’m dramatizing a bit, but essentially that’s the idea I’m talking about.
So lets talk a little bit about what the whole tone scale is. It is a 6 note scale made up of all whole steps. There is no series of half and whole steps like in most other scales. Just whole steps. Because of this, there are only two possible whole tone scales. There are 12 possible chromatic notes. Those 12 notes are distributed into 2 6 note scales. On the guitar this makes for some cool possibilities that we’ll talk about later. So this means that, every other note can be a whole tone scale. I mean, start on any note, and play every other fret on the guitar, always skipping half steps, and your playing whole tones.
Now that I’ve made it sound really easy, let me just show you what a pain the fingering is. It will take a lot of time to get used to licks with these strange fingerings but practice it enough and the phrasing will become more natural.
TAB OF SCALE IN A
TAB OF ARPEGGIO IN A
Practice these up and down until you are fluent.
In improvising situations this scale comes in very handy. It is technically the chord scale for augmented chords, and it will sound good if you solo using whole tones over any augmented chord of course, but I use it all the time on just about any sort of dominant chord. It gives any dominant chord some extra spiciness.
Here is an example of some whole tone licks over the A7 in the beggining of the jazz standard “Tune Up” by Miles Davis
TAB EXAMPLE OF LICK
Using this scale instead of just a mixolydian scale or some more “typical” scale for an A7 chord makes the solo sound more dissonant, or to use that word everybody’s talking about, “out”.
Another cool thing about the whole tone scale on the guitar is if you take a whole tone lick in one position, every two frets you move it , it will still work. You can take any whole tone lick and move it 2 frets, or any multiple of 2 frets in any direction and it will still work. It makes for some really cool phrasing ideas.
There are all kinds of things you can do with whole tones. Practice it enough and slowly begin integrating whole tone licks in your playing. Practice all the patterns and manipulations of the notes you can think of and soon it will become comfortable.
Good Luck!
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