Chromaticism Pt 4 Delayed Resolution

Shaun Baxter looks at ways of creating melodic interest by embellishing and prolonging your chromatic journey to any given target note.

- Shaun Baxter

We have recently been spicing up our lines using non-scale notes. Such chromatic ideas allow us to introduce tension (dissonance) then resolve it (consonance), rather than dwelling on consonant notes all the time. We’ve looked at:

1) Chromatic Approach Notes: either from a semitone above or below the target note.

2) Chromatic Bridging: whereby one note is linked to another (however far apart) by a consecutive series of chromatic steps.

3) Enclosure: which involves approaching a target note from both above and below, either diatonically or chromatically.

In this lesson, we are going to look at a method of embellishing the approaches that we have covered so far by incorporating notes from other strings (which often act as pedal notes) in order to extend or perhaps delay the chromatic journey to each target note.