Duration: 8:21 · 1080p Stream
Master video playlist mapped. Ready for batch offline download to media/videos/improv101-2-7.mp4.
A bonus ear-training deep dive. Freeze an A7 chord with an infinite-sustain pedal (like the Electro-Harmonix Freeze) and listen, note by note, to how every degree of the major and minor pentatonic scales sits against it — from rock-solid consonance to the notes that beg to resolve. It's the fastest way to internalize why the note you land on makes a phrase feel finished or unfinished, and the technique works for any chord and any scale you're learning.
What follows is this lesson’s section of the Course Guide — you can read it here or in the full guide →
Consonance and dissonance are words to describe how a note sounds in a particular harmonic context. The more a note sounds “at home” when played against a particular chord, the more we would say that it sounds consonant. The more it “clashes” with a chord, the more we would say that it sounds dissonant. The same note can sound consonant over one chord and dissonant over another. The terms consonance and dissonance describe two opposite extremes of a single variable, so if a note is consonant, that means it is not dissonant.
The level of consonance and dissonance of a particular note is strongly predicted by the flavor of the chord (minor, major, dominant, diminished, etc.) it is played over and the interval between the note and the chord’s root. Good musicians learn those associations, so that they can predict how dissonant a note will sound before it is played.
Because each position in a pentatonic stack or rectangle (rectangles are covered in Module 3) is always the same interval away from the root of the scale, we can learn to associate different positions in the stack or rectangle with different levels of consonance and dissonance, even if we don’t know the intervals by name.
A great way to explore consonance and dissonance is to “freeze” a chord with an “infinite sample hold” pedal, and then experiment with how different notes sound played over it. I own and can recommend these two pedals, but there are several others available on the market:
No pedal? This holds the chord for you. Explore the stack over A, then retype the chord — Am, then A7 — and hear how each position's consonance changes with the chord's flavor.
A2 · C#3 3 · E3 5
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