Chromaticism Pt 2: Bridging
Chromatic notes are non-scale notes that can add spice and tension to your playing. Significantly, you need to know how to resolve such tension if you are to apply it with control and avoid tuneless chaos. In the previous lesson, we learned how the easiest application is to approach a target note (scale or chord tone) either from a semitone below or above (note that, of the two, approaching from a semitone above is the most dissonant-sounding option). In this lesson, we’re going to look at developing things a bit further by seeing how two notes can be linked via a chromatic ‘bridge’.
The simplest form of chromatic ‘bridging’ is where a chromatic note is used to link two notes a tone apart. For example, a B note could be linked to an A note via a B b note.
It’s also possible to think in much bigger terms whereby we take two notes much further apart and simply fill in all of the gaps in between. For
