Chord melody is one of the most fun things to play. And it is pretty mind-blowing that you can take a song and play it on guitar as if you are an entire orchestra, and that doesn’t have to be as difficult as it sounds. I’ll show you in this video.
I am sure you have listened to the masters of this style like Joe Pass or Ted Greene, who seem to do impossible things as solo performers, but Chord melody does not have to be complicated at all, and you can start with a song that you anyway want to learn: Autumn Leaves!mostly just by taking a fret next to where you want to go. In that respect, passing chords are often over-complicated with theory, and these are just about moving notes up or down a fret.
For the first bars of the song, let’s add a passing note for the F7
there are many options. It is just about experimenting and picking what you like. Before I go into some more advanced things, let’s check out how the whole song could sound with a few basic tricks but mostly keeping it simple. I adjust where I play the chords in a few places because that works better with the melody, and, as I already mentioned, the melody is the most important.
One example is the beginning of the B-part, where I leave out the Aø chord for most of the bar, just play the melody and then insert it before the change to D7: