Your at the jam and someone calls out the infamous “Jam in E”. Ugh. Here comes your big solo - you have E, you have E7 - where do you go from there?

One way to add some spice to your solo is to imply chord changes within the single chord. I’m not really going to go into the “whys” or tonal mechanics of how this works so fiddle with these variations and decide which work for you.

Four measures of EMaj7:

EMaj7 | EMaj7 | EMaj7 | EMaj7

variation 1:

G#-7 (relative minor) | C#-7 | F#-7 | B7

variation 2:

EMaj7 | FDim7 | F#-7 / B7 | EMaj7

variation 3:

G#-7 | GDim7 | F#-7 | B7

variation 4 (out there! - use very sparingly at your own peril):

EMaj7 | GDim7 | F#-7 | FDim7

Feel free to mix and match these combinations for variety.

And of course this can be applied to minor keys. These are all I/vi/ii/V straight up and with tritone subs in the major key. Minor keys also have their own diatonic movements and substitutions that relate to the key center.

-at

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