Double Lydian Concept: How a Mistake Led to a Practice Room Breakthrough

This is a guest post by Seattle based guitarist and educator  Joe Walker. To learn more about Joe and check out more of his lessons, please visit his site Deft Digits Guitar Lessons.

Back in 2007, I was practicing my 3 to 9 arpeggios and stumbled across a peculiar sound. Specifically, I was working on Ebmaj7 arpeggios over Cm9 and Em7 arpeggios over Cmaj9. While I was improvising and playing around with this sound over Cmaj9, I made a mistake:

My fingers naturally wanted to play the Em7 arpeggio as if it were part of a ii-V. Hitting that C# would be fine if the progression was moving to A7, but it sounded very strange over a static Cmaj9. Who plays a b9 over a maj7 chord?

From everything I had learned about jazz theory, this was one of the worst notes you could play, but it didn’t really sound wrong or bad to my ear, just different. I wanted to harness and understand this sound, so I figured out my “mistake” and duplicated it in several different keys.

Conceptualizing the Sound

The reason I hit that note was because I was treating the Em7 arpeggio as E Dorian, which includes the C#. I had ingrained the Dorian instinct from all the static minor chords and ii-Vs I had worked on previously. I began to think about the nature of maj7 and m7 chord-scales and arpeggios.

• Lydian is the best fit for a static maj7 chord
• Dorian is the best fit for a static m7 chord
• A great arpeggio over a maj7 chord is a m7 starting on the 3
• A great arpeggio over a m7 chord is a maj7 starting on the b3

Now, starting with a maj7 as the fundamental harmony, instead of superimposing just a m7 arpeggio on the 3, why not superimpose the entire Dorian scale? Over Cmaj7, instead of just playing Em7, I could play all of E Dorian. I then took it a few steps further, superimposing G Lydian (on the b3 of E Dorian), B Dorian (on the 3 of G Lydian), D Lydian (on the b3 of B Dorian).

It felt like breaking through an upper barrier. Like I had ventured beyond the conventional extensions applied to jazz chords. Indeed, I started to look at it exclusively in that light and it fit perfectly. When you expand a Lydian scale out by thirds, you get alternating major and minor thirds, all the way up: 1 3 5 7 9 #11 13. If you extend that pattern beyond the 13, you get #15(#1), 17(3), #19(#5), etc. So instead of switching scales, I came to see it as one giant scale, stacked in thirds like an extra-long arpeggio.

Courtesy of Professor Rick Helzer at San Diego State University, I later came to know this concept as “Double Lydian.” To arrive at a Lydian scale, you can start with a major scale and move it down a perfect fourth. G major is equivalent to C Lydian, changing the F to F#.

If you move the scale down another perfect fourth, to D major over a C root, the C in the scale becomes C#, and you’ve achieved C Double Lydian. You can repeat this process as far as you like: Triple Lydian (G becomes G#), Quadruple Lydian (D becomes D#), and so on. As you play through these scales in order, you gradually lose the connection to the original harmony.

The preceding explanations are all just different ways of understanding the same thing. In the end, the sound is what matters.

Applications

If you’ve listened to these new notes at all, you’ll know they bend the ear. Like any dissonance, it can best serve the music through tension and release. Over a static maj7 chord, you might pull away from consonance into Double Lydian, then Triple Lydian, then fall back to chord tones at the right moment.

I’ve also found a couple ways to ease the listener into these sounds. One is to utilize the new notes in a high register. Imagine the extended arpeggio above, and keep your #1 and #5 far away from the range of the bass player, who’s likely emphasizing the 1 and 5.

The other strategy is to enclose the new notes within a familiar context. In my original mistake, I arrived at the #1 through a well-known lick. A better way might be to use the sound of the closest four-note arpeggio within the giant one. Reaching straight for the #15 might not work as well as leading into it with 9 #11 13 #15.

When I first discussed this concept with Professor Helzer, he recommended that I check out Woody Shaw. His playing delightfully skips around the border between inside and outside, often making explicit use of the Double Lydian sound. In his solo on “What Is This Thing Called Love,” originally released on the album United, he includes a nice strong C# over Cmaj7 a few times. Check out this line:

In preparation for my recital in March 2011, I composed a tune as a dedicated exercise in Double Lydian. I called it The Kármán Line. It focuses on Lydian and Dorian throughout, and I use Double and Triple Lydian at various tension points, both in the head and improvisation.

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One last wild idea which I’m dying to try some day: give different chord symbols for bass, rhythm, and solo. For a certain measure, you could give the bassist Cmaj7#11, the rhythm player Gmaj7#11, and the soloist Dmaj7#11. Just make sure they know what’s going on, or they might bend more than your ear.

Check Out Related Jazz Guitar Lessons

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