Earlier this week on my I mentioned that I was going to revive the section of my website and asked readers what standard they would like to see a new article on. While everyone had good suggestions, the tune I got requested the most for was how to play Autumn Leaves on guitar. If you are new to jazz guitar, Autumn Leaves is a great tune to start with, but hopefully this article should be of interest to more experienced players too. This article breaks down the harmony and structure of Autumn Leaves and shows you how to create a chord melody, blow, and comp over the changes.

If you sometimes find learning standards tricky, Even if you already know this tune, there should hopefully be material here that helps you develop your single and, so let’s get stuck in. Autumn Leaves Harmonic Analysis Autumn Leaves is a 32 bar song form that follows the AABC song form structure.

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Each section is 8 bars long and marked out on the example below for you to follow along with. Having two A sections which are almost the same means the harmony and chords in the first half of the tune are almost identical. The Autumn Leaves chord progression switches between major and minor ii-V-I’s as illustrated on the diagram. The first ii-V-I is in Bb major, and the second ii-V-I is in G- which is the relative minor of Bb. The B section of Autumn Leaves starts with a minor ii-V-I and modulates to the major ii-V-I, so you could think of it as been a reserved A section.

This type of movement makes transposing Autumn Leaves into different keys quite easy because all you really have to know is relative minors and ii-V-I’s in each key. For example if someone called for Autumn Leaves in the key of C and you knew that A-7 is the relative minor of C, then that’s half of the work done. A ii-V-I in C gives us D-7 — G7 — Cmaj7 and a ii-V-I in A- gives us B-7b5 — E7 — A-7 which is effectively the first A section of the tune already. Play the minor ii-V-I first, and then the major ii-V-I and you have the bridge. It is worth noting that Autumn Leaves is commonly called in two keys, Bb and G major.

Intermediate jazz guitarists should practice Autumn Leaves in both keys. I have written out examples for this lesson in both of these keys, but they should ultimately be practiced in both. The G7 is sometimes used in the last bar of the A action to provide a nice V-I minor cadence.

The Ebmaj7 in bar 4 is essentially there to create movement before the modulation to the minor ii-V-I, but the Ebmaj7 can also be seen as a into the A-7b5 in the next bar if you’re feeling more harmonically adventerous. Autumn Leaves Melodic Analysis When learning a new melody, the harmony should be examinded so that you’re interalizing the music not just memorizing shapes. The melody of Autumn Leaves is almost entirley based of using thirds. All the quarter note rhythms are scale based phrases leading to a long note which is the 3rd of the chord as shown in the example below. One of the best ways to outline the chord changes to a progression is guide tone soloing.

Guide tone soloing means in a musical fashion, and provides an effective way to outline chords quickly. Using guide tones helps us hear and see how the harmony is moving. The example below uses guide tones to voice lead through the progression smoothly which can be used as a basis for improvisation. Autumn Leaves Chord Melody Autumn Leaves is a great piece of music to write a for no matter what stage you’re at in your development as a jazz guitarist. Before you learn a chord melody for Autumn Leaves, make sure you know the melody as single lines first to avoid getting lost or tangled up in big chords. I decided to write out my solo guitar version of Autumn Leaves in the key of G, because of the open string possibilities the minor ii-V-I in E minor permits.