20 Sunny Style Fusion Licks

MARTIN SAYS:

Hello and welcome to the “20 Sunny Style Fusion Licks” package, I want to thank you for checking this product out. My goal with this was to provide you with some ideas over this chord progression that has become a real standard among fusion guitar players in the last few years.

Before we get into all the fancy stuff I want to take some time to take a deeper look at the chord progression and dissect the harmony a little. When I was doing research for this package, I watched plenty of videos of people jamming over this tune. There seems to be a widely common misconception that this song is in the key of A minor. So a lot of times you’ll see someone derive their ideas from the A minor pentatonic or one of the A minor modes. This works to some extent, but really doesn’t do the chord progression any justice.

First of all here’s the first half (we’ll get to the other half later) of the progression laid out for you:

|Am7 |Gm7 C7|Fmaj7 |Bm7b5 E7| x2

So let’s have a deeper look: yes, the chord progression starts out in the key of A minor, but it only stays in the key of A minor for as long as the Amin7 chord lasts (= one bar). As soon as the chord drops to Gmin7 we’re in a new key. The Gmin7 chord becomes the II-chord of the II-V-I progression (a dead giveaway for a key change) in F major: Gmin7 - C7 - Fmaj7. While F major and A minor are relatively close to another (compare them, they only differ by one note), they’re not entirely the same, so chances are you’re going to hit a bum note if you’re just improvising off of A minor. If you don’t know exactly what a II-V-I is yet, I suggest you to do some extra studying on this and functional harmony in general. It’s an entirely different discipline than modal improvisation but it’ll open up a whole new world for you.

The last bar leads us back into A minor territory with a minor II-V-I: Bm7b5 E7 -Am7