[Zasterz]

Am trying to figure out which chord on my alto sax matches up with the A Chord on guitar

F#

 

[Zasterz]

What to play obviously depends on context-- including whether arpeggiating the chord would be boring for the listener-- it might even be overplaying, let's say there's a singer and 3 other horns. We don't have enough information to say what is right to play.

 

[Zasterz]

I agree with Zasterz. I played a gig today with a band I sometimes sit in with. Some of the songs are country-ish. All I could do on some tunes was just hold the tonic note of the chord until the chord changed and then play the tonic note of that chord. So basically I was playing whole notes on, for example, A, D, and E chords. If I tried to play anything more, it just sounded wrong. Then the next tune would be a fast blues in A and I could play all over the place, doing a lot of pentatonics but also ripping through passing notes and playing scales or even chromatically up or down to the chord change. What notes to play over an A guitar chord depends entirely on the tune and the changes and the context.

Exactly- country, folk, singer-songwriter-type stuff— I’ve played in plenty of situations where you can barely sneak in an inoffensive 2 or 6 over the major triad!