Chord Tone Soloing – Pachelbel’s Canon Example

This lesson describes how to create your own solos over Pachelbel’s Canon in D. For analysis of the Canon Rock song check out the Songs and Analysis Course.

Pachelbel’s Canon is in the key of D major. The chord progression is eight bars long and goes as follows:
D A Bm F#m G D G A

Here’s the Pachelbel’s Canon Rock backing track from the YouTube video – a difficult track to find on the Internet! Canon Rock Backing Track

We will start simple by playing root chord tones over each chord in Shape 5 we get the following:

In the key of D major we have the following notes: D E F# G A B C# D.
The chords as usual for major scales are: D Em F#m G A Bm C#dim D.

The chord tones for each are:

D – D F# A
Em – E G B
F#m – F# A C#
G – G B D
A – A C# E
Bm – B D F#
C# – C# E G

Let’s add a typical classical sounding sequence to the root notes, using eighth notes and play the idea twice in each measure.

Okay that’s not bad. Let’s try a smoother mostly descending line rather than jumping from root to root. This is known as voice leading. We will start on the root of D major then descend to the next closest chord tone for the next chord, staying in shape 5. For that we get:

Okay now let’s build the same sequence over this new voice leading line.

That sounds a bit smoother than the original, and demonstrates how you can start to add complexity to a simple chord tone framework. This is the key concept to absorb in this entire site!