The idea
Greg's own written definition is the one to memorize, from the Somewhere master class: "Every phrase should land somewhere. A goal note is created by two things: motion toward a place, linear movement or consistent intervals pointing in a direction, and stopping, rhythmic consistency that suddenly ceases, marking arrival."
Two ingredients, and the second one is the half most players skip. A note you approach and then play straight through has only the first. The stop is what makes it a goal note.
He said the same thing to you in the lesson: "You want to always know where you're going with the melody." Then the part that makes it compositional rather than decorative: "You'll have motivic development coupled with a trajectory, a musical trajectory." Your read-back was the right one. "It's kinda like pool almost, like you gotta leave yourself set up for the next shot."
Motivic development gives you material. Goal notes give that material somewhere to be.
Watch
Goal Notes using Minor/Major scale ideas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnrWVHln4sA)
- The color is the minor-major scale, 1, 2, ♭3, 4, 5, natural 6, natural 7 [00:33], and the goal note he picks inside it is the dissonant one, the major 7 [00:49]. A goal note does not have to be safe.
- The finger exercise to reach it: the scale in thirds, starting on the root, down a whole step first, then thirds throughout, ending on the major 7 [01:10]. He calls it "this like long weaving path down to that goal note" [01:57]. All keys, slowly, metronome on [02:06].
- Applied over "Footprints," the approaches in order: from below [03:36], from the step above [03:51], enclosed in fourths, "you can enclose anything in fourths" [04:26], then by thirds and minor thirds [11:21].
- The advanced move: keep the goal note and change the scale underneath it [07:01], [07:39], letting the same pitch go from dissonant to consonant when the harmony moves to F [06:28]. Blue In Green Goal Notes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpyHdvvAjWY)
- Take the goal note from the melody, "especially because it's that main note of the melody" [02:40]. The rule for moving it: the goal note can move, but "if it moves it should move melodically, so in stepwise motion" [01:15].
- Why it matters most when the harmony is loose: it gives your solo an anchor, "especially when you're using these scales that are kind of out" [02:09].
- The warning: do not move it in one direction indefinitely, "because eventually you run out of keys" [03:43]. Learning Wayne Shorter Solo Technique - Goal Notes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9DzZxt9ers)
- Two goal notes derived from the melody by duration and phrase placement: G primary, C secondary, both "held out" [01:00]. Chorus 1 starts on G, tops out on F without reaching G again, then ends the phrase on C [03:13].
- The measure-29 phrase is the centerpiece. Shorter goes to D, then B♭, then C, then G [04:23]. The D and the B♭ are not goal notes. Move two half steps inward from each, toward the center of that pair, and you land on C, the secondary goal, and the phrase then hits G, the primary [05:01]. "On the surface it might just sound like a cool bluesy phrase, but it's really much more deep than that" [05:19].
- Chorus 3 lays on C almost continuously, in octaves, using G as a grace note [05:44]. "It's really simple but hugely effective musically" [06:26].
- The ending is a physical constraint. Shorter cannot play the low G on tenor, so he ends elsewhere [08:36]. Instrument limits shape goal-note decisions in real music. Keith Jarrett Piano Lesson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otf4G07PdXw)
- "His phrases start somewhere very specific and end somewhere very specific." The demo lick starts on the 1, goes up a third and down a third diatonically, and returns to the 1 [00:00].
- The goal note moves. The first is a D, then he lowers it to a C, a phrase-level descent of the target itself [05:07].
- Melodies stay in the home key rather than chasing each chord. Over a ♭5 chord he keeps targeting the 1 [01:39]. How to Solo Over Giant Steps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vgJeDuY3uY)
- Pick a target pitch that works across the current pair of keys [04:23]. His example is F♯, which functions "in B and in D," so it survives the modulation, and he rules out E♭ on the same test [05:01]. Then move the goal to a new register, keeping the goals related to each other [06:40]. Outlining the 3rd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vffy6-2Nf9c)
- The constraint: aim at the 3 of every chord, demonstrated on Greg's own song "Hills" [00:45]. The approach figure he keeps using is scale degrees 5, 4, 1, 2, 3 [01:23].
- Why it works: the tritone formed by the 3 and the 7 of the departing chord is what pulls you into the 3 of the arriving chord [03:06]. Once thirds are secure, you end up outlining other degrees too [02:03].
Goal Notes using Minor/Major scale ideas
- the primary lesson: choosing a dissonant goal note and every device for approaching it
Blue In Green Goal Notes
- taking the goal note from the melody, and the rule for moving it
Learning Wayne Shorter Solo Technique - Goal Notes
- a whole four-chorus solo analyzed as two notes and the paths between them
Jazz Piano Soloing Lesson - Outlining the 3rd
- the systematic version: aim at the 3 of every chord, and why the tritone gets you there
Keith Jarrett Piano Lesson
- the goal note as a moving target, lowered from one phrase to the next
Weekly Piano Lesson: How to Solo Over Giant Steps
- choosing a goal note that works across two keys at once
At the piano
What counts as a goal note. Motion toward, then stopping. Placement decides whether the ear registers the stop, and two placements do it reliably: a strong beat, and the moment the chord changes. A goal note on beat one of a new chord is the strongest version, because rhythmic arrival and harmonic arrival happen at once.
The goals need their own progression. This is the rule that turns a device into a piece. From the master class: "Your goal notes should have their own progression. If your first goal is an F, your next goal should be nearby, within a couple of half steps. The goals themselves tell a story across phrases." He said the same to you live, and demonstrated it in the Blue in Green video by moving the goal note up a half step at a time, "moving that goal note up stepwise motion" [03:01], [03:42].
Every scale degree has a character. His table from the master class, which tells you what a given goal note will feel like before you play it.
| Degree | Character | Function |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Home base, most static | Resolution, arrival, stability. Your default anchor. |
| 2 | Adjacent tension | Leads to the 1 (resolution) or the 3 (forward motion). |
| 3 | Abrasive voice | Static with tension, especially in blues. Not really moving anywhere. |
| 4 | Suspended | Leads down to 3 or up to 5. Wants to move. |
| ♭5 | Maximum dissonance | Related to the 3, both being dissonant tones. Creates strong pull. |
| 5 | Second most static | Stable, but not home. A resting point away from home. |
"Diverging from the 1 says I'm going away. Hitting the 1 says I'm home."
The forward-motion test. Not every scale points somewhere. "The Dorian scale (with its b7 and major 6) is static, it doesn't lead anywhere," so when a chord has to resolve you need the notes that point forward. His example: "On a D7 going to G: F# and Eb say 'going to G.' F natural and E natural (Dorian) say 'I'm staying right here.'" When you need arrival, pick the notes that propel.
Octaves are a special case. "An octave is both the same note and a different note," same pitch class with a different affect in a different register. Leaping to the octave of your goal keeps you home and adds color, which is why it reads as an accent rather than a departure.
Choosing them, in order of difficulty. Thirds and sevenths first. These are the guide tones, they define chord quality, and they already move by step from chord to chord, so a line that lands on them audibly follows the harmony. This is where "Outlining the 3rd" lives. Then 9ths and 13ths, color without ambiguity. Then non-chord colors, the major 7 over a minor-major scale, the ♭9, a note borrowed from a superimposed key. The Blue in Green video says why that last one works: the goal note is doing the anchoring, so the scale above it is free to leave.
Connecting them. Four approach families, all in the videos. Scalar, Greg's 5, 4, 1, 2, 3 into the third. Chromatic, from a half step above or below. Enclosure, surrounding the goal before landing, since "you can enclose anything in fourths," and equally in thirds or minor thirds. Leap and recover, jumping away and stepping back in, which is what makes a wide interval sound intentional instead of stray.
Goal notes as the skeleton of a melody. At 12:53 in your lesson Greg said everything "has a direction that goes back to a home base in a long form, but then it also does it in micro. It's like it's fractal." The source course, Lesson 16, gives that its technical name.
He gave you both ends of that scale in the same minute, and they are worth keeping as a pair because they are the same instruction written twice at different sizes.
The small end is Bartók. Greg's words: "Bartok wrote these piano pieces that were, like, four measures long where it was just a motif and then a motif and then the motif and then motif and, like, just saying something about itself as as these experiments." Take that as Greg's description from the lesson rather than as a catalogue claim, since he did not name the pieces and no score is cited for it here. What matters is the model it describes. Four bars. One motif, stated and then answered by itself, and nothing else in the piece at all. That is a complete musical thought at the smallest size a musical thought comes in, and it is a form you can actually write this week, which is why it is the Compose prompt's ancestor.
The large end is a symphony, and his claim is that it is not a different kind of object: "a major symphony, it fractals out into those ideas then become a bigger idea and a bigger idea and a bigger idea that has a trajectory toward goals over time. And that's what makes music good." The same idea at two scales. A four-bar Bartók experiment and a forty-minute symphony are doing one thing, which is stating something and then going somewhere with it, and the difference between them is how many times the going-somewhere nests inside itself.
The practical consequence for you is a sizing rule. If a piece is not working at sixteen bars, it will not be rescued at a hundred and sixty, because the fault is in the four-bar thought. Write the small one first and check that it says something about itself. Then let it fractal. Schenker's claim is that "beneath the surface complexity of any tonal composition lies a simpler voice-leading structure," whose upper voice is the Urlinie, a stepwise descending line. The course keeps the usable core and drops the orthodoxy: "voice-leading is the skeleton of harmony."
The jazz version of that skeleton is the guide-tone line. On a ii-V-I in C: the F, third of Dm7, becomes the seventh of G7 and barely moves. The C, seventh of Dm7, drops a step to B, the third of G7. Then B rises a half step to C and F falls a half step to E (Source course, Lesson 16). Two voices carrying the whole progression. The course's sentence about soloing over it is the bridge to this entire lesson: "The guide tones are the skeleton; your melodic invention is the flesh."
Goal notes are that skeleton, chosen by you rather than dictated by the chord symbols.
Goal notes in composition. Write the skeleton before the line. Sketch sixteen bars as goal notes, one or two per bar, nothing else. That shape is the melody, before a single passing note exists. Then compose three lines through it and pick one. Greg's practical starting pick: "Using the fifth as a goal is a nice one because it can move around."
Goal notes in rock and metal melody. Two documented cases. In Death's music, Ocaklı's thesis finds that the perfect fifth "provides melodic direction" and, unlike the power chord, "has become a structural element that defines the character of riffs." That is a goal note in a genre with no functional harmony to supply one: when there is no ii-V to define arrival, the riff's target pitch does the job alone.
In art rock, Osborn's analysis of Radiohead's "2+2=5" identifies a vocal motive that "consists entirely of a double chromatic neighbor around the focal pitch C4," and a second motive that begins the same way and then "introduces two leaps from the focal pitch: a perfect fourth up to F4 and a perfect fifth up to G4" (Osborn 2011). Osborn's own word for C4 there is focal pitch, which is Greg's goal note under another name, and the neighbor figure around it is an enclosure. Take that specific analysis and nothing wider; no claim is made here about Radiohead vocal lines in general.
Exercises
Exercises 1 and 2 are Greg's own, from the master class, and they carry his tempos: metronome or drum machine at 50 to 70 BPM, and "do not speed up until you have fully internalized each one."
1. Goal Note Landing (master-class exercise 3). Do: Play over changes, a blues or a standard, at a tempo inside his 50 to 70 range. For each phrase, pick the goal note before you play it. Use linear motion or an intervallic pattern to lead to it, then stop on it and let it breathe. First chorus: make every goal the same note. Second chorus: pick goals freely but keep them within a half step of each other. Done when: every phrase has a clear destination and the goals themselves form a melodic progression across the solo, in Greg's words.
2. Octave Constraint (master-class exercise 4). Do: Play "Autumn Leaves" or a blues restricted to one octave, F to F, for the whole form. Notice how an octave leap creates emphasis without truly leaving home. Done when: you can prove to yourself that "range is not the same as expression," which is the goal he writes for it.
3. Guide-tone line, then the four approaches
Do. Take "Autumn Leaves," reduce every chord to its third and seventh, and play only those two notes through the whole form. Then pick G as a fixed goal and reach it six ways: scalewise, chromatically from below, chromatically from above, enclosed in fourths, enclosed in thirds, and by leap-and-recover. Take the six through all twelve keys, slowly.
Done when: you can play the guide-tone line of the full form from memory and sing its upper voice, and produce six approaches to any named pitch without pausing to think.
4. Sing before you play
Do. Put on a slow ii-V-I loop. Before each chord arrives, sing the note you are going to land on, then play it. Then sing the whole phrase you intend, then play that.
Done when: you sing the goal note accurately before playing it on eight consecutive chords.
5. The pre-chosen chorus
Do. Write out one goal note for every downbeat of a chorus of "Blue in Green." Improvise a chorus that lands on every one of them. Record it.
Done when: on playback, every downbeat is the note you wrote, and the chorus still sounds like a line rather than a checklist.
6. The Shorter analysis, then the imitation
Do. Get the "Oriental Folk Song" transcription and play-along from weeklypiano.com. Mark where G and C fall in each of the four choruses and label every phrase ending as arriving at, departing from, or outlining one of the two. Then play chorus 3 yourself: repeat one goal note almost continuously in octaves, using the other as a grace note, then release upward and return.
Done when: every phrase ending carries a label, measure 29 included, and your imitation holds a listener's attention using essentially one pitch.
Compose
Write a sixteen-bar melody, skeleton first.
Step one: write only the goal notes, one per bar, over a progression you choose. They must move stepwise at least twice, stay within a couple of half steps of each other as Greg's rule requires, include one arrival that is not a chord tone, and trace a shape you can describe in one sentence.
Step two: write three melodies through that identical skeleton, a different approach family in each. Step three: pick the one that works and add a left hand.
Constraint: at least one goal note is approached from the wrong side, meaning you pass it and come back. Notate all three in Sibelius, circle the goal notes, and send Greg a voice note of the winner.
Checkpoint
- You can state Greg's two-ingredient definition from memory and name the placements that make an arrival audible.
- You can play the guide-tone line of a standard from memory and sing its upper voice.
- You can improvise a chorus where every downbeat is a pre-chosen goal note, and a second where the goals themselves progress.
- You can move a goal note stepwise across a chorus and bring it back without stranding yourself at the top of the register.
- You have a sixteen-bar melody built from a written goal-note skeleton, with three drafts on file.
- You can point to one moment in the Shorter solo and explain what it is outlining.
Read
- Greg Spero, Somewhere Master Class (WSU, April 2026). Read Pillar III first: the definition, the rule that goals need their own progression, the scale-degree table, the Dorian-versus-dominant test, and the seven exercises with tempos. https://gregspero.com/wsu/materials/somewhere-master-class.pdf
- Source course, Lesson 16. The Urlinie, the guide-tone principle on ii-V-I, and the "Autumn Leaves" reduction described as "a miniature Bach chorale, stripped to its essential two voices." https://composition.gregspero.com/library/garnett-course.pdf
- Brad Osborn, Music Theory Online 17/3 (2011). Open access. Read the "2+2=5" paragraphs. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/mto.11.17.3.osborn.html
- Ocaklı (2025) on Death. The perfect fifth as a structural melodic determinant. https://tezara.org/theses/977960