You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 "Giant Steps" Hacks

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Today, Peter and Adam tackle John Coltrane's masterpiece "Giant Steps" and give some helpful tips to make navigating this tune a little easier.5 Giant Steps Hacks:4 note shapes are your friendAlso... 3 note shapes are your friend!Descending root movementChange keys, not chordsRoot, Shell, PrettyBONUSLinks From This Episode:There's a new course coming to Open Studio - Your Sound Is Your Signature! Join jazz bass extraordinaire Christian McBride as he teaches you how to play ballads, odd time signatures, fast tempos, and more! Featuring our beloved Guided Practice Sessions to help refine the concepts of this course. For updates, just follow this link.Friday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Adam's Guided Practice Session on YouTube8:00 PM - Peter's Shelter in Place solo piano concert on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Yo, Adam. Yes. Check it. Oh, you mean like... Or maybe. Or how about like... And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearer podcast.

Music advice coming at you. Coming at you emphatically today. Peter, we are dealing with giant steps finally. We are dealing with giant steps finally. I love this tune. This is an important tune. This is a tune that is part of the canon, as you like to say. It is part of the canon.

And it's also a tune that sometimes the jazz police are on high alert. for. They are. They're hovering around. They're listening for it. Listening for the for the baseline and stuff. But we're going to talk about some ideas, some hacks that will help you to navigate the changes, kind of conceptually get around practice. You got to practice this tune a lot. You got to learn the soul. You don't have to learn the soul. But that's a good one to start with it. It's a great one. And everybody has to deal with this eventually. So you might as well just bite the bullet and get to it. And what makes giant steps kind of tricky is the fact that it changes gosh darn keys so fast. It goes through in

major thirds. It starts in B and then goes immediately to G, then immediately to E flat. Yep. Right? And then does the same thing to G, then to E flat, and then to B. And we all have to figure out how to navigate these in a way that doesn't work with functional harmony. Like if you were just to be like, you know, it's not the same thing. It's a whole different way of thinking about things. Yeah, that's the one. And that sounds hip. Yeah. And the nice thing about it, though, is as you're working on this, you know, everything's kind of relative. So Like you get to that E flat major, and because everything's moving so violently, harmonically and so quickly two beats each, that the E flat seems like forever. Yeah.

You know, that's like your little layover and you're like, oh, no problem level. Oh, no, and I got to go right back to G. Oh, I'm going to say. But really, look, the trick on this tune, and I've never heard anybody play it, you know, well that didn't have an innate and almost unconscious understanding of the form. You know, like you cannot be thinking about the chords. We're going to talk about going through it, but we're not, you can't be thinking about all these chords. You just have to know them. So a lot of repeated practice, slow, it's going to reward you.

But that's not even what our hacks are. Let's get into what our hacks are. You've got to listen to this tune, too. Listen to Coltrane's version. Luckily, it's an incredibly inspiring recording. So that's not going to be a great piece of art of the 20th century. That's right. No problem there.

But make sure to listen to it a ton and ton. So what's our first hack? Our first hack is that four note shapes are your friend. Are they ever? They are your friend. And we're going to give you a bunch. And actually, talking about listening, if you check out Coltrane how he starts his solo.

He plays a number of the four-note, but four-note shapes that we can use melodically. Yeah, what is he doing? Like one, like one, two, three, five. That's the first one, right. And I think that one's the first one that you want to really. And you can learn that. You should learn that in all keys,

almost like doing it as an exercise. And, you know, we think about it, the piano, these shapes. And certainly, you know, obviously Coltrane's playing on the saxophone. These are melodic ideas. You can, we have a little bit of advantage at the keyboard because you can play them. But, you know, anybody can come and play it on the piano, but it's about breaking it up. And then also, as you're learning those, you're already thinking of ways to... Yeah, to break them up a little bit.

So they're not the same linear shape the whole time. But it doesn't matter. You know, when the advantage we have at the piano is we can do something like this, where we go like... You play all four notes. of the shape at the same time. That gets you a great sense of, okay, so if I have this shape here, right, on the E flat, which is like 7, 2, 3, 5,

or let's say 7, 2, 3, 13. Good hip, get hip. That's pretty hip, right? So I can play them all at the same time on the piano, and now I can see, I can go up, I can go down, I can go up, like skippy, a little skippiness, you know, you can go skippy down.

You can do any kind of, you know, variation of those. shapes, which is why even if you play saxophone or something like that, having a little piano background can be really helpful with any of these concepts. What makes four note shapes good is it fits symmetrically within this... From a rhythmic standpoint. Yeah, you're right there. You can go straight eighth note and have some jolly, jolly good times. And some jolly good times. It fits perfectly. So, you know, just start, like you said, sticking to one shape, one direction, and then practice going in...

a different direction and then practice. Like changing it up as much as you want. And then you can practice, like once you have a bunch of different shapes, I mean, there's so many different combinations. 1-357-3-5-7-9. I think those are important just to highlight because that's kind of your jazz arpeggio. Yeah, yeah. So break that down again.

It's 1-357-3-7-9. Yeah, yeah. And really, you know, it's a five-note shape in a way, but because we're breaking these up as four-note shapes being your friend. You want to kind of think about them like that because you might do that kind of a thing. We're moving around and we're going to get into like breaking it up rhythmically later. But the idea is that we're identifying those shapes. And you could practice going in different like geographic locations.

You could practice staying in this very like really like squaring everything in one space. Well, and that's a great thing to be able to do once. you get all these. Right, then you can mix it up. You can kind of keep it. It's almost like your voice leaning is right in there the same way you would kind of comp behind it. Love it.

So a couple more before we move on that are fun are 7, 2, 3, 5. And then any of these, you can invert to find some interesting things. 7. Oh, yeah, so. And then you can go 7, 2, 3, 13, or 6. So that's like on the D7. and then you talk about voice leading. Yeah. And then you can add in some alterations.

That's 7, flat 9, sharp 11, 13. Super hip. Yeah. But it's all based on porno cheese. It doesn't sound like it's not that musical, but once you start putting it over the changes and you can do that flawlessly, it becomes really a great tool for this. And then you're not thinking like 2, 5, 1. It becomes something different.

So what's number 2? Number two is that three-note shapes are also your frame. Oh, you threw a curveball. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so the four notes in terms of like how they lay down rhythmically should be starting to make sense. But we want to think about three-note because you can pair those with the four notes.

So it might be, um, so if we look at just that triad, which is really just an F-sharp triad, but it's over B, the ninth, the fifth, and the major seventh. So we go one, two, three, four. So that's a little more interesting in some ways than... Which is nice, but... Yeah. So it's one, two, three, four. And especially for longer phrases, you hear Train do this a lot.

You hear a lot of the great players do that where you're starting on the end of one. Or it could be even starting, you know, if you, you know, adding a couple notes before it to like the end of four or whatever. But basically you're breaking it up instead of just do. But da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ha. You know, although Train makes that sound pretty good. at the beginning. So it's like, but then he, you know,

baby it up, skip it, divid, dividibid, divit up. So that's just, yeah, three notes.

And really any of these can be, uh, the four and a one note ones, you just take one note away. So you got the one, three,

five, seven. You might go one, five, seven. You can invert that too. You can, you know,

like, yep. Like on the beat, too, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do with that. And then that can lead to some cool

rhythmic, some synchum, syncopation. Awesome. Number three, now this is something that we picked up from our dear friend Jeffrey Keiser. Yeah, and you were playing this already. You did a little foreshadowing with this bad boy. Oh, I love it. Yeah. So, you know, the changes here, like, if we look at these first, the first section, right, it's kind of broken up within two sections where the changes move really fast, and then it goes into a sort of slower moving two-fives. But when the changes move really faster, right at the top, B-major 7, D-7, G-major 7, B-flat-7, E-flat major 7. You know, on the recording,

the bass does this goes down in whole steps, which tells you actually a lot about how you're thinking about this. So, yeah, whole steps. One thing that you can do is instead of thinking about this

is B major 7 to D7 or D7 over A, you think about this as B major 7, A minor 7, G major 7, F minor 7 to E flat major 7. We know that these minor 7

cores, like the 2 of a 2-5, right? It's like kiss and cousins to the five to two. Right. So in a two five to G major, this A minor seven is the kiss and cousin of D7 going to the G. So why not use that? So instead of thinking like this shape, right, where you're here and you go bomp, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, like that, think about it going down in whole steps, the root movement going down on whole steps. Oh, man.

It's so it's so much fun to think about it that way, and it's a whole different way to do it. Yep. Awesome stuff. All right, so that's number three, descending root movement. Also, just real quick to note on that, that kind of root movement is easier to hear that. Yeah. Like, that's a kind of tricky thing.

And you can always, like, if you want to sing these, like you'll hear how hard it is to hear those intervals. Still important to hear it that way, but... Yeah, going down whole tones is a little easier for sure. That's a good one. Okay, number four, change keys, not chords. So this kind of picks up right where we've been talking about. So if we go, you know, this is the first chord here, B major 7, that second chord, the D7,

and we'll put an A there because that's what it is on the recording. That is now in the key of G major, right? We immediately change from B major, the key of B major to the key of G major. This is the five of G major. So there are oftentimes, I don't know about you when you're thinking about playing this, but I'm not thinking like 5-1, 5-1, I'm thinking like B, G, G. E flat. Yeah.

Right. It gives you more time. It gives you more time, right? So I now have four beats to think of the key of G and four beats to think of the key of E flat. Because both of these chords, right, the D7 to the G, that's all the key of G. The B flat seven to the E flat seven, that's all the key of E flat. So you can literally just think of like, I mean, you still want to change the chord. Yeah.

Where it happens. But you don't have to like shift into like, mm-mm-mm. And then it gets even more, you know, like, once. you're there in that second half of the tune. You really have two measures on each on each chord if you think about this one. Like I'm just thinking about E flat, G, B, I'm changing the tonal centers

because especially at the tempo that we were like played it at the intro. I mean, I know we eased our way through that. It was for you and I, but it can be difficult to try to think of like every single chord every time. Yeah, and then you still get sort of the natural symmetry of this tune in which the first half, you know,

everything is basically moving twice as fast. Even though we're elongating it by two beats. So we've got, like you said, B major for two beats, but then you've got four beats. I'm shifting it over in the bar lines, but you've got a little bit longer. But then at the bridge,

you've got two bars on each chord. Yeah. Right, so. Look at what you could do with all this time. I know. Now it's like, wow, the changes aren't going by quick enough.

You know, they say, this does help psychologically with navigating it as well. They say you can't buy time, but I think we've just bought some time. We bought ourselves a little for the time. That's right. That's right.

All right. So that was number four. Number five is in our final Giant Steps hack, although we do have a bonus. We do have a bonus. That's right. We forgot to say. So stick around for the bonus, which might be the most useful and the most fraudulent, I might add.

It is very fraudulent. But our fifth hack for navigating Giant Steps is Root Shell Pretty. What do we mean by Root Shell? This is a classic open studioism here right now. Right, right. I mean, root shell pretty, you know, we don't necessarily associate. it with giant steps until today. That's right.

We did and we realized how well it fits there. So you've got root, shell, seventh and the third. And then any note that sounds pretty. Could be the fifth, could be the six. I like it. It could be the sharp 11 even. Right? Is that legal?

Certainly could be the 9th. I'll allow it. You know, the 9th or the 6th down there. And basically, you know, the idea is that we're taking these notes. they're all going to be non-roots. Yeah. No matter what you do because you got the root on here. And then you're going to port it melodically, right?

And you want to really... Portamento. Portamento. You want to really think about these in terms of voice leading from those three-note root shell pretty chords. So we've got... Say you do the seventh, third, and the fifth. Yeah.

And we're going to go to D-7. We'll do your descending thing. And so I'm just moving up and I'm keeping that top note the same. So I've got the shell on the aisle. outside with the ninth on the inside. And then where do we go? It starts to kind of solve itself.

Right? 3, 5, 7 now. And now we're going to go B-flat major. We can go a little fancy. With the 13th is your pretty note and your shell and your root. What you're basically doing here is outlining the chords in a very specific way.

Like we have our root. We have our, you know, our shell, our guide tones, important tones. And then some pretty notes. And it helps us. to navigate the changes, it may be an interesting way. So even if you play trombone, you know, you can do this. Like you can get through these important notes of the chord in a way that's maybe a little different.

That's right. And no matter what instrument you play, try to get to the piano and just from the standpoint of learning the form of this tune. And we were talking about it earlier. Hank, you have to really internalize this somewhat complicated tune. Look, this is the thing. And this is the biggest hack, I would say. This is not even our bonus yet. but on this tune is like really learn the form.

For sure. Because there's such an inner logic. This is one of the most logically constructed and architectural tunes of all time. So it seems like if you only look at it in a linear standpoint and you don't understand it holistically, it can seem like just a complicated mess. But it's so logical and symmetrical once you learn it,

even with the two halves of the tune. So if you give your ears a chance to really absorb the tune, not only with the melody and the root, The root and the melody in that interpretation, but here we're going for the root shell pretty, or even just root shell. How about just doing that in time for about an hour? Just sitting on the piano and doing that is going to do so much good for you, for sure.

You're right, man. There's nothing more important than that. Getting that form. Well, world peace. Vaccines and the coronavirus. But it's number three for sure. But that's how you really start. Did you say it's number three for sure?

This is number three. Behind world peace and the virus. The vaccine. But yeah, but you got to do a lot of that kind of practice. And then how that ports out is to understanding the changes and the form and the architecture of the tune, the inner logic. But then it also gives you some beautiful melodic stuff as you were playing. And then you can combine it with the four notes. Some more scale kind of stuff.

I love it, man. That's a great hack. So if you're loving this, I'm loving it. McDonald's. No, we're not loving that place. Are we? No, I don't think so. If you're loving this, how about liking and subscribing?

Because we're coming with tutorials like this every week. And if you want to go next level, what do you do? You put the bell on. You put the bell on. You can ring my bell. Hey, listen, this stuff isn't going to tutorial itself. So give us a like and subscribe. Put the bell on.

Because we're going live every week. We're doing it all this time. We do it at a designated times. And then we surprise folks too. So we're going live. Check us out. These blue LEDs don't pay for themselves. That's right, right.

Yeah. All right. What's our bonus? Our bonus. This is a hack for pretty much anything. A lot of hacks do this. A lot of hacks. But you can do it well.

You could do it well. You can do it. Everybody can do it well. This is the chromatic bailout. The chromatic bailout. Like Morgan Stanley in a financial crisis. Too big to fail. Too big to fail.

Now, the trick to doing this so that it doesn't sound like just a jumbled mess is to really concentrate on your time, on nailing the form. with probably your left hand or just your general awareness of what's happening because we're sort of abandoning the harmony with our melodic playing. Although you don't have to totally do it. So look, this is just based upon

running up and down the chromatic scale. I love a chromatic bailout, man. It saved my ass so many times. If you think about where you start and where you're hitting at certain key points rhythmically, though this can make sense still harmonically.

So like, I'm starting on that major seventh instead of going because that would be a little bit of a downer. It's gross. Right? It's a bit of a downer. Now that's a lot of chromatic. So it might be.

But I mean, the idea is, see, if you're a little bit lost on the change is play something hip rhythmically, you know. I mean, you can even take some of these like three-note shapes, four-note shapes. And chromaticize them. I mean, that is a bailout. That's like open up the golden parachute. That's right, right. Right. J.P. Morgan, here I come. Big Papa. My sugar daddy.

So the thing is with this, though, is you got to really know the form to be able to pull this off. So if you're like... Sounds great, though. Because I'm coming out of it and then I'm going into the chain. Like if you stay out and you're lost and then, especially if you let the rhythm go or something. This is a good exit. I don't know if I could play the baseline and do this at the same time. That's good.

Yeah, yeah. So you got it. Oh, my gosh. Somebody timestamp that. Somebody timestamp this. Stop. automatic bail-up. Yeah.

Damn. Well, until tomorrow, you'll hear it. Which is funny because we don't do this daily. Okay.