You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5-Note Voicings - #25

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Today, Adam and Peter go over some really handy 5-note voicings. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What you know about that, Adam Manus? Those are slick. What are those? I don't know. Stay tuned. I'm Adam Annis. I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Here at Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you from our Steinway O here in beautiful Midtown St. Louis.

You almost said downtown. We're pretty far downtown, but technically we're in Midtown. Midtown's happening right now, man. Midtown is where it's at. We're here. IKEA is here. IKEA is here. You know, this is one of the only, it's right around the corner.

We're going to get Uber local right now. It's one of the only, well, it's one of the first. They have some other ones now. In-city, urban, IKEA's in the United States. Did you know that? I did know that, and it's dope for St. Louis, that we have it right in the heart of midtown here. That's right. Can I get a what, what?

What, what? Yeah, what. Okay, cool. What are we talking about today? IKEA. No, we're talking about five-note voicing. We're talking about five-note voicing, and we're back at the piano. Excited to be back at the piano.

Yeah. And this is going to be, you know, we're talking about two-handed voicing. Of course, we could have five-note voicing. you know, in just one hand. But this is really a concept that I have, that I have, that many pianists have. How many is that? What is that?

That's five notes, but, oh, five fingers, but more than five notes, actually. But, yeah, this is a concept that's used a lot and, you know, kind of getting into our structured, restrictive practice. I think it's a good way. You know, it's amazing how many questions we get about what are some good two-handed voicing,

comping in general. Such an important part of our job as the pianists, but I think for all you guys out there, instrumentalists, vocalists, drummers, anything, because, you know, we preach how, I mean, everybody knows how great it is to learn some piano and how much it helps your jazz playing in general. If you're going to learn one other instrument,

get some basic piano stuff. And so two-handed voicing seems like it's super advanced and it can be, but a little bit of basic two-handed voicings. And I think this five-note voicing is a good kind of entree point to that can be really nice. Now, when you say five notes, you're specifically talking about two-three voicings, right? Two in your left, three in your right?

Exactly. Exactly. These are some of the most useful. I mean, and there's so many, you know, there's so many ways you can do it. You can do it on literally every single chord has some kind of two, three, five note voicing. Yeah, and I mean there's, you know, even something like this, which is almost like a modern block chord, because it's all within an octave. It's still, you know, this is super close because you got a second, a couple of two, you know, fourth and a third. Yeah.

But a lot of the ones I kind of gravitate towards our more open fourth, thirds and fourths. Classic open-fourths, yeah, yeah. Stuff that you can move around diatonically. That's the so what voicing right there, right? So what, so what if I am playing this song? You got a problem with that? Yeah, exactly. What a great sound.

I remember when I was younger and learned those, I was like, this is great, but then I was like, I can't play it because it's too basic. It's too overused, you know. So what are some sort of, speaking of basic? What are some sort of beginner ones that people can jump on if they maybe don't know these voicings at all? Yeah, well, so I think that the ones

that are all force or all fourths with the triad, kind of second or first inversion version on top of the best, and that's gonna be your so what voicing. So you're building up. Well, if we look at that one, you know, we're building up, looking at D Dorian, just all force with a major third on top.

Starting at the root. Yeah, starting at the root. And you know, the way you can think about it, I love, a lot of times people won't think about this as a triad because it's not root position. But in terms of the function and the sound of it and how we're gonna be able to use it, And even like kind of move it around, it's very much the triad's important.

So what we're looking at is an F major triad, which of course is the relative major of the D minor where we're dealing. And the reason the second inversion is just because... So what's great about this voicing too, you have, here you have D, G, C, F, A, like you said, is that's a D minor 7. You can use as in like the sort of Dorian sound. But you can also use it as a B-flat major 13, right? If the bass player is playing a B-flat in the root,

it sounds great. You could also use it as an E-flat, Lydian. You know, those shapes work so well for so many different kinds of chords. And actually, I think typically I kind of use this the most for that B-flat major or for the F-major. Yeah, it's like a F-major 6, yeah, yeah. You know, 6-9. And then also because then you can get into sort of diatonic movement,

even if it's not strictly moving. It's just, and basically it just means, say, everything, if you're on the B-flap major, and we thought about like a Lydian sound. And we're just moving up stepwise. Beautiful. And then you can open it up with fourths. So all I've done is take that same voice and then gone up to straight force.

And then I'm moving diatonically, so I'm going to get some nice, you know, augmented force tritones in there. And these can also work over a straight major, but a lot of times they don't know, they don't sound as good. So if I got... As you put in that natural... Yeah, that's a little weird. That's okay.

It's all right. Actually, sounds kind of good. The more I play it. But yeah, exactly. So the concept is, you know, these are open for us, a little bit of thirds, that kind of a thing. Man, can I piggyback on this voicing and show you one of my favorite five-note, two, three voicing? Yeah, because I invented that one, so go ahead and piggyback. So if we do the same voicing but like a B-flat six, right?

Yeah. You know, let's say you're playing rhythm changes where it's like B-flat. major seven, B-flat 6 to like a G7. I see where you go. I like where you're going. I like our destination. Well, there's a few things you can do here. So here's our B-flat. This is the same voice thing, but just up and forth from what he did. So G-C-F-B-flat D. And if I want to go to G-7, that's all I do, right? Yep. And that's some good voice leading there. That's great voice leading. Now here's another thing. Let's say it's B diminished, like you're doing this thing.

Yeah. You know? One voicing I love is... Oh, by the way, that G7, that was F, B, E, A, D. Yeah, that's straightforward. Starting on F, all white keys, fourths. Now, if I take this same G7 voicing, but I flat the 9, so I take that A.

Yep. This is a great diminished voicing. This is B diminished, F diminished, D diminished. And look what's right in the middle of that. Check that out. I love this. Yeah. And you're just moving it chromatically up. And look what's in the middle.

middle of that the three notes. Oh, an E tria. E tria, second inversion again. You have that G7 flat nine sound. And you're going to always get, I mean not always sometimes they don't work, but you're going to often get some great symmetry. So I mean that's the thing I like about the five-note voicing. It's asymmetrical in terms of two and three of course because we don't have two and half fingers in either hand. Yeah, yeah. But you get some nice setups for trias on top, bottom, or in the middle. So here. you know, that's a very well-balanced chord. There's also other, if you want to go sharp 11.

Yeah, that's really good. I like it. Yeah, yeah. And if you want to start breaking it up, you know, what we've talked about before in terms of voice leading, you can rhythmically break it up. But that's, yeah, that's getting into some great kind of voice leading without even changing any of the direction.

You know, that's a whole other thing we can do with the five-note voicing. Man, these are so great and useful. So we have a couple of different things on five-note voicings available at openstudio-network.com slash blog. If you go to our blog. I think I did one a couple years ago. You've done one now. Just because they're so handy, these two, three voicings.

And we should just say that we're doing mostly rootless voicings, but some of the beauty of practicing these is that you can, you know, restrictive practice all rootless, or at least no roots at the bottom. But then you can also do these as rooted voicing. And normally they would open up where the interval is large and then a third and four. Yeah, these are really useful. So on piano voices. Yeah.

And this is still two and three. And it's really all force and thirds up here with the top, which you go into a root in six, root in seven. Right. The left hand is usually root in seven or even root in third if you're close. Yep. And that's usually about it. And then everything else is kind of sparkle on top. You know, you pick out your third, seventh, and then color notes, 11th, 9, 13.

And then how do we decide if a voicing is good or not? If it sounds good? Oh, it's so simple, though. Can we really just do that? You'll hear it, I guess. You'll hear it? Oh, is that the end? Yeah.

Oh, no. No, no. Hey, and just another thing, if you're listening to this and you actually want to see some of these voices, we have an overhead camera going on right now. Do we? What? What's up? Peace. I had no idea. Head over to YouTube. We'll have these piano podcasts up on YouTube so you can check them out. I was just going to say, too, I use this a lot. We traditionally would think, I'm going to use these kind of voices. We're playing duo. Those are great, you know, with the singer, guitars, whatever.

But I use them a lot in trio too going in and out of so we would start, you know, like rhythm changes. That's actually a rooted voicing already. But so we're rootless, rootless, rooted, rooted, and then we jump back out. You know, you can shift that in and out. No, we've talked about this before. For some reason, this whole idea of rooted voicing being the enemy of a trio pianist is completely ridiculous. Just badly implemented. Just badly.

Yeah, I mean, if you're down here going, that's going to sound crap. Yeah, stop. Yeah, it's not going to take Ron Carter to hate that. Yeah, but just as you showed, you know, like, throwing in some punchy rooted voicings and then back to them. Yeah. And it's just a great way to move around. Like when we get into this tempo and comping, two-handed voicings,

you know, a lot of pianists kind of abandoned good voice leading, which I think is a mistake. Unless there's a dramatic reason in terms of, like, Because when you're comping two-handed voicings, you're making an arrangement along with the soloist, basically. And so you really need to be thinking about, you know, the same kind of rules apply in terms of music and voicing and voice leading. So this is a great way to kind of move up and down in a way that's organic and there's a good flow without getting into this kind of, you know. That sounds pretty hip, actually, yeah. Okay, well, you know, well, I'm trying to say, like, you could do, we don't want to think about individual good voicing for a particular course.

We want to know a bunch, but we want to always be thinking about where are we, where are we coming from? Where are we going? If you don't know where you've been, how do we know where we're going? That's so insightful. No, the best voicing is coming off of a voicing that sends it there. That's the best. That's the best voicing you can pick is the one that is going to sound the best after what you've just done. Yep, that's good stuff.

So hope you found this useful. Like I said, you can check us out on YouTube if you want to see some of the overhead. Check out our blog. We have a bunch of stuff on Five Node voicings. Yep. Go to you'll hear it.com to leave us an idea for a future episode, to subscribe to our newsletter, to rating a review. Okay, keep on.

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