You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 Triad Pairs That Sound Great - #79

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

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Hey, what's up, folks. Adam Maness here for today's Yule Here At podcast. Still Flying Solo, as Pete's schedule would not allow any you'll hear at recording this week. But we're at the piano, which is always a popular request from our faithful you'll hear listeners. And today we're talking about something that we get asked about a lot. And this is triad pairs and how to use them and some common ones. So here are five triad pairs that I think sound great. These are fairly common and pretty useful. But with triad pairs, and I think, we're pairs, I always say, you know, they're kind of personal. Like, you need to be fiddling around with these yourselves. Find what works with your sound. Find ones that you like. The great thing about triads is because they're structured already for you. They're triads. They have a structure that sounds familiar. You can get away with, like, a lot of dissonance or a little dissonance or no dissonance, whatever you want to do, find the ones that you like. But here's some pretty common triad pair, like cliches almost. The first one is the, the, the, five and the sixth triad over a major chord. So if we're in C, like I C major seven,

we can use the G triad and the A minor triad, just diatonic. Pretty basic sound, but get you really good happy results, you know, on this major chord. Now with triad pairs, one of the things to practice is doing them in all kinds of ways. You can do them straight up and down for sure, but mix it up. Another question thing about triad pairs is sometimes you can just borrow one note from the triad and to me that can be really eye-opening as far as melodic content so if we have this g and this a minor you know here i have the g triad and i'm just adding the a from the a minor above it or surrounding the a minor triad here you know with a g minor in the with a major in the middle

you know what i mean going going between them just adding one note from that other triad can really then it becomes almost like a hexatonic scale that you have all these options. But it is useful too to keep them just in triads. All right, so the 5 and the 6, the G and the A minor over a C major 7. By the way, this works too, like over F, Lidion and C, whatever is in the key of C that's diatonic. We'll all work. Okay, for our next sound, we're going to go Lidion, which I was just kind of talking about. And this is a different kind of a Lidian sound.

Actually, this is the same Lidian sound that you would do on that. that f but we'll do it in c so you can kind of see the consistency of everything so this is the major two chord it's lydian so we have that that sharp four that f sharp here in c and then the three which is e minor great sound really really useful number three that is on a dominant chord just a straight mixillidian style dominant like a c7 no alterations or anything the flat seven try and the one triad. You could use this on a Suss 7 chord. Here, I'm just adding that one note from the other triad.

Such a great sound. Or just combining them. The key is to really experiment with different ways to play these, different orders to play these different configurations. Great stuff. Okay, now let's alter that dominant, you know, from what would be a C-7 or a C-S-7 with no alterations. Let's do like an altered sound.

Now the most common one for this is the flat 5, flat 6. The G flat and the A flat over a C alter. To that F minor sounds so good. Really gives you that altered sound. Really gives you a lot to play with and is such a cool sound. Okay, number five of our five triad pairs that sound great. I'm not used to talking this much without breaks. I need my iced coffee.

I need a glass of water. My mouth is going dry. here but having fun at the piano. Last one, major, minor, and minor thirds over a flat nine. What the hell does that mean? That is very simple. So we know that a flat nine chord you can use the diminished scale, right? So C7 flat nine use the half-hole diminished scale. Now some these, and the funny thing about this last one is these aren't even triads. These are kind of a mixture of one chord. So for this, we can use four different major slash minor, not triads, but four note shapes. We can start with C, major, and minor. So it has the major third and the minor third, right? C, E flat, E,

E flat, E, G, and then up in minor thirds, E flat, major, and minor. E flat, G, flat, G, B flat. See, we have both major and minor, and then G flat, major, and minor, any inversion, and then A, major, and minor. Now, what's cool about this is you can go through these A major, minor, G flat, major, minor, E flat major, minor, C major, Miner seamlessly. And it gives you this, uh,

this half-hole sound, this diminished sound. Great for... I mean, isn't that... And again, mix up the order. Don't just go straight down and straight up all the time. Put little delays on it, but that sound is great. So, again, it's like a C-flat-9-sharp-11 sound, which is a common altered dominant sound.

You have the C-major-N-minor triad, the E-flat, the F-sharp, G-flat. and the A. Such a cool sound. So many possibilities with that one. Okay, so just to recap our list here, five triad pairs that sound great. Number one, we have the five, six, over a major.

Number two, we have the two and the three, the major two and the three over a Lydian. It's D and E minor over a C. Number three, we have the flat seven and the one over a dominant chord. Number four, we have the flat five and the flat six over an altered dominant. And number seven, we have the major, minor, both at the same time, triad in thirds, in minor

thirds, for a flat nine sound starting on the root of the flat nine. Not starting on, but one of them. That sequence. Such a cool sound. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Still flying solo tomorrow, but we're going to be talking about Barry Harris's sixth-de-minute scale, So stay tuned for that. Go to you'll hearer.com and ask us a question.

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