You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Chords From 1 Shape

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

In this episode, Adam and Peter explore a simplified approach to playing chords.They advocate for using "shapes" as a tool to sidestep excessive analytical thinking, allowing us to achieve the desired sounds and fostering a more creative musical experience in the moment. Open Studio Pro | GATELISTTriads To Melt FacesHave a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

You're listening to the You'll hear a podcast. Are you running into 2020. I'm doing a little dance, man. I'm just trying to wake up, you know. It's like I'm a little bit slovenly. So you're hearing this. Slavily. Slovenly.

What is slovenly mean? I'm a little bit slow. Slovenly? Slothenly. Like a like a sick of suckling pig? Like a, yeah, like a like a pile of pancakes covered in butter and syrup. That's what I feel like today. You know why?

Because I had so many pancakes this weekend. Peter, it's 2024 for our listener. But for us, it's boxing day. It's uh... In 20203 In 2023. It's the day after. Well, that's right.

Boxing Day. It's boxing day. Shout out to the UK with all your weird holidays. Including this one, which why is this a holiday? The day after it's, I guess you return all the presents? You know what else they have to be? That's a very UK concept. I didn't like anything I got.

Right. We do that too. But, um, but, but the other thing that they have, I found out, there's two different things bespoke to the UK. And then we're going to get into, don't worry. I'm not going off the rails, but I am a little bit. Dude, I'm, who's worried with. with Vlogmas?

Did you excuse you? Did you just sleep? We've been getting into Vlogmus. We might have to do this next year together for the pot.

Is that not a German pancake? Das Vlogmus! No, Vlogmus. Caleb, do you know about Vlogmus? Oh, he's like, you've done an episode on Vlogmus? But you still don't know it.

I'm telling you, I'm so full of carbohydrates right now for Christmas that I can't. It's a vlog that leads up to Christmas and so it's been going every day. But the other thing I learned.

Oh, The advent calendar, I do remember now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the other thing they do, Boxing Day, yes, and also they do Christmas Eve's Eve. Christmas Eve's Eve. Which, of course, is the 23rd of... Is that a hat on a half? Any excuse to drink, really. Let's go.

That's a hat on the head. Yeah, for sure. Anyway, shout out to the UK. Where we have some of our most die-hard and longtime listeners, I might add. It is our second most... Our second biggest audience is in the UK outside of the U.S. That's right. It's right.

That's the way it goes. Anyway, welcome... Should we get that on the front of Open Studio? Like, New York, London. St. Louis. You know how they do that with like clothing stores? Like Chanel.

Yeah, exactly. So welcome to 2024. Thank you, dear listeners, for being here for yet another year of glorious fifth takes. Thank you, dear listeners for glorious fifth takes.

No, we really appreciate you guys. We hope that this is finding you wherever you are. It's very propagandish. Our dear listener and the glorious fifth test. Bowed out to your dear... No, so this has been, yeah, we've had... Takes aside. It's just been one of the...

mornings where I've felt very slovenly, slobbingly. Slobby. You got slobberly? You got slobberly. It's like, it's just taking us a long time to get going here. So Lister, we appreciate you sticking with us, because the energy now feels right. The energy feels good. Energy feels good. But we want to just bring you peace and love and joy to you and your family as we enter into this next year. And thank you guys to the listeners. You make all this fun stuff happen for us. And we decided instead of like a bespoke new, you know, New Year, New Me, or Welcome Best of 2023 or any of those kind of New Year's typical episodes, we're going to jump right in with the content that we think you might enjoy the most.

Yeah, we haven't done a Best of in a long time. You know why? None of them are very good. No, no. There's no best. But just, you know, we're always looking forward. So this is seven chords from one shape. Seven chords from...

Full disclosure. I don't understand this. These are my favorite, Peter. These are my favorite. When Peter doesn't get it, but he plays all of this stuff, I love these episodes. But I'm super interested in it. So this is a way to think about chord shapes.

And what it does is it saves our brain's CPU, if you're doing this right. And this is, of course, from Barry Harris. Which is topical. Because we have very little despair. But it's a really fun concept. And it's a bit of a steep climb at first. But once you get it, it saves you so much brain space because you can think of one thing and come up with a great sounding chord voicing.

You don't have to think of individual notes, which is what we're actually our goal is, is to just systematize everything. So we're just splashing around in music. We're not thinking about the nuts and bolts. This can help get you there faster. And it is a really specific way to play great courts. Actually, we worked on this in the Open Studio Pro guided practice sessions last week, Peter.

And someone was like, Peter Martin never teaches this stuff. And I was like, yeah. Because Peter Martin doesn't understand it. He plays all of it, but he doesn't teach it. But this is a really, I think, a really quick way to get some great sounding voicings. And like I said, with just one shape. It's caveat, it's kind of one-and-half shapes.

And those shapes are, ready? Well, can we, before we even do that, just because I always think about this, is something that this stuff comes a little bit slower. Seven chords from one shape, can we just talk about why shapes matter? And kind of what they are, too. I think it's somewhat obvious, but for me, this was a little murky conceptually for a long time. So shapes matter because they just, again, they save us the brain space of having to think of each individual notes. And, you know, shapes can, you can interchange sort of a voicing.

with the idea of a shape, right? But the shape itself, if you just are thinking of, and for these shapes, actually, we're thinking of the shape and all of its inversions, right? It's a grouping of notes that just save us having to think about, well, what notes should I play on this chord?

If you play this shape, it'll work over this chord, period, like full stop. And I think one thing, I don't even know which kind of these are going to be, but I like to think about two kind of basic areas of shapes you've got, you know, chromatic and diatonic, right? So if I go one, three, five, right? Yeah.

And I'm going to move up diatonically. I'm in C major. I'm just moving up. That's a shape. That's like a physical shape. Right. And it's a diatonic shape. But if I were to play this as a chromatic shape, then when I went up to D or D flat, it would be...

I'm transposing. Right. So is that still a shape, actually? Yes. Because you're looking with a little bit of doubt in your eye, my friend. Well, it's not... So I don't want to confuse the issue here. So we're not going to move these shapes around either of those ways.

What we're going to do is use the shape to super... almost like a polychord, Peter. So what we're talking about here is six shapes, major six and the minor six shape. So, no, no, no, don't shut up. No, I should. No, like talking about this is good. You can practice them chromatically

and you can even practice them diatonically. But we just want to start with what they can be used for. So let's start by, first of all, what is a major six and minor six shape? Okay. So we maybe put up on the, for the YouTubers, we're going to put up a bit of a cordy vibe here so that we can see what we're talking about.

So this is the major six shape, right? This is C major six. I just guess that's C, E, G, and A, right? So he's got a major triad with that A natural Lontoc. Root position. Root position. Now, this can be used, of course,

for a C major 6 chord, right? Love it, use it. We're going to talk a little bit of two about, like, how to voice these, but let's just start here in root position. So these four notes are the root, the third, and the fifth, and six of a C major six chord. Now, we can use this,

this exact same shape for several other chords, including A minor 7, right? So here in A minor 7, these four notes are the root 3, 5, 7 of A minor 7. So this C major 6 and all of its inversions are both a C6 chord and an A minor 7. Not only that, if we did an F chord, we can use these four notes, and this is an F major 9, right? So now we have the fifth, the seventh, the nine, and the third of an F major nine, right? Including all of its inversions. This is where brain power gets saved. Once you can just do these shapes and you know the chords that they go with, you know, you put a bass in your left hand and you've got the shape in your right.

And it just sounds good. And then the last one we'll do for the major six, again, the same shape, the same four notes. You put a D in the base, it's a D7 Suss. So anytime you have, it could be a D minor sus, but you can definitely use it on a, your dominant seven Suss chords are more common. So you can use that. Now, here's the cool part, Peter, is we can do an exercise over like a 251, right? Which is like a common jazz chord progression. I have a D minor 7, a G7, and a C major.

And we can use nothing but sixth shapes. So on our D minor 7, right, we use an F major 6, right? We use that, just like the C6 work for A minor 7. Yep. Right, this for the D minor 7, relative major, F6, right? You got D, which is just the same thing as root 357 of D minor 7, but F6 is the shape. Let's see what we do do the G7? Let's keep that F6 for a nice G7 suss.

Yeah, right? And then let's do, well, we're just going to keep this G7 suss for now. And then we go to the C major seven, we can use that G. 6, right? G major 6, right? So we've got two different six chords all on this 251. Right. Right?

You could also start, you can go from G6 to C6 on your C major 7. Barry Harris talks about this. Yep. Where you get this movement here from the G6 shape, right? And the B and the D move down to C and A, to the C6 shape. So again, D minor 7, G7, Suss. both are using the F major six shape F, A, C, and D, right?

F major tri with a D. Yep. G major six, right? Now, those are the four chords that we can use, four out of seven, that we can use with just the major six. But there is another six, Peter.

Minor six, right? So C minor six. What can we use this for? Same shape, but just a flat third. C, E, flat, G, and A. Well, obviously you can use it for a C minor six shape. Yeah.

Right? You can also use it. a half diminished. That little prickly half diminished. A little prickly half diminished. And in fact, a lot of bebop pianist would call this a C minor over A. Yeah.

Right? So the C minor, six shape is in full effect. Using the same root motion, right? Down to F. 9. That's an F-9. That's an F-Dominant 9, right? So you've got C, E, flat, G, and A.

You've got the third, the fifth, the seventh, and the 9 of an F-7. Right? So these are now our 7, and we have a bonus. by the way, we do have a bonus, which I'm going to show you a little bit. So now we add the minor in, we have a couple of options that we can do. So we have our D minor seven chord, right?

Back to our 251. We have our G7. Yeah. Now, instead of just staying here on the G7s, with that F6, we can do a D minor six. Yeah. And you got the G9. Yeah. Which is really just one note between F6 shape and D minor six.

D minor six is D, F, A, and B. Right? That's the fifth, seventh, ninth, and third. of G7 and then we've got our C major 7 to the C6 so again now we've got and now that we have this shape we can use these four notes like in drop 2 in all these different inversions right all of these work great little chromaticism before so that's the six shape right so our C major 6 gets you C6 shape A minor 7 F major 9 and a dominant 7 D dominant 7 suss our C minor gets you C minor gets you C minor 6, A half diminished, and F9. Now, it also gets you, our bonus, what if we did the C minor six shape, and our bonus chord, put a B in the bass. That was not what I was expecting you were going to go.

Right? So the C minor 6, I'm going to put the E flat on the bottom. E, F, E, A, A, and C. That is a flat 13, flat 9 sound. You could also call that an altered sound. So now we have an altered chord using a C minor 6. And we're using, again, if you want an altered sound, you use the minor six shape from just a half step up.

And that's all you need. You need the root and you need the minor six. Here it is in drop two. A, E, flat, G, and C, get you a B7 altered, or B7 flat, 13, flat nine. Yeah. Isn't that cool? That's just from, and so we're saving.

I love hearing where it can go. Once you have these kind of in your hands, it actually doesn't take that long to realize all this. You just go through your favorite tunes. Yep. And then, like, put some six shapes in there. it works so well to do this and just kind of go through all that's really all you need you could do an entire gig using nothing but six chords because you have pretty much everything so you could start messing with this too of like you know if we go back to our two five in the key of c right like you could do two five in the key of c maybe with that altered a flat minor six on the g yeah do that maybe you want to do a two five in the key of c minor right? F minor six.

Yep. G7, flat 13, flat nine using an A flat minor six. C minor six. All six shapes. You could do major too. Yeah. That is the power of the six shape. Again, that's eight chords.

That's seven with a bonus. Major six, minor seven, major nine, and sus seven for the major six shape. You got minor six, half diminished, dominant nine, and dominant seven, flat 9, 513. All of that is from this beautiful, simple little shape that Barry Harris teaches. And it's just, once you hear it too, you can't unhear it. It's all in the good way. In a good way. It's all in arrangements and classical music. It's all over the place.

It's really, really cool. Very, very effective. It seems like, again, it's a steep climb at first to kind of like get it and realizing you're superimposing. But once it clicks in, it's like, man, it saves so much space. Yeah. And you can already hear how it's leading your ears, especially over these 251s to some really cool like, you know, it's like those inner voice movements

that almost resolve themselves if you commit to listening. Totally. Like they're almost like one or two solutions that are given to you by the time you get to the major or minor. Well, let's use all six

for intervoicement. So we start on our D minor seven. F6. Let's go to F minor six. So like, so what's happening here is F6, F minor six.

F minor six. over G. We'll go back up here to D minor 6, right? So that sounds in time. It's amazing, isn't it? Just like, that is this little inner voice movement that happens from just using these six words. Now, we've talked about hinging, we've talked about all kinds of techniques to get

inner voice movement. There's no one way to do any of this stuff. I love thinking about these in these different ways because I start using them in all different contexts. This way is such a great way, too. when you're arranging for multiple voices, again, to get that voice leading going. Yeah.

Because if you're using these four-note shapes, and let's say you have a five voice section. Yeah. Right? Like you might with a string quartet plus a bass. Yep. You got the root, and then you get all the harmony right up here.

Or sax section with the berry. Sax section with the berry. All of these works so great. Again, I'm doing these now and drop two because it gives you spread, but you could just do everything close. All of the inversions of all of them. Don't me, I'm your brother.

All that stuff, man. All that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. When I love that one, it's funny, I've definitely used these a lot. I've never thought about it. Like the C minor 6 over B, given at that altar. Like, that's an interesting one because I think in this one, in different keys,

I mean, this is not an acoustic piano, but it's got an acoustic piano sound very different based on the instrument or the register. So I'm thinking like this one I use a lot. It's just the same thing. It's just a step down. The B, flat minor six over A. 100%. And what I was kind of talking about at the beginning,

and this is not to confuse us, but this is maybe for some of the more advanced players that like, oh, I've got that. That's just this. That you can think about in terms of your improvisation. Well, we'll go back to the first one

that you had the C minor 6 over B for the alter. Yeah, when you're improvising. Yeah, they work melodically as well. 100%. And the whole thing of like the shape, you think, oh, this is a static thing that you're moving around.

No, it's the foundation. That shape is the foundation for melodic ideas. And sometimes like players as they're getting more advanced. I don't want to do that. That's too basic. But that's where the gold is, right? Actually, in terms of melodic content, restrictions, like, what can you come up with? Of course, you can always leave that and then go more scale-based. But sometimes players that think they

understand harmony, and maybe they do on a theoretical level, like a higher level, in terms of scales, they sound like they're running scales because they're not willing to go back to these foundational, really just triad plus one shapes, but use them. And in order for it not to sound like you know, it's or is using it at some unusual places. Very basic foundational, you know, melodic content, but put it at some unusual. And then you can still, you know,

run up and down to diminish or something. Well, I mean, I want to address the diminished because some people are going to say, well, isn't this the six diminished thing? That's like sort of the next level of this. You have your C6 here. Yep. And you can use the corresponding diminished. So a D diminished seven.

shape in between and borrow from. And that's where everything comes from. And that works over C6. It works over A minor. F. It gives you like this F diminish thing. Same thing with the minor, right? C minor, six, D diminished. So that's where Barry's six diminished scale of chords comes from. And that's sort of the next level up. But you don't need that to get started. All you need are the six shapes to get sort of the core of the voicing. And then you could start adding diminished stuff in between willy nilly. Right. You know what I mean?

Absolutely. Yeah. Good. I've got it. Mastered. All right. Peter, I expect a full chorus on Open Studio from this concept from you. Seven chords from one shape.

One week. Sounds good. Until next time. You'll hear it.