You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - A How-To for Drop 2 - S3E34

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

For today's piano lesson, Peter and Adam answer a user question calling for a tutorial on drop 2 chords.The ending theme song for today's episode is "Laura and Jonas" by Christian Deckert, whose album Pointing Out can be found at https://jazzartx.bandcamp.com/album/pointing-out. To get your music featured on You'll Hear It, send an MP3 recording of your music to [e-mail] us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Pete. Hey. You ready to drop the deuce? Let's drop it. Whoa, whoa, whoa, what? I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearer podcast.

Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Continuing our series here at the piano at our beautiful Open Studio headquarters in the studio. We're sitting at the piano. We're looking at you, YouTube. We've got our overhead camera. Maybe we should have a name for this. You're like conversations from the keyboard or something. Keyboard conversation.

What is? A PBS show? And we could wear like period costume from. Ben, do you watch slide aside here? Do you watch any of those, I don't want to use the word horrible, but that's what comes to my, those PBS shows that are like period pieces. Well, so my wife is obsessed with them,

which means that I have to watch. So is mine. Mine is too. Although, I found a nice bar that's open on Sunday. They all come on Sunday nights. They do. We need to start meeting. Actually, we should do our PBS period piece club,

and we don't watch any of them. We just get together at taste or something. That's right. But what is the one, I don't even know if it's the first, on the really big one. Well, there was Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey.

Okay, I actually played a gig once for like a watch party for the premiere of... No way. Yes, and everybody wore a period piece costumes except for me

and it was weird. It was a little bit like a cult. How was that a gig? And they raised a lot of money for PBS. Well, that's good. Yeah. But why have modern jazz

on the Downton Abbey party? That was very weird. That's crazy. It was very strange. Why are you boxing me in? How you know it was modern jazz I was playing? So Downabby,

which I've seen all the way through Sorry about that. I love the theme song for that show, actually. Really? There's some hit moments on a theme on that theme song. That's some good lighting. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, what do we got today?

Does this have anything to do with what we're talking about? No, it does not. You guys know what I'm talking about in the theme? There's a moment. Okay. Yeah, and it's not like a period theme, as I recall. It's kind of modern. No, it's kind of modern.

Okay, so this, we have a question from one of our listeners, and we're switching places from the last couple days here because I think that you have such a great, you Adam have such a great concept and understanding of what this question's about. So we're just going to read it first. This is from Ben and he says I really enjoyed Adam's 10 minute take

on Barry Harris's diminished sixth system on the podcast. Oh, this was one of your solo ones. It was, yeah, yeah, yeah. It made something that I'd struggle to understand previously very easy to grasp. I was wondering if you might be able to do something similar for drop two chords, both how to construct them, practice them, and how to use them

meaningfully while playing. And I think that's great. It's so great to construct them, practice, and I love that you said using them meaningfully, because that's always a part of the process, not just about understanding the theory of it and being able to play them. How do you apply it meaningfully?

Yeah, no, that's good. And if you thought, Ben, if you thought that I made the Barry Harris thing easy to understand, this is going to be even easier. This might be a two-minute episode. Because if you understood the Barry Harris thing, then this is just a natural takeoff. Man, two minutes from now,

we're going to be back to analyzing PBS docudramas, my watch. That's right. So I will say something about the drop two. I mean, it's a great voicing concept, and for me, it's evolved over the years, especially watching you play it, because I know it's like, I don't think it's anything that you've

like particularly, you know, shed it on, I have to know every single drop two, but you kind of play it naturally in your tenths. And I've seen other great players, Kieser kind of plays it naturally, and he knows a lot about drop two, but he plays it more in the context of tense. And so that's the first thing I'll say, about this pen is this is really on the piano it's a way to play in tense and I think if you

think about it that way it can kind of fills in the rest of it right so but you don't mean actually playing a tenth between both hands so I mean the important parts are this and then this is not secondary it matters but really what you're getting out of it is this sound and when you hear people like Oscar Peterson play in a drop to style occasionally or even someone like Art Tatum would would play these things but he was always playing in the concept of tenths first right right he would start off playing tense and then fill in the chord and that's kind of how I think this got developed and then of course as most jazz musicians like to do we overanalyze it and put it in the theory and then everybody and then yeah and then everybody

thinks like oh it's just this all the time and I have to say like I don't really think it is I think it could be a number of things so so like anything I think that we would we would teach you like Like, you know, take with a grain of salt, figure out your own way of doing it. That's what all these masters did with it. You know, everybody has their own different way of approaching this. But for me, it's easiest, I think, if we come off of those George Shearing-style voicings, which I talked about in the Barry Harris thing, right, which is like a C major six block chord with the C on each octave.

This is the kind of easy way to get in the drop, too, right? Yeah. So 1-356 octave. 1-3-5-6 octaves. And are you thinking about the construction of it like that, specifically. Yeah, especially getting into it because it's easy to see because we know, because this isn't easy voicing. And if you know this kind of thing already, then it's easy to see it as, okay, I take the second to top note that, you know,

if we're going one, two, three, four, five. That's from the bottom or from the top down, right? One, two, three, four, five. If I take that two, and I drop it down an octave. And then I take what was the bottom note and I just leave it off. So a five note voicing, becomes a four-note voicing. Yeah. Open. But these two are connected and that this is the kind of

closed version of the voicing and this is the open version of the voicing. And that can be done if this is the closed version of that Barry Harris scale, then this is the open or the drop two version. Just like that.

And this is a great way to start, right? Because that's so easy to see. Yeah. The difference. C major 6, diminished. C major 6, diminished. C major 6, diminished.

C major 6, diminished. Yeah. but then it goes much, much deeper, and there's so much that you can do with it. But I would start there. If you kind of get that Barry Harris, and then again, it's just like the Barry Harris thing. It could be minor, you know.

Worked on the arpeggios of this. And then the more and more you get into this, the freer that you become, and there, I mean, you know, you can break this down forever and try to write things out and try to systematize it as much as possible. But, you know, I think you're,

ears are the ultimate judge. And if you play around with this, you're going to find that there are some things that are not so easily defined and systematized. And maybe you don't actually want to think about it like that. Yeah. So, for instance, you know, if I'm playing a 251 in C here, I'm not going to think about it in the, in the sort of, you know, Barry Harris, six diminish thing. I'm going to think about this D minor, the historian.

Like, I'm going to keep the middle notes the same. Really, I'm really thinking tense here. Yeah. And trying to fill in the chord. Yeah. With what I think sounds good. I might even put three notes in the middle if I think that sounds good. You know, I'm not going to be...

Cluster it up a little bit. Exactly. I'm not going to be beholden to this idea. I want to get it as close to, you know, in my hands as possible, but I want to make sure that what I'm playing sounds good to me. Yeah. It is creative to me. Man, play the ones the first ones you did before you just did.

This? No, no, no, before that. Oh. Yeah. Man, that's very much like, you know, WC kind of Woodwind voicing. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you can hear it. You know, you can hear it in block chords in a closed voice.

Yeah. You really get that, but... There. Nuage, image. Cé bon. These are just locked hands here, just... See la vie. You know?

And then, like, at the end of this 2-5, I did... Yeah. You recognize that? Oh, yeah. holdover from yesterday. Yeah, so this is the half hold diminished. Nice. Again, locked hands. Also sounds great, by the way. But drop two here I have. So again, you can even think about this as these like minor six chords. Yeah. One or two, are you thinking like go through that same descending thing with just the outside with the tense? Because when you said at the beginning,

you think about it as tense once you start to pull away. Would that be one way maybe to practice? Totally. Especially with this, you're going over the diminished scale. So this is a diminished scale in tense, right? And then to fill in the chord, I like this sound where I add in, like here I have G on the bottom and B flat on the top and I have B natural and E flat in the middle. And then just move that down in minor thirds.

Just those two notes. And then it gets fun when you start practicing this kind of, you know, you can practice this going up. Nice. Those sound really, really great. Yep. So that's kind of the beginnings for me of drop two. And like I said, Ben, think of it.

First, I think of it as tense and, you know, you're going to find things that sound really good to fill in in the middle. These are pretty standard, you know, pretty like straight down the middle. But good point of departure probably, right? Great point of departure. Yeah. Experimented with different scales. Experimented a lot with the melodic minor. Experiment with the diminished scales over diminished chords over, you know, the whole half and the half hole.

It seems like with the diminished there, you really get those. opportunities and like you were resolving to that big fat six nine I think major six nine yeah on that one but you've really got some things you could go up down whatever but you're going to be resolving somewhere you're going to be usually usually like there's a destination in mind and then you know the best test of this is to play a melody with it you know yeah find find a standard and be able to voice it now I actually didn't do a great job voicing it the challenge that can happen with block two which doesn't happen as much when you do the George Shearing style yeah the melody The melody is so strong on the journey shirt.

Right, right. It's the top and the bottom. So you really have to think about the voicing and how you voice it. The voicing of it. And by voicing of it, I mean what notes coming out. And if you're doing the melody, and again, this is where it could help

to not think about everything as locked hands and whatever. But think about tense. Because maybe I lay off some of the chords. Right. You know, and let... Yeah. Come through.

Yep. And that can be very helpful. I love that. Always think with the melody in mind when you're playing the melody. Absolutely. Well, that's cool. So drop two, does this lead to you being able to drop it like it's hot?

Drop it like it's hot. Bro, I do that. Is that part of it? All day, every day. Okay. You know about me? You know that about me? Come on, man.

That's how we do it. I didn't know if that was a separate technique. I got my shiny white shoes on that. I'm ready to go, man. But then drop it like it's hot. Cool. All right. Well, Ben, Ben, thank you so much for the question.

This was super interesting to me as well because it's definitely something that I occasionally kind of play, but I wanted to understand more. And so this is some fun ways for us to practice it. And I think I love the concept of really getting out of the locked in, like going to the outside, the same where we talk about practicing melodies and root movements. It's really not that different from this, although there's not necessarily the roots, and the tenth below is normally moving with the melody. But it's still that like outside to inwards.

And then we start to hear what we can put as you learn these. I think that's the way to go. I mean, and Ben, if you want to get deeper in this, you know, there's a lot of people who've written about this who know a lot more about it than me. and I encourage you to do your own research, but I think this is a good starting place for that. And the key to any of this, whatever we're talking about,

is always listen. That's right. Use your ears first. Absolutely. Cool. And then also, yes, so the last sentence of Ben's question, this is kind of funny.

Really enjoying the podcast makes me feel less alone in learning jazz piano later in life in a more desolate backwater of Canada. Oh, come on, buddy. He's known shade on his own country, which we're big lovers of Canada.

We're all about Canada. Oh, Canada. And it's not like America doesn't have its own desolate backwater. Exactly, which is 97% of our great nation, as it were. But yeah, thanks so much for the question. You can always go to where.

You'll Hear It.com. Go to you'll hear it.com. And leave us a question via voice memo or written. Yeah. Or you can... Go to your podcast app. Hit the old subscribe.

Maybe give us a share to your friends so we can get higher on that rankings list. We're trying to move up mainly for personal ego, but also for some business decisions as well. I think that's why we do anything that's right that's right um no we actually what it is is like we're doing the podcast this takes a fair amount of work um from the whole team here it's not just adam and i yeah our producer andrew we have an assistant producer just starting today right Alexis yeah no speaking of

andrew it does it takes a lot of work but especially when we say stuff like day yeah yep um absolutely that's just added three hours to his workload um but we We, yeah, no, look, we're doing the podcast. We're throwing the info out there. And so our only hope is that it gets into as many ears, all up in your ears, ear food. We want to get it to as many folks that are interested in that it can be helpful for. It's a great Roy Hargrove. Great record.

One of my favorites. Cool. And we have our ending tune today. This is from our... That's what Adam is serious about something. Okay. All right, guys. Let's all get on the same team now.

This is sent in by Christian Decker. Christian Decker, also one of our great transcribers. If anybody here is a member of an open studio chorus, you know that we have lots of killing transcription. We're giving too many transcripts. We're going to talk about that. We're over transcribed. We're doing it just right. But Christian Decker is a very talented person and sent in this tune pointing out.

All right. We'll hear it.