You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Adding Some Serious Spice

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

This episode Adam and Peter debunk that special 6th diminished sound we all know and love. Check out the video Here!Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Peter. What? It's one of your favorite episodes. Yeah, great. I'm so excited. Six to minute scale. Oh, actually, I am excited. Hey, I'm Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you listen to the You'll Hear podcast. Jazz. Explain. Oh, Peter. We're back where we belong. I was trying to, you know, I was trying to liven it up there. Yeah.

The intro, but. No, it was good. Because I know that these are not your favorite. No, actually they are. This is, well, no. Yeah, you're right. They're not my favorite. But I do like them.

And more importantly, our listeners like, we deliver entertainment, but we deliver education to. Sometimes we're able to combine the two. Today probably won't be that, but who knows? We'll let the end user be the judge of that. Edgatainment, you might say. We occasionally cross into edutainment,

which hopefully we will. But, you know, this is exciting. So we had a lot of fun the last two episodes. If you didn't get a chance to check those out, and this boring one and go directly to those. No, we did some blindfold. That's kind of old school, downbeat style. But not as stale and staggy as those.

Not as stale and staggy. This is all about the six diminished scale of chords made famous by Barry Harris. But really what this is about here, Peter, hold on to your beanie. It's about it's about borrowing from the diminished and from the six on the six diminished scale of courts. So. And maybe we'll have a link to, didn't you do a video about this recently? I did. Over on the YouTube.

If you haven't checked out Adams. videos and mine as well but over on the YouTube you can go to YouTube and just search Open Studio and check out our channel give us a like and a subscribe if you enjoy it but check out it's called triads that will melt

faces I believe that's a good one is the title of it yeah that's not about this particular thing yeah yeah what's the one that's about this I know Caleb will put a link to her I forget the time this is why I need to be informed but you can also check out best decade of jazz effort that's another one that's you know best decade of jazz oh you mean

your most recent just promote yourself bud that's great it's open studio yeah no we'll have Caleb put a link to the YouTube video that deals with this

but we also have been working over this on Open Studio Pro so shout out to my Open Studio Pro folks Bebop Chords for Beginners No that's Is that it?

No that's not Sorry I'm just looking at things that we've done lately Am I screwing up the show here man? You're killing the five here Give me a swoosh and the swoosh

will take us into improvement There we go Here we go So let's just talk a little bit about the basics of what the

six diminished scale of chords. So Bear hair is called this the scale of chords. The scale itself is easy enough. It's like a major scale with a key of F major scale, with a little half step between the fifth and six tones. Some people call that the major bebop scale. I call it an octatonic scale. It is an octatonic scale.

But here's the thing about this scale of chords is just from adding that extra tone. If we want to make a chord out of the scale by skipping a note, we get a nice little F-6 chord, right? Now, root position. And I have this as like a locked-hands voice thing. In my left hand, I have F. In my right-hand, I have A, C, D, and F. So you get a...

Oh, man, he already knows it. He knows... No, you got it. So if we move each one of these notes up the scale... Diatonically, just up this six-diminish scale, the next chord is a G-diminished. Full-diminish, right? Yeah.

If we do it again, the next chord, F6. If we do it again, B flat diminished. If we do it again, F6, if we do it again, D flat diminished. F6, diminished, six diminished, six diminished, six diminished. And what these diminished do really is it becomes a one, five, one, five. One, five. Right.

And if you don't, you know, if you don't understand that, there's plenty of, like, basics on the six diminished. But basically, exactly. exactly you have your f6 if you just put a c on any of these diminished it becomes like a c7 flat 9 right and if you put like a little tritone side you get a little ahead sorry sorry so here's but here's what we're talking about today is like as brilliant as this is if we wanted to voice melodies right right using this it works great yeah however we can borrow even when the melody is part of one or the other. So what do I mean by that? Like, so let's take a tune like Days of Wine and Roses, right? Right? So the melody is like C to A. And it kind of hangs on this A. And what you'll hear

players do, who are very familiar with this, like you can, of course, use an F6 to voice this, right? But what you could also do is borrow from any notes of the diminish. Yo, can I get some notes from you diminished? I'm just like a representative. of how that works. So the very first version of doing this would actually be to do this. Right? And then you resolve it to the six. So we're going from here I have in my, I'm just going to play the root of my left hand.

And I'm going to do a little closed voicing, C, D, F, and A, right, to voice that first. Right? And so by adding this borrowing of one of the notes of the diminished and then resolving it, we add this inner voice movement, right? Yeah. Now you can do that with one note. You can do it with two notes. How about this?

So here we're borrowing now E and G, like a F major nine, right? But if you think about it, Barry Harris would think about this as borrowing from the diminishing. But Peter, wait, it gets even better. You could borrow three notes. And then resolve it. So here is B-flat, D-flat, E, and A, right? So this is like a little C-7-9 couched in the F. Still with the F in the base.

All works. well by resolving it. That is borrowing. And so think about any situation, especially like if the melody is a third or a fifth on a major chord, it works so well. But even like on a minor chord, like if you think about alone together, you can borrow from the fifth from that diminished, right?

So a minor six diminished, which by the way, very closely related. So you can borrow, right, from like an A7 flat nine or an e diminished. how you want to think about it over that D. So it works on minor chords too. It even works on two chords. Like if you were to do... So what happened there? Right?

So this is autumn leaves, right? So normally, right, you would do like a C minor 7. What if you borrowed from its diminish, which would be like a B diminished, right? G7. So here I have, right, our root is C, our melody is E flat. In between, I'm putting a little B diminished chord. And then resolving that. to the E flat six,

which resolves nicely. And then why not do it on the one? Right? So this is where like borrowing underneath, right? So we're adding that like tension of the five to the one. It becomes addicting. Like you can really do this anywhere. Like any tune, you can throw in these like fives

wherever you have a little bit of space to just get them in there. Like the more I work on it, the more I'm like, all right, don't overdo it, buddy. Well, no, but it sounds like too. and because the way that the changes to autumn leaves go, once you start stacking them in a row, like it just sort of adds to the effect even more so than just doing it once and moving on

when you've got a progression of them. Totally. Right. I mean, like we did... Because it's going to be different one of the three diminished patterns each time. Each time it can be different. So what about Stella by Starlight, right?

Something that starts on a half diminished, right? Well, really, like Barry Harris thinks of this is like G-minous. So what's the 5 of G minor 6? D7? As long as you resolve it, right? So you put a little C diminished, E flat diminished. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Even here. Right? You're just adding this extra layer. I mean, you can literally do it the whole way, right? Isn't that fun? Yeah. I'm giving Peter some juice here.

Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's borrowing. I'm sorry, can you start at the beginning? Yeah. The Zinich scale is, no. That is like an amazing thing. Just that little thing.

We don't even have to go that deep because that alone. Remember, that's where we started. That's the part I never thought about is in relation to that scale. I always thought about it as like half step below or the five of or even the tritone of where you're going like, you know. Or even anything that's on that same, you know, minor thirds diminished cycle that you could use from that. But I never actually thought about it all. with that scale. Yeah.

No, it's, it's, I mean, it's an amazing resource. So an amazing way to think about voice leading, functional harmony, you know, creating movement. That's what we're really doing. Like we were working on today, we were working on all the things you are using this concept, right? So F minor 7, that's like an A flat six sound, right? So you can use, you know, and so you can use this concept, just moving one note. You know, to create like whatever. Please is such great intermelodic movement.

Totally. You can start and then rumble. So you can do that on every chord and it just creates this little tension and release. I bet Bill Evans would love to have known about this. I'm sad that he never learned that. He was just being held back by lack of knowledge. He was so close to play.

No, but don't let the, like, information overwhelm you. Like, you literally just take this one step at a time. Yeah. What is the five of whatever chord you're on? Yeah. is available to you to add tension even if like the the core changes don't have to say g7 over c minor 7 like don't worry about that you get to add this as a as a spice i think too just having that mindset of that like when you go to another kind of subbed in chord or another area

like so back to the f major if you're like um that you don't yeah you're thinking about it and hearing it as the five and then with that flat nine or any the different permutations of it but you don't, don't be so, let's not be so quick to go to the actual root to do that. We still want to hear it and we can't because it's a melodic thing, whether it's only inner voices or at the top. So the root stays here. Yeah, you don't have to, you don't have to tell the bass player about it.

Yeah. The root stays on F. Exactly. And you know what, classical players are good about this because when they look at harmony, it confused me at first because it's always like, they don't think about the root being on the bottom. It's like what's being built up from what's being played on the bottom, you know. Yeah, absolutely.

And then the actual harmony. And I think that for this, because it is something that once you understand the concept and start to hear it and get it in your hands, that you can pull out as a really primarily a melodic device. I mean, it's a harmonic concept. But it's melodic. But it's a lot. It feeds the melodic ideas. Well, Fred Hirsch has done a lesson on this on his open studio course. And when he's doing it, I mean, he's literally like.

Oh, using it. Yeah. As counterpoint. Exactly. Like it's a way to build tension in this. But kind of outlining some of that harmony. Exactly. You don't have to do big, thick chords.

It can literally just like. one additional note, but you have this, like this little idea to build tension melodically. Yeah. Oh, it's great. It's great stuff. Well, man, way to break it down, bruh. And we'll link to the YouTube video if you want to see some visuals of Adam doing that as well. That's what we do.

That's what we do. All right, Peter, thanks very much. If you want to, by the way, join these groups we're talking about, go to open studio, jazz.com slash pro. But don't go there if you're not at the level of Herbie Hancock or above. Well, no, could you be a little lower? Nobody's at that level. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the Herbie Hancock from Chicago.

This guy we know not here who's never played piano. Hubert Hancock, yeah. Hubert Hancock, exactly. Well, until next time, you'll hear it.