You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - All About Triadic Chromatic Concepts

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Today, Peter and Adam answer a listener's question on creating altered melodic ideas while improvising without it sounding like a random lick.Open Studio has a brand new course from renowned pianist Helio Alves! Brazilian Jazz Piano shows you the authentic way to play Brazilian jazz styles including samba, bossa nova, baião, and more. Go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/brazilian-jazz-piano for more info.Also new from Open Studio: get our official practice journal! This is the perfect tool to improve your playing, and includes 52 weeks for a full year of notes. Learn more at https://store.openstudiojazz.com/product/practice-journal/28Like those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet 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, Peter. Hey, man. How many ways can you connect your triads? Let's see. Inside, outside, top side, bottom side, through, I don't know. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast.

Daily Jazz Advice, coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored by Open Studio. Go to Open StudioJadio.com to check out all of our courses. We've got tons of great courses. hashtag courses I just want to see if Andrew's paying attention and yeah Peter's got courses

I've got courses now Jeffrey Keyes just got courses Alves has a brand new Brazilian I was gonna say you didn't seem excited now you're getting excited I like that setting it up

Elio Alva Rule of 3 has a great new Brazilian jazz piano course you gotta check that out I mean I learned so many styles I had no idea what they were and then I heard them I was like oh yeah that

and you can also not only we have great artists like Elio Alves we have some products now. Did you know that? Like the official Open Studio Practice Journal. Yeah.

Hey, Ryan, go grab one of those practice journals. Yeah. We're going to put it on camera. It's a poo. It's not a boojo. It's a pro. It's a prude. It's not, if you don't practice with it,

we're going to send Kujo to get you. It's a Prajo. A Prajo. A Prajo. We're making this up as we go. Yeah, we have no idea. No, Ryan's going to fetch one right now. They're absolutely beautiful.

Shout out to Clara of who designed the cover. Yeah. Did a great job. Shout to Ryan for getting all up in the camera, man. Thank you, Ryan. And he gave a little, oh, there's Dan. We got one, Dan.

Thank you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everybody just jumps when we, whenever we speak. It's great. Projo, Prado. Bring it, bring it. Urban. No.

Bourbon. Old Granddad. So, it's, first of all, the size is just perfect. I love the way you're holding that in your bare paws there, but that's beautiful. This is so difficult for me. So, so difficult. Okay, this is a brilliant welcome from me. Do you ever read books to your church?

children at night? Yeah, every night. And you, like, hit them with your bare paws as you're opening the book by accident. Yeah, they're terrified of me. Go to tuck them in. So it starts out with, like, a log for tunes to learn, for concepts to learn. But then we get into 52 weeks where if you're on YouTube here, you can kind of see. Yeah.

You know what? I can do a little audio description of it. You've got scales. Yep. You've got tunes. Ooh, all your keys. You've got rhythms. Monday through Sunday.

We don't do it. You know what, jazz doesn't take a day off, does it? horrible description. So there's like a scales category with the days and then all of the keys like that you can tick off. Like I said. Like I said. I didn't say the tick off. So you can keep track of the scales you're working on, the tunes you're working on the rhythm

and then you can keep track of what keys you've hit that week. You can set goals. You can keep notes. It really, actually you know, it kind of popped off this weekend because of how cool it is. Yeah. So that's the Pradio, the practice journal official Open Studio Practice Journal. So you can check that out at Open Studio Jazz. And

what are we talking about today? We got a question. We always do. You got a question from email. This is from Austin. Why don't you go ahead and read Austin's question. Okay. So this is from one of our premium members, which we don't officially accept them by email, but we've been known to from our premium members.

It's all good. Hey, guys, I love the stuff you've been putting out lately. A lot of, thank you. A lot of helpful information, helpful information, and I'm really digging the user recording submissions. Also, I dig the new website design. I have a question maybe you can help with. How do you approach creating altered, melodic ideas when improvising.

I know about diminished whole tone scales, diminished scales, and other things like that, but how do you properly incorporate those into your improvisation without it sounded like a random lick that doesn't fit with the story you're trying to tell? I know you've covered a similar topic before, but any advice on the right context of those sounds? Who to listen to in order to expand that part of my vocab

and anything else you have to offer would be great. All right, Austin. So why don't you take this one? Yeah, so you know what? I was, for some reason, I was under the impression that he was talking more about out stuff, but it sounds to me like he's just talking about altered ideas. Is that what you're getting out of this? Yeah.

I don't know why the title is suggested for playing out. Come on, Andrew. Maybe playing out, like, about, you know how they used to say, like, have you been playing out much lately? We think of that as like, are you screwing up, like, the changes and playing random avant-garde stuff? But people used to mean playing out, like, going to sessions and stuff. Yeah. Well, you know what? I had a little spiel prepared about playing out, and Austin's question is about altered.

I think we could do a little bit of both. Okay. They both kind of work over dominant chords. So specifically, like, an altered sound, which is I think, like, you talk about the diminished scale and the whole tone scale, but that's not really an altered sound. Altered melodic ideas when improvised.

Oh, that's how we got to the out place. Yeah. Okay, altered melodic ideas. Sort of like, I think he's talking about playing out, right? I thought I knew what he was talking about, but you got me totally confused, right? I'm super confused right now. Spun it on my head, man.

We're just going to go with what? Let's talk about how to play a blues. How about that? All right, Austin. We're going to cover how to play all. These are definitely altered melodic ideas. Because this is George Garzone's triadic chromatic concept. And this is where I was going with this originally.

But this is a way to play out without connecting to the chord at all, which is a really difficult, challenging thing to start with. But it can be very freeing once you kind of get it. And the beauty about this concept is. is it starts off very simply, and then it gets really, really complex, the deeper you go. And it's basically we're connecting triads

via a half step. And there's only one rule. The rule is they have to be connected via a half step, and you can't do the same inversion twice in a row, right? It does not matter what notes are in the chord, which is why this is the first way you can really get out of...

Yeah. Pete's face right now. It's terrified. It's not the melodic idea. It's the M-A-Odio key station that's got to be terrified. Oh, yeah. Okay, so let's take an example here. So if I want to just start with, I'll just pick a random try-t.

I'll pick E. So E, G-sharp, B. And then I can either go up a half-step or down a half-step, and I'll go up to F. And so I'll do the triad of F in the second inversion. Right? And then from this A, I can either go up or down. I'll go down, and then I'll do G-sharp.

Now I could do E, but that's the same inversion. So that's against the rules. So I'll go down in A-flat. Right? So E, F, A-flat. So we've linked three triads. Oh, he's putting in this practice journal to practice. We've linked three triads, three major triads.

Oh, I did it wrong. And we got this really great sound. And you could just keep going on this. It gets really challenging. especially now when you realize that you can switch tonalities.

You have major triads, minor triads, diminished triads, and augmented triads. So from the E, if I wanted to do instead of F, let's say I wanted to do C augmented.

Ooh, now we're getting into some colors. And after that, C augmented, which ends on a G sharp, maybe I'll go to A and I do an A diminished. Look at that. I hate A, though. Ugh.

Yeah. But so this is like a simple way at first to really get outside of the triads. And I remember now why I picked, or outside of the harmony. And I remember now, Austin, why I picked this for you because you would said, you were feeling like, you know, when you did these altered melodic ideas, that it was just felt random and that it wasn't very confident. And the reason why I picked this was because this exercise, trying to do these sort of disjointed,

not having anything to do with the tonal centers of the harmony, forces you to really have to groove and think about the feel and the sound and also have the confidence to pull it off because if you just sort of like like nambi-pambi your way through these it sounds terrible. You have to like just sell it every way.

You have to be grooving. They have to groove or else it's going to sound again weak because it's totally non-functional harmony. Yeah. So I've been doing these for years and years and years. And you know what? They come out in my playing every so often. It's a weird thing, because I don't have that kind of relationship with playing outside the changes.

Someone, another musician who's maybe more, like apt to do that. You know, you know me. I like a lot of inside baseball. Right. I like a sweet. Oh, blues. You're a St. Louis cat. I'm a St. Louis guy.

But this will come out when I'm feeling that way. When I need something like this, I can pull that off, and that feels great. So I would start with that. Just start by linking triads by a half step. Make sure you don't repeat the same inversion twice. Yeah. And then start getting more complicated by doing, you know major chords minor chords diminished chords

augmented chords you can even then start you know instead of going literally in a linear fashion in a linear fashion you know you can start breaking it up like that that triad is the f triad instead of up I go and I'm in a different place

you know it's awesome no that's great and I think that the whole thing about how do you know he's asking too about how do you not make it sound like a pre-plan lick. This is the same for anything that we talk about that's either pattern-based or playing out or using this scale or learning this lick or whatever. It's like always the question and the fear. Rightfully so.

It's like you don't want it to sound contrived. Right. And it's, you know, I think it's very simple because you can apply the same concept, you know, to this situation as you can to many others that we've talked about. And that is practicing this kind of regimented. You even, like, said, it's rules. I can't do that. I can't, you know, like with this system.

Yeah. Practice and listen, number one, listen as you're practicing so that you're incorporating this, getting that muscle memory going and learning what these sounds is. And then never, I don't want to ever hear anybody saying, I'm going to go into the Adamanus, George Garzon, what is it called? Triatic. Chromatic concept on a solo. Yeah.

Let it come out naturally. That's right. Trust the process. Trust the system. That's how it doesn't sound contrived. Then if you never plan it, so what it is is people feel like, oh, I bought this cute new dress and I got to wear it. Right. You know, yeah, wear it at the right occasion, though.

Don't wear it to the grocery store at 7 in the morning. Let it happen. Just because you're excited about it. Every time I've tried to force this into a solo, it's a total, like, catastrophe. Yeah, it just doesn't because it doesn't land, right? But on the flip side, every time I just let it happen as it wants to happen, it's always killing. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, and I think that that's a lot of stank face from this.

A lot of stank face. If properly apply. If not, you can get some stink face, which is not a good look. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is good. Great stuff. And so I think, too, because he was asking about scales and you didn't really address that, that's okay. That's okay.

But the idea would be maybe these are things if you deal with them in kind of an organic way that you can link up with scales in your melodic playing, right? Isn't that allowed? I mean, I know not for practicing this thing. Yes, absolutely. So if you are playing, you know, an altered scale thing. thing. Oh, the key station feels great.

Like, that's... I think I made it for bare pause, buddy. Yeah. I mean, that's the great thing about dominant chords. And especially, like, if you're setting up with an altered scale, then I can start going

into tons of other, like... And that's not altered scale. That's the triadic chromatic concept. What I love about, like, anytime you play out and you use the, like, it's like the dichotidic. me of the most solid, easy to understand for anybody melodic concept, which is a triad.

Like that is such a foundational sound, any of the trials. Oh, yeah. But now you're applying it to playing out is a great way kind of entry point to get there, like to bring the audience in. Like when you take two really out concepts, like, you know, it's very difficult. Like, say, playing out of time and then playing out of the harmony. and you have to link that up with your melody. You know what I mean?

It's like the triad might be the only thing that could pull that off. Oh, yeah, the triad you can literally just... Yeah, it gives people something to hold on to. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's in it or not. So, I mean, this is really why it works. And yes, you can link it up with any scales, with the whole tone.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, you go up and then bam, come down with the triads. It's a great way to get out of it. And like I said, it doesn't matter what the notes are on the chord. It's just that, that shape. of the triad and stringing them together helps solidify it. Oh yeah, we like it. Good stuff. All right. Thanks, awesome, for the question. Um, folks can, can folks ask questions? I feel like we're restricting now. I feel bad.

I know, yeah. I mean, I love our premium members. Yeah, well, everyone could become a premium member. That's right. You could go to open studio jazz.com slash memberships, I think. Is that where it is? You can also go to you'll hear it.com. Oh, that would be easier. Yeah. You'll hear it.com. If only we had a website for this enterprise. I was going to say, go to the podcast page and there's a way to sign up for the premium support the podcast you get the extra bonus content at the piano with the PDFs you get the archive

people love the PDFs man Shabang yeah yeah yeah so check that out check out our other offerings and if you get a chance give us a rating or review we haven't been pining for those lately because we got a little bit of brushback I shielded you from it your young virgin ears I didn't want you to hear about it because I know you're sensitive cat so see you play sensitive songs

and I didn't part Part of my job here is to take the heat, but we did get a little bit of brushback. We stopped. Stop asking for ratings or reviews. So we stopped. Who's going to be a busing? Non-premium members, apparently. I was going to say, yeah. But basically, just give us a thumbs up.

Or, you know what, give us a thumbs down if you don't like what's happening. But then again, why are you here? We're not forcing you to be here. If you don't like it, leave. That wasn't very nice to me, was it? I like the dichotomy of your beautiful, friendly chords and my mean comments, man. I like scoring your end of show rants. This is great. Good. Well, until tomorrow.

You'll hear it.