You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Building Rootless Left Hand Voicings

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

The Keystation might sound cheesy, but these voicings sure don't. Today, Peter and Adam show you how to make your own rootless voicings.Coming soon to Open Studio: Adam's doing a whole course on left-hand voicings as Volume 2 of his Jazz Piano Basics series. You can purchase Volume 1 - Lead Sheet Breakdown here: https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-basics-lead-sheet-breakdown.For more on the Root, Shell, Pretty concept mentioned in this episode, read our blog post on it: http://youllhearit.com/5-easy-jazz-piano-chords-that-sound-great/Like 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, Pete. Hey. Do I sound like Jagal Kyle? No. I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you.

Hey, cheers, buddy. Happy vacation to me. Yeah. I'm on vacation right now. It must be nice. Except I have to go to work. You call this work? Speaking of vacations, didn't we do an episode one time when we talked about all your,

oh no, we made fun of you because you were at Disney World with your family. Yeah, why would you be doing? I don't know. Because we were jelly. Oh, you know what it was? It's like I went to Montreal. You hear that rhyme? We were jelly.

I had a couple of vacations in a row once, just by happenstance. I don't even know how it happened, honestly. But this time, no, I'm not actually on vacation. I did take the weekend to go fishing with my family, which was awesome, down in Rockbridge, Missouri. Shout out to Rockbridge. Got a new sticker for my new computer once I get my new computer going on Rockbridge, Missouri. Excellent trout fishing. Okay, hopefully just Rockbridge, Missouri, excellent trout fishing.

There's not a flag as part of that. No, it's a rainbow trout flag. Okay, good. And that's it. Yeah, it's a bunch of trout nerds down there. Nice. Among other things. But then I'm taking the rest week off.

I'm doing some string ranging for the great Kennedy Holmes. Yes, that's going to be nice. The, I was just thinking the trout nerds you said, did you spread the love about our podcast? Not necessarily that they'd be interested in this, but somebody down there might want to, sorry, I'm having to take my headphones off because it's loud AF in here. Yeah. Oh, that's better, Ryan. Yeah, there you go.

I mean, that's overkill a little bit. Split the difference. Split the difference. But perhaps someone down there would like to start a trout daily podcast. Oh, I'm sure there's some kind of trout podcasts going on. What do you know about noodling? I know not to do it on either music or trout. First of all, it doesn't work on trout, but it doesn't work on catfish.

But that's done down in that area a little bit. In the Ozarks, man. I'll tell you what. Were you in the Ozarks? We were in the Ozarks. We were in the Ozarks. And the Ozarks are flipping beautiful, man. They get a bad rep from all the TV shows and the meth and the crime and whatnot.

Other than that, there is, it's incredible. And such, there are really cool people down there doing cool things, and it's really just a gorgeous part of the country that gets kind of a bad rap. And I'm just giving my love to the Ozarks. Ozarks are awesome. And especially when you're not actually on the Lake of the Ozarks, which is where the show, well, the show is filmed in Georgia. Yeah, but it's supposed to be on the Lake of the Ozarks. Yeah, the Lake of the Ozarks is whatever.

It's got some pretty parts, too. Yeah, but just the Ozarks, people only think of whatever it is. Not Dollywood. What's down there? Branson. Branson. Yeah. Which is in the Ozarks.

Yeah. And the lake of the Ozarks, but the Ozark Mountain Range, which is one of the oldest mountain range. For sure. You know. Yeah. It's beautiful. Gorgeous.

Gorgeous. Even like down into Arkansas and stuff. A lot of old granddad's down there. There are a lot of old granddad's drinking bottles of old granddad, perhaps. Yeah. So we got the key station out. We did our little witty banter intro. That was good.

Tomorrow, you know what? I might come back at you tomorrow. So tune in. Are you going to be tuning in? I mean, I have to. You get a text on vacation? What's up? Yeah, so everybody wants to know where I'm at on my vacation.

I'm like, I had to go to work. Daily Jazz advice doesn't cease just because Adam wants to go trout fishing. That's right. That's right. Okay, so today I wanted to talk about, I wanted to drop kind of a pre-drop of a course that's going to be coming out in the next couple weeks. So a couple weeks ago, I launched a mini course called Jazz Piano Basics. I hadn't heard of that. You hadn't because it's done really well.

It's been really popular with some of our. I'm being facetious. You talk about it every day. Well, I'm very proud of it. It's the only contribution. When you were fishing, words I didn't have to hear that was nice. Well, no, so it's going to be like this.

It's going to be a series of mini courses. The first one was all about lead. It was called Lead sheet breakdown. It was all about how to interpret a lead sheet. Go check that out on Open Studio, jazz.com. But I'm going to make another one, like the follow-up. And it's not really about lead sheets. This one, it's more about left-hand voicings,

all kinds of left-hand voicings for piano. Just the basics of what every working pianist ought to know, you know we'll cover things like fourth voicings rooted voicings a little bit of stride even maybe we'll see about that clusters will be in there all kinds of just straight ahead to avant-garde to out stuff what about job two you're going to cover that that's that's two hands bud oh it is yeah maybe that's going to be part of the two-hand course two-hand voicing course so this should be good because I think this is um I mean we get a lot of recurring questions which is fun because it really helps us focus in on the areas that you know folks are looking for helping but this is you know left-hand is always coming up.

Always coming up. And there's a couple of easy things to remember. So today I thought we would talk about just how to create basic but good sounding to, sorry, left-hand voicings in a rootless position, right? So we don't have the root on the bottom. I like that too. It's always nice to kind of frame the discussion with a little bit of restriction, because that's a good way to practice it too, right?

And these were, for me, some of the first left-hand voicings I learned from a real jazz. a real jazz teacher. And I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people. And I probably wish I would have learned some more rooted voicings first, you know, some solo piano stuff first. But this is what my first teacher taught me straight away. Okay. And so I'll just do this concept that I've been doing forever. So it's really easy. So we start, we'll do a 251 because you can kind of see some voice leading, which is, as we know, important for any voicing. A voicing doesn't exist in a vacuum. Right. And we want to remember a lot of times I see, I think people know. the voice leading is important,

but then for some reason they're only thinking about it when they're doing like four-part writing or two-handed voicing or bigger stuff, saxophone section. But even down to two-note voicing. For sure. In fact, that's how you build up your ears so you can start to hear some of this stuff automatically. That's right. So we'll do a 2-5

in E-flat. I like doing an E-flat because it's kind of a nice range in the keyboard that you can do either inversion of these that will do. Even on the key station? Even on on the P station. Nice.

Sorry. I'll stop doing that now. So we'll start, though, by doing the very first thing you want to do with any voicing, and that's finding the shell. Level one. Level one here. Our 251 in E-flat is, of course, F-minor 7, B-flat 7, E-flat major 7. So for that F-minor-7, we find the shell.

In this case, we'll do the seventh on the bottom and the third on the top, the E-flat and the A-flat. be as opposed to the third on the bottom and the seventh on top, which would be your only other option. Right. Exactly right. So from here, just like any other voicing, we have the shell, we want to add some color notes, right? So we'll add on this one, I think,

what sounds great is the fifth and the ninth. So from the bottom up on this F minor 7, I have E flat, G, A, flat, C. Here's how it sounds with the F. Luscious key station. You might need to bang that low F as hard as you are there. It's angry. There you go.

So that's a good voicing. You could also do, instead of C, you could do B flat. You could do the 11th. That's amazing. You're going down one whole stuff from the top. Such a different kind of sound, though. It is. It's so modern.

Yeah, it's more modern. It's a little bit more like pensive. I don't know. There's something less happy about it for some reason. I think it's like the cluster there. and there is super valuable. So either one of those is good with either the C on the top or the B flat on top.

So there's our first F minor 7. For the B flat 7, all we need to do, really all we need to do, and I play this voicing all the time, is move that E flat down to D. Yeah. I have D, G, still that cluster, G, A, A, and C. The G now becomes the 13 and the C now becomes the 9 of B flat. And I think play those just that change from the 2 to the 5 with only the shell.

Because that's really the foundation, like, of hearing that. And I think when people will be able to hear, you still wouldn't, and then when you play the outside, the whole voicing, you want to still hear that show. Because I think, you know, and go back to the shell with the perfect fourth, that, if you can understand the voice leading of the, and you can hear that, and then you hear everything else around it, then you'll have a foundation that you can really take to a lot of different keys with these voicings.

That's right. Okay, so now the one chord, we do the shell, we do the seventh and the third, and then we'll add the ninth and the 13th of E flat. Your color notes. The color notes. And in fact, I'm giving a little color commentary about the color notes.

This is really shell and pretty. We've talked about root shell pretty. This is really shell and pretty notes. Two shell, two pretty. Maybe we can, let's link below, Ryan, to our root shell pretty five great chords that sound jazz chords, because that's a good,

especially if this is feeling a little bit advance we'll hear this over the airwaves, as it were, that'll kind of hit some of this to lead you up to this. So the thing to remember for this is we have the shell, the third and the seventh, and then all we want to do from there is add pretty notes, right? The 9th, the 11th, the 13th, the 5th. So let's take the same 251 progression in E flat,

and we'll do it in a different inversion. Instead of having E flat on the bottom and A flat on the top for the top for the shelf for that F minor 7, we'll do, like you mentioned, A flat, and then E flat on the top. And this is actually more of a comfortable range for me. especially when I'm soloing if I have room. On the key station.

Yeah, on anything, but especially the key station. Yeah. So we have our shell here, the third, the seventh here. Here's how it sounds with a root. Yep. Right. So from here, I want to add the ninth and the 11th. I love this voice.

Okay. B six. F. Yep. Okay. From here, we have the B-flat 7, and we wouldn't, to the other B-flat-7 voicing, right? That's just bad voice leading.

To go from here, down to there. The easiest thing to do is just like we move that E-flat below on the first inversion, we just move that E-flat down. So we could keep that B-flat there, but how about we go up a half step? So we have, again, from the F-minor 7 is A-flat, B-flat, E-flat, G.

And the B-flat is A-flat, B natural, D, G. But that's what you actually want to do as you're practicing. For sure. In the privacy of your own abode. Privacy. Yeah, it's important, though. You think you can hear something,

but until you can sing it, you're not really hearing it, you know? That's true. And what's the name of the podcast? You'll hear it. And number one. Listen. That dude's on vacation, but his mind is always there, man. Always here.

Always there. Okay, so we're here from the B-flat 7. So, okay, we need the shell for the E flat for the one, right? So obviously from here it's G and D, or is it? Because in this instance, I think the shell should be a third, instead of a third and a seventh, which is G and D, a third and a six. And this is kind of one of the only exceptions to the shell, always being the third and seventh rule, right?

Right. On a major chord, oftentimes the shell can be a third and six. And how do we decide, which is going to be? Usually by the melody. or by voice leading. Or by whatever sounds better. Or by whatever we think sounds better. Yeah.

Like that... But whatever sounds better is inevitably based on the voice leading. Based on the voice leading, based on the melody. Like we say, I say melody because that's what the major six chords function is. Yeah.

Oftentimes, you know, on the tonic of a tune, the melody will end on the tonic. Mm-hmm. Right? So if we have a major seven chord underneath that... Mm. It gets us this funky little...

Yeah. That's a funky. little drop two there. Minor nine. So it actually sounds better to do the six. And so again, singing these things, both the funky way of those inner voice,

if you can start singing these inner voices as you play, that's how you're going to start to learn. And you know, there's nothing wrong with like flat. It's just a different sound. It's a different sound. And there'll be a time for it,

but you do want to be able to hear it, play it, sing it so that you can, you know, put it into practice. Okay, so our shelf for the E flat is going to be G and C, right? The third and the six. So we need to add two,

other color notes, I'm going to add the ninth, the F. And I'm going to add the fifth. Or, ooh, instead of the fifth, what if I did the sharp 11? I think it's nice. Yeah. To me, when you added the fifth, it didn't take away, but from any of the other, I mean, obviously the Sharp 11 changed the tonality. So that's more of just a personal choice and an option that folks would have.

But when you added the fifth, it didn't take away, but it didn't really add. It doesn't really add. I mean, the fifth never really does. Yeah. You could do the sixth and the seventh. Yeah. I like that sharp 11. And there's nothing ugly about the fifth.

It's just kind of there. You know, or you don't have to be so strict with everything else to be four notes. You could just do G, C, and F. That's right. They get that great symmetry of the fourth voicing do. Even if you're going, like voice leading wise, if you're going from a four note voicing to a three-note voicing, how many, choral pieces do you see where two voices will end up on the same note for a brief period of time? You're not losing, and the way that we hear that, both as players and more importantly as the listener,

you're not hearing that as a lost voice. You're hearing two of the voices converging into the same place. Because it really goes down to what is the sort of sonic resolution that makes the most sense. And sometimes that is them going to the same place. On the piano, we can't really see that. You know, the guitar, maybe you could play it on two different strings, I don't know, or whatever. And certainly, you know, choir, which when we talk about, voicing that's the best way to understand for sure any kind of voice that's that's why we say sing these things as you go I mean you could see it on the piano in say like Bach fugues or three-part inventions oh if you're doubling it happens all the time

where you'll see the voices come together right you know because that's what was written for the organ so that you'd have a different manual you could you could have a different manual if you want right but but even just the idea of it of those two voices coming together it's totally acceptable this is great stuff speaking of manuals I think you should make a manual to this whoa that's gonna be volume two That's what I'm saying. Jazz Piano Basics Volume 2, left-hand voicings.

This will be a part of it as will like cordal voicings, fourth voicings, rooted voicings, clusters. What else did I promise? GPS. Oh, guided practice sessions. Can we do that on this? You're painting me into a box now.

I'm sorry. We could do guided practice sessions. I think so. Because it's been popular. I think that this is an area. It might not intuitively feel like that's where it would go, but actually you got to think about

think about little baby Adam. Little Adam Manis when he was in a diaper and wasn't so adept at this. You could really use a little guy to practice. I could have used it. Like now you can play this stuff, but like really, and that's, I think sometimes people have problems with left-handed voicing and two-handed voicing and just voices in

general because they don't put in the time. It feels like, oh, I've got that voicing. Yeah. So I don't need to practice it. Okay, maybe they'll practice it in all keys. But after that, they're like, I know that voicing. But this type of thing of going through a progression and a 251 is certainly just level one, well, really a 5-1, just sort of level one.

But going through a progression is the way that you could practice this and having a little bit of guidance in that and getting that discipline of actually going through these. We'll start to get folks because I noticed that, you know, when I was adding left-handed voicings either from transcriptions or things that I would see, pianists do or just stuff that I would discover sounds that I liked, they didn't incorporate in the same way that a line would into my plane. I think partly because, you know, our ears, just like any other, any listener is naturally gravitates towards what's on top. So hearing these inner voice and stuff is harder. It's actually harder than just hearing a single line or a two notes up in the right hand. Totally. Treble area or whatever. So give them a shed and look out for jazz piano basics, volume two, left-hand voicing's coming to a theater near you.

Oh, I wish it was in a theater. No, it's just going to be. Oh, that would be a lot, though, wouldn't it? Would that be too much? Yeah, a little bit. And also impractical. Bring your key station with you to the Tivli Theater and watch Adam Annis on the big screen. Could get ugly.

And HD. Could get ugly. That'd be fun. All right. Well, I was about to say until tomorrow, but we need to talk about, we got a song, don't we? We do a song. Hold on, stall. Stall.

Okay, we're going to just do a little bit of umshap. I don't have the key station from it, so I'm just going to do a little rhythmic. I could do a little. No, I got it. Okay, so this is our listener tune today. I'm going to stole a little bit. My brother Adam. What's going on, Ryan, singing the blues.

Hold on. Andrew might have started this tune already. So this is, we're going to. to listen to Street Beat from the Brass Monkey Man. This was sent in to us by our listener, Kevin Stevens. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks, Kevin. Yeah.

And until tomorrow, you'll hear.