You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Chroma-Dramatics

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Adam and Peter drop some knowledge about how to use chromatic progressions to add some drama to our playing!Check it out 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, Adam. Yeah. Cromatics, first thing. Free association. I'm for them. You're for them. Yeah. Okay.

What else? What else? It's a little claustrophobic because they're so close together. They are close together. Let's get into it. Okay. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Mark.

And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Jazz. Explain. We really can't explain what we were just talking about. Yeah, people could know what just happened. Okay. That got dark, man. But we're not here to go dark.

We're here to go close. Close. Not close to darkness. No. Close to other notes. as in half steps, right? Even other chords as in half step, because we've been...

Maybe we should just show instead of... Yeah, give me a little taste. Give me a little taste there. That's chromatic. Chromatic scales. Right. But we're talking today about chromatics, but specifically,

or mostly, in voicings, right? In voicings and within chord progressions, specifically. When do you use them? How do you use them? Everything you ever wanted to know. Exactly. Like, what are they?

Where do you use them? Why do you use them? I think the why is a pretty, important question we can hit on here. But we have a couple of examples that we can maybe discuss. Cool. So Peter, you want to start it off? What's your first thought about using chromaticism within a chord

progression? So the idea here is we have a chord progression. Do you have an example maybe of a tune or something? Yeah, yeah, I got a couple. What tune are you going to use? Oh, I don't know. But I was just thinking like a like a 251 introduction that I always hear as, it always reminds me of

Nat King Cole, because I don't even remember the tune but there's a great string arrangement. It's just a string. playing and they start. I think it's chestnuts. Oh is that chestnuts? Okay. You know, something like that. But basically it's a two B5 minor or whatever key is doing. I think it's yeah, A flat. And then to a five, maybe to a three, six, whatever. But the whole idea is it's like you can go two. So to be clear here, what Peter's doing. But I'm not actually doing any chromatic. You're not doing anything chromatic there. That's just a two five and a flat. Yeah. Right. Going to a flat major. So B5 minor seven, E flat seven to A flat major. Now where does the

chromatic. So we're starting from below, which is a little unusual because a lot of times we're thinking chromatic starting from above or shifting to above. So like a domino chord below, a major chord below? Chromatic. Everything is chromatic. So there's no diatonic movement. It's exactly a half step. Look, chromatics are always based upon half steps, right? The chromatic scale, play it, love it, learn it, right? Learn it, yeah. So I take the voicing that I would use on the B-flat minor. This is very basic root, shell,

and five, which is normally a no-no, but it sounds good. That sounds great. And so basically I'm just going A minor seven below to the B-flat-7. And then if I wanted to keep it going, for fun, I could go below. So that would be A-minor to B-flat-minor, same voicing. And then I'm going to actually up to an E-flat suss, but I go to a D-sus. That's below, above and below. That technique of using the half-step below, it's not as much talked about as what we'll talk about next,

which is from above. But from a half step below, it gives everything a nice lift. Like, you feel, it feels very buoyant, obviously, because you're,

like you're just going. Notice dynamically, too, you're sort of phrasing, you're not like, no, right? You're sort of phrasing into your target here,

which is a loaded word, but target of the, of the second chord, you know. Right. So it's like, yeah, and then kind of

where else you, go whether you you have choices like where it doesn't have to be strictly chromatic which is fine you can jump back I mean I know we're talking about chromatic today but the other flip side

of that is always diatonic stuff so if you think about the B flat minor or A flat major with this voicing we move it around diatonically right but chromatic very different same voicing the combination I think is always interesting as long as the melody

kind of leads things. So let me ask you question. It's okay. So that if I'm doing a 2-5 and A-flat here, then I can, you know, for two, three, four. Every time, right? You do it all the time? Once you start it, you have to keep doing it. No, no. Ocontrere, Montreire, as they would say in Paris. Okay. In fact, you definitely want to, like, find those opportunities to leave the chromatic or even make some skips. You might still be chromatic, but you're not setting it up as like an endless robotic kind of a pattern. it's more of like just a technique that we use and we start to combine.

When you're practicing it, chromatics is like in a way is the easiest thing to practice. Your hands may not be accustomed to them. Yeah. But especially on the guitar. Hello. I mean, if you're open string,

you can chromatic all day. Just slide your hand up. Yeah. But it's kind of similar with the piano, though. You find your shape. You do. But it's, but chromatically moving is pretty.

Yeah, yeah. Take that one and move it up. No, no, like so the root seven. Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah, but you're a good player. You know those. But if you don't know those voicing chromatically,

like you're making all those subtle shift with your fingers pretty like intuitively, you know, unconsciously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Peter's not sitting here working out the fingering to that. No. It's all just a subtle thing. But it's definitely not as easy as just that. Okay, if you don't do it every time,

why are we using this chromatic from below? Well, this is a very complicated question with a very complicated answer because it sounds good. Ah, that's a great answer. Yeah, no, it does sound good. And I think it's because it's really driven off of the melody often. So the same reason you don't always want to go, you know, you might.

Yeah. You know, so if we go, you know, let's see, that's kind of more interesting sometimes than, right? So if we go, as opposed to. Hey, yeah. Right. This gives you a little more tension, a little more.

So that's the key to me. Okay. It gives you a little. Oh, you let me right where you wanted to go. Well, you were going there, It gives you a little bit more tension, right? Music and the way that we use music, especially within improvised music,

is this sort of crafting of tension and release, right? That's what it's all about from a very grand scale. So, like, you know, if you're playing a tune like chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the Christmas song, right? There's a bridge to that tune. That bridge provides tension to the A sections, right? Right. And more of a bigger level.

That's a bigger level. And then you could go down literally to Nat King Cole's intro, which is, You know, which is smaller tension even amongst the first chord of the intro. And that's what we're all about here is creating tension and releasing it. Absolutely. I love talking about this like parallel minor from, or just chromaticism from below because it doesn't get talked about a lot.

But its cousin gets talked about quite a bit. And Peter, maybe we can do a little experiment here if you don't mind. Could you play the... What's now, app. Could you play the F below middle C and the B below middle C at the same time, please? The F below middle C. And the B. Right, right. Now, below that, play a G in your left hand.

Ooh. All right. Nice. Now, experiment time. So I'm just a monkey. Tell me what to do. Keep the F and the B. Keep the F and the B. Yes. And instead of the G, go down a tritone. That is a D flat seven. So we went from G7, right, where F is the seventh and B is the third, the dominant G7, to D flat, where F is the third and C flat. is the dominant seven.

So these two chords are very, very important. And it leads us to our next bit of chromaticism, which is something that many of you probably know all about. And some of you may have heard, but maybe you don't understand fully, but it's the tritone substitution. Yes. And the reason why it's so used

is because you can essentially put a five on any chord by simply putting a dominant chord, a half step above it. So any major chord, any minor chord, and any dominant chord, you can approach it from its five, which is add attention, right, simply by playing the dominant chord

a half step above. So what do I mean by that if we go? And this always works in every situation, right? Pretty much. We're guaranteeing. I mean, you can overuse it for sure. We can't guarantee anything. But this does actually, I mean, Peter,

you're a master of this. I made a YouTube video about this a few months ago, and I used a bunch of clips of you doing this because I feel like you have such a great concept naturally on this. But the idea is if you have any chord, really it's part of any progression here. So if we were to do like, have you met Miss Jones, right? So this, you know, maybe you do a D minor.

D minor seven is your second chord, right? Just keep it straight down the middle, right? You can add a five chord, E flat seven, before your D minor seven, maybe you add a five chord to the two. A flat seven. Now, why am I saving five chord if it's a half step up? Because look at what E flat seven is here.

It's G and D flat is the third and the seventh. And if we put the tritone, if we move the base up a tritone, that's A7 now, which of course is five of our D minor seven, right? So just by thinking of it as, oh, it's a dominant chord, half step up, you get the same effect as an A7. Yeah. But it's a little bit slicker because it. It gives us that chromatic movement down.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it really, it's like we're thinking about where we're coming from and especially where we're going. Totally. It's like, it's a journey. So it's not just random substitutions. It has some girding in the form, even though we're altering it.

But that's why I think a lot of people mess up. They're like, oh, I'm going to do alteration. It's going to be random and vertical and like static ideas. We're going to jump from this to this. Yeah. Well, and the great part about this is, like I said, is you could actually use this pretty much anywhere. Yep.

So this is the entire. This is the entire A section to have you met Miss Jones. Literally, it's just a one, six, two, five, three, six, two, five. You can literally add tritone subs in front of each one of those chords. A little chromaticism there. Yeah, yeah. Adding slightly larger level, slightly longer level. Tritone substitutions.

I mean, that's like the most you can do. But when you do that, now you're adding all of this tension. But it's tension that makes sense. It's tension that is just essentially a five chord. But with that bass note, a tritone substitution away. Now one important note here, people often ask me, like, what kind of dominant seven chord do you use on these tritone subs? More often than not, especially on a tritone sub,

you'll hear players using the Lydian dominant sound. So like a dominant 7 sharp 11, you wouldn't do like necessarily. do like E7 altered and then A7 or A flat 7 altered. I mean, you could for extra add attention, but mostly players are playing like a dominant, a Lydian dominant sound because it gets you that sort of unresolved. It gives me a little baseline here with all those. One, two, one, two, three, and. So all of those were Lydian dominant.

I was trying to get the Sharp 11 in as much as possible. But you can hear that it, because. Because they're not super weighted, they work well with that half step, half step slide down. Now, just for clarification for me, I'm a little slow on these things on the uptake sometimes. So are you going to the E flat seven or to the E7? E flat seven. Interesting. So that's substitute from the A7.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could also think about it as the tritone substitution of the B flat, can't you? Because normally like. Well, ah. So, yeah. So what, okay, this is, let's talk about this.

And then we've got actual chromatic movement down with the bass note. So sometimes on a longer 1625, which this is, right, you'll hear someone do sub in a one, four, three, six, two. Some of your traditional ice cream changes, as we say in the loop. Ice cream changes. And yes, you could try tone sub each one of those. So what we did here was F major, B flat seven or B flat major, usually B flat seven, A minor seven, D7, landing to the G. it gets you to the same place at the same time, right? So that was a one, four, three, six, two.

Now, we can tritone sub one or all of them. Or just some of them. If you tritone sub the B flat, that's an E7, right? So, you could go tritone sub the A. That's an E flat seven. So now you have a chromatic thing. Down to D7 and then ending up on, you could end up on tritone sub that.

I'm forcing you to a total chromatic. You could literally tritone sub everything. out here. Would your head explode if you did that? Or would the listeners? Or you could choose a couple. So maybe you go F to E7 to A7 and then to A flat 7. You know, you can pick which ones you want to do. A lot of possibilities actually with these when you start thinking about it like that. Totally.

I would almost say infinite possibilities, but we don't do public math on this show because that trips us up. We definitely don't. But it's an endless well, the tritone sub. Remember, most often than not, not always, but most often than not, you want it to be a dominant seven chord. Yep. You can do all the math. It's a tritone sub away from its five,

but it's easiest to think about a half step above what your target is. And most often than not, it's a Lydian dominant sound, a dominant sound with a sharp 11. And I think a good way of thinking about, you know, it's usually a dominant chord.

It's probably almost always either a dominant chord or a chord that you could sub it into being a dominant chord. By that, I mean, if you go one, four, that's dominant, and then three would normally be minor, but you can play the three as a dominant. So good.

and same on the six, well the six is. And then the two. Totally. As long as it works with the melody. As long as it works with the melody. And then when you get to the solo, you can even get a little bit more liberal with your substitutions of dominance from minors.

That's right. Because remember, as the soloist, you're creating the melody. You're improvising a melody. And you're always jumping off like the two chords. Like if we think about a two five, one, or even like a one, six, two, five. That's supposed to be major seven,

dominant, or minor seven, that you can already substitute the six minor. But if you make them all dominant, even the one, like I'm going to play this. You just play the melody, which this shouldn't work, but I think it's going to work. All right.

One, two, a one, two, three, four. That's wild. Yeah, that's all dominant chords. Because dominant chords, they are... And that's just chills. They're unsettled. They're tense by nature, right? And the drama, like, the resolution

this is built in, even if you substitute out these chords with the baseline, of kind of sort of how the math works, that it's going to resolve itself. And then when you got the melody or the soloing like that, melodic resolution as well, linked in with that form of 8-8-88, that's already taking you there. That's part of the tune. So it almost gives you more opportunities to do that.

We've got to stop before we completely nerd ourselves to death here. But the takeaways here, the first example that Peter was talking about was you literally move whatever voicing you're playing, whatever chord you're playing, you kind of pivot down a half-step resolving it to your ultimate target. And then the other way is the classic tritone substitution. Peter, we put a link in the show notes here to that video I made about tritone subs, which kind of explains them in detail and there's a PDF and everything. If you're new to the tritone sub game, it can be a game changer. And you don't have to, you know, do what we were doing where we're doing. Literally everything is tritone sub. Sometimes just a really subtle tritone sub at the right place can like really add a lot

to what you're trying to do. At the very least, when you're soloing, adding a tritone sub to your to your soloing can give you that extra tension that sometimes you need to Peter you're a master of you know being able to throw in oh go on now these tritone subs to great effect Peter's typing in now so I think we got it man we got it that was cool good episode great episode I think we nailed it you know I want us to start doing a new feature we haven't done a feature in a while we do we should do new feature Friday remember when we used to do you know so our new feature is we're going to be talk about features that have fallen at the end of the episode. The new feature is the feature graveyard. Yeah, the features that are falling off of our radar. Remember when we used to do and wait until the end, there's a bonus. Like we'd say seven things. Bonus Jonas Jonas was at the end.

We totally stopped doing that. But no, the new feature now, oh yeah, this is what I was thinking for the new feature. Okay. How about if we do just like a 20 second recap, a little grading of ourselves, maybe even perchance each other at the end of the episode? Okay. Like, I'll show you what I'm thinking. Okay.

That was a pretty good episode. I think we nailed it. I was pretty good. I could have been a little bit more clear on my introduction to Tritone subs. I agree. I'm going to get myself a B minus. No, B minus is, that's like writing METO4. I'm not a fan of the B-I.

Buddy, I have high expectations. No, but I know, but B-minus is basically an F. Damn, you. No, because what would be the difference is with a C-plus and a B-Mine? That's the way we run my household. Wow, you poor kids. That's what my kids love me. That's why your kids go to.

very nice schools. No, but you know what I'm saying? Like, B minus. Like, that's, it shouldn't be that different from a solid B, but it is. Because basically you're saying like, you know. B minus is basically an F. Damn. Yeah.

Okay. See, I was you glad we're doing this new feature. I got you laughing. I'm just saying, like, I have, for me, like, promise land is everything is clear in about 25 sentences, right? And we've got this. So that's an A minus, I would say. I like, I'm a big, I'm a fan of the A minus more.

than a B minus or even just a solid B. So what does a B minus look like? An F. Is it a total failure? It's not a total failure. What does an F look like? No, an F is you don't show up. That's like an incomplete.

You know what I mean? Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, I mean, so maybe we got our, we... I mean, like, if we're professionals, everything should be an A or B. And we should, on a day we do an episode that it's a B, we should already be like,

you know, because we usually bring our A game, right? I'm sorry. We bring in our A game? I mean, I'm trying to, but apparently... Yeah, no. Why are we talking about bringing our B minus game? I'm not talking about wanting to bring the B minus game. I feel like this was an A.

Perhaps an A minus this episode. I just got an idea for a new feature, by the way. What? It's a feature where we rate our ratings feature. So how do you think that first one went? That'll be a bonus. Bonus Jonas Jonas. Yeah.

All right. Well, until next episode. You'll hear it.