You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Dealing With Rhythm Changes

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

On this episode, Peter and Adam give you a taste of the You'll Hear It Premium experience with a discussion on how to navigate rhythm changes. To view the PDF, click this link: https://www.openstudionetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/YHI_-_Rhythm_Changes_-_Piano.pdfLike 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, Adam. You got rhythm? I got rhythm. Bam, I've got rhythm. I've got rhythm. No. I'm Adam Manus.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. You know, sometimes you do your funny jokes, and I don't think they're very funny, and I don't react at all. Why are you calling them funny jokes then? Well, because funny, sorry, air quotes funny. But sometimes, you legit get me. Come on, man.

That's how I do it. That was spontaneous. It's pretty good. Yeah. So today we're talking about, well, first of all, it's kind of a special day, right? Because, you know, we've had a lot of movement on You'll Hear at Premium. A lot of folks have bought into the You'll Hear Premium. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast.

And you do fun fact about You'll Hear at Premium. We're coming up on two months now, maybe three. Yeah. No one has ever left. I don't know if we can keep that going forever because I'm pretty sure somebody's going to, like, you know, have an expired credit card or something. But so far, knock on wood, everybody's stay with us. You might have just reminded some people that they could leave. Yeah, don't leave.

Don't leave. We need you. Well, no, so we wanted to just kind of give a shout out to our you'll hear at premium members. Yo! Shout out! But also, you know, for the premium members, at least once a month, we give them a premium episode over the piano with some PDF worksheets on what we're working on. And we thought we would kind of tease that a little bit today to show people who haven't jumped in to the premium membership,

which is very affordable, by the way, what you're going to get. Not only where you get the full archives and discounts on swag, and, a personal email from Rachel Morgan. I didn't know about that. Yeah. Okay, Rachel, that's on you now. But no, we have these premium episodes. We thought we'd give you kind of a mini premium episode.

We're not going to be over the piano, but we do have our lovely key station here. So this is normal instead of premium. I can see what's happening. This is like Mediante. That's like when we get on the airplane, you know, traveling a lot. Occasionally I've been known to receive an upgrade,

which I never take for granted. I'm always very excited to have that. But then when I go back to coach, I never call it coach. Did you know that? No, what do you call it? I call it garbage glass. Oh, my gosh. And, you know, like United and Delta have this, like, slightly better, like, economy comfort.

I call it garbage plus. Garbage plus. There's first class, then there's garbage, there's garbage plus. That's the three classes. But not here. We've got, you'll hear it. We've got something in the middle. Yeah, which is today.

You'll hear it garbage plus. Can I give you a little bit more just to show you what's going on over there at you'll hear it premium. Also, I don't want you to be intimidated at him, but I'm kind of going to be for the first time looking down on you just so you know, because I'm working on my posture. I don't know if you've noticed this. I appear in video and still photography as shorter than you, only because of my bad posture.

You're just not standing up straight. But now I am, so I just didn't want you to be intimidated. This is great. This might be a princess bride situation because I also do not stand up straight. So. Ready? Watch, watch the, yeah. Oh, and someone's higher again.

Okay. No. I do slouch quite a bit. Yeah. I think all pianists have a little bit of, except for classical pianists. They have that... They're so uptight. Straight back.

Big shout out to the classical pianist. Anyway, okay, so we've gotten a couple of emails recently about rhythm changes and how to deal with rhythm changes. So we thought, hey man. Sorry, my pushing... Oh, I bet. I'm not going to remember this. We've got logistics in the pod cave. We've got a PDF here on the table.

I got my glasses off so I can barely see. That's what's happening. So we've been asked, like, how to deal with rhythm changes. I think rhythm changes is actually, man, for me, I don't know about you, but, like, people talk about cold trains. changes or like, you know, weighing shorter tunes or whatever, but rhythm changes is like a lifelong pursuit of, damn, this is, it's tricky. Hard. Hard A. F. I agree. I think it's, yeah, I mean, we've talked about this a little before, so this will be fun to kind of do a little bit of a deep dive, but I really think that the tricky in it, I mean, for me, I've gotten, and I think you too,

I mean, we, you know, we've been doing this for a while, so it does start to get easier, but I, I think it's not one of those things that instantly kind of clicks for anybody. Like, it's always, yeah, you learn the form, you feel comfortable with it, but in terms of really feeling free, I mean, there's always different things that we, like, if I was going to play rhythm changes in E right now, I would not feel totally free, like the same as I am an F or B flat or C or whatever. It takes work. Yeah, but you start to kind of learn the form, but I think it's just such a circular, cyclical kind of situation where you're hanging around, almost hanging around that tonic so much, it's like,

oh, you know, where's it going? And then you get to the bridge, you're like, ah, finally. And then the bridge is over. like, oh, back to this garbage again. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sorry. Got a little harsh there. But what's great about rhythm changes

is with that bridge, it really teaches you how to build tension within the form. That's one of the great things about it. But I think the trickiest part about it is how, to your point, of how tonic heavy it is, but also the changes move in small chunks, in two beat chunks, right?

So typically you might have B-flat, major six, or major seven, then G7, flat-9, then C-minor-7, than F7. So for a lot of people, it feels like it's hard to connect the dots in those short chunks. And I found, I don't know about you, it sounds like to me when I hear you play

short chunk changes. I think I just coined that term. Short chunk changes. Short chunked changes. You better check with the SEC before you coin that change. It seems like players who can really burn over this stuff have little two-beat modules of a change, right, to connect the dots between one change or the other.

I'll show you what I mean. So I have here four different examples of the first four bars of B-flat rhythm changes. And so the idea was if I, and this is just an exercise I did, I wrote it out, and I think some of you might find it useful, that if I have a starting note, in this case B-flat, what's a four-note module, eighth-notes, two-beats module that will get me to a chord tone of G7-flat-9, which is the next chord, right? So here's my B-flat. So if I'm starting here,

You know, for me, the simplest one that came to mind was just, right? Just straight down. Timing it out a little bit. Exactly. Adding that chromatic step between the G. So B, flat, A, G, and then a chromatic step down to the F, which is the seventh of G7, right? Okay, so from here, what's my four-note module? So I have here on number one.

So this is another way you can do it. Instead of going up or down a scale, you can do a broken chord. In this case, it's a diminished chord or a flat. you know 7 flat 9 chord on g f and then down to a flat b natural d and that leads me to either e flat or c we'll say c yeah and then once i'm here at the c uh i can do this one which is we'll call this a little turn right surrounding a note uh and then that takes this will this will be my starting note for f and on f we'll go back the 13 right we'll go back down and surround the tonic so then the whole thing ends up sounding like this.

You know, it's very formulaic or whatever, but those little modules, those ideas of of having a, knowing how to get from one place to the other in any prescribed beat. And you can do this in a million different ways. I did it in, I did kind of the same shapes

in four different places in the chord. Like then if you start it, instead of B-flat, if you start at D, you know, you can get same shapes and the same thing starting in F and then and G as well. So there's ways that you can, you know, similar ways you can get from one chord tone to the next with all of these things. And there's like a million different ways to do it.

Yeah, yeah. But I think this is, you know, something that you mentioned at the beginning really, really explains this, connecting the dots. Right. Like that's this way of playing. Because I think if anything, people that kind of level one to being, you know, for any instrument or vocalist, kind of being comfortable with rhythm changes is doing very kind of open. melodic riff bass I'm thinking like bop bap

bap bo do betty leap you know which is great and it's like in the time but you're having space the changes are going by

and you know to this point of it hovering around or as you said tonic heavy you can do that you can actually do that all the time

and that's a great a great way to play but this is sort of that maybe next entry point for folks when you're going to play I mean basically what you're showing

is continuous eighth notes so it's like how do you play those without just automatically changing to the exact scale for that next core because then you end up kind of just playing a major scale actually right and this is what we've heard from people who've written in it's like how do I sound like I'm not just playing in B flat the whole time and and the idea is to to really um and this is I think this is still kind of like level 1a right is you're sort of outlining the changes with these little modules now you don't ever want to just play straight eighth

notes like this you wouldn't like I mean you would sometimes but but maybe if you if you didn't start right on the one, then you can get away with it more. Sure, sure. Start on the end of one. You spend a chorus and a half, you know, doing what you were saying, and then you can go with, you know, start burning as this happens. But this is great, I think this is a good exercise to get into of like,

how many different ways can I go from the C minor seven to the F? There's, you know, there's, you know, the classic. Yeah. There's a ton of different ways. And what are those ways? And if I can do that in the C minor to the F, I do that in the B flat to the G. Is it the same shape for the G7 to the C minor?

Yep. All those things, I think, are important to work through. And I think these will be good for folks. You can go, are they going to have the... Is this going to be available to them? Yeah. Or is that just a premium? No, everybody's going to get this PDF, but this will be...

Well, what's it between premium and normal then, man? We're over at the piano and there's a lot more. I just want to show people what... This guy's generous, man. I keep around my toes. I like it. What does premium look like? Well, it looks a little bit like this.

So I think, too, for folks, to think about, like, if you're practicing these, and look, any kind of, you know, sort of exercise or conceptual way of playing, the key is to not take this and string it into a soul is to try these out, get used to how they feel in your hands, get used to how they sound laying over the chords, but then you can think about, you know, omitting a note here or there,

to get out of that continuous eighth note thing. Totally. Like, you're still almost kind of hearing it, or just omitting the first note. Like, you can get away with, I've found, playing a lot of continuous eighth notes. First of all, if you're swinging and playing good, you can just play straight through.

If you look at John Coltrane on Giants, there's a lot of continuous melodic eighth note playing, except he had to breathe. Some of these shapes, too, actually. Yeah. But I mean, like, if you're going, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ba-da-but. You know, if you go one, two, three, four, be-be-de-be-de-be-de-le-le-lobo-de. It starts to be kind of melodically monotonous.

I mean, kind of the melodic rhythm almost of it has become monotonous. but if you're just like one, two, three, four, do be, de, be, de, be, de, and just start on that end of one, you could even do some of these same lines and just offset them a little bit. Totally. Maybe we're into one C, I don't know. No, that's getting one C. But that's, yeah, that's the next step for sure. And, yeah, you kind of want to maybe master some of these first, but always be thinking about ways that you can shift things and omit things, offset, whatever, rhythmically,

because that's kind of the magic to the same, you know, sometimes we think, oh, I already know that little part. It's like, yeah, but do you really know. how to apply it and use it and make it hip and use it as a jumping off point of springboard for you to play some other stuff after that. That's the magic with these kind of phrases. It's not about just putting them together the same way each time. It's having them part of your vocabulary. Well, and really, and thinking about them, you know, I think about them almost as modules, right? So even though I wrote one that was strung out for the whole first bar, I would take any of these on. I remember when a great pianist was strung out for way more than a few bars.

Like, I could, like, if I take that, I could just take that one and do like, like a, you know, and now I have like an actual phrase of music, but that module is right there, you know what I mean? Or I can combine one or two or just, you know what I mean? Like, I think having these four note sort of modules for lack of a better word helps us to... I don't know if it's lack of a better word. You've used about 30 times so far today, sir. It's a pretty good word. Yeah. Pretty good word. Module. But for me, it just helps me to to expand my melodic content as I'm playing, like really to hear things. Absolutely. And, you know, sometimes, I mean, I'll still find myself hearing certain things and then trying to, like, figure them out or play them.

And I'm shocked how much relatively basic melodic modules, little chunks of music, riffs, whatever, that, like, it feels like I've never played it before. At least not in that situation. Totally. It's almost like, we shouldn't we have gone through? Because, I mean, like, that's the thing. When you start to look at rhythm changes a little differently, like we were talking up at the beginning, it's like, oh, it's so monotonous because it's just hanging around the tonic area. But then when you do start to look at a little bit differently and realize the possibilities, I mean, you can go decades and still be discovering new things.

And that's what makes it interesting. And then just moving something around or playing it a little bit differently can be like whole new, you know, melodic vocabulary, really. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks everybody. I think we had three people in the last few months writing about rhythm changes. It's one of our most common questions. I mean, forever.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's something I practice on the regular, too. Yeah. And, I mean, one little bonus thing I want to throw in or should I do that at the thing? No, you got it. Oh, you want to do a bonus thing? I'll do it. We'll do it little...

One more plug. You can get more stuff like this over it. You'll hear it premium. Check that out. Support the podcast. Yeah, go to You'll Hearit.com. Check out the blog, which is free, of course. Lots of stuff like this on the blog as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are brought to you by Open Studio, which is holding this whole thing together like a super glued. It's stuck. You know what I'm saying? And we're really excited to be here continuing on this You'll Hear journey. And I'm going to give a little bonus. that I actually thought of as you were showing something for rhythm changes playing.

Yes, sir. And that is, if you think about, you know, some of the common times for us to get anxious is when, you know, you use that substitution if you go B-flat major, and then you go to maybe B fully diminished next instead of the G7. You know, a lot of people just because they feel more restricted on a diminished than they do on a dominant. but think about that B diminished, even if the bass player goes there

or if you played or whatever, as a G7, either, you know, kind of flat 9, flat 13, even over that beam. You know, because the dominant,

like that's, the dominant chords is where we always have some flexibility. Yeah, altered, half hole, those kind of things. Whereas diminished, we kind of tense up.

But you can always layer that dominant into a diminished. And I think about it as a major third before, but, you know, above it, me below it. So like a B diminished would be a G7. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, because often in some functional harmony. Yeah, exactly. That's that root movement. Totally. Cool. All right. Well, until tomorrow.

You'll hear it.