You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Delayed Gratification

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Adam takes you on a journey to pay more attention to those tonic chord tones. 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

I'm Adam Anas and you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Jazz explained. Welcome back, everybody. Peter's still out on the road with Inside Straight. And so I'm doing another solo episode. We're dealing with the Six Diminished all week this week. And today I have a very cool concept for you. It's all about delayed gratification today. It's all about adding more tension to your tonic chord tones. What does that mean? We're going to explain it. So if you don't know about the Six Diminished, we have have tons of episodes here on the 6 diminished. There's a lot of resources on the basics of the 6 diminished.

But just real quick here, the 6 diminished is a scale of chords, right? It is a octatonic scale here in C. It's C, D, E, F, G, sharp, A, B, C. So it's like a C major scale. But with a half step between the 5th and the 6, between the G and the A, there's a G sharp. And of course, what this does,

if we make chords out of this, in other words, we skip a note that gives us a C major six chord right because we have that G sharp in there right now we have a C6 and then if we move those up we have a D diminished we move those up a core a sorry scale tone we have a C6 D diminished C6 diminished six diminished six diminish so that's how it gets its name we've we've been over this a million times but if you don't know it you should check out our YouTube channel you could even search here in the podcast for six diminishing and I know we've We've done episodes on it before. But that's the basics of it,

is that with this octatonic scale, this eight-note scale, with that half-step between the fifth and the six tones, you get these major six chords, move each one of those up a scale tone, a diminished. Major six diminished. Major six diminished.

Major six diminished. Now, why is this important? Why do people use this? Well, because if you look at this here, in the key of C, you've got a tonic chord. A major six is a tonic chord. It's what a lot of jazz musicians use when the melody is the tonic, because then you don't get that major 7 rub of this half step here against the melody.

You get a nice, clean, major 6 sound. And then the D diminished. Why is that important? Well, because if you look at the notes of the D diminished, there's an F and a B, and there's a D and an A flat. If you add a G in the base like I've just done, this is a perfect G7-flat 9, which is the 5 chord of what? C6. So what you actually have with the six-diminish scale of chords is C-6, right? Tonic, G7-9, dominant,

tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant, tonic. Now this is crucial here for our purposes today. This scale of chords can be used over a tonic, like if we're in the key of C, it can be used over C to voice melody notes. It could also be used over C's dominant G7, right? Because G7 is baked in. If you start, with the D on top. It works great as a way to harmonize melody notes over G7. So that's really we're going to start the conversation today. And we're going to get here to our main topic of delayed gratification right after this. Okay.

So here we have our six diminished scale of chords. And we're talking about delayed gratification. What does that mean? It means that we can Barry, Barry Harris called this borrowing. We can borrow notes from one or the other of the chords because there's only really two chords in this scale of chords, right? There's C major six and all of its inversions. It's only C major six and it's D diminished and all of its inversions,

B diminished, A flat diminished, F diminished. They're all the same four notes. Same thing with the C6. It's just the same four notes. So that's why it's a C6, D diminished, C6, D diminished, C6, just different inversions of each one of those. The best way to see this is to actually start with the diminished. And we'll do the diminished with the D on top.

So I'm using my right hand. This is all four-way close voicing. So we have all four notes of the chord as close together as possible here. So I have F, A, F, A, F, B, and D. Played with my right hand. I'm going to put a C in the bass, because this might be over. like a C major chord. Right?

Now the melody note here is the top note. And when we borrow, this works best starting on the diminished. You can do either actually, but the diminished is sort of the most potent version of this. If we have, let's say, an E as the melody note, which happens quite a bit, you know, we can use this F, A, flat, B, and D. We just move that top note D on the note, D up a whole step and it gives us this shape. That is an important shape.

F, A, flat, B, and E. So this is an amazing way to delay the tonic of a situation. So if the melody is something like, right, what did I do there? I went this diminished F, A, flat, B with the E on top. No D in this chord. We're just borrowing up. And then I resolved it to a C6, moving everything up. You could go split it and go.

down as well if you want more of that downward resolution. No worries there. The voicing doesn't really matter. What matters is here we're doing this E is our melody note, which would normally be part of the C major six, yeah, but all three notes below it are part of the diminished, that D diminished, F, A, flat, and B, and E. Now, we can use this to delay gratification. Let's say we're doing Days of Wine and Roses. We'll do it in the key of C, right? We can delay this gratification of a tonic by putting its dominant there, right? This also works if we do the next inversion up, like A flat, B, B, natural, D, natural, and F, right?

That's the next inversion of that diminished. We can borrow up on this top note. Instead of F, we could put G, and then resolve that to a C major six, just by going from A, flat, B, D, G. Notice that's the same shape. It's such an important shape. We delay that tonic,

and resolve it. So A-flat, B, D, G becomes A-C-E-G, C-6, right? Isn't that awesome? Like so, if you're doing my romance? How great is that? Or maybe my foolish heart? Isn't that gorgeous? We can do it again, the next inversion up.

Remember, we're starting with the diminished here. So B, D, F, and A-flat. What is the next scale tone? It's A. How beautiful is that? We can do it again on the root. Right? The next inversion is D, F, A, flat, and B.

We can borrow up from the B to the C, so something like on Green Dolphin Street. You know what I mean? Instead of going straight with a major chord like this, you can... Here's a drop-2 version. Here I have the root, C, and then I have a drop-2 voicing.

A-flat, D, F, and C, a big open voicing. And I resolve that diminished, right? Up to the six. Isn't that great? So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about delayed gratification. We're talking about on any of these major scale tones

in C, the C, E, G, A, right? We can use, instead of voicing underneath, like on the E, you might typically voice a C6 underneath, right? That's what is the go-to, right? the first option. Instead of that voice the diminished underneath the E, and then hit the 6. Right? And you can also do this, by the way, on the five chord, right? On a G7. Remember, it works for both. So if you have, for instance, you know, a G7 and G is the melody, you don't have to do a C6. You could, but you could also do, you know, of course, a diminished voicing.

It works on all of this. How beautiful is that? Just delaying and delay. I mean, you can go through and practice a whole tune where you're delaying these tonics as much as possible by using their diminished. And it is so much fun. So that's it for today. Join me on Wednesday for a cool challenge where we're going to work on contrary motion using four-way-close, drop two, and drop three. and get some really cool sounds out of the six to minute scale.

It's got so many applications. The deeper we go on this, the more it opens up for us. So thanks, everybody. Thanks for nerding out with this stuff with me today. Peter will be back next week. Until then, happy.