You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Do You Believe in Magic Chord Systems?

Starting point is 00:00:13 Welcome to the You'll Hear at podcast. My name is Adam Manus going solo today because I've got a really, really cool nuts and bolts concept for making chords. I've been working on this system over at the daily guided practice session. I know a lot of you might be over there on the daily guided practice session. If you're a piano access pass member, if you're a piano guided practice member at open studio jazz.com, you have access to our daily guided practice sessions, either on the app or on the website or we even do it live on Zoom. I'm practicing with you every day. If you're not, you can head over to open studio chess.com. There's so many affordable options to get in on this daily got to practice session, and it's super popular and fun. It's just really good motivation to keep working every day. Anyway, so for the last several weeks, we've been working on this voicing system. I've kind of come around to calling it the magic chord system or the magic voice. It's going to be something magical because it is kind of magical. And this isn't out of of left field. This is somewhat known, although I don't know how widespread this system is known,

Starting point is 00:01:21 but when I kind of discovered it on my own, I started researching it a little bit. I found a book or two, and I found some videos that talk a little bit about it, but it's really not that fleshed out as far as like the general jazz populace. So you might know about this already, but you might not, and if you don't, I hope this is eye-opening, because it sure was for me. This is a simple way to voice using a pentatonic scale. And this is great if you're a piano player, obviously, but even if you're a guitar player or a horn player that is interested in knowing

Starting point is 00:01:53 how harmony is built, this system is so super cool because it is a system. And it makes a lot of logical sense and you can apply it in various ways. So, okay, what is it? So like I said, it's based off of a pentatonic scale. So if we're in the key of B-flat, right, the B-flat major pentatonic, starting on B-flat,

Starting point is 00:02:11 is a five-note scale penta right so b flat c d f and g right the root the second the third the fifth and the six you've heard this sound obviously if you're an intermediate or advanced player you know all about the pentatonic scale and how we work with it in jazz now you might not have known that you can build a whole system of chords off of it now you might think of someone like mccoy tyner who does those kinds of voicings this is not that This is actually a little bit more nuts and bolts functional way to get things like ninth and 13th chords that don't just move around diatonically, like planing chords might, but it's actually a way to use the five notes from a pentatonic scale to create really beautiful sounding voicing.

Starting point is 00:03:00 Now, I first discovered this when I wanted to have a more robust melodic concept with my comping. Now, you're saying, Adam, comping is chords. How can harmony have a melodic aspect? Well, of course, harmony has a melodic aspect. It should be just individual voices that are playing melodically. And I wanted more options on the top note. I would find myself comping behind singers or horn players, and they would play, say, a B-flat, and I would play this voicing.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Right? And that B-flat on top would cause this minor second clash, and they would give me a funny look, and I was not happy with what I was able to do. But I didn't know any better. I would kind of fake it by, you know, doing something that didn't sound as clear or as good. So I was like, I really want on every single chord, you know, to be able to play really any note on top in a way that sounds good and doesn't repeat too many notes and is logical to me. So I ended up stumbling upon this and then found out it's actually a thing.

Starting point is 00:04:03 So again, we have our pentatonic scale, right? B-flat C, D, F, G. Now the way I like to introduce this is on a B-flat 6-9 chord. We've talked about the 6th chords before and how important they are when the melody or anybody is playing the root, right? A 6-cord avoids what I just gave in that example of that clash between the major 7 and the root, right? If we have a B-flat, major 7 with A on the top and someone plays the root, which they often do on a major chord if it's the tonic, then we have again that clash. So the 6-9 chord, really there is no major 7. It uses the 6th as really its kind of 7th and the 9, right? Those are the two color notes.

Starting point is 00:04:47 So it's a B-flat triad with the 6 and the 9. Now, lo and behold, you might just notice here, the notes that I just said, the B-flat triad plus the 6 and the 9, also the 2nd, those are all the notes of the B-flat major pentatonic scale. Right? The same notes that I introduced before, the B-flat major pentatonic scale, are the same notes that make up a B-flat 6-9 chord, right? So if we start with B-flat as our top note,

Starting point is 00:05:15 and that's how we're going to think about it, is from the top-down because we want to be melodic, we can use the notes of a B-flat-major pentatonic scale, skipping a note as we go down and get a beautiful voicing, one that you might actually know if you're a pianist. So we have B-flat, the next note in the pentatonic scale is G. We'll skip that. Go to F. The next note is D. We'll skip that.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Go to C. the next note is b flat we'll skip that and go to g the next note is f we'll skip that and go to d so we have this voicing built in fourths right from the top down b flat f c g a common voicing this is a b flat 6-9 chord if i play the root right heard it a million times perfect chord for when the melody goes down to the to the tonics say at the end of a tune. Sounds beautiful, none of this. Right?

Starting point is 00:06:16 A lot clearer, a lot sharper. Okay. So you may know that, you may know that as B-flat-6-9. But did you know you can take these notes in the pentatonic scale and move this chord up each note one pentatonic step?

Starting point is 00:06:35 So the D becomes F, the G becomes B-flat, the C becomes D, the F becomes G and the B flat becomes C. Aha, another B flat 6-9 chord. This time with the ninth on top. So we had our root on top, this time the ninth or the second.

Starting point is 00:06:54 However you want to think about it, I'll think about it as the ninth because it's a 6-9 chord. So already here, we have two options on a B-flat 6-9 chord. Now, if you've been following Open Studio and specifically what I've been teaching the last few You've probably seen me do this a few times. Definitely on the Daily Guide of Practice session. I've done a YouTube video about this. You can go search for that too.

Starting point is 00:07:22 But I really want to hit up because I know sometimes people are just listening to the podcast. I wanted to make sure you get this because I think it's so cool and can be very eye-opening. All right. So we've gone up one step on the B-flat major pentatonic scale. We now have two voicings. We have from the top down B-flat F, C, G, D. And if we move everything up, we have C, G, D, B, flat, F, right?

Starting point is 00:07:47 We're just moving each one of these tones up a scale tone of the B-flat major pentatonic. These are all the same five notes just repeated in different inversions, and we can keep going. So if we move this chord up, one pentatonic scale tone, ah,

Starting point is 00:08:03 we have from the top down, D, B-flat, F, C, G. Now, you may recognize this voicing as a so-what voicing, right? built in fourths from the bottom up with the major third on top. You've heard this before. This is also built like this with the D on top, a B-flat-6-9. So now we have three.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Already we have some melodic options that we might not have had before. All that over a B-flat-69 chord. That's not even taking an account the things we can do, like slide. All with no repeating notes and super-chrisp voicing, lots of force, lots of really sharp edges on these voicings. Just beautiful. All right, so here we are with our D on top. All of these notes, again, part of the B-flat major pentatonic scale, right? If we take these out here, B-flat, C, D, F, G.

Starting point is 00:09:14 That's it. Now we move these same five notes up that B-flat pentat scale for our fourth voicing. We have F, C, G, D, B-flat. All right? I love this particular voicing. It's a guitar. voicing to for a major six nine B flat major six nine now you might notice too because we're just using notes from the B flat pentatonic scale the melody that we're creating is a B

Starting point is 00:09:47 flat major pentatonic scale so that which we know is easy to improvise on a pentatonic scale makes almost everything sound good now we have all these options don't don't forget to include some chromaticism up or down and it's so sweet we have one more so if we take it here with the F on top and we move everything up one more pentatonic tone. We have G, D, B, flat, F, C from the top down. And now we have a full,

Starting point is 00:10:26 that's just repeating the first one. We have a full B-flat major pentatonic scale using five-note voicings. All of those notes in the voicings are from the B-flat major pentatonic. It's just nice and tidy. Look at that. And that is our system.

Starting point is 00:10:43 That's why I call it the magic chord system because it's just everything sounds good. You start again adding some chromaticism. It's so much fun. You can play on it all day. Now, one last thing. So you can go over to the daily guided practice session and check out how we've integrated this into real tunes and real core changes and real chord progressions. Because I think you're going to have your mind blown. But I'll just leave you here with one more concept. Oh, also, I'm actually creating right now a whole set chorus for Open Studio with just this magic chord system that will go through all of its iterations. But think about this. We have our B-flat major 6-9. These five chords that are part of it,

Starting point is 00:11:39 right? But this isn't the only chord B-flat-6-9 that this specific set of voicings work with. It also works with G-minor 7. So if you have a 2-5-and-f, this could be your 2. And there's a bunch of other chords that this specific set of notes go with. You just have to figure it out. You have to get it in your hands. You have to be able to think like that. So I encourage you to go over to Open StudioJazz.com. If you aren't a member already, go check it out and check out the Daily Got a Practice session.

Starting point is 00:12:18 We did three weeks on this where we went through rhythm changes. We went through just a ton of stuff, minor, two-fives, and how to use it with melodic minor, pentatonic stuff. It's just a fascinating subject that if you know more, more about it, please write into me. My email is Adam at open studio jazz.com. We're really trying to flesh this idea out. It's really, really super fun. All right, thank you very much for joining me for this solo episode.

Starting point is 00:12:44 We'll be back with Peter Martin on probably Wednesday. And until then, happy practicing.

You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Do You Believe in Magic Chord Systems?

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