You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Easy tips on chord voicings

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Method Monday: Voicings, voicings, voicings. Peter and Adam each show their favorite chord voicings using the circle of fifths, and tell you why.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, Peter. Hey. Are you ready for 12 tones of goodness? I mean, we've been planning this for weeks, if not months. So, yes, I'm ready. So much work has gone into this. It should be really good. Yeah.

I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Jazz. Explain. He got it. That's two taglines in a row. Why you cut me off, man?

It's supposed to be drama before, in between and after. Sorry, sorry. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast. Jazz. Explain. Okay, that was a... That was a pregnant with twins pause. Yeah, the pause at the end too.

That pause was too big. We're still workshopping it. We're still working out. What's going on, man? Nothing much, man. We're having a fun day in here recording. By the time folks hear this, while they hear this, we will be in the future. Future Adam, future Peter, jetting off to an exotic land of sunshine and, well, I don't know about that.

But yeah, New York City. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking forward to that trip. The center of jazz universe still, still. It doesn't change. Even as the jazz world expands, still has to have a center, a focus. We're going to have a great time, man.

It's going to be nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't wait. I can't wait. So, yeah, but before we go, let's talk about some methods, because this is Monday. It's Method Monday.

It's Method Monday. Method Man Monday. Nope. It's Wutang Wednesday. It's fresh purse of ballet or Friday. That's right. No, we should do Wutang Wednesday some Wednesday. Yeah.

But I thought we could do, because we were talking about like, what should we do? something on voicings, maybe about how to voice like over or under a note. And then we were kind of coming up with a bunch of different options. Then I was like, why don't we just do every, like we'll take, we'll pick a G.

Yeah. There's our melody note. Yeah. And let's just Yeah, let's start with C and we'll talk about like, you know, a couple of ways to voice. Maybe I'll give one, you give one for C. Okay. And then let's just go in like the circle of fourths and see if we can voice this G with every single chromatic note. I like it. Yeah? I like it. And this is cool, too. because it's like instead of building up,

which we often do with voices, we're going to build down. That's right. We're going to fill in underneath. So we've got G. Yep. Let's do C major. Well, actually, it doesn't, you know,

we'll just say, you can be whatever. It can be whatever, because here's C. So, okay, if it could be whatever. Why does your sound, you play, this is Adam sound here. And this is mine. Mine's sort of plain, like yours is like, like a killer room.

I've got tremolo, man. Yeah, you need some. I don't have tremolo. I don't have a generic Yamaha. Big shout out to Yamaha, grand piano. Actually, that sounds pretty good. All right, I'm going to do something here. Oh, did I just give mine away?

I'm going to do something. Maybe. Hold on, here we go. There's my chord. Dominant. It's a dominant chord. This is a little Barry Harris' 6 chord here. I've got a 10th in my left hand.

I got C and E, and then I have B, flat, D, and G. So I come a G minor triad in my right hand. Make it a little G minor six shape there. Yeah. That's called the 6 from the 5th, right? I like it. Beautiful, beautiful chord. voicing. I love this voicing. You could do it with the C-Up, too. It's like a sex queen.

It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's great. It's spaced out just lovely. You got a tritone. You got a third. You got a fourth. We talk about this sometimes like in the open studio pro, we talk about like, why do voicings that have sort of like mixed intervals, like seconds, thirds and fourths sound better than voicings that are just like a stack of thirds or even a stack of fourths, which sound brilliant. They sound great. But notice like even with force a lot of times, someone's putting a third on top of it, right? Yeah. So mix it.

Anyway, this is a good case of that. Well, that's good. Well, I'm going to call into question that concept then. I was going to do something else, but I'll go back to, okay, this is my C, C in the root, G on the melody. Okay. Very close. Very close. So this is going, this is a bunch of stacked force.

That's all perfect force. G, D, A, E, and then C, but an octave lower. So, like, if it's closer, it would be the. Yeah, but I like it with that open 10th at the bottom. Do you like that? Yeah, so what is it again? So starting at the top, top down, G, D, A, E, and then skip down a 10th. Yeah.

All right, so really the same as mine, but the B flat is an egg. Exactly. Yeah. But all of a sudden, that gives you those fours, all perfect force. Perfect fourths. Plus a tenth. That's what I'm saying. That's a little mix.

We're starting basic. We start basic. Yeah. Okay, so let's keep the G on top and let's go in the circle of force. F is next. What should I put on here? I'm going to steal this. This is what you would do, but I'm going to do it. Yeah. Oh, that sounds like minor 11. It is a minor 11. So I've got F, one note in my left hand. You could put it a tenth in there, but you don't need to. F in my left hand, in my right hand, I have A flat, B flat, that's the 11th. Yeah. E flat, that's the dominant seventh.

I love that ninth on top. You got that E flat triad. The E flat triad is that little A flat cluster down there. Bam. That's a Peter Martin voicing. See? Look at him. It goes to a nice place. It does. So I'm going to go with something a little unusual. Okay.

And we're not going to go down real low, but it's still F in the base. Okay. Ooh, what is that? I'm going to double the F just for... So this is a major set, major 9, sharp 5. Oh, that's beautiful. So that G is the ninth. Yeah.

E, C, Sharp. So that's almost like an A dominant chord in your... Over F. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I like that. What you got over B flat?

Okay, B flat. Well, how about one of these? Another dominant. So here I have in my left hand, B flat, A flat, G of course, always on top. B flat A flat, B natural, a little flat 9, D the third, E natural, the sharp 11, and that G is now the natural 13. Good. Yeah. Boop-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b--skit-b-b-ha-ha-ha.

That's right. Okay. So B-flat in the bass. And let me try something that may not work. No, okay, I'm going to do this. Oh, that's crunchy, man. It's kind of crunchy. And I think complements what you did.

So this is a B-flat 13. If that would be something you might be interested in? Very much so. I think so. B-flat-13, sharp-nine. Yeah. That's an interesting chord, right? So that's a natural 13, but a sharp-nine.

Yeah, yeah. And so that will be one that you could... Beautiful. Going to an E-flat minor kind of situation? Nice. Well, speaking of E flat, here we've got our G as a melody, E flat. I'm going to go classic. I'm going to go.

No, no, this is major nine. So E flat, B, flat, F, so the ninth there. Then G, D, G. There's no C in that. I thought I heard. You could do G, C, G, for sure. I'm hearing it wrong. But I like this.

It's very good. I get a little, some fifths going on, you know. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to take it a little bit. Okay, yeah, I don't want to do. So this is... Oh, that's a sharp five. That's actually...

No. No. It's like a C triad over E flat. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, C over E flat. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. In that spirit, if we're going to go to A flat... Yeah. C triad over A flat. It also works very beautifully. Yeah. Nice. Okay, so A flat.

If we're going to go to A-flat, which we are, we can go. So, you know what, I was here, you know, where I was talking about progression, so we're progressing, we're moving from something. So you add, and what I hear that going to... Oh, yeah. So that's A-flat, minor, minor, 9-7. Beautiful. So different places you can go.

But I like it from that. Hell yeah. Okay. So D-flat is next. The G on top. What a little just regular straight-up diminished. Great diminished. Don't diminish my diminished.

D flat, E natural, B flat, and then D flat again repeated. You could actually do, to make it a little more interesting, you can do that E flat instead of doubling the D flat. Nice. And then you get this nice diminished, what you might call like a diminished seven, add nine chord. Yeah, some people call it. Good. So it's basically like an E flat triad over D flat and E. Nice.

Yeah. Nice. All right, so D flat, I'm going to go, I'm going to open things up a little bit. Mm-hmm. Is it D-flat 6. 9 sharp 11. How much more do you need in that? Scourgeous.

Scourgeous. And that's what you, you know, got a E flat, try it on top. Yeah. Ooh, okay, here we go. So G flat, so now we have the flat 9. So we're really, we're in the realm of, I think we're going to do one of these things here. So you have G flat, E natural, or F flat, really.

B, flat, D natural, and G natural. This is a G flat 7, flat 9, flat 13. Okay, I'm going to just change one note in what you just did. There's not much you can do unless you wanted to do. Well, go ahead. Go with what you're going to do. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Is that the... So that's an E-flat over F-sharp 7, I'll call. But it's really just that F-sharp 13. 13. Flat-9. Yeah. Flat-9. Yeah, yeah.

Because you had that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Both pretty chords. Yeah. Now we have B. Now we're getting into... I mean, one of us has to do...

Backcord. One of us is going to be doing... Yeah. If you were a piano player alive in the 90s, this is your favorite chord. It really is a beautiful chord. This is the moo chord, also, the Steely Dan chord is what it's called. Moo, because everyone goes Moo, wouldn't you play it? Woo!

It's the Wu chord. Oh, that's the Moo chord. No, this is the Moo chord. Moo major or something. Anyway, it's a G add 2 over B. Right. So here in my left hand I have B natural. Don't even think about playing the three except for in the bass.

That's right. Oh, there's a YouTube video here for that. I have a B natural, then a G in my left hand. In my right hand, I have fourths. D and that's that like sound beautiful yeah exactly it begs to go somewhere

yeah let me do something we're getting so well okay so I'm talking about begging to go somewhere how about this oh I see it flat 13 flat 13 sharp 9 so this is really all force with that major third on the bottom and that's

augmented fourth perfect fourth perfect fourth yeah beautiful beautiful I'm going to go. So E is next. I'm going to continue with the moo chord. Moo. Moo.

So here I have E in my left hand. And then my right hand, I have G, C, D, G. So this is a C2. C2. C2. Like a C add to over E. Yeah. Beautiful.

Or somewhere like that. Okay. I'm going to go a little Stravinsky on this one. Nice. Is this a jazz only? Is this jazz explained? You can do whatever you want. I don't know if this is our podcast. Don't forget.

register. You know, like, when certain voices you know exactly what they're going to sound like, this I don't know exactly, but I think it's going to work. Barry Stravinsky. It's more penderecky. Yeah, yeah. This is an E flat over E, two trias. That's a fun thing to do.

Yeah. So it's kind of, I think the main crunchiness is, you know, the fifth and the flat at fifth. Yeah. And the major seven. Yeah. Beautiful. But that fifth and yeah.

And I'm going to go over. And then there's some stuff in Petuchka where it's like, I don't know. Or ride a spring or something. Yep. Yeah, that's fun. For our A in the base, G on top, I'm going to go. Dominant 7, sharp, lower.

Oh, sharp a letter. Nice. Yeah. So A, G in the left hand. And then B natural, C sharp, D sharp, and G at top. Yep. Yeah. All right.

I don't know if this is going to work. I think it will. I'm going to go moo. Moo it up. Can we move with that? The ninth on top, the second on top. Well, hold on. We had an A in the bass.

Oh, yeah, you couldn't move it up. So an F add two over A. Look at you, man. Actually, you know what? This guy's thinking out of the box. Yeah. No, that's all good. I'm going to go for, now we have D.

Let's go classic here, huh? Minor level. Oh, Suss. Yeah. We can do a number of things. We could do a little cluster here. Let's do that. That's fun.

So here in my left hand I have D and A, like the power fifth. And then I'll put a C major 7 in my right hand, B natural, C, E. NG. C major 7. Beautiful. All right, so I'm going to go very close to that. I actually thought you played it first, and that would be... I did. That was what I played first.

Look at the golden ears on Peter Martin. Yeah, totally. Kind of based on that... Yeah, yeah. What's that tune called? Oh, La Pregunta. Pretty. Yeah.

Minor 11. D minor level. Nice. What do you got on D? That was D. Oh, that was, oh, sorry. Well, sorry. I mean, it's not the greatest.

Well, here we are. Towards the end. Towards the end, everybody. This is our last one. This is our last one. I'm going to do, man, you've, what should I do? You know what?

I'm going to do this. G and G. Do you know what this is? You're my brother. That's Michael McDonald, right? That is. You know, I'm planning. This is the Phrygian sound on G, right?

So there's like a A-flat major 7-sharp 5 over G. Nice. Like A-flat, just G in the left hand. A-flat, C, D, and G in the right hand. That's like the classic, like, Charlie's Angels commercial drink. Totally. Will Bosley, make it back. Okay, I'm going to go straight Keith Jarrett.

Beautiful triad. I think it's a great way to end this show. It is. I didn't play it as well to Keith Jarrett, but nothing wrong with the try. I mean, you could get a slight little move. Don't even scratch that. Come on. Just try it. G try it. That's all you need. Yeah. Awesome. Until next time. You'll hear it.