You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Fun With (Hard) Triads

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

In this episode, Peter goes solo! Ever wondered how to practice and experiment with harder triad shapes? Well in this episode Peter's got you. Practice your triads the PM way.Open Studio Pro | WAITLIST Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open Studio🎹 Head over to our YouTube channel for a better look 👀.Follow us on Instagram

Yo, what's up Peter? Hey, how you doing? I'm good. How do you feel about doing a podcast today? Well, I feel really good, except that I do feel like I'm talking to myself. And you know what that means? No, what does that mean? It means we are rolling solo style here on the pod.

So get ready. What's up, everybody? I'm Peter Martin. This is the You'll Hear a podcast. I am rolling, as I said. By myself today, Adam Manus is out sick, playing hooky. We don't know what he's doing, but he's not here. But it's all good.

because we're going to have some fun with triads today. First of all, we are brought to you by Open Studio. Please go to Open StudioJazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs and potentially go check out OpenStudiojazz.com slash pro for our Open Studio Pro program to get on the wait list there. You might be like, I'm not ready for that. Well, perfect, because we have waitlists only now, but maybe by the time you're ready,

there's no obligation to join the wait list. That just kind of puts you in the line so that when we open things up, which will probably be in the next couple of months. We kind of just, you know, we're trying to keep the numbers because of all the great live sessions that happened there, the numbers manageable.

We have some new teachers. We got some new exciting things happening over there. So you're going to want to get on that. But what are we talking about today here on the pod? First of all, when I say I'm rolling solo, I mean, I'm rolling solo. I'm looking at a mixing board here. I'm pressing the buttons.

I got headphones on. I hope it sounds good. I guess if you're hearing it, it works. But I thought what I would talk about today would be something that is hopefully Just looking for my pedal This is like old school radio This is audio only by the way

This is not going to be on the YouTube channel But I thought it would be fun to do something Where we could lean into the audio only And you could use your ears Potentially even better Than trying to look at what I'm playing There's nothing wrong with kind of thinking about the piano keyboard visually I think that's super helpful

but it's also nice to be able to sort of hear things. And the piano, like any chordal instrument, can be difficult to hear because you can have such a combination of intervals and notes. I mean, in terms of being able to hear something and then duplicate it and play it yourself. But I want to give you one little trick today,

which I think will be helpful, and it is fun because it's with triads. And it's really about being able to kind of recognize some patterns. And it doesn't get to be any more of an eye. identifiable pattern in terms of a chord than a triad, I would say. So, of course, we have major triads, minor triads, augmented triads, diminished triads, and then we have kind of loosely based kind of Lydian triad, where you've got the first, the third, the root, the third, and the sharp 11, an unofficial triad.

But all these different things today we're going to do, I think are going to be the more traditional triads and really just the major minor, maybe a little bit of augmented. but we're going to put them and find them and hopefully hear them in the middle of a voicing or even like an arpeggiated situation like this because when we want to be able to hear something, it's not just about like learning the notes, but like to explain something kind of after the fact

I think is really useful, both in terms of like checking out what somebody else is doing, maybe transcribing something, but also being able to hear a voicing that you like. So what I'm playing here, so this is F minor and I've got the root, So we hear the intervals, and those are both perfect fifths, F, C, G. And then you want to kind of try to find something that you can hear.

That minor second, that half step, you know, traditionally should be an easier, not easy, but easier thing to latch onto than anything, because it's the closest interval. That's why when we talk about practicing and learning and being able to hear, Chromatic scales, that's all minor seconds, right? So we've got, that's our root. We go up a fifth to that G, and then we've got the half step. And then this is a pattern that you might recognize.

So we're starting on the A-flat, major triad, right? And then we're going up to the major seventh if you're thinking about that A flat major seven. Now you might say, well, great, I can hear all that. Why do I need to know that to try it? Well, you can do things with it. What am I doing there? Major triad?

Mm-bo-de-bo-boo-boo, augmented, right? Totally different sound. Right? We can also go, that's a minor six-nine sound, but we've got a different triad in there now. B-flap major triad. We had an A flat triad before. We can go up to another A flat triad.

That's just a second inversion. So all these things can kind of work together. I'm going to jump around now a little bit just because I don't want you to get stuck on here that same thing. See if you can hear this one. So you might hear that and say, okay. There's your root. There's a third.

But I don't actually play the third. So you can kind of hear that. You're like, wait. two, four. So, that's a suss. Anytime you got the ninth or the second and the fourth, but you don't have the third, that's a good little hint.

That it might be a suss, okay? But what else can we identify? Remember we talked about the minor second, the half step, the chromatic scale. So that's the root, octave. Those are usually on the easier side to hear.

Then we go down to the dominant seven. And then we build up a triad from the dominant seven. B flat. B flat major triad. So this is similar to what we did before. We're just building it off a different. Now what if we take that B flat triad? Remember before we tried out an augmented tri?

And it gave us the major seven. This time, everything else stays the same. Rue, six, dominant seven, ninth, F sharp, which is a sharp 11. But in terms of that triad, so this is actually a C-13, sharp 11. And then remember I kind of hinted at that hybrid or fake triad. One, three, sharp 11, like a Lidian.

This is coming off of B flat, but the root is C. That's just a straight 13. Then what I went to about the top, now it's a G minor triad, first inversion. Now I'm going to give you one that's a little bit more advanced. Again, we're going to kind of jump to a different key. So we've got F-sharp. There we go.

Now remember we learned this interval? How do we get up to back to the root? It's the dominant seventh. What's the relationship of this note to the root? This is coming off F-sharp as the root, by the way. Or G-flat. Now, we're not going to worry about finding these notes because it's getting weird. It's kind of nice, right?

Or? I think that's good there in terms of reaching. We've got root dominant seventh, third. What kind of triad is that one three five, three five one, one five three one. That's the root of the triad. Now what is that in relation to the root? And it's the second inversion. This is getting complicated, but you hear that triad.

Rood position, first inversion, second inversion. So we got F sharp, F flat, root, Dominant 7 third flat triad, B flat, E flat. Cool thing about these kind of voicing when you start to see these superimposed or inner triads is you can move them around. I'm just keeping root in seven. Dominant seven in the left hand.

I'm just moving around different triads. They can also have some really nice melodic implication. And I'm just adding in the minor third. There's the triad. Bidipo bidi-de-ba. Minor third, major third of the E-flat triad. And the minor third. is actually the root, the G flat.

Let's see what other ones we can find. Okay, so this is actually, this is like moving around actual triad. So we got G, G dominant seven, remember we find it off that chromatic. And this one's built off of the tritone from the root. So we're going to D flat from G. D flat.

That's our triad. Then we check out all the inversions. And then maybe we go, go to anything on top, right? How about that? It's going up to the 13th there. D-flat triad, second aversion there. Rout seventh over G.

So here I'm going C minor, 11. We're going to skip, even though that one's got some triads to this. So this is an F-13, 13, sharp 11, flat 9. And what I'm doing here is similar to the one we did the D-flat over G, but we got a tritone sub.

in a little different place, B over F. So that's our triad B. So then we've got this is A flat minor 11. This actually doesn't really have a real triad in the middle of it. But if we go to here it does, A flat half diminished. We've got that B minor. Second inversion, that's the fifth root third.

All ideas in there for you. Triads are fun, don't you think? Until next time.