You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Funkify Your Playing Now

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Adam and Peter dive in deep for a question from SpeakPipe about how to get that funky sound. 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, you smell something in here? Yes, something's a little... I like that smell, though. It's kind of funky. Oh, yeah. I'm Adam Manus. I'm Peter Martin.

You're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Two pianists talking music. Talking music, we're getting funky today. We are getting funky. We got the... You know, so we use Spectra-Sonics key scape. Spectrosonics is a tongue-twister of a company man. I mean, it sounds like it's some kind of like the evil company in a James Bond movie, right?

I still don't even know. Of the leader of Spectrevision. Spectrosonic. Spectrosonics. Anyway, we use Keyescape. And we usually use, like, I'll use the vintage vibe on mine, and I'll use a nice Yamaha grand piano on yours. But for today, we are taking a speak pipe,

a question from one of our dear listeners, and it's about playing funky comping over one chord. And I was like, well, let's break out the clavinets. Not that that's the only way to play funk. No, not at all. You can do it on an acoustic piano. You can do it on an electric piano. You can do it on a synthesizer.

You can do it on harmonica. Yeah, you could. But you can especially do it on a clavinet, man. Yeah. This is the sound. It lends itself there. Right here. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

A little bit. A little bit. How are you doing, by the way? I'm doing, okay. How are you feeling about this? Let the window being open? I'm loving the window. We're back to the window.

Folks, we had some requests for it, producer Caleb, some reconfiguration. We're still a work in progress here. Oh, my gosh. But we're liking this. You know, we've got the life of the city right here. Yeah, if you're listening. historic Washington Avenue right here in St. Louis, Missouri. If you're listening to the podcast, you might want to go and check out our new YouTube

channel. You'll hear it YouTube and you can see the beautiful look. It's cold out there. It looks cold, but it is so beautiful. But it's warm in here, warm with information and tutelage. And kind of funky. It kind of stinks. It kind of stinks. So this is a perfect setting for what we're about to talk about. So should we get into it? Let's do it. Let's listen to this. This is a speak pipe. And just a reminder to our dear listeners, you can leave a question for us whenever you'd like. We love audio.

We like video too. We just haven't figured out how to incorporate it from our dear listeners. Someday, someday, someday. Video conferencing. Right. FaceTime us. FaceTime us. No, we love the audio questions.

And just a reminder, I know some folks are shy out there. But why would you need to be shy? You can leave your question if you go to you'll hear it.com. You'll see where you can leave an audio question. And you can do multiple takes if you want, if you're that kind of. We're friendly guys. We are friendly guys. We're not going to make fun of you.

Not on air. Well, if you do multiple takes and it's a crappy coin, we might. We'll see. We'll see. Check it out. This is from Miro. Mehole. Hey, Adam and Pete, this is Miro again.

Pete. I wanted to ask you about some funky stuff today, and specifically about like funky comping patterns. Because I kind of had my problem in funk, especially with these tunes that don't have many chord changes. and most of them only have like one or two chords and I don't know I had my problem to come up with like

different variations of funky comping patterns because I had like a few patterns I could play but over that I was kind of lost and yeah I wanted to ask you about maybe your favorite comping patterns or how do you come up with ideas for like this funky groove feeling in the funk music about these

about these small chord chains with little amount of chords. Yeah, thanks for that and bye-bye. That's a good question. Yes. Yeah, and we broke out the clavs for it because they're so conducive to some funky combing patterns.

So the first thing I would say, Miro, to kind of like reframe the situation is don't worry about individual patterns. That kind of doesn't matter. I don't know about you, Peter, but like, you know, when I'm doing this kind of thing with the clav thing, It's really all about sort of we have our right hand comping rhythm, right?

So it could be anything. So I'm just kind of, you should be able to do anything you want. And your left hand is used to kind of play the ghost notes between that. So all of that is like, right? I'm using that left hand. So we have here, we're in E-flat minor, classic funky-comping key, right? Stevie Wonder's favorite funky comping key.

And part of that is, you know, you've got that foundation of the pent minor pentatonic. Exactly. But you've got easy access. But instead of thinking like, oh, I need some patterns, you might just think about like some easy positions. So here in E-flat, if I have my left hand,

my pinky on E-flat, and then D flat and E flat. High. Right, this gets us up to three ghost notes that we can play. So if I'm doing just like quarter notes or eighth notes, you kind of ghost with your left hand in between them and make it swing, really. And then if you need more eighth notes, then you add in that, like this is the classic, right? So that's a steady stream of daca, ducat, ducat, but I'm just kind of breaking up.

And then you could break it up even in your right hand to your thumb. That's right. So what Peter's doing here, you can do between your, like basically between your thumb and the rest of your hand on both hands. And that gets you like a continuous stream of ghost notes, eighth notes. That's where you start to get some freedom. And then you can learn classic comping patterns. Stevie Wonder is an endless well of this, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And I was doing this partly too because, you know, I think if we can feel what that underlying syncopation, because, you know, groove, I always say like the groove on the swing. Like if we go, you know, shifting between the funk and the, and the it's got a little bright in here isn't it? Okay, those of you

on those of you on the audio broadcast you might have heard a certain vitamin D-esque flavor to my voice all of a sudden there. Yeah, the sun came in but yeah, back to the question. No, no, no, I mean, we could if you want.

Funk is canceled. No, funk is not canceled. But I want to stay on task here for Miro. So you were saying about the groove. So the idea is that like we don't, like the things that we know about playing in the group,

groove over a swing, you know, tradition, whatever you call that. Swing, jazz, whatever, you know. It sounds funny on the clapping. Yeah, yeah. It's still there within the funk. It's not that different. The main thing is like feeling where the foundation of the groove, like in the swing, we're thinking, tune, tune, tune, we might break that up into two and four.

One, two, three, four, one, two, but can you go and go, go, but then the fog is back. Tick, back a tick, like the syncopation is still falling at the same. places that it would within the swing group on eighth notes, but now we're feeling it and you're thinking about it as 16th notes, right? One, two, one, two, three, and then all those different possibilities that you were exemplifying between the left hand and the right hand, those are syncopations within that, that 16th notes. So if you think about, if you go left and right just with your hands, but even if it's just one

hand, one, two, three, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, three, one, three, one, two. Like, you've got all those different possibilities in there. Anything that's downbeat, upbeat, you know, juxtaposition is going to give you that. That's right. Yeah, just, it's crucial that you mix up that downbeat, upbeat thing. But have fun exploring. And really, something you might be able to do to practically practice this is to practice those either two ghost notes or one ghost notes.

So you can do like, and I'm just doing D flat and E flat here in my left hand and then playing triads in my right. I'm just playing down to be down here low. But watch, keep playing that. I'm just going to play one single patient in the baseline. See how good that feel? That's the 16th no upy. That's a great tempo to practice at you. It's too much fun, man.

You can practice it on one note, too. Yeah. And if all those feels is get yourself a funky clavonet sound and everything sounds pretty great. Well, let's put out a road. Let's do it just a little bit. Just because we want to show, we're not overly reliant. I mean, we are relying on them. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, you know, when you speed it up, so it's like that, kind of practice is good to lock in that precision but then it's like and what I was showing you were able to hear better with this baseline like we're on the beat that's just a little bit of syncopation on the up beat of the six notes one two deep for one two deep for one two three four you can play around with that you know you check out that that's that's of course superstition there's a lot of that that syncopation built in really brilliantly in the lines and in the comping both hands I think we nailed it I think we nailed this all Hey, hey, thanks, mirror, for the question.

If you want to leave us a question, you can go to you'll heara.com and leave us your speakpipe. And until next time, you'll hear it.