You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Does That Work? Drop 2 Voicing

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

Adam finishes off his How Does That Work? series with an episode on drop 2 voicings, an especially useful tool for anyone interested in arranging.For more lessons at the piano with Adam (and Peter!), check out our brand new course: Jazz Piano Technique. In Volume 1 of this series, you'll get a 4-week bootcamp entirely focused on improving your ability to play pentatonic scales. For more info, go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-techniqueLike those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus, and you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice is coming at you. It's my last day here at the piano solo. Pete's coming back, I think, remotely next week. And so we're going to do our last episode here of our series. How does that work? It's a basic jazz theory series. Check them out early in the week. I've done some on altered dominance, diminished chords, chord substitutions and playing out. Today, we're talking about drop two. And drop two is a voicing concept. But don't worry, you can use it. Even if you're not a pianist, it's great for arranging. Anytime you have four voices, drop two is a very convenient technique to use. I was just doing some orchestral arrangements the other day,

and I was using this in the strings because I know that it always sounds good if you use it right. So what is drop two mean? Well, it actually means exactly what it's called. You drop the two or the second note from the top. So if we have a C major seven chord, a four-note block chord, C-E-G-B, just a regular vanilla wonderbread C major 7. The second note from the top, the G, we just take it and we drop it down an octave. We omit it from where it was, literally move it down an octave.

And that's what it is. And for some reason, these voicings sound awesome. Beautiful. That's it. So any four note block chord that you have, here's D minor 7, like the 2 of a 2.5 and C. D, F, A, C, take that A second from the top and drop it down. These sound great. And so there's just an incredible amount of things you can do.

So one thing I talked about in a video from last year was the Barry Harris Sixth a Minish scale, and these drop two voicings work great with this. And I'll briefly go over that. So the sixth diminish scale is when you have a C major six. Let's do, yeah, let's do this. We'll do it starting here on this first inversion, E, G, A, and C, right? So the C is on top. That's our melody note.

And we're going to do our drop two. C major six. And then we alternate going up the six-diminish scale, which is a major scale with a half-step between the fifth and sixth degree. Octatonic scale that is even. Right. right? Instead of just, there's a half step, this A flat between G and A. Okay, so we have our C major six on C. Every chord tone in this, C, E, G, A, and C is going to be a C major six chord.

Just in different inversions. And this is all dropped two. I'll go slower so you can kind of see this if you're watching on YouTube. And then every other degree in this scale, you might notice forms a diminished chord, which, as we learned on Tuesday, is symmetrical in minor thirds. These can be used in drop two. So if we have this D here, we were here, see, we can do the same thing in drop two. And now we're alternating between major six, diminish. Remember, all major six chord tones are major six chord. Major six diminish, major six.

Major six diminished, major six diminished, and so on. It's very cool and can be incredibly useful, especially if you're voicing melodies in four-part harmony. If you're a pianist, you can use this to play chord melodies, and it sounds really cool. You could do this in block chords with the octave thing, but in drop two for some reason, to my ear, it just sounds so great.

And there's these little moving that you can get into, but that's really more of the sort of next level of this. Just know that the basics of the drop two are we have a four-note block chord, and we move that second to top note down one octave, and that could be any four-note block chord that you want to play. That's it. That's the basics. That's how does that work? Drop two. Well, this has been really fun. Go to Open Studio Jazz to check out our new Jazz Piano Technique course we launched just last week. Really, really fun, a bunch of guided practice sessions designed to

boost your power speed, dexterity control. Super fun. I became more dexterous and faster and more powerful from just making the course. So if you take it, I could only imagine.

But check that out. Go to openstudiojazz.com. And Pete will join us remotely next week, but until then, you'll hear it.