You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Inner Voice Movement & Voice Leading on "All the Things You Are" - #23

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

Piano day! Today, Peter and Adam discuss voice leading and inner voice movement over "All TheThings You Are". See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hmm. Is that inner voice movement by any chance? Indeed. Nice. I'm Adam Ennis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you from the Steinway today.

That's right. If we sound a little more echo-y than usual, it's because there's many more mics on us from a larger room because we're sitting in front of a 5-11-inch Steinway. Oh. Right. Oh. And we've left the pot cave. You know, some people thought that we live in the podcast. Like lemmings on the prairie.

Like gollab coming from underground. I don't even know if he lives underground. I don't even know if that's his name, but, you know, the troll dude coming out from the Pied Cave. Say Golub? Golub. Isn't that his name? Gollum? Gollum. Gollop.

Not a fantasy guy. You know what? No, no, no. If you're on the inn like I am with that world, it's GOLOV. Yeah. My cousin's actually in the Lord of the Rings. Acting in that. Right.

PM Tolkien. Yeah, no, we've been threatening to do this for a couple weeks. And we always get such great responses when we do our episodes sitting at the piano. So we thought we would do this episode sitting at the piano. And today we are talking about inner voice movement and voice leading. We're going to use the classic standard, all the things you are. Hell. Because there's so much going on in this one.

I did this blog post. Actually, I wrote a little court arrangement for dealing exactly with this very issue, voice leading and inner voice movement on all the things you are. So you can go to Open Studio Network slash blog if you want to. to see that. Yep. Maybe we'll even put a link in the newsletter if you want to sign up for the old newsletters. That would be nice.

Yeah, and it's a great arrangement. I was looking at it again. I think you did this about a couple of months ago, a month or so ago, and I, you know, heard the way that you played it, and then it was so fun to look at the chart and to see how it kind of, you know, lays itself out visually, but you worked in a number of different, really interesting inner voice movement ideas in, well, you call it a chord arrangement, but it's really a beautiful musical arrangement of this too. Thanks. You know, I like doing this, and I actually suggest for a pianist to kind of work on your voicing chops.

You're improvising voicings all the time. But when you kind of sit out and arrange, even if you just did four bars or eight bars of a tune, and arrange out the voicings that you would use under a melody, it can be eye-opening of what you leave behind when you're improvising. It kind of gives you something to practice towards. So I do this every so often just to kind of like try to get new ideas that I can then work into my practice routine. get a good arrangement out of it that I can use on a gig. Yeah, and I mean a little pro tip for you guys that are out there that are interested in string arrangement, big band, any kind of ensemble beyond

just a trio setting is that doing this kind of arrangement and laying it out gives you a great template for what could be a larger ensemble arrangement actually where you could take this because great voice leading at the piano is the same thing as great voice leading

with vocals, with choir, with orchestra. It's just a matter of then thinking about the orchestration and how you apply it to the correct instruments in a way that makes sense to them. Yeah, actually, this piano arrangement is all the heavy lifting is done for, say, like, an orchestral arrangement. Then it's just a matter of putting it, you know, putting it out to all the different instruments, the orchestration part. But this is sort of the meat of all of that. So before we kind of get going into anything deep on this, let's kind of define some terms. We've talked a little bit about voice leading, I think. And really, that's just,

there are a whole bunch of, obviously, classical rules and things. But jazz kind of has its own pathway to this. Classical voice leading will always sound good. It'll always make sense. Well, good classical voice. Much as good jazz voice leading. Somewhat are French, you know what I'm saying? No. But who? But jazz, you know, when you start incorporating all the 7th, the 13s, the 9th, we have kind of our own rules with those. And so we're just trying to get voice leading that doesn't sound clunky, that makes sense, that doesn't take the listener's ear off of what we want to put on, which is in this case the melody.

Right. So it's complementary to. It enhances. It doesn't get in the way of. It's okay, I think, to distract a little bit at the right times, the right amount. But I think, you know, a great definition or guiding principle for voice leading in jazz is just remember the melodic element. Yeah.

Like each one of your voices has, it doesn't have to be, and in fact it shouldn't be necessarily the most interesting and sophisticated melodic thing going on because then it will distract. possibly from the main melody. But it should be beautiful melodic, sing it. See if you can sing it, especially if it's in your range, you know, and if it falls well in the voice, it's probably some pretty good voice leading. Because we get caught up in the like how they interact with the harmony,

and that's all important. But first and foremost, voice leading needs to be really interesting and just well-crafted melodies. Agreed, yeah. So, you know, some examples here that you can, you can use, I mean, some things that I like to do, the first thing that you can do for good voice leading, everybody can just harmonize a melody. Let's say you have a melody that's just, you know, the easiest thing to do is to add something parallel to that, you know, and that is voice leading,

but it's not great voice leading. That's just kind of harmonizing more than I think. The first kind of trick you, I think you learn, is to do some kind of opposite, contrary motion, whatever that may be, whatever works with the melody that you're doing and maybe the core changes you're doing. I think what you just showed there, do that again, the second one, and then the first way, just in parallel. So you immediately get the independence of the voices, which I think is important to be able to create interesting melody so that the listener can hear that, and that is kind of the easiest way to get it.

Exactly right, yeah. So when we're talking about good voice leading, you, you know, ideally, every single voice is its own little melody. Yeah. That makes sense, you know, by itself. That's really, really good. You know, great choral writers are so good at that. Yeah.

That, you know, every singer is singing a melody to them. Yeah, yeah. And I think part of the trick with that, and it really, you can apply this to the piano, to the guitar, to arranging, you know, big band orchestra, anything that has multiple voices, part of the key to that works for vocals and the reason great vocalists, I mean, vocalists. I mean, vocal arrangers do this. If each section or part has an interesting melody

and a beautiful melody, they're going to sing it all the better. And just like if you give the violas a great melody, even if it's real simple, but it's their own thing, and it's good. It's not just sort of sitting on some footballs. They're going to play it better. I mean, I don't care if it's the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony,

any of these great orchestras. It's just human nature. You're going to play something better, the better the quality. So that's a trick that, you know, that vocal arrangers have been using forever. But it also works for the piano. I think we're going to see some of that is like, you know, when we give the left hand, the top of the left hand

or the bass part or whatever, something more interesting to play, it's just easier to make it sound good. Totally great. And to stay engaged in it. You know, another thing that pianists can do, this is kind of a hack. This is kind of a growth hack. Yeah. Because you actually don't have to know a great voice leading

for every single voice to kind of make it work on the piano. Sort of the first trick you, I mean, that I learned, that not knowing what voice leading was, was not to use the same shape twice in a row. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Because if you don't do that, there's a good chance you're not moving things parallel to each other.

One of the voices is moving. So, like, if we just take these first two bars here of all the things you are, right? So I have these two shapes. Yep. Now we know that all the things you are, everything is based off the third on this tune. Right.

It just follows the third around, you know, up, up fourths. So I could have done this same shape. just moved it up a fourth. But that does not sound nearly as interesting as, you know, moving this bottom note here, which is the fifth, down to the root. Yep. And you're immediately getting that contrapuntal independent voice without even, you're actually only moving one of the voices, that kind of tenor voice,

and only slightly, but because you're expanding out with your shapes, it already gives it, like what you did here. This is a great sound, but it's a very like, Corridal, vertical kind of sign. Totally. you know, and then you could expand it out. But in moving out immediately, you've already given it that independence before you even have to get into a lot of movement.

You've been able to reserve that to a little bit later. That's so true, man. And like, so it really is for pianists. And if you're scoring out anything, if you're writing a string quartet arrangement, you know, if you just start by avoiding the same shape, that's going to go a long way. And it doesn't have to be very different either. Like if you were to even do, you know, some different alternates.

might be, you know, like going with pretty much the same voicing, but moving the root down as well. One thing moves differently. That actually will change the entire setup for your listener, you know? Good. So that's some kind of like basic voice leading and some, you know, the hack that you can do. I mean, there's so many schools about it. Yeah, I think another good one here, and you've got it in a bunch of places, but you even get into it a little bit at the beginning. It's just, you know, so you got the shapes to delineate the different voices, but also. any kind of different rhythmic feel or movement between just one voice, not necessarily

to, you could do that later and you get into that, but as opposed to just or just. So now, so you've already, you've got this, and like if you had something else going like, you know, oops, you know, any kind of moving that rhythm into there starts to draw the ears, attention, just a little bit to those voices. Well, this brings us kind of to the next part of this episode and what the kind of goal of this arrangement was, and that is to have one voice, at least one voice in every single bar, have some kind of movement. And this presents all the challenges to the voice leading. But like you just said, it also breaks up the harmony to the listener. And then for solo piano

stuff, you know, now all of a sudden, I can provide a nice lovely time feel just by moving one note, like you think you have to do all this. Yeah, yeah. You know, you don't. You can just, just by moving one... Please don't do all that. Not in that range. By moving one node, I can make it feel pretty good, you know?

Yeah, it gives that pulse. So, you know, just by moving a voice up or down, this is the beginning of inner voice movement. You're taking one of the voices somewhere, not on the edges, although you can do the edges of the highest or lowest, and just moving it. You can rock it back and forth. You can move it down a diatonic step.

You can move it up a diatonic step. Shirley Horn, it was so wonderful about doing this. You know, she would place voicing like this. Yeah. And just like move a little bit. And then on that Here's to Life record, you know, the arrangements, a lot of those arrangements are actually fleshed out

voicing of hers, orchestrations. On the strings. They record that stuff, and then they added the strings and arranged it around. But you get a little bit of that, you know. And so it doesn't always have to be... You know where it's going to get in the way, it can just be that little pulse thing and give it that groove.

Well, you do a whole thing with your left hand where you move one voice or you move two voices or you just kind of rock back and forth. And it creates a whole feel for the right hand as a pianist. So, okay, now we have some basic voice leading. We have one movement where we just take one voice and we move it somewhere. There's kind of some exercises that you can work on as a pianist. to kind of get these things going. And that's really just to choose a chord value and then say, I'm going to move that every time.

So if we're here on all the things you are, let's just say we're going to move something around the fifth every time, right? So if I start here, and I'm not doing the chord range, but I'll just do my own thing here. If I start on the F, I do something with the C. And then to the B minor, I'll do something with around that F, because that's the fifth of B-flat minor. You know, and so on and so forth.

So there's some movement around it. You're starting either below it or above it, going to it, or you're starting on it, rocking back and forth on it. And this is such an important way that we recommend to practice, this kind of restricted practice where you're going to say, because you're talking about to a specific voice. Yeah, I'm saying every chord that we play on this tune, I'm picking the fifth, and I'm moving that around somehow.

Because what ends up happening, like you might get to the point where you could play some nice, you know, voice leading inner voice movement over a tune like this. But you're basically doing things that are comfortable on certain chords that you know how to do, as opposed to getting out. Like, how do we practice to get out of our comfort zone? And this is the exact kind of thing that we preach here. Am I getting too preachy for you'll hear it? Just preaching enough, man. No, but it's like you've got to take yourself out of the company. This is not about, like, you would play the whole arrangement like this on the gig.

Right. This is about practicing so that you're starting to discover. and you're forcing your hands into new positions to hear these. You're not going to like the way all these work, and that's okay, because you're going to be using these at different times, but you've got to get them over every chord of this tune. And really, trying to go next level is taking this to different keys, so that you're really forced into different shapes.

Same concepts, different keys. And it doesn't have to be the fifth every time. And, you know, every tune you do is not going to be all the things you are, where luckily the melly note is always the third. This is why you have to work it on all the different notes, on all the different tones of the chords, the seventh, the sixth, the fifth, all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hope this helps everybody. This is, it's really fun. Man, I can geek out and talk about voice leading and voice movement all day. I know, that would be great. But then we wouldn't be a daily podcast anymore, would we?

You'd be an all-day podcast. You'd be an all-day podcast. Cool. There might be a market for all-day voice-lead podcast. I don't know. That would just like a live stream. They'd never end it. Well, cool.

Well, this is good. It's good to be back at the piano with you, Adam. And we look forward to more of these at the piano. echoee affairs, man. That's right. Yeah. If you want to ask us a question, a musical question, or a topic for a future episode, go to you'll hearat.com. You can also pick up one of our t-shirts. You can also subscribe to our newsletter. I'm going to put a link to this chart and this blog post on this arrangement in the newsletter the week this is going out. So make sure to subscribe.

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