You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Simplify your chords

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

It's Method Monday. Adam does a deep dive on simplifying how you handle chord voicings.Like this kind of tutorial coaching session? Check out Open Studio Pro hereWhat would you like featured in a Method Monday? Leave us a SpeakPipeWatch Live: YHI LIVE Mondays at 4pm ET on YouTubeWoosh or No Woosh? Hit us up on Twitter and let us know which team you are onSupport the pod by spreading the word with the link youllhearit.com Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

Hey, Peter. Peter? Peter? Is it just me again? By myself? Oh, boy. Okay, here we go. I'm Adam Anus.

And there is no Peter Martin for this lesson because we're going very, very basic. It's Method Monday. And while Peter is out, I'm going to take on a very nuts and bolts thing that everyone can do, no matter what skill level you are on. If you want to build very simple, very easy chords, this is a process that can simplify the way you think about voicing chords. And even if you're an advanced player, you might just take a swing at this in some harder keys because there's a good chance that you don't have all of this in every key automatically. So what am I talking about today? So we've been talking about Barry Harris's

six chords a lot in Open Studio Pro and the daily gather practice session. I've been doing weeks of YouTube videos on it because it's so fascinating and the well of that is so deep. But we're not talking about that today. We're going one gear simpler today. We're going the most basic version of this idea. The idea is to simplify how you create chord voicings by putting a chord over a root. What does that mean? Okay, so if you wouldn't mind, if it's possible, I know a lot of you are driving around commutes, but if you're near a piano, even if you don't play the piano, go over to a piano, or when you get back to a piano, go over to a piano and hit the C below middle. for me in your left hand. So you just have the C here. Now in your right hand, play an E minor triad.

Right above middle C, E, G, and B, right? That's an E minor triad. That's a E minor triad. That is a C major seven. Now, the cool thing about this, of course, the C major seven, right, is we can keep that C the same, but we can do this E minor triad and all of these inversions, closed voicing, meaning that Each note of the E minor triad is as close as possible. We can do open voicings. So here's C and B. So our E minor triad is now in this beautiful open voicing. And that's a C major seven.

And all of its inversions. How pretty is that? This is like the starting point. This is the jumping off point for having some beautiful harmony. So that's our E minor triad over C. Put an E flat major triad over C. E flat major over C. over C.

That's C minor seven, right? And it's the same thing. We can do all of the inversions, keeping the C the same, but an E flat triad over C is a C minor seven. And then again, we can do open voicings or closed voicings in all inversions. And it really gets you these super solid four note voicings. Isn't that beautiful?

That's closed. Here's one that's open. You really start to have these, big beautiful chords with just one triad over the root note. So why do we do this? Just to pause here for a second, why not just say 357 or root 357? And I realized that the genius with the Barry Hare six chords, which is a similar thing, but a little bit more complicated, is that it simplifies the whole thing. So I'm not thinking 357 in C. I'm just thinking there's that shape of E minor, right? I know it's always going to work in closed and open voicings. So a good way to practice this

is just to do all of your triads, major, minor, and two more that we'll talk about here in a minute. So, of course, we've done C major 7. That's an E minor triad over C. We've done C minor 7, which is a E flat major triad over C. What about, let's try an E major triad. Interesting. Okay, so this is a C major 7 sharp 5.

Kind of an esoteric chord, but when you need it, you need it. You can take this, do a very, very bare-hares thing too, and do an E-major triad going to an A minor triad over C. And they get you a little C-major 7-5 to C-6. How great is that? So that's a C-major triad gives you like an augmented sound. Beautiful. What about a E-d diminished triad over C? Aha.

That is our dominant chord. So again, all inversions of the E-diminished triad. Diminished right as E, G, and B flat. All inversions, closed voicings. What about open voicing? What do those sound like? So beautiful. That's where all of that stuff comes from,

are these simple movements of just very basic four-note chords, three-note, four-note chords, able to move like this. Okay, so just to sum up here, our simplification process of making beautiful chords. So if you put a C in the bass, So we do an E minor triad, right? A minor triad from the third, if you want to think about it like that,

we get a C major 7. If we do an E flat major triad, the major triad from a minor third up, we get a C minor 7. And again, you want to work all inversions, closed voicings, open voicings, all inversions. If we get an E major triad over C, that's the C major 7, sharp 5, gorgeous chord.

We get an A minor triad over C, that's a C major 6. out the fifth. And if we do an E diminished triad over C, we get that C7. All right? E, G, and B flat. And again, it's a C7. So C is likely always going to be the root.

So getting these other notes of the chord that don't include the root and getting them in the different inversions really, really help. So that's what I'm talking about. And then you can take that same logic then to the Barry Harrah six chords, right? So our E minor triad can become basically is related to the G6 triad, right? The six from the fifth, and that gets us like a whole C major nine situation. But this very basic, right, these four triads, right, the E major, E flat major, E minor, and E diminished triads, they're so super handy for just getting some basic. And the A minor triad, too, can't forget about that. Just some basic great-sounding triads, great-sounding voicings over very simple chords.

What about a 251? What about some kind of simple cadence? Let's do it's 251 and C. Right, so here we have our D minor 7. We have D in the bass, right? We can put that F-major triad in our right hand. Maybe we'll do a big open voicing here. Oh, it's beautiful.

And then maybe we'll go to a closed voicing of G7. G in the bass and a B diminished triad, unbelievable, to an open voicing of C major 7, C in the bass, and an E major triad. So again, you're like, why do you think about all this? Because once you get the shapes in your hand, I'm just thinking about the triad aspect of it more than anything. Like that, those shapes are super important because I can move them around. I know that F major triad in any inversion is always going to give me, a decent D minor 7. You know what I mean?

Just about thinking less, which I don't know about you, but I need that.