You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Slash Slingers

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

This episode Adam and Peter talk nothing but slash chords!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, we are slashing all the chords today. Every chord must be slashed. Wait, are we slashing prices? Are we slashing tires? Just chords, bud. Just chords? Just slash cords.

I want to learn about this. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Jazz. Explain. Oh, it's explained. You saved me.

Full disclosure. Adam Manus just saved me. Don't show them how the sausage is made. We haven't, you know what? We haven't made sausage in a while. We're trying to avoid a sausage festival here, in fact. We haven't made a sausage festival here, in fact. We haven't made.

made the sausage in a while and I, for some reason, I love, do I love jazz explained? I think I do love it. I came up with it, right? I think it's a really good tagline. I totally forgot it just now, though. It's been by far our most discussed in podcast tagline. We keep talking about it. Every time you say it, totally slipped my mind though. You saved me just now. Every time we do it, we talk a little bit about it. Oh, we do. I thought you meant our beautiful fan. Oh, no one else cares. No one else cares, Peter. Not a single soul. Get to get to the information. Yeah. Get to the show. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, well, let's get to the show. It's my podcast and I'll do what I want.

Oh, Peter's singing. It is popular, though. But people do talk about that. Yeah. Oh, don't we have a... You're not stupid. No. Caleb put something.

Was that for me? Thank you. So we do have a speak pipe today. You know what I was thinking, man? Yes. We've got, we're backed up on the speak pipes. A lot of people have been leaving us a voice message. Which is awesome.

It's awesome. We love it. You can go to you'll hear it.com and leave us a voice message. So I'm thinking, man, maybe the next few episodes, we just knock out these speak pipes. Get to these voice messages. Man, you just gave away the, the, there's no drama in that. Now we've got to go back and take that out.

We're not going to tell them what the questions are. Okay. Yeah, stick around for some great, stick around for some great listener questions. Great listener questions. Even better answers. You know, so we've got a great question from Shlomo today. But before we get to Shlomo's question, Peter, it's a momentous occasion.

This is. This is episode number one of. Oh, we, let's start. Let's start a new season with this episode. Yeah, they're arbitrary anyway. Okay, sure. This is episode number one in our new space in the new pod room. Podfront.

Podfront. That's the name, the pod front. Well, that's been established. We are in a storefront. Yeah. It's a little bit of a covered up Hubble at this point. Like we're scared of the front because the front part is still covered because we're still work in progress.

We actually just came in today for the first time. The first time that we were in, that we've been in our new studio. We have a beautiful main studio space. where you'll be recording your lessons, we'll be recording courses in there. We've got a beautiful control room. We've got a beautiful studio B, which I'm excited about.

We're going to do some stuff in there. And then we've got our pod front here. Podfront. I love how we just established that name. Maybe we talked about it before. I think this was producer Caleb's idea, the pod front because it's a storefront. Like we are on Washington Avenue here in St. Louis.

We've got Florida ceiling, 12 foot high windows out front. We've, of course, covered them completely up because we are terrified of the sun. Mostly. And the city. No, we're not. We love the city.

Wait, can we throw out our address or is that going to attract some crazy listeners? Oh, it's a beautiful address. Okay. Because, I mean, does the Today Show have a problem with this as they're filming in Rockefeller Center? No, nobody knows when we do this thing. Well, they have security, don't they? Yeah, yeah. So we're at 33, 33 Washington in the heart of Midtown St. Louis.

That's right. But blocks away from the Scott Joplin home where he composed many of his most beautiful rags. That's right. We're just down the street from historic Gaslight Square. some of the greatest jazz clubs. And so we're really just excited and privileged to be here. It's an honor to be with you here, Adam, in our next location. Likewise.

You know, turning the page into the next chapter of the You'll Hear podcast. Yeah, it's amazing. If you would ask me, we'd be in a beautiful, spacious podcasting storefront windows on the Washington Avenue. You know, three, how long ago? Was it 30 years ago when we started this? 30 years ago. That's what it feels like. like, yeah, I was, I would have called you crazy. And I did. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, it's an honor.

Yeah, the humble beginnings of this were, you remember that time, it was only like three years ago. We came into, to work together at the old studio and I said, you know what, we're going to start a cool. I love podcast. Yeah. What did you have in mind? I was like, I don't know the name of it, but we're going to start. We're going to record our first episode today. And we're going to do it every day. We're going to do it every day, which we did for a long time. For a long time. We did seven days a week for the first six months. That's right. Yeah, that's crazy. Right. Yeah. Well, Peter, we've got a great listener question one of our many amazing listeners here on the you'll hear podcast this is shlomo and you've got a question about slash courts yes hi peter and adam this is shlomo uh bass player from

upstate new york again um i was listening to uh adam's course uh regarding the sixth chord diminished sixth chord and barry harris and all that i figured i'll ask if you guys would uh perhaps be able to take us on a little spin on slash chords, also known as inversions. When you're listening to more like advanced modern music, like fusion, jazz fusion, Alan Haltzworth and those guys, and you hear them doing all kinds of crazy inversions that is not even in the beb or any type of old school jazz vocabulary anymore, but it makes us really curious to know what they're doing. If perhaps you guys can elaborate on that and give us a little bit more insights of what this whole, I'm not going to call it, you know, Herbie Ancock says it's a craft, but it's a craft

that still comes from the deep desire of knowing the unknown and figuring out and digging deeper. So, yeah, can't wait to hear. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Lomo. Okay, so we've got our orders here, Peter, slash cords. Inversions at one point, he said, which are, I think. Holdsworth analysis. Yeah, Alan Holesworth.

That's a whole. Yeah, that's a big, it's a big ask, slowmo, but we'll do our best here. And Barry Harris. And Barry Harris. you know what this is really interesting then so I was just doing some orchestral arranging a couple weeks ago first time in a while and so I wanted to brush up on some of my some of my uh orchestration shops because you know it's like when you're working with a larger ensemble like I want the chords to ring true I want them to sound good so I always go to the principles of orchestration by Rimsky Korsakov ever heard of it ever heard of it it's classic

he's got a slash name he's got a slash dash slash Korsikov right the original slash chord. But I was reminded of a rule that I've known for a while. And this made me think of this slow mode and this may be a place to start when you think about this kind of stuff. But this is really for more inversions. And I love this rule. On dominant chords, if you're using an inversion in the bass, you do not put that note, that's the bass note, anywhere else in the court. So if you have a G7 over B, you have your B in the cellos and the contra bass. Put a little octave down. down there. Every other part of... Well, you just violated it. You already put it in another place. Well, no, the cello and the contraband. That doesn't count. That's just the full stops.

But everywhere else in the chord has no B in it at all. This works on any note. So if you were to do G7 over, over D, every other note of the chord that's not the root, which is in this case D, every other part of the G7 has no D in it. So you're not doubling that base note. Also works, by the way on major chords, especially on the third to not double the third of a, of a, like a C over an E. That's great. You know, so like Shlamo, that's like a very basic principle that will actually, it seems very simple.

But if you consider that so many of your inversions can be used on dominant chords and major chords, keeping that rule of whatever the slash base note is, right, whether the inversion is, if it's the third or the fifth or the seventh even, to not double that note at all in the upper structure of the chord. fantastic and I think that you know when we think about voicings at the piano it would behoove us to you know heed some of these I mean this is in a specific orchestral situation horse behooves you've been behoeven Beethoven so yeah so in other words this applies to orchestration and we can hear it and play with those concepts in a very interesting way when we're

writing for orchestra and that we have different instruments and like how they're combined, but it's sort of an overall concept is as far as not doubling. But I would say when we're playing voices on the piano, the more orchestrally we're thinking, the better. So it would also apply there. It sounds great on the piano like that. Yeah. You're not using.

Basically, if you double this, if you do G7 over B and you put a bunch of Bs. Oh, yeah. You know, it's just too happy. It's an amateur hour. What are we doing here? It's just 230. Yeah. You know what I mean?

230. 2.30. Yeah. Right. Doesn't work. And so, okay, so this brings up a good point here. So we're, let's move on to, this is a type of slash chord that is a good starting point, I think, for us to think about. Very basic.

Very basic. It's almost like what you're talking about at the bottom, like with your cello and bass, is not the root. It's the bass note. Exactly. Not that for the instrument, but the base note. The root is G. The base note is B. Exactly.

So that's our first kind of slash. Should we call it a classical? We should just call an inversion. An inversion. An inversion. Exactly. But the one that maybe we're talking about more Herbie Hancock, Alan Holdsworth, or Adam Holdsworth, is more of like there's a certain harmonic sonority and stability and kind of, you know,

dominance given to both equally perhaps, like an E flat over E? Is that a slash chord? E flat major over E. So an E-flat major triad Yes. Over just an E root. No, over an E triad. Over an E-triot?

Am I doing too much slashing? That's very advanced slashing. That's slashy, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I wouldn't even know. I mean, it's definitely doable. That, to me, is the most advanced slashing. When you're taking two completely different chords

and putting them stacking them on top of each other. But that is very Herbie Hancock. Yeah. And I was thinking is that maybe kind of the bridge between the classical? Because this is something that's very stervis ski too you're getting a lot of those kind of you know different inversions you know e flat and g uh g first inversion yeah um i think it might be a good way especially for some of our more classical players to think about this or is it like the stevie wonder thing of a two chord

yeah of a so here's like an f sharp over e a a sharp over d sharp yeah yeah try it over a right so this is a great bridge to the next type where it's really just a the bass note that's different than the harmonic content of what's happening above it, right? Like you, I always for years thought this was just A flat 7, 13 sharp flat 9, right? Right. But it's not when you, I mean, it is. No, but it sounds as a triad. But it's literally an F major triad over A flat. There's no seventh in it, which is big.

It gives it a glassier sound. And even when we're thinking about improvising, that can really inform where we take it, as opposed to like if it's an A flat, flat 13, flat nine, whereas if it's an F, oh, I'm sorry, regular 13 actually for that. Yeah. But it would be the same thing if it was like an A minor over A flat. Like think about the difference if you see, if you think about the difference if you saw a C major nine or a G over C.

Right. Right. It's just like that's giving me this impression of the slash chord of G over C. It doesn't to me mean like, right at all. It means a glassier, simpler sound of those. Classier or glassier? Both. Both.

Well, that brings us to maybe a good point where we should segue quickly before I talk about my next one, which I'm interested. Well, hold on. Before you do, Peter, we'll be right back. Okay. What were you saying? Okay. So the next one, and this is actually kind of good that we're not necessarily going in. We're throwing out different ideas. Slash chords are such a misunderstood and kind of vague potential territory because we're applying a term to a number of different scenarios. So these are all just sort of ones that we think about and that we use. at different times. But the next one I'm going to throw out there,

is this something that would interest you? Because it kind of relates to what you were just doing. Would that be something you might be interested in? Yes. Okay. So this is a C over D. Yeah. Right?

Any kind of the inversions. But this really relates to, I think, something that's closely related, which is a Suss chord, like a 9 Suss chord. Totally. Like a D, 9, Suss 4. Right.

But it's... The new pod front is a little dusty. here. Some of our voicing are dusty. So someone might write this C over D. Someone might write it even

D7 or D9 or D11 Suss. Yeah. But if you really want this sound, you would write C over D. Exactly. And that you're going to get this clean triad over a root sound.

Right. Because you can, and what's cool about that is you can go, whether not you write all this in or whatever can be more of a decision as you go. It doesn't have to be notated.

But places this can go and like where we can progress to, C over. over D and then maybe, you know, A, A minor, 9 over D. Or C major 7 over D. Or C major 7 or C major 7. Or C major 9. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of little subtleties. What about this? The difference between.

I think like that, my main voice has a lot of those. Absolutely. What's the, do you remember the two high one? Isn't the two high one a bunch of different slash chords? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, those are actually, yeah. Well, they just try as a.

So it's not like slash slash. Like an aversion triads. Oh no. The next part is too high, too high. So these are, the way I think I did it on the chart was like A flat 13. So, right, over E. Yeah. And then down a whole step to G flat 13 over E to E to E to D to C 13.

Yeah. To C13. I mean, you could also think about it as like minor nines, but I just don't hear it that way. So it would be like E flat minor 9 over E? Yeah. But I hear more as the A flat 13. Interesting. Yeah.

But those are definitely slash chords over like a pedal point or an ostinato, as they might say in the Piamonte region. A couple of more that I feel like you could think about as slas chords, as opposed to just a seventh or ninth chord. The first one that comes to mind is instead of, you can use instead of C diminished seven. you can use B over C, right? And it still gives you a diminished sound.

Yep, that's great. Especially, like, if you do this first inversion, you know, if you have the melody as B maybe, you know. Yeah. You know, that is something to be often. Another thing is instead of, like, C major 7 sharp 5, E over C is another one you see quite often. Right.

You know. Yeah. And also a great way. And, you know, slow, can I just point out one thing? This might help some people. That example,

you just said, E over C, as opposed to thinking about it as a C major 7 sharp 5. Yeah. The way this can come in handy is places that you're going to go next. Right.

So it might be like E over C and then to A minor 11. Oh, yeah. You know, because then that E is like a, it's, even though it's not in the root, it's the harmonic root. It's the harmonic foundation. So it's a five to one movement.

Absolutely true. And that could even go to like, you know, A minor over F. I mean, it's really F major, you know, 13, sharp 11. But like those ways of thinking a little bit independently, which gets you into some almost like counterpoint maybe with your left hand, whereas the bottom note of the slash chord is going somewhere just like the harmonic. You know, it's like they're almost moving independently, but together, that can be a fun way to look at it.

Well, then, so maybe the sort of final way we could talk about is sort of the penultimate? The ultimate? The ultimate. Oh, the ultimate. The Alan Holdsworth, Harvey Hancock way. Barry Harris. No, not Barry Harris, definitely. That's where the question started.

But is using the slash chord as, especially this idea of a triad or major seven or seventh chord over a root note as a way to create a lot of tension. So I'm thinking of something like D over D flat, you know, or even something like, something like you know B major 7 or B major 9 over B flat you know you see this sound quite a bit you know that's great like really really tense sounds where you're a lot of times that's when we're moving away from just to try it we're actually having maybe even some alterations some major seven totally yeah absolutely like like yeah c you know C sharp nine uh flat 13 over B you know you know what I mean where it's like you get this really crunchy thing

and it's you know the melody is this and the root is that it's a major third but this chord in the middle you get this crunch spicy yeah it's crazy that's great yeah well there you go thank you slow mo for the great question if you have a question go to you'll hear dot com and leave us a speak pipe anything else Peter no we're you know we are sponsored by open

studio we are in the home of open studio go to open studio jazz dot com to learn about all of our offerings. If you want to go next level, go to openstudiojazz.com slash pro, but you're not ready for that. Yeah, don't do that. Don't go there. All right, until next time, you'll hear it.