You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Sus It Out

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Adam breaks down some harmonic tools towards using suspended chords in real time. 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

I'm Adam Aniston. This is the You'll Hear It Podcast. Okay, today we're going to work on sussing it out. I want to talk about real quick here, a brief session all about sussing out your dominant chords. Would you like to be able to do this? Would that be something you might be interested in? What is that? That's something that I directly ripped off from our own Peter Martin.

Don't tell him that I ripped it off because I don't want him to sue me or anything. But when I first started working here at Open Studio, a lot of my job here was transcribing what Peter was playing and putting it on our lessons and trying to break down what he was doing for the students. And this was one of the first things that I saw Peter do that I recognized. I recognized actually from a pianist that Peter knows, but I don't think is like one of his people. Bill Evans does this. And so I immediately locked onto this. And then I heard people like Hank Jones and Barry Harris do a very similar thing here. So I thought, okay, this must be a very common thing that all these great players do. It's sussing out your dominant.

seventh chord. Say if you're in the key of B flat here and you have an F7. So sussing it out means you suspend the third. And actually you might think, oh, you suspend it up to the fourth. But no, actually, you can go either way. We were kind of talking about this in real time over on Open Studio Pro. And if you notice, a lot of the suspended chords in jazz have both a suspended second and a suspended fourth. So the third splits almost. Here's a perfect voicing to demonstrate what I'm talking about here. So if we have an F7 sus, in my left hand I have F, B, flat, and E flat. In my right hand, I have G and C. Now you could do this, you know, two notes in your left, three notes in your right, whatever's comfortable, really. But notice here we don't have the third of F, right?

We do have the G, which is suspended down from the third, and the B flat, which is up. So it's almost as if this third splits apart both ways. And you hear most suspended voicing's at least amongst jazz pianist is this. If this were like Elton John, you might hear something like this, or this, either suspended up or down, right, on either side of the third, diatonically. But here, you hear something like this. Now, something really interesting that you might notice here, especially if you're a follower of Barry Harris, which aren't we all, is that this shape, F, B, F, F, E, flat, G, and C, if we take the F off, the root, this is just a E flat major six chord in drop two, right?

It's also, you might consider this, a C minor seven shape, which isn't that interesting, because if we're doing a 5-1 in the key of B-flat, the C-minor-7 is the 2, right? So this F-7-suss is really just, I mean, it's all F-7, it's all just the 5, but it kind of helps to think about it, maybe it's like C-minor 7 over F, for some people.

Might be a way to think about it. And then we, after the F7s, we play the dominant chord. And I'm going to play here this voicing that we've been talking about also in Open Studio Pro. And also I ripped off from Peter Martin. In fact, this whole sequence. So here we have our F7sus, FB, E, flat, G, and C. And then for the F7, we're going to do a F-13-9-sharp 11 based off of the diminished scale, the whole half, sorry, the half-hole dimnish scale.

right and so this is classic so here we have f a e flat g flat flat 9 b natural sharp 11 d the 13 on top now is that something you might be interested in again this shape here what I love about this especially if you've seen any of my videos on the diminished scale this shape here in my right hand right so in my left hand I have f and a in my right hand I have e flat F sharp B and D now in this shape contains a B major triad and a B minor triad. And I've talked about this major minor triad on the diminished scale before. It works on all of the triads available in the diminished diminus scale. So if we're here in this F half whole diminus scale, it works with also like D minor and major, B minor and major, A flat minor and major, and F minor and major. That's how you get

that sharp nine sound, right? So it's a brilliant bit of things. theory here. But this, and then for my one chord, I might do a six, nine voicing here, B, flat, D, G, C, F. I'll be able to do a tenth to fill it out a little bit. But this is as beautiful and as punchy as you're going to get. See if you can play around with those voicings in all 12 keys, or at least keys you're familiar with. We did it here in B flat. See if you can do it in C, 251, or a five, suss, five, one in the key of C. see if you can do it, E flat, F, A, flat, G, you know, the keys. All of them.

That's all I got for this week. Peter's going to be back next week. Thanks for indulging me on these incredibly super nerdy things that we're talking about here. These are things that I think about all the time and that we practice over on Open Studio Pro all the time every day, pretty much. So if you want to come through Open Studio Pro, if you're an Open Studio member, but you're not an Open Studio Pro member, we've been doing these open houses the first Wednesday of every month.

Check it out. for September the very first Wednesday. You can email us at support at openstudiojazz.com if you want to learn more about this Open Studio Pro open houses and come through. Okay, until next time, you'll hear.