You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Two-Handed Voicings That Kick Ass

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

On today's episode, Peter and Adam revisit a blog post on some of their favorite two-handed voicings. To see the original blog post, you can go here: http://youllhearit.com/two-handed-fourth-voicings-peter-martin/.You'll Hear It is now an award-nominated podcast! That's right, we're a finalist in the Music category for The People's Choice Podcast Awards. To see the full list of nominees, go to https://www.podcastawards.com.Like 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.

Hey, Adam. Yep. How many hands do you have? Two. How many paws do you have? Two bear paws. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin.

And you're listening to the Yule here at podcast. Daily jazz advice coming at you. Coming at you because you're, oh my gosh, I dropped my food again. You're referring to what my lovely wife, Heather, referred to on the podcast a couple of months ago, which is my bare paws, that I make our family's living with my hands. And yet I can't really do anything and play the piano with them. I tend to drop a lot of things. I tend to if I'm opening up a package, I tend to damage what's ever in it. Is this more of a mental or is it a physical defect?

It's 100% mental. Okay, because I could see you using it for certain housework. I can't help. I have bear paw. Or if it's time to tip. Oh, I'm a T-Rex. I can't reach with my little bear hands. The gator, I can't get the wallet.

Sorry, guys. Yeah, that is a little bit like that. Right. Yeah. Why are we talking about hands anyway? Well, we're talking about two-handed voicing today. We're doing, as I like to say, a shallow dive, not a deep dive. Because we don't have time for that.

We don't have time. We've been told people, short commutes are happening again. I don't know if you knew that. Is that true? I don't know. Well, also, I have a hard out in about one hour. That's right. We got out of here.

We got it. This episode's not going to be an hour. Oh, thank goodness. Yeah. You know what? But this episode is really interesting because we are going to start kind of going back into some of our older, you'll hear it blogs. Yes. That maybe, you know, we're around before we had a big listenership.

Yeah. And this is one of them. This is from a blog post called a four-handed. What is it? Two-handed? Two-handed fourth voicing. Two-handed fourth voicing. Four-handed.

That's a fouthful. Tooth-handed fourth voicings. And really, this is a two-minute jazz video. It is, yeah, yeah. It's the extent of the blog post, but it's... But I was watching it. I thought it was awesome. And I just thought that our you'll hear listeners would, like, really appreciate some

of your insights into these fourth voicing. Yeah. So what is a fourth voicing? Oh, no. No, a fourth voicing, I mean, for me, is just a voicing with fourths in it. And I think the main one we're going to look at is actually all fourths.

But I would also consider even something. Man, the key station can screw up any voicing. Oh, like it. So lovely. Big shout out to M Audio. Just the flimsiest plastic available. We're going to put it out there. M audio, if you're listening. Up your game.

We will, no, I'm sure that they have upped game. Send us something better and then we will stop our tirade against you, right? For sure. I guess we could just buy something better. I mean, we did buy the cheapest possible key station. I think this was $49. It was really. I think it was $1 per note.

That's the price. It's not the amount of keys. Yeah, and it was like free shipping from Amazon and we're complaining about it. It's actually not bad. It's really not bad. If you would have had this in the 80s, you'd have been like, oh, my goodness. It's so light. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Okay. So the main one I think I went through. in there is five notes actually. Or was it six? It was both. It was both. I love the five note one,

two in the left hand, three in the right hand, and it's all force. So the key on this as opposed to kind of obvious like all perfect force. Which can work too.

Which can work too. That's a nice thing and you move it around chromatically. But these are diatonic movements with the fourth. I think these are great. So if we look at G minor, we're starting on G.

And just go up and fourths. Yeah. And you're not worrying about if they're perfect fourths diminished. It's diatonic. It's all diatonic. So it's, you know, C, G, C, F, B, F, B, F, E. And then you move through the, in this case,

the Dorian scale, I would recommend. Yep. I'm not usually the sloppy, but the key station has certain physical limitations unless you have bare paws that fit in there. If you breathe on one of the keys, it hits. Yeah. But then the fun with these is when you're...

When you combine in a little bit of chromatic movement. So the way to learn these, is to go through all the different keys are certainly the ones that you want to learn first, but also to learn the voicing chromatically, kind of at the same time almost if you can. I think that's good advice. So do me a favor. Let's do that same voicing,

but let's do one alteration. Play that voicing one more time, starting on G. Oh, key station. Okay, now the very top note, let's take it down one whole step. Aha. The veritable so what voicing? The so what voicing.

So this is G, C, F, B, flat, and then it's, Instead of E on top, another fourth, we put a third on there. Yeah. Now, you can do the exact same thing that you did with the other voicing, moving around diatonically. Yep. I still consider this a fourth voice. I do, too.

It's a stack of fourths with a third on the top. Funky stacks of fourth third. It's a very common voicing. Obviously, so this is from, so what? The do, but do, do, do, do, do, yeah. So what? So, yeah, and I think that what you hear the distinction between those two, this gives it, with the full force gives you a little bit more

tension and so as you're moving diatonically what we're doing is listening for those places where you can resolve the tension so it's really between like there that's got more tension because of that augmented fourth that tried to

this one has a little more but the augmented force on the bottom so it's not that big of a thing can I give you a can I give you an Adamana special? Yes so start on B flat B flat is your low note then D, a major third up. Yeah. And then all fours.

Now we're still on Dorian. Yeah, so go up on all fours from there. I love that voice. Nice. That's a nice one. And that's kind of... So it's the same vibe, but inverted, right? So the third is on the bottom. The third is on the bottom. Right. Yeah. So I think that the force, the key with them is, it's going to be all force. It can be with one third. You don't want to start stacking thirds in your fourth voicing because then you just got a third,

you got a regular voice thing. That's right. Yeah. Man, you're comping game. Every sip you take up that old granddad, you go up another level, man. I got to give you to you just get more confident with it try two-thirds on every end sorry that's good are we going to win that podcast award i don't know why that just jumped in my mind no really we just filmed an acceptance yeah is there so are first of all andrews going to put a link here to this blog post for the two-handed fourth voice war sings uh it's a really really cool video peter's at the piano you can see the overhead and he goes through it in in a little bit more detail check i i kind of lay it is this the one where i lay it uh

lay it over autumn leaves a little bit. It's on autumn leaves. Over the changes, autumn leaves. Yeah. Because I want to just to show like what it actually sounds like in usage. So I do some of this total diatonic movement for sure,

but then I combine it with a little bit of alterations, I think, and stuff like for how you'd actually move through the changes. Because you can think about it, like say over that C minor to F7 to B flat major. Yeah. It sounds horrible, doesn't it? Sounds great. That sounds good.

That sounds really good. Like I'm hearing this over that entire 251. Yeah. You know, you don't have to change it. And the tension and release that it's afforded within those voicings actually can work over progression like that. Yeah, it's so true. Like, you don't have to think of the 251 as three separate chords.

No. No. Hells no. Hells no is what he said. That's right. Awesome, man. Well, go check out that blog post. And then we are nominated for People's Choice Award for the podcast awards.

And we want to thank everybody who's voted for us. already. We're going to have a link to those awards here in the description as well. Go to the blog, go to the podcast awards, and give us a vote. We might win. We're not going to win, but we might win. It's so funny because we had to, part of the requirement is that we record

the acceptance. We said that already, didn't we? Yeah. Okay, but we think that they're judging us based upon the acceptance award. How's that for turn it on its head? Yeah, yeah. So, we're definitely not going to win. But hopefully. All right. All right. Well, until tomorrow. You'll hear it.