You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Voicings for Pop and Rock

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

It's another live edition of You'll Hear It where Peter and Adam take your questions - today, they answer a question about how to play voicings for basic pop and rock tunes, as well as Peter's Root-2-Melody technique.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.Tuesday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Piano Guided Practice Session with Adam on YouTube4:00 PM - Open Studio Demo & Tour (register here)8:00 PM - Listening Sesh with Peter and Adam on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Shall we get to some questions? Let's do it. All right. So, Zach, up at the top, near the top, Peter, has a great question. Peter and Adam, I know you are sophisticated jazz guys, but any tips for voicing when playing more basic rock and pop tunes? So, yeah, Zach, I actually flirted with even doing like a pop piano course a few months ago. There's a YouTube video that I did with some basic.

Blockbuster YouTube video. Well, it's not, I mean, we're a jazz company for sure. But I stand by that video, though. That's right. It's a cool, it's a good info on there. Concepts I love creating some beautiful pop voicings, like using simpler chords. So, Zach, the place to start on this is knowing the difference between closed voicing and open voicing. Yeah.

Right. So start with four note voicings. That means you'll do a triad with one of the notes repeated. Here's our C triad, C, E, G, C. This is a closed voicing in that everything is within the octave, right? C, E, G, C. So if we take this same voicing and we just take the right hand up, C, G, C, E.

Now this is an open voicing. That means that the outside notes of the voicing are above an octave, right? They go beyond an octave. So close means anything within an octave, above means beyond. And really, the closed and open refer to the triad itself. So this is actually a closed voicing, even though the C is so low. that is open. Right?

I have C, C, G. Another thing that can help are just some basic orchestration principles for doubling notes because you're gonna double notes with pop voices, right? Unless you, if you just do three notes, it's gonna be a little,

it's gonna be a little thin, right? So if I just do the triad in three notes, even in these big open voicings, it's just a little too thin. You need at least four, sometimes even five. So the thing to think about is the closed voicings and the open voicings, and then what notes to double. There's actually a lot of theory on what notes to double based on the overtone series. So the root is always the number one A-O-K thing to double Zach.

You can double that a lot. And still, you can, here I have three Cs in the C chord. Sounds awesome, right? Here's just one C. Here's three. It's so much more. C-E, right? What happens if we did three E's though? That's not so great. That's a bit loosey-goosey with the overtone. It's a little Lutheran there, right? Yeah. So the idea is that

C is your first choice to double. G is okay. Here's a, here's a double G. I have C, and then a tenth up E, then G, C, G. And then E is really the last thing you want to double. And in fact, if E is in the base, no other E needs to be in the chord. Right? So if E isn't in the bass, kind of get away with it a couple maybe. You've got to be careful still, even with two. But if it's the bass note,

that's the only thing that needs to be in that triad. So now what you need to do with this information, closed voicing, open voicing. See, I'm super into this, Peter. I don't know if you notice, but I've thought about this. I'm confused. Do a simple chord progression like 4-5-1, right?

And practice doing different invertsings. with the bass. So maybe starting on the three. That sounds fancy, right? I just did the three with a, F. This is an F chord, F major, A, F. I put the nine in, G, C, F. Maybe that's even too pop for you, so you can omit that. And then I went to a root position G, G, G, G, B, D, and then root position C. Then you can just practice going in the different inversions. All different kinds of ways. You know, and just keep working that. It's so much fun, actually.

Yeah. So there's all different kinds of ways to do that, but then you can do that in every key. Then you can do that with major, minor, diminished, and augmented chords, and that'll get you most of the way through most pop tunes. That's great. And, you know, the only thing I'll just add in terms of the question, you guys are sophisticated jazz guys.

I would say that this is a little bit of, sort of bad rap or good rep or too good of a rap that we get as jazz guys. It's hard to play these simpler chords. Like in some ways we, I think, to a fault, maybe jazz musicians hide behind complex chords,

complex voicings, you know, all the time. And we feel like that makes us more sophisticated than we are. I mean, being able to play some really good simple voicings, I mean, to me, that's the ultimate level of sophistication. So I think that that's something that jazz musicians need we need to pay more attention to simplicity addition by subtraction we mentioned this early really being able to and and we should never feel like we're above

these basic rock and pop tunes uh pop voicings someone here peter this isn't a question but frank mentions peter's root and two was quite a mind opener good stuff can you briefly explain that root i forgot that last week okay i did it yeah well just real briefly actually i think the video is still up it may not be staying up but the the jazz piano method live that i did last week which is going to be like a monthly or bi-monthly thing. Nice. Well, it might be a pro only. We don't know yet.

But the idea is, I mean, I'll just, there is a video on it, so I won't go into it too deeply. But the idea is that we talk about root and shell a lot. And root shell pretty. You're a great concept. So you got root. This is F minor. You know, F third and seven, A flat, E flat. And then Pretty would be that.

G. But trying to start, like, when we want to play, you know, all that kind of inner movement, Everyone's always wanted to know how to get that. And I always kind of struggled with figuring out how to explain that. And I think in order to open our ears up to get to the point where you can start to do that, thinking about some other inner movements besides that are kind of expansive on the root and shell. So we would talk about root plus two being, you know, seventh and ninth. So let's say we're going to do C minor seven to F7 to B flat major.

So we normally would be thinking of that's root and shell right so if we go root in ninth We go to sharp nine and flat 11th and then seventh and ninth basically like one plus pretty in a way Nice so I what was I doing it all was it was it was Stella? Stella right right so You got fifth and seventh and then you're gonna go to So you're using voice leading to seventh and flatted third and then, you know, so that's all it is. Root plus two notes that are not the shell.

And then let that lead you with voice leading to the next place you're going. That's great. Yeah. Check out this question here from DeFunky Unit. The funky unit. Watch Peter Kill It last Friday even noticed he uses the soft pedal. And he tips, tricks, guidelines on using the soft pedal, aka Unicorda. Ugh.

In the jazz context. You don't like Frenchman or Italian, Italian? It's fine. It's fine. You were, you were, right before we started, you were like, Uncafe, poor, for you were good with that Italian. I was good with. I am good with that Italian. Okay, so soft pedal.

When were we talking? I was talking with someone about this. We were talking about last week a little bit, but what's your general concept on it? So you want to learn, first of all, all the pedals, there's many different places that it's not on or off. It's not a binary, like, computer kind of pedal. like on or off USB pedal. So you want to learn how all the different gradients of that pedal do, especially the soft pedal,

because depending on the instrument and the condition of it and the maintenance of it, you're going to get some good, you know, you might have 200 different possible places within that. 200. Okay, maybe 100. I mean, theoretically it's infinite because it's not, you know, it's like an analog.

It's not. I mean, how much control do you have over that three inches? 200. So, leave that alone. Okay, so the idea is that you've got all these different places that you can use the soft pedal. So what I'm seeing maybe as a mistake or not a mistake is just sort of not the most creative way to use it. It's just on or off. So when once, when we, when we slam down the unacorda, what we're getting.

Un cafea. Like, we're getting a whole lot less, you know, one instead of two or two instead of three strings. being struck by the hammer because it's moving over on most pianos, depending on how it's set up, you're getting less resonance,

less strings, less sound, which basically, whenever you want that sound, you want to go for that. But it's very rare that you want to just have a totally

thinner sound, although there are times. So I find myself not necessarily using the unicorder in the same way, even on the same piano. It's more like,

how does it sound in the hall? Like if there's like huge amount of resonance, I'm leaning on that, especially solo piano. Like I'm trying to be able to have a broader palette so that when I go really big, I can do that. And like the hall is already making everything reverberates so much.

So you're reacting kind of to the sound that's happening. That's right. So one thing to understand about how it works is a piano tech can set that depth and how much everything moves over on the unicorder. So they might not be that proficient and making it sound the best. And also the piano might change by the last time it was set. Also, most texts don't check it. And you can go to Duay Corda.

That's a dangerous situation there. It's a dangerous situation. but what you want to do, and oftentimes, just to your point, Peter, I'm either going between, I mean, sometimes I'm just barely tapping it because that's what sounds the best. It's like when you mute like a bass string or a guitar string, right? When you're playing guitar or bass, you know, you don't just put your palm on there and you're like, okay, it's muted and I don't care what the results are. The same thing with the unicorta. So you need to, when you sit down to a new piano or even on your piano, experiment with where the best sound is. And the difference sounds, because sometimes you can use more than one depth, depending on what the situation calls for.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's the main thing. I think with all the pedals, but especially the wood recorder, it's just experiment on different instruments. And if you're always playing the same one, that's great, you can get to know it. But all the different places that what it sounds like and really, it's so much ear training with pedal. Like there's technique, of course, but it's so much ear training connected with it, I think. Just going to say, what's up to John? No question.

but high from Spain. Duo you rock. Cool. Well, this is, okay, I'm going to throw up this one from our friend Rob, because this is kind of a little bit in line with that. As pianists, you have to step up to different instruments all the time. How do you adjust to the particular piano you're playing at a given night? So this is another one of those where what you were talking about as far as mindfulness,

equanimity, being prepared mentally for the unexpected, being prepared for something that's less than optimal. I mean, look, if you play piano and you've got that kind of, like, you're so specific that something has to be exactly the way you want it, you could approach the greatest instrument being maintained by the greatest piano technician ever and be dissatisfied because it's not what you're expecting. So it's like we have to have. And look, if you look at, I really believe, the personality of most really good pianists of any genre that play piano, the ones that are successful, the ones that have a very flexible attitude. because you have to. You know, you're not going to succeed at doing this. And you can't just be like, well, that's great. I mean, I would say that Keith Jared maybe is an exception,

maybe not the most flexible brother out here. But he also has learned, you know, how to adjust his will to making sure he has the instrument the way he wants it. So like if you got to clout to Keith Jared, it's going to be like it's got to be like this. And it's got to be set up. If you have the money and the will that Keith Jarrett does have an instrument that's as high quality

as he can have, then that's what you do, you know. But if you don't, then you need to work on your acceptance, which, by the way, Keith Jared has loads of that as well. Yeah, probably more than the legend would imply. Totally. So I would say, like, you know, exactly to your point, Peter, like, you just have to expect the worst, demand the worst, accept the worst. That's right.

Just get ready for, practice your stoicism. It's going to be terrible. That's right. It's going to be hard to deal with. It's going to be unskillfully made. and an unkempt piano and I have to get some music out of it and it's okay because it's me

and I'm going to be me. But I mean what a great thing when it's a horrible instrument you can make it sound half decent. For sure. I mean, that's a lot. And sometimes that's easier than I've played on some incredible pianos.

I'm thinking like in Germany, Steinway nine foot. Like there's one in the hall in Essen, the filerone hall in Essen. And the guy who maintains it's the technician is like a legend there with Steinway. and beyond and that piano is perfect.

It's so much pressure, it's like, you've got to play perfect. Yeah, now you've got to be as good as this piano. You got no excuses, you know. So I think even with the greatest instruments and everything in between, but in terms of like how do you adjust to the particular panel, you're playing on a given gig, this is more sort of mindset stuff we're saying prepared. Yeah. What I like to do when I'm going to another piano is to take some time,

which is normally when I first sit down on it and do some specific things, some sort of specific scales and exercises I like to do. that I'm so familiar with, and I've done on so many different pianos, that I can get to know the piano as quickly as possible. It gets you a base level of where you're at. Exactly. Because we never know, like, you,

I mean, ideally you have three hours, five hours, but that's very rare. Sometimes you come in and you're playing, you're like, oh, I'm going to have time, and then all of a sudden the drummers in there playing loud, or they're like, oh, you got to, it's a union break or whatever. So I like to take the first five to ten minutes

to be like, I want to really get to know what the piano can do, what it can't do? I mean, I think all instruments. And then what can you do that day as well? there's also that. That's right. Well, you don't have to worry about that.

Yeah, I've been resting all day. I'm fine. No, but so then, because it's like a lot of things, like if you're thinking about, it's very easy to fixate on what the instrument can't do. And even the greatest instruments can't do some things as well as some others. But to me, it's more about like, I mean, the piano is so big and powerful. Find what it can do, you know? Can we get a little lemonade?

Can we make lemonade out of lemons? Can we have nice pianos? Can we have nice pianos? And so, like, maybe that's like, a chance for you to really explore, like the upper range sounds great. Like a lot of the, you know,

it used to be. Don't do it on that. Don't do it on the hammering. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, we want to look at the bright side because most pianos have that.

Now, if it's just a total dog, I guess you can, I don't know, what do you, what do you just not play or something? The only time that's, the only time that's happened,

and it wasn't me that our production, or, I guess, yeah, production manager. Hey, own it, man, own it. Yeah, well, he got to the club in Istanbul.

I think we talked about this before. And there was an upright piano. He's like, Peter's not going to play on an upright. And so they went out and bought a piano. I felt so bad. The lady was crying. Because I got there,

there was this little Yamaha baby grand and had the price tag still like sitting on it. They're like, we went and bought this because your guy said that you wouldn't play otherwise. I was like,

that's right. No, I didn't say that. I feel terrible. Yeah, yeah. Wow. They left the tag on so they can return it the next day. Peter's not going to sign upright.

Wow, that's great.