Spread It Around a.k.a. Serial Soloing

Even in the context of triads, even in the context of closed position, of single note playing, I have been ignoring yet another area of interest: spread voicings. They sound gorgeous.

Could we do the exercise with spread triads?

Considering every arpeggio covers a 10th or 11th depending on the inversion, you run out of room much faster. I think what’s happening here is bigger than triads. Really what I have been talking about is creating and sequencing 9 note intervallic patterns. (3 inversions, then it resets). The relationship is diatonic, not absolute. I suppose I’m only really beginning to touch all the possibilities of this way of thinking by limiting myself to intervals based on triadic structures. (And with good reason, one month in, and I’ve barely scraped the surface of a single position. Hopefully the others will be easier when I finally move on). I guess this is a follow up thought to something in the previous article “Oh Boy...” about creating large sequences.

Count out the number of intervals in the above pattern before reaching the note G in the second bar. There are 9. Suppose we could create any sequence of 9 intervals, for the time being, keeping the whole group of 3 thing going by saying that the first 2 intervals will ascend and the third one will descend, although this is not necessary. Let’s throw out some random numbers and see what happens.

4 4 5, 2 3 4, 6 4 7. And now the pattern that results. First, according to the outline above, I will do 2 up, one down. At which point, according to the outline above, I might continue trying out different sets of intervals and seeing how they sound. But I could also keep the same set of intervals and see what happens if I change the order or number of intervals ascending and descending.

hmm... Maybe just dealing with one set instead of 3 would be a better place to start. Supposing you limited yourself to a 7th as the largest interval you could create a set of 3 intervals with, that would mean 343 combinations of 3 intervals you could sequence. WOW!

Maybe you could use 9ths, or 10ths, maybe you could use only a 2 interval pattern, or 4 interval pattern, or combine sets of 2 and 4, 3 and 4, 2 and 3 intervals. Maybe your head is also swimming from all of this information!