Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
7 no 5
A simple enough rock riff... or is it?
An Em7no5 chord spread huge with the 7th in the bass, planed through different chords of A minor. The flat and natural sixth are used. It's a 5 bar pattern. And the pedal tone of A gives it a certain eerie quality. I also always find it interesting when open strings are used and two notes which appear very far away on the guitar are actually quite close together on the music staff.
Or is it in D mixo/dorian?
An Em7no5 chord spread huge with the 7th in the bass, planed through different chords of A minor. The flat and natural sixth are used. It's a 5 bar pattern. And the pedal tone of A gives it a certain eerie quality. I also always find it interesting when open strings are used and two notes which appear very far away on the guitar are actually quite close together on the music staff.
Three's company
For the last few months I have been largely preoccupied with finding interesting four note voicings and arranging them in an order which allows for chords and melodies to be played. What I have noticed is that this lends itself much more effectively to playing alone or at the most in a duet situation, perhaps accompanying a singer. But in the context of a band or a jam session, many of these voicings have not fared as well.
For starters, part of the beauty of the open voicings is their openness. This is obscured in a band situation. Their space is overwhelmed by the sound of ride cymbals and saxophones. If there is a piano player there, they are obviously totally ineffective. Smaller shapes with a more sparse and percussive comping style should be used because more often than not it just always sounds like the guitar is stepping on the piano’s toes and not the other way around (speaking generally of course).
I have also recently started to play duets with a bass player. The bass player is there to lay down the harmonic foundation. The chord inversion is completely up to them. And then there’s just the fact that their instrument is so full sounding. Big four note open chords are great because their openness ironically makes them sound fuller as they create a sense of space. With a bass player, the options increase incredibly, because the pressure to create that sense of fulness is largely taken off of our shoulders.
Let’s take a look at the power of three notes. There are the triads, but also spread clusters, three part fourths, as well as 7th chords omitting the 5th or the 3rd (omitting other notes from any other kind of voicings results in a redundant voicing explainable in another way).
Now I need to plane modally, explore inversions and chord types and write arrangements or studies which help me find ways to put things in a traditional context as well as get practice transposing and recycling them. Most of all, the more hard work you do with them in as many different ways as possible, the better you’re going to remember them and be able to find them when you’re looking for them. It seems to be working.
Here’s a chart which clearly resembles the Mick Goodrick chart from the last article. It is interesting because it contains every possible combination of 3 notes without having any note repeated. That means that the chart for any key or mode would look the same, just with a different key signature. I didn’t bother spelling the triads.
Once again, the power of working out this chart as a practice aid before sitting down to experiment with the possibilities cannot be overestimated. You could play a row or a column. You could choose a single box every day and explore it uniquely through different inversions and who knows what else. You could play a standard deciding to go through the voicing type column, cycling through them as the changes go by. If you get confused, you can just breeze on over to the corresponding square to find out exactly what notes you need and apply the appropriate accidentals for the context of the song.
You could find a thousand different ways to use this piece of paper. And it will not be the same as if you practised without it.
What's amazing is that after three volumes of voice-leading almanacs, there's still new ways to present the same material which are not redundant. This is because with every new layout of the same information, due to the complicated nature of the material, I think we tend to see different possibilities based on what the layout suggests. That's probably why Mick bothered rewriting the same thing so many different ways. Every one really does make you think differently.
I chose to follow this train of thought before checking to see what existed in Vol. III on the subject of 3 note voicings. Now that I open it up I find that my chart is not there. What is there, is a detailed listing of every possible inversion and order these notes could be in as well as their relationship to four part chords. There is a huge amount of redundancy in those charts and in many ways this chart is more practical in its reductive quality. It does require a certain facility with inverting chords though to be practical.
The charts which appears later on (p. 55-61) are much more interesting in my opinion. They systematically list all the ways in an abstract and generalized form which the collections of 3 notes listed above can be led into each other! There's only six possibilities! Hopefully nobody minds if I put this chart up on this blog because I doubt anybody going out to buy Vol. III would choose not to because of this one chart. And it will answer a lot of questions. Choose any two voicings from the above list and the way in which they lead into each other can be described by the following chart:
From these two charts, every possible movement of 3 notes to another 3 notes without having a doubled note can be extrapolated in a systematic fashion. Rather than working like a computer to work out all the possibilities, how exciting does it seem to dive into the endless and completely unintuitive intellectually (but often easy enough to play) and extremely musical possibilities that these papers unlock?
In an age when jazz composition is rhythmically driven by odd time signatures and polyrhythms, and harmonic progressions are becoming simpler and more modal in nature with an emphasis on bass groove, how could these papers not excite a person to think of all the possibilities that still lie within a major scale?
This is an extremely relevant and new intellectual framework from which sounds can be discovered. In an age when so much has been done, we need to organize our thoughts scientifically or else we will never reach the extreme boundaries of what is mathematically possible while still more or less in the realm of the tonal system, or at the very least the kind of ancient modality dating back thousands of years.
Or screw the whole damned thing and let's go microtonal. But I like this.
For starters, part of the beauty of the open voicings is their openness. This is obscured in a band situation. Their space is overwhelmed by the sound of ride cymbals and saxophones. If there is a piano player there, they are obviously totally ineffective. Smaller shapes with a more sparse and percussive comping style should be used because more often than not it just always sounds like the guitar is stepping on the piano’s toes and not the other way around (speaking generally of course).
I have also recently started to play duets with a bass player. The bass player is there to lay down the harmonic foundation. The chord inversion is completely up to them. And then there’s just the fact that their instrument is so full sounding. Big four note open chords are great because their openness ironically makes them sound fuller as they create a sense of space. With a bass player, the options increase incredibly, because the pressure to create that sense of fulness is largely taken off of our shoulders.
Let’s take a look at the power of three notes. There are the triads, but also spread clusters, three part fourths, as well as 7th chords omitting the 5th or the 3rd (omitting other notes from any other kind of voicings results in a redundant voicing explainable in another way).
Now I need to plane modally, explore inversions and chord types and write arrangements or studies which help me find ways to put things in a traditional context as well as get practice transposing and recycling them. Most of all, the more hard work you do with them in as many different ways as possible, the better you’re going to remember them and be able to find them when you’re looking for them. It seems to be working.
Here’s a chart which clearly resembles the Mick Goodrick chart from the last article. It is interesting because it contains every possible combination of 3 notes without having any note repeated. That means that the chart for any key or mode would look the same, just with a different key signature. I didn’t bother spelling the triads.
Once again, the power of working out this chart as a practice aid before sitting down to experiment with the possibilities cannot be overestimated. You could play a row or a column. You could choose a single box every day and explore it uniquely through different inversions and who knows what else. You could play a standard deciding to go through the voicing type column, cycling through them as the changes go by. If you get confused, you can just breeze on over to the corresponding square to find out exactly what notes you need and apply the appropriate accidentals for the context of the song.
You could find a thousand different ways to use this piece of paper. And it will not be the same as if you practised without it.
What's amazing is that after three volumes of voice-leading almanacs, there's still new ways to present the same material which are not redundant. This is because with every new layout of the same information, due to the complicated nature of the material, I think we tend to see different possibilities based on what the layout suggests. That's probably why Mick bothered rewriting the same thing so many different ways. Every one really does make you think differently.
***
I chose to follow this train of thought before checking to see what existed in Vol. III on the subject of 3 note voicings. Now that I open it up I find that my chart is not there. What is there, is a detailed listing of every possible inversion and order these notes could be in as well as their relationship to four part chords. There is a huge amount of redundancy in those charts and in many ways this chart is more practical in its reductive quality. It does require a certain facility with inverting chords though to be practical.
The charts which appears later on (p. 55-61) are much more interesting in my opinion. They systematically list all the ways in an abstract and generalized form which the collections of 3 notes listed above can be led into each other! There's only six possibilities! Hopefully nobody minds if I put this chart up on this blog because I doubt anybody going out to buy Vol. III would choose not to because of this one chart. And it will answer a lot of questions. Choose any two voicings from the above list and the way in which they lead into each other can be described by the following chart:
From these two charts, every possible movement of 3 notes to another 3 notes without having a doubled note can be extrapolated in a systematic fashion. Rather than working like a computer to work out all the possibilities, how exciting does it seem to dive into the endless and completely unintuitive intellectually (but often easy enough to play) and extremely musical possibilities that these papers unlock?
In an age when jazz composition is rhythmically driven by odd time signatures and polyrhythms, and harmonic progressions are becoming simpler and more modal in nature with an emphasis on bass groove, how could these papers not excite a person to think of all the possibilities that still lie within a major scale?
This is an extremely relevant and new intellectual framework from which sounds can be discovered. In an age when so much has been done, we need to organize our thoughts scientifically or else we will never reach the extreme boundaries of what is mathematically possible while still more or less in the realm of the tonal system, or at the very least the kind of ancient modality dating back thousands of years.
Or screw the whole damned thing and let's go microtonal. But I like this.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Exploring The Possibilities
What follows below are 3 sheets of paper, one compiled by Mick Goodrick and the other compiled by me for a piano player. They both address the issue of how to come up with new voicings to freshen up your playing. Perhaps the global lesson of all Mick Goodrick's Almanacs is that before even picking up your guitar it can help to lay out a theoretical road map of all the possibilities for whatever you're going to work on. The reason for this is that once you start working, you very quickly get bogged down with possibilities. If you're trying to learn them all you'll never get to the end of the list.
It's much less exhausting to think about the all the possibilities first and write them out then to have to play them all. Suppose that you're trying to learn drop 2&4 voicings. Suppose you decide to go through all the chord types, maj7, then min7 etc. It becomes overwhelming to have to think of all the possibilities and put yourself under the immense pressure to both remember and learn them all on your guitar. So probably you will never get to the vast majority of the mathematical and technically feasible possibilities. But if you make a list, you can hop around.
Take a look at Mick's list below. Mick is trying to come up with minor II V voicings, so he makes a chart. He wants to use the 6th mode of melodic minor for Em7b5 and the altered scale for A7. So he writes out every possible four note chord voicing from the five categories of chords which exist in the mode and he circles all the ones that don't have the note E in them. He's decided that he wants to use rootless voicings. He could have decided otherwise.
Now imagine if you were trying to think of all that while you were also trying to play them on guitar? It's confusing and hard to keep track of everything. Did I do that one yet? What was that last one? This way you can jump around from circle to circle without constantly having to recalculate that information and then see if you find anything you like on the guitar. Having a systematic (maybe even scientific) coding system before you start practising allows for a much less systematic and generally more inspiring and productive practice method.
Then we see all the four note possibilities for the A7. Again, because all the possibilities are mapped out, this frees up a great amount of our imagination and concentration while practising to look for musical and emotional possibilities rather than just systematically running through the list. We can never learn all the possibilities so why even try? But we can reduce them to one handwritten 8.5x11 page. And then just go wherever we are interested in going at that very moment.
I cannot stress enough: without writing out that page, it becomes necessary to memorize it without ever even seeing it, and probably you will be trying to play them at the same time as think of them. For those familiar with the juggling act, this is a few too many balls even within a practice context.
Take a look at the pages I wrote. They essentially recycling the information from the Almanacs. It is just another way of presenting the information on Mick Goodrick's page. Since it is geared for a specific talented piano player who transposes and planes shapes modally quite effortlessly, you'll notice that I spend more time explaining the way voicings are constructed (drop 2 vs drop 3 etc) as opposed to Mick's page which assumes you already have done a lot of work exploring inversions and is more interested in the aspect of modal planing.
Either way, it is a good idea to write down everything that comes to you. You don't want to have to repeat the mental process to get back to it. Thinking is the important first step. But once you've thought your way somewhere interesting it is time to mindlessly memorize it on a totally non-intellectual level.
You'll notice that if you treat the G# minor scale as a vertical scale (and don't mind the crunch of the 5th and 6th occasionally), that any chord from the mode in any inversion and in any substitution (TBN, clusters etc) becomes a possible chord (at least for a few beats if it is extremely tense and feels like it needs to be resolved). You'll also notice at the bottom of the last page there is an equation which shows that there are AT LEAST (and probably more) 1176 easily playing voicings on the piano for a G#m7 chord in a modal context.
Working through them would be pointless. What if one of your all time future favourite voicings is number 1032? What if it's really not obvious to you? I would hate to have to play 1031 to find out what it is. That's why a good road map is essential. Or maybe it's more like the yellow pages. You know what you're looking for but you're not sure who exactly is going to give it to you. You look up the general area you require and then you dial a few numbers to find exactly the right thing you needed. Or, maybe, just maybe, it is indeed like an Almanac.
It's much less exhausting to think about the all the possibilities first and write them out then to have to play them all. Suppose that you're trying to learn drop 2&4 voicings. Suppose you decide to go through all the chord types, maj7, then min7 etc. It becomes overwhelming to have to think of all the possibilities and put yourself under the immense pressure to both remember and learn them all on your guitar. So probably you will never get to the vast majority of the mathematical and technically feasible possibilities. But if you make a list, you can hop around.
Take a look at Mick's list below. Mick is trying to come up with minor II V voicings, so he makes a chart. He wants to use the 6th mode of melodic minor for Em7b5 and the altered scale for A7. So he writes out every possible four note chord voicing from the five categories of chords which exist in the mode and he circles all the ones that don't have the note E in them. He's decided that he wants to use rootless voicings. He could have decided otherwise.
Then we see all the four note possibilities for the A7. Again, because all the possibilities are mapped out, this frees up a great amount of our imagination and concentration while practising to look for musical and emotional possibilities rather than just systematically running through the list. We can never learn all the possibilities so why even try? But we can reduce them to one handwritten 8.5x11 page. And then just go wherever we are interested in going at that very moment.
I cannot stress enough: without writing out that page, it becomes necessary to memorize it without ever even seeing it, and probably you will be trying to play them at the same time as think of them. For those familiar with the juggling act, this is a few too many balls even within a practice context.
Take a look at the pages I wrote. They essentially recycling the information from the Almanacs. It is just another way of presenting the information on Mick Goodrick's page. Since it is geared for a specific talented piano player who transposes and planes shapes modally quite effortlessly, you'll notice that I spend more time explaining the way voicings are constructed (drop 2 vs drop 3 etc) as opposed to Mick's page which assumes you already have done a lot of work exploring inversions and is more interested in the aspect of modal planing.
You'll notice that if you treat the G# minor scale as a vertical scale (and don't mind the crunch of the 5th and 6th occasionally), that any chord from the mode in any inversion and in any substitution (TBN, clusters etc) becomes a possible chord (at least for a few beats if it is extremely tense and feels like it needs to be resolved). You'll also notice at the bottom of the last page there is an equation which shows that there are AT LEAST (and probably more) 1176 easily playing voicings on the piano for a G#m7 chord in a modal context.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Slippery Slope
This tune is literally a page straight out of Mick Goodrick's Voice Leading Almanac Vol. III.
It is (i)grip-slipping through a (ii)six tonic system in (iii)cycle 7.
(i) The guitar voicings represent grip-slipping although I cheat a bit. Grip-slipping means voice-leading through inversions. I say that I cheat because the first voicing is drop 2&3 and the second chord is drop 3 instead of being another drop 2&3. The third chord is drop 2&4. In fact this creates a 3 voicing cyclical pattern so it's quite an interesting cheat. You might say it's grip slipping cubed. The A section interrupts itself at the tritone before finishing the cycle in the B section.
(ii) It utilizes a six tonic system, which is another way of saying that the roots of the chords are derived from the whole tone scale but the notes of each chord are not related.
(iii) For those who haven't checked out the voice-leading almanacs or read earlier posts of this blog, cycle 7 means that the roots of the chords have a relationship of increasing by a seventh. Cycles are always ascending.
Cycle seven is cycle two backwards. Notice the contrary movement between the root and the voicings which is integral to grip-slipping.
The C section just sounds nice. The tighter voicings as well as the quicker harmonic rhythm provide a nice contrast.
Also intentional is the avoidance of accidentals in the A section melody, despite moving from no flats (or one sharp) to 5 (or 6) flats.
It is (i)grip-slipping through a (ii)six tonic system in (iii)cycle 7.
(i) The guitar voicings represent grip-slipping although I cheat a bit. Grip-slipping means voice-leading through inversions. I say that I cheat because the first voicing is drop 2&3 and the second chord is drop 3 instead of being another drop 2&3. The third chord is drop 2&4. In fact this creates a 3 voicing cyclical pattern so it's quite an interesting cheat. You might say it's grip slipping cubed. The A section interrupts itself at the tritone before finishing the cycle in the B section.
(ii) It utilizes a six tonic system, which is another way of saying that the roots of the chords are derived from the whole tone scale but the notes of each chord are not related.
(iii) For those who haven't checked out the voice-leading almanacs or read earlier posts of this blog, cycle 7 means that the roots of the chords have a relationship of increasing by a seventh. Cycles are always ascending.
Cycle seven is cycle two backwards. Notice the contrary movement between the root and the voicings which is integral to grip-slipping.
The C section just sounds nice. The tighter voicings as well as the quicker harmonic rhythm provide a nice contrast.
Also intentional is the avoidance of accidentals in the A section melody, despite moving from no flats (or one sharp) to 5 (or 6) flats.
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