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.

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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.