Jaw-Dropping Arpeggios

For all that talk of drop 2 and 4 voicings, I really don’t know what to do with a lot of them. Unlike drop 2s, there is a much more limited range where they sound good. But starting to look at them in greater detail has reminded me of something I have meant to do for a long time and is certainly connected to the work I’m doing now in terms of creating more angular and jagged melodic textures.

I recently asked myself why I’ve been doing something for seven years and then decided to change it. This first thing I realized was that I always played consecutive triads voice-led melodically in the same direction and always the same inversion as a consequence. Well now I’m asking another question: why are my arpeggios always derived from closed position voicings?

An arpeggio is a chord except the notes are played individually. On a guitar we have very few closed position voicings that are convenient (and you can see many a guitarist sweep through them excessively on a Bbmaj7 or Gm7 chord). As a result, we tend to think of our arpeggios as derived from a scale because they often contain more than one note per string. This is also true but it doesn’t help us understand what’s about to come.

Once we understand that an arpeggio is just a different way to express a chord voicing, we can start to experiment with different chord voicings that involve greater leaps and inversions of chords.

Part of why this is so unintuitive and difficult to integrate into our playing is because these sounds are very difficult to sing, especially if we’re not the best singers. It appears that many people sing while they play because it makes them SEEM more expressive or in control of the sounds coming from their instrument, not because it actually MAKES them more expressive or in control. And there’s an inherent limitation to playing what we sing: we have to be able to sing everything we play. And as guitarists we are capable of doing things melodically which only a truly expert singer could ever even stand a chance of reproducing vocally, especially in tempo.

We put so much time into playing extensions, triads, and all sorts of stuff over our chords, but we always voice them in the way that is most singable to our terrible guitarist voices. Why not try and use a drop 2 voicing or drop 2&4 voicing as the basis for a melodic idea? Because we’re not good enough singers to sing three consecutive and large ascending intervals (i.e. 5th, 6th, 5th in the case of drop 2&4). But this is an interesting and modern sound! We should learn it and learn to hear it and understand it’s nuance but not ask ourselves to be able to sing it in any kind of performable way.

When we learn the lick we should play it slowly and sing each note, practice each interval, and be able to sing the lick at a very slow tempo or out of tempo. This is enough to be able to hear and appreciate the intervallic nuance of a line. So break out the inversions!

How slow Can You Go Pt. 3

So hopefully you’ve now tried all the different possibilities of placing a very slow metronome in various places in a bar, and even a shifting place within the bar. Maybe though, like myself, you really can’t do it very well. In fact, maybe, like myself, you’ve realized that you still aren’t half as good as you’d like to be at placing the click on the various offbeats, never mind alternating offbeats.

Enter Factorial Rhythm, another Goodchord publication by Mitch Haupers and Mick Goodrick. This is (not so) simply a book that breaks down rhythms into small 2 beat “seeds” or “cells” as they’re more commonly referred to, and then goes through all (or most or some) of the different possible permutations that can be created over 2 bars.

Here’s a small sample. There are 4 different ways to have two 8th note attacks over 2 beats of 4/4. This is all the possible combinations using all 4 seeds, beginning with a dotted quarter:

Now start with a single rhythm, and try and place the click on every downbeat and upbeat of the bar, swing and straight feel. Then move on to the other rhythms. Sticking with a single, short rhythm and moving the click helps you get over your tendency to push the click forwards or backwards onto a downbeat. You get used to the rhythmic dissonances in a very controlled environment.

And That's The Whole (Tone) Story

Oh yeah by the way, all I originally wanted to say was that a chord 1,3,#11,7, has only 2 voicings because of tritone substitution. And now replace the root with the 9th and enjoy all those inversions plus their various translations (I think that's the right geometrical term). And why Ab7 all of a sudden you might ask? Well I’m used to using these voicings the most in Stella so it’s a natural starting point. Of course it turns out all this applies to C in the end anyways...

Why does this chart have 2 lines when yesterday’s chart had 4? And now derivations of the derivations:

Curious about bars 1 and 5... Well that’s a lot of work to do! But most of it mental because there’s only one other scale. Huh?

How To Make Greener Music

Today it's all about recycling, maximizing efficiency, reducing emissions. Actually I'm not sure what that last one has to do with making music, but the first two are certainly relevant. In Mick Goodrick's Almanac of Guitar Voice-Leading Volume III, there is a catalogue of all the different applications a collection of 4 notes (otherwise known as a chord) could have.

The notes of the Cmaj7 chord, for instance, could be construed as extensions over a Dm7, or a D7sus4, an F maj7, make a nice passing chord on an F#m7(b5). There are many different ways that you could use those 4 notes, and all the voicings that consist of them, in a wide variety of situations. So, instead of trying to learn a million new voicings, we might want to spend some thinking about how to get more milage out of the old ones also. As I was lucky enough to hear Mick point out in person, this becomes even more evident when dealing with less common inversions for guitar such as drop 2 and 4, where sometimes an Fmaj7 might sound more like a Cmaj7add4, for instance. In other words, depending on the order and spacing of the notes, the chord might not even sound like itself, especially without a bass instrument playing the root.

Ok, so we all know about chord substitutes, what’s the big deal? Well there’s a huge deal! This catalogue in Mick’s book is almost 40 pages long! That means that, any given chord you can think of probably has anywhere from six to twelve applications you’ve never even considered and certainly don’t ever use, especially when you’re improvising.

Now I personally run into a voicing a month that I keep if I’m lucky. It takes time to digest anything and integrate any concept, as I’ve been discussing in regards to triads, but for some reason chords take much longer for me. Especially as the sounds start getting weirder, you almost have to build your sound from scratch around the chords because there’s no way they’ll fit in the context of what you were doing before. Just yesterday or the day before I started looking at the different drop 2and4 inversions, but I’m a long way off from using them in what seems to be (perhaps falsely) a spontaneous manner. And that’s only in the context of putting them where they’re most obviously supposed to go: where they match the chord on the paper. Now I’m supposed to take every single voicing I know and do that a dozen times over!? We all substitute Dm7 for Bbmaj7, and perhaps we get so used to subbing Fmaj7 for Dm7 that we end up making the connection between Bbmaj7 and Fmaj7 in a roundabout way that’s quite unconscious and totally natural. But that’s just a network of 3 chords!!!! We’re talking about 10 or 12!! and even then I bet you only use half of your Fmaj7 voicings at the most over Bbmaj7 because it was never conscious to begin with and you’re missing out on plenty of inversions which would sound absolutely amazing.

Ok, so in other words, this is a nice idea, but if we want to harness the power of this concept and apply it to our practice and eventually playing, it should become clear that no human being could ever possibly internalize in a useful way more than a small fraction of this material. It’s just a way to think ourselves into unconventional sounds, to find a small corner of the harmonic universe that excites us and then to live there for a while.

So, now that you get the concept and also how stupidly huge the possibilities are, and maybe some of my excited nervousness has been contagious, it’s time to get to my real point (I know, I wish it didn’t take me so long also).

How can we take a short cut without cutting corners? Easy, 7#11 chords, dim7 chords, 13 chords, 9 chords, 7b13 chords, 13b9 chords. What do all these chords have in common?

Well they all fit in the whole tone or diminished scale, which means that the resulting fingering can all be applied in either 4 or 6 places on the guitar neck that will fit over an altered dominant (different notes, same guitar fingering).

So this is a great way to save time when trying to understand these kinds of concepts, because you can get at least 4 wildly different sounds that fit on a dominant chord, that all are the same fingering as the voicing you already know. I find this makes things a bit more complicated at first, but then you wind up with a huge amount of dominant voicings, ranging from totally clichéd to totally wacky and there’s only 6 or seven fingerings and then there’s only 2 or 3 sets of fingerings for all the keys instead of 12 because these are derived from symmetrical scales.

Once you really start getting into this kind of thought process every key becomes unique. Aside from the fact that there’s a lot of information to process and it takes a long time to be able to transpose that information freely, the even bigger problem on guitar (or piano or anything else) is that some of these ideas are going to be unbelievably easy to execute and some unbelievably difficult, and this might change depending on the key. You might start practicing in C and hate a certain voicing and think you’ll never use it, move on to something else, forget about it, and a couple of months later it just pops up in F# and it’s totally playable and you love it.

If you tried inverting most of the chords above after you’d slid them up or down a major second or minor 3rd, you might have been disappointed to discover that this results in even more fingerings, not less (although excited to discover that those fingerings are also transposable).

Does anybody else love the symmetry of this grid? Who needs Sudoku? There's got to be a hundred voicings I've never thought of that can come from this line of thought.

Space: The Final Frontier

Why should keyboard players get to have all the fun? Here I’ve been talking about triads and thinking about triads for a month, in a single closed position (which I’ve been trying to use as much as possible in as many different keys and playing contexts as possible), but been completely ignoring something on my mind for quite some time. S P A C E.

And to think all I really wanted to talk about last time was how beautiful Drop 3 and especially Drop 2 and 4 chords are and how I’d like to use them more in my chord playing. But that’s just not how things happened.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that, except to buy Mick Goodrick’s Almanac of Guitar-Voice Leading or Advancing Guitarist for everything you could ever want to know about that subject from a technical perspective. But I’d like to add that all the horizontal chordal triad work that I started doing at first really didn’t appeal to me. Firstly, everything sounded classical. Secondly, there’s no space! All my chord playing involves consecutive strings, involve stacked 4ths or triads or their inversions or Drop 2 chords.

But MAN do those drop 2 and 4s sound amazing. And everybody uses drop 3 whether they realize it or not, but MAN do some of those inversions sound great. And MAN would I like to arrange some standards with these voicings, my primary device not being reharmonization or chord substitution but simply chord inversions and beautiful open chords with greater span, but not ugly 6 note bar chords. No, I’d love to hear beautiful airy voicings that leave space to recognize and digest every note. Ted Greene’s Chord Chemistry is also a great reference if you feel like you need more technical guidance.

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!

How Slow Can You Go Pt. 2

OK. 30 BPM is SLOW. I’ve started using it as my reference when practicing scales as well as practicing songs. Oddly, I find the scales harder than the songs. One intermediary step, more related to the first article then to the exercise that follows, I should add parenthetically, is to place the metronome on the offbeats of every beat. So the click is on 30, and now it lands in the same spot on every bar, on the offbeat. VERY HARD not to get pulled ahead to the next downbeat. Anyhow, on to the other exercise.

Ever get really thrown off by a drum solo? What is happening that is so disorienting? The superimposition of different metric feels over the original pulse. Suppose you’re trading fours. A good drummer, regardless of how they think of it in their own heads, because there are many different ways to describe the same process, is probably at one point or another ignoring the natural accents of 4/4 and creating longer and shorter phrases with counter-intuitive accents that somehow add up to sixteen beats.

So how do we, as melodic instruments, work on this capability? We have enough to think of as it is. Well, I think the answer is to learn to feel these rhythms. That’s basically the answer for any rhythm after all. To play in any meter or tempo naturally, it can’t be a conscious process, it must be felt. So, once again, the question is how do we improve our ability to superimpose phrases of various lengths and awkward (at least at first) accents over a regular time signature?

Well, the metronome stays at 30. But now you’re going to have it click on every 5th beat. So in the first bar the click is on beat 1, the second bar beat 2, third bar beat 3, fourth bar beat 4, and no click in the fifth bar. It is crucial to notice that although the click is playing over a regular interval of 5 beats, that you are playing in 4/4 so the click gradually moves through all the beats as the song progresses.

Apparently, after a few months of this, it becomes much easier to feel phrases of 5 over 4/4. Of course, you could also do phrases of 3,6,7,8,9, and even higher. You could also do the same thing except displaced by an 8th note. Or you could have the click represent a certain odd number of 8th notes. Perhaps 7/8. In this case the click would land on 1, upbeat of 4, then 4, then upbeat of 3 etc.