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.

Tying Up Loose Ends

Here are a few more exercises, some obvious holes in the work that has been done so far.

The first is that I left out one inversion in the cycle 2/7 triad exercise, which is if you start the C major scale on root position D minor. This inversion doesn’t occur starting on C, because the chord before it would be 2nd inversion E minor, skipping the note C to get to D. (System 1)

2 other obvious ones are to go through the scale using the same inversion throughout, but using inversions other than root position. (Systems 2-3)

Here’s a neat idea: anyone who’s ever harmonized a chorale gets the idea of passing chords. A chord moves from one inversion to another of the same chord, and through the process of voiceleading another chord is created. Could this be done vertically and with arpeggiation instead of horizontally and homophonically? (System 4)

And of course, although I won’t bother rewriting everything, all of these can also be played using a ton of different nested patterns such as alternating between ascending, descending, broken, etc.

And here's a variation on yesterday's dorian lick:

A Few More Licks

Finally a lick outside of Ionian and Lydian! Definitely a good idea to sing these as well as play them. The second one is especially tough.

How Slow Can You Go

Something we all go through at some point, but I notice especially in younger students of a certain age group, is an extreme difficulty in playing slowly and accurately. Explain as many times as you want, but the concept that eliminating mistakes at turtle tempos will lead to the best performance at faster speeds just won’t sink in. It’s harder to concentrate on something and keep time accurately at slower tempos. Nick Gélinas, my metric mentor, has been suggesting exercises to me which have really exposed certain rhythmic shortcomings in my playing. These are HARD. So I’ve begun a simpler but similar exercise which is testing me in several ways.

I went out and bought a nice metronome. It can do subdivisions, different swing feels, and most importantly, it can go down to 30BPM. 30, if you’ve never heard it, is SLOW. If you made the click the downbeat of each measure, you’d be playing the equivalent of 120BPM as the 1/4 note value. So that’s what I did. I started playing Solar, because that’s the tune Nick always talks about with this stuff. I could play basic chords or the melody pretty consistently without messing up after a bit of practice so what’s the next step? Well, move the click to beats 2, 3 and 4 of the bar and see if that’s disorienting. I find 3 the weirdest because I can’t help hearing the metronome as an accent at this point and it’s an accent on the weakest beat. Of course, once this becomes very easy, the next step is to play the metronome on the offbeats of every beat.

But there is a fork in the road of this exercise, the first path is to work on being comfortable with the metronome anywhere in the bar. But I’m also working on keeping the metronome on the first beat of the bar, and trying to play more complex ideas without rushing or slowing down (mostly unsuccessfully at this point). It’s unbelievable how hard it is to keep really almost perfect time without hearing the metronome more often. With the metronome playing twice a bar even, it gives us a chance to correct subtle little imperfections in our time. But with the metronome playing only once a bar, those two extra beats make a massive difference in our ability to correct ourselves. For starters, a small mistake has 2 more beats (which is actually a lot) to become a slightly larger mistake. And if that weren’t enough, once you realize you’ve sped up or slowed down, without 2 clicks per bar, it is extremely difficult to correct yourself because the metronome really doesn’t give you any help at all.

So I’m going to work very hard on this, and once I feel confident enough to move on to the real exercise, I’ll come back and write about it.