Jonah Dempcy
Jazz Lessons
Shell Voicings on Piano
One of the habits that some students of jazz have is to play 4-note voicings all the time, leading to a full sound that can be clunky or out of place at times. While it is certainly appropriate to play full voicings at times, it is necessary to have both sparse and full voicings in one's arsenal. With that, I offer a simple method of creating sparse shell voicings on piano. You can adapt this to other instruments quite easily, but for the sake of this discussion, we will be focusing on keyboard instruments.To start with, everyone learns the basic 4-note voicings for a given chord, e.g. C-E-G-B for C major 7. Most people will be familiar with this in at least the root position and 2nd inversion (in this case, G-B-C-E) and perhaps also 3rd inversion (B-C-E-G). If you aren't familiar with basic 4-note voicings for chords, then I recommend brushing up before continuing this lesson.
Root Position Shell Voicings
The first shell voicings to learn are root position voicings for all chord types. For all chord types except Minor7 b5 (half-diminished), the shell voicing consists of the 1-3-7 or 1-3-6 of the chord. For Minor7 b5, you can think of it as an Eb-6 and voice it accordingly. (1-3-6 = Eb Gb C)
Here are a few examples:
C Major 7 = C-E-B
C Major 6 = C-E-A
D-7 = D-F-C
D-7b5 = F-Ab-C
G7 = G-B-F
So, we can call these root position shell voicings. (Although the D-7b5 is technically a first inversion shell voicing, it could also be considered a root position shell voicing for F-6).
2nd Inversion Shell Voicings
Next to learn are 2nd inversion shell voicings. These begin from the 5th of a chord and contain the 5-7-3 of the chord, except for 6 chords which contain 6-1-5 of a chord (3rd inversion).
Here are some examples:
C Major 7 = G-B-E
C Major 6 = A-C-G
D-7 = A-C-F
D-7b5 = Ab-C-F
G7 = D-F-B
The reason that 6 chords have a special rule is because you wouldn't want to play 2nd inversion (5-6-3) because of the major 2nd interval between the 5 and 6. It's preferable to play 6-1-5 which is the 3rd inversion. (You could also look at this as root position of the relative minor, e.g. the notes A-C-G are root position A minor 7, as well as being 3rd inversion C major 6).
Here's an example of a practice you could do that mixes and matches these shell voicings:
C: C-E-B
A-7: A-C-G
D-7: A-C-F
G7: G-B-F
C: G-B-E
A-7: E-G-C
D-7: D-F-C
G7: D-F-B
C: C-E-B
(repeats)
You can practice this in all keys, or adapt the voice leading technique to a song or chord progression of your choosing.
3-7 Voicings
Another useful sparse voicing which might be considered a shell voicing is to simply play the 3 and 7 of a chord.
Here's the same progression as above, playing only 3-7 or 7-3 for chord voicings.
C: E-B
A-7: C-G
D-7: C-F
G7: B-F
C: B-E
A-7: G-C
D-7: F-C
G7: F-B
C: E-B
These shell voicings can be quite useful, either for accompanying someone without stepping on their toes or for adding contrast to full voicings.
Adapting Shell Voicings For Extended and Altered Chords
While not technically shell voicings (as the name shell voicing generally implies the rudimentary notes of the chord), you can also adapt these voicings for 9, 13 and altered chords.
This will be explored more in-depth in another post, but for now, suffice it to say that any of these shell voicings can be played as a rootless voicing in another key. For example, the root position shell voicing for C Major 7 (C-E-B) can be played as a rootless voicing for A-9. Played as an A minor 9, the notes C-E-B correspond to the 3-7-9 of the chord.
There are too many correlations to enumerate here, but I recommend trying all shell voicings in other contexts (over other root notes) and exploring to find interesting combinations. You can simply move the root note through all steps of the scale and see if anything works. For instance, taking the root position C Major 7 shell voicing, play C-E-B in the right hand and test it against all 7 possible root notes in the key of C. Many of the voicings won't work, but you may find interesting combinations that do work. In this example, C-E-B could also be the 5-7-#11 of an F Major 7 #11 chord, or it could be the 7-9-13 of a D7sus4(13) chord.
I will go into depth with some of the more interesting combinations in a later post, but for now, go ahead and familiarize yourself with these shell voicings, or if you are already familiar with them, try combining them with different root notes to generate rootless voicings with extensions and altered notes.
Giant Steps Played by Robot
I came across this humorous and intriguing video clip while reading David Valdez' blog, Casa Valdez Studios:You won't believe this video that Dan Gaynor just turned me on to. I've
heard tons of guys play Giant Steps like this at Berklee but this guy
takes the cake. Here is the next generation of young unswinging tenor
players. Things are looking pretty grim for the future, but at least
we'll have live Jazz in space.
Link: Giant Robot Steps
Barry Harris Subs - Clarification
[reposted from comments on "Barry Harris Substitutions"]"Barry Harris Substitutions") and experiment with the various methods of reharmonization.
I see how all the final chords resolve to Cmaj except the last. G7 to C, V7 to I; Bb7 to C , fine bVII7 to I; Db7 to C , ok bII7 to I; and I'm fine with adding a II chord before each dominant, but E7 resolving to C? This I don't really get, either theoretically or aurally.
You can think of E7 resolving to C in a number of ways.
For one thing, E7 regularly resolves to A-7 which is an inversion of C6. Also, the chord E7 can be played along with a shell G7 to yield the G13b9 chord.
You could play the 5th mode of A Harmonic Minor over this chord (E F G# A B C D) and it would sound quite fine.
But, I'm guessing you don't have a problem this kind of E7b9 -> C transition, but rather E7#11 -> C. E7#11, to which you would play 4th mode of B Melodic Minor as a scale (E F# G# A# B C# D), is somewhat difficult to make work. E7#11 to C is "out there" in the same way that E7#11 to A-7 sounds a bit odd.
However, you can still make it work. Here's an example of a lick in 8th-notes that uses this substitution:
Chord changes:
E7#11 | C
Descending 8th notes:
A# F# D C# B A# G# F# | G
Another way to look at it would be as an Ab-7b5 or Bb7sus4b9 chord, since both of those share the key of B Melodic Minor with E7#11. Bb7->C is quite common and sus4b9 chords are often substituted for unaltered dominant7 chords so it's not unheard of ...
On the topic of why this could work theoretically, it's because E7#11 shares 2 of the 4 notes comprising the diminished 7th "backbone" of the C major key. According to Barry Harris, a major key is comprised of a major 6 chord from the root and a diminished 7 chord from the leading tone. Hence, the key of C is comprised of C6 and Bdim7. This yields an 8-note scale, C D E F G G# A B, which Barry Harris considers superior to the 7-note scale taught in mainstream music theory.
It also accounts for a second tritone that resolves. Whereas conventional music theory only examines the resolution of the tritone of the 4-7, Barry Harris' theory includes the resolution of the tritone of the 2-b6 as well.
In conventional music theory, it is said that the 4 resolves to the 3 while the 7 resolves to the 1. Barry Harris' theory simply states that any of the 4 tones of the diminished backbone of a key will resolve to a neighboring tone from the major 6 chord from the tonic. Here's a table showing this:
Dim7 from 7th | Maj6 from root
B | A, C
D | C, E
F | E, G
G# | G, A
This table is for the key of C. The left column consists of the notes of the Bdim7 chord and the right column has notes from the C6 chord. This table illustrates how notes from the Bdim7 chord resolve to neighboring tones from the C6 chord.
To tie this back in to the discussion of E7#11 resolving to C, we simply say that it is not as strong of a resolution as E7b9 to C, because only 3 of the 4 notes from the diminished backbone are present. In the case of E7b9 (or G7b9, et al.) the notes B, D, F and G# are present, so it resolves strongly to C. In the case of E7#11, only B, D and G# are present, so the resolution is weaker. But, it is still possible to make it work. Just experiment at home first before trying it on the fly at a gig!
Also, of course, you would probably not want to use this reharmonization while accompanying someone. It would clash if they played F or G, both of which are commonly played over G7. So, I would only play E7#11 as a sub for G7 resolving to C when playing a solo.