Do you get bored listening to yourself playing chords? Let’s look at some 3-note jazz chords that change things up a bit so you are not always playing the same tired harmony.
Warning: Some of the chords in this video can be both rootless jazz chords and incomplete, they are so hip that they are almost only alterations.
Make Chords Your Own
This example has a few “advanced” sounds but it also still makes sense and has a natural flow.
You could see this example as derived from these chords that you then change a few notes and make more interesting, and the way I do that is something you can also do with the chords you play.
On the Am7 we have the 11 instead of the 5
On the D7, #9 instead of b9
Gmaj7: First #11 instead of 5 and then chromatic up to #5 and then #11 instead of 5
Why You Use 3-Note Jazz Chords
As you can see some of what makes it more interesting is also that I move around voices in the chords, and that type of movement is a lot easier to execute if you play 3-note chords, in fact, you can really start to improvise with them as if they were 3 voices. This is much harder with 4-note voicings that are a lot less flexible. (B-Roll 3-note voicings?)
Open Up How You Think About Chords (No More Wonderwall)
One of the things that you should develop if you want to play chords and Jazz harmony is that you don’t want to get stuck only thinking about the chords as static grips where you don’t know what notes are in there. As you can see in the previous example you open up an entire world if you are able to start changing the different voices in the chord. (b-roll, changing the notes of a chord?)
Exploring chords and working with the type of things I do in this video is a great way to get into that. Making your own chord melody arrangements is another one. In the end it is important that you don’t find yourself screwing up the music and say
Next: Let’s try the same type of thing but then also break a few rules for the chords.
Color is more important than Rules!
When you play voicings like these then the context of the II V I is pretty predictable, and therefore you can really get away with playing pretty vague chords as you can see here.
The voicings in the example above are derived from this set:
Here I chose to have a 9th instead of a 7th on the Am7
The D7 doesn’t have a 7th either because I include both b5 and b13. You could see it as coming from this voicing.
The Gmaj7 is actually a G6/9 and you could see it as an Em triad where the G is replaced with an A.
This is followed by a voicing that is really just constructed from what you can fit under the melody, which is the 3rd. The important part of the sound is the minor 2nd interval between #11 and 5th.
But of course, you can also explore these sounds on the high-string sets as I do in the next example.
It Is Fantastic Not To Be Tuned In 4ths
With these voicings you don’t have to sit on the middle string set all the time, you can also branch out to the top strings, and with standard tuning that makes some voicings a lot easier to play.
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