Drop 2 voicings are really useful for a lot of things in Jazz. They are essential for most jazz comping, Wes Montgomery or George Benson chords solos and other kinds of block harmony.
In this video, I am going to go over how you take a basic set of drop2 chords on the song Satin Doll and then expand them adding chromatic chords, making riffs and melodies. It will also show you how to really comp a song using melodic concepts like call response and motivic development that really are what separates you from just playing the harmony and sounding like a musical statement.
I am going to take the first 8 bars of Satin Doll and then in 5 levels add different things to the comping working on voicings, melodies, and rhythm.
Level 1 – Basic Chords
The first example is using one voicing for each chord. Keeping it simple
When you less complicated chords you can focus on great rhythms and that is also important.
Level 2 – Top-note melodies
Even though we are playing chords we still have to make musical statements. A big part of that is playing strong top-note melodies. The next step is really going to open up the possibilities for the melodies you can create.
Satin Doll and chord progression really lend itself to motivic development. There are a lot of repeating progressions like between bars 1-2 or between bars 1-2 and 3-4. This makes it easy to repeat and develop motifs.
Level 3 – Mixing voicing types
I have a lot of videos where I talk about how important it is to not get stuck in only using one chord type. You want to try to combine as many things as you can.
This example is it mixing the drop2 with 3-note voicings. The 3-note voicings are really just the drop2 but then leaving out the top string, which gives us a lot more options for melodies.
As you can see in the example below:
The II V I example mixing the different voicings is this:
Level 4 – Chromatic Passing notes
The top-note melodies we play are Jazz, so you can add a little chromaticism in there on top of the chords.
Level 5 – Chromatic Chords
With chromatic melodies, you can also harmonize them and get some great sounding chromatic passing chords.
Drop 2 Boost for your comping and chord solos
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