Jazz Comping and especially good jazz comping is not about knowing a million voicings. It is more about how you play the chords you know. The different ways you add embellishments or connect the voicings that make the difference.
In this video, I am going to go over a few different approaches and techniques that you want to add to your comping. This will help you have a wide vocabulary of techniques and options available when you a playing chords behind something else.
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A great approach to Jazz Comping is to not only rely on chords but also use intervals as a way of conveying the harmony. Using intervals is an easier way to leave more space for the rest of the band, so it also works well if you play with a piano player.
In this video, I am going to go over some of the ways you can work with intervals and demonstrate how this works on the Jazz Standard All The Things You Are.
Finding intervals for Jazz Comping
If we first take a look at the first chord of All The Things: Fm7.
The note that we want to have in there is the 3rd and then add another note and check out the intervals we get, as shown here below:
Notice that I am not trying to find all options, just exploring and experimenting with what I think might work.
Voice-leading intervals
As an example, we can now look at how to voice-lead the different intervals on Fm7 to the next chord Bbm7. This could be done as shown in example 2.
In some of the examples I am adding extra movement between the two intervals. This is not too difficult when working with intervals so it is a good idea to already experiment with that option.
Counter melodies and polyphony
The final bars contain a few examples of several voices moving. In the last bar the voices are also moving in the opposite direction.
Playing the song with the intervals
When I comp like this I am not always staying completely clear with all chords, but I am trying to get an over all flow that makes sense on the song.
In this example I am keeping it simple by not having to many moving melodies and playing one or two intervals per chord.
Making an improvised Counterpoint as an exercise
You can turn the voice-leading part of this into a small counterpoint exercise that sounds like the one in the example below.
You can hear in the video how this example has a lot of moving voices, keeping one voice static while the other is moving around more.
Adding some rhythm and a little more Jazz Feel
Besides working on this with playing long notes and sustained sounds, you also need to work on using the intervals while adding some jazz rhythms.
An example of this is shown here below where there is also a focus on rhythm, not only moving voices, notes and extensions.
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Most of the time advice on Jazz Guitar Comping is about what chords to play and not how to play them. This one is about how to actually Practice Comping.
Comping is important, but since it is about playing behind somebody else it can be difficult to practice on your own. So how do you work on it? In this video I am going to show you a few ways to work on your comping and a list of things to think about when it comes to listening to your own comp.
Ways to Practice Jazz Guitar Comping
The old method: Metronome 2&4 play some comp think about how you want it to sound and imagine the band playing with you.
This is the most important thing to practice and you want to be able to do this well, but there are other ways where you can try to work on it.
One of the ways that take advantage of some of the things we have available in this more modern tools like recording yourself and using backing tracks. I also discuss some of the things that you can learn and think about when doing this.
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In short you want to work on your Jazz Guitar Comping. It is probably what you spend the most time doing when you are playing in a band. It is also one of the best ways to develop your ability to interact with the people you play with which can makes your solos much much more interesting to listen to and add a complete other dimension to it.
There are ways of thinking about comping that will improve how you comp and in this video I am going to talk about how you
Connect with the band
Support the soloist better
Help the song become a musical story
Comping is a difficult art to teach in a lesson because it is about interacting with several people at the same time, but it is also a huge part of what you do as a jazz musician, and for me a big chunk of what I do for a living, both as a sideman and in my own band. It is also something that I love doing because the emphasis is on playing together with other people.
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In this lesson I will take a look at 4 very common chord voicings and expand on them in several ways to demonstrate how flexible they are and how much you can get out of them!
Most Jazz guitarists are trying to constantly expand their chord vocabulary and learn new chord voicings. Of course it is important to have a lot of options, but it can be an even better idea to sit down and go over what you can actually do with what you already know.
The basic chord voicings
In the lesson I will take 4 very common chord voicings that I expect you already know and then approach using them in a few different ways so that we can really open up what we get from them while relying on what we already know.
To keep it simple I have taken a turnaround in the key of C major and will use this progression throughout the lesson as a progression.
The 4 chord voicings in their basic form is shown here below both as tab and diagrams
Loose the root and gain another voice!
The first thing to do is of course to convert them into rootless voicings which should also give us some more options because we then can play something else with that finger. This is shown below again both in tabs and diagrams.
Using the smaller rootless voicings for great melodies
Now that we have some smaller more flexible voicings we can start making more varied melodies with the top notes of the chords.
The options we have available by just changing the top note to another note on the same string gives us these possibilities for top note melodies on the turnaround:
With these variations we can make the following comping example:
The Expanded set of top note choices
The next step could be to start using top notes not only on the same string (which is the B string in this example) but also on the next string.
If we extend the top notes by adding the ones on the high E string we have these options:
And this could be turned into this example:
Thinking in layers of harmony
With all these options it is possible to make a lot of different melodies, but everything is still played as a complete chord all the time. One way of breaking this up is to split the chord in a melody and a chord part. This is in many ways what we already did in the previous examples, but only in the way that we thought about the melody.
Now we can also try to use that when playing the chords so that sometimes the chord is played alone, sometimes with the melody and other times just the melody.
An example might be like this:
They are also arpeggios!
Taking the layer concept a bit further would be to start using the chords completelyas single notes and arpeggios. An example of this is shown here below:
Putting all the ideas together
The best way to finally use this is to take all the different approaches and mix them up and make use of all the things combined in your comping (or soloing) An example of this might be something like this:
I hope you can use some of these ideas to re-invent and expand what you can do with your chord voicings. I often find that it can be a great idea to take a step back and lock at what you can make of what you already know instead of starting to explore something completely new.
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“What are good comping rhythms?” and “can you make a video on standard comping rhythms?” are probably the two most common questions on my channel. This lesson is giving you an exercise to help you improvise or compose endless amounts of great comping rhythms.
Instead of making a set of comping rhythms I decided to make this exercise so you can add some rhythms to your vocabulary. When you are comping it is a big part of the job to listen to the soloist and the rest of the band and fit in what they are doing.
The idea in this lesson is to teach you three rhythms that you can use and combine to make a lot more rhythms. I have used a blues in F as a chord progression to try the rhythms out. This chord progression is well know and has a lot of different chords we can take the rhythms through.
The chord voicings and the first rhythm
Since the point of this lesson is to work on playing stroing rhythms it makes sense to keep the voicings more simple so we can focus on the rhythms.
The voicings I used in the demonstrations are simple rootless shells, consisting of 3rd and 7th for each of the chords. The voicings are shown here below.
The rhythm in example 1 are played in two variations of the first rhythm: Playing the chord on the 1 and on the 3. The 2 variations I have used is to start with just playing on the one, and then moving to playing one and three.
The two rhythms are shown here below:
The second rhythm
To add some more variation the first place we can add another rhythm. This one consists of two 8th notes. Example 3 has two variations on it.
If we use the new rhythm and the previous rhythm as material to comp through a blues chorus we have the example shown here below:
The Final ingredient
The example in the previous part of the lesson is already beginning to sound good. Because we are always starting on the beat we miss a rhythm that does not start on the beat. Adding this and some variations gives us these rhythms:
Now we can improvise a comping chorus through the F blues like this:
With the combinations of these three rhythms we can comp quite varied and start to develop a big vocabulary of solid comping rhythms.
Putting it to use!
Getting these rhythms into your playing doesn’t have to require a lot of work. If you can comp these at a medium tempo with 2&4. In the beginning it is probably better to stick with simpler progressions like the blues or a turnaround. Start with the first rhythms and add the rest along the way!
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Counterpoint is a beautiful way to add another dimension or layer to our jazz comping vocabulary! This lesson is going to cover how I add another melodic layer to some simple II V I ideas. I will also go over how you can use jazz counterpoint as an approach to add fills and movement in a chord melody arrangement. For this I have included the beginning of the song Stella By Starlight harmonized with this approach.
The II V I examples
In the II V I examples I am using voicings with three notes. This is mostly a practical limitation. Three note voicings are a bit more flexible and easier to keep a melody note sustained while adding another melody.
All the II V I examples are in the key of C major.
Keeping it simple!
The first example has a very simple step-wise top note melody. It is moving from C to B and then stays there.
The counterpoint idea is also a slow stedy moving quarter note melody moving one voice a chord to another voice in the next chord.
Notice that I am using an alternate fingering for the first Dm7 (F triad in fact) This is often necessary to make it possible to play a melody under the top note.
The way you work on making these is to try to play the chord voicings and then add a scale melody under the top note. I have done this for all the II V I examples in this lesson. The first one is shown here below.
More melodic movement
In the second example Moving into more movement in the top melody. On the Dm7 the top note melody is still just an A. On the G7alt it is a three note walk from #9 via b9 and back. This resolves to the B on the Cmaj7.
The Dm7 and G7(#9) are fairly common voicings. The Cmaj7 is an open voiced Em triad which is not at all far fetched even if we don’t use it as often.
The Example starts with stating the Dm7 chord and then adds a melody to take us to the G7. It is in fact targetting the B. On the G7 the chord is sustained while the top note melody is moving and then immediately after the lower melody continues with a G altered line that resolves to the low G in the Cmaj7 voicing.
As in the first example here is an exercise to find the notes available for these voicings.
A little more activity in the movement!
In the third example I now have movement in the top note melodies of both Dm7 and G7alt.
The Basic voicings are:
The Dm7 melody is moving from F to G and then the lower melodies takes over and leads us into the G7(b9) voicing. Here the lowest note is starting a descending melody that leads into another G7 voicing. Here the lower part of the 2nd voicing has a small melodic fragment that encircles the 5th of the last voicing. On the C the inner part of the voicing is moving from the 7th(B) to the 6th(A).
If we turn the last voicing set into an exercise similar to the first two examples we get this:
Getting your priorities straight
You should keep in mind that once you start playing the counter melody then you don’t need to try really hard to sustain the chord (if you played one) the collected amount of pitches and the melody should be enough to spell out the sound of the harmony. This also makes it technically a lot easier to work with.
Chord Melody on Stella By Starlight
The idea I am using in this fragment from Stella by Starlight is to use the main melody as the top note melody and then make a counter melody whenever there is a long note in the melody.
On the Em7b5 the counter melody is purely consisting out of arpeggio notes. This will happen a few times in these few bars. On the A7 the melody is moving so I don’t add a counter melody.
The Cm7 transition to F7 with a small melody that uses a chromatic approach to the 3rd(A) of F7. On the Fm7 the melody is a sustained G. Under this I add an Fm7 arpeggio melody that takes us into the Bb7. From Bb7 to Ebmaj7 the melody is moving.
On the Ebmaj7 I add a melody that takes us down to the Ab7 by playing a descending Cm Coltrane Pattern.
Taking Jazz Counterpoint to another level!
In the examples that I used for this lesson I am playing the chord on the one of each bar to associate the counter melody with the chord. But of course it is possible to leave the chord out and just rely on two layers of melody moving around. As a short example that I play of this in the video is shown below:
A few concluding thougts
My examples in this video are a bit busy and maybe not entirely suited for comping, but I thought it better to really emphasize the melodic movement and the two layers. You will probably use this in a more sparse way, at least I do, but it is anyway fun to work with!
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Jazz guitar comping is a topic that does not get covered so much. There are a lot of lessons on chord voicings, music theory and extensions, but when it comes to comping it is more difficult to find material. In this video I want to talk about comping by taking the Jazz Standard Just Friends and comp through it in a few different ways and discuss some approaches and philosophies. Since this topic is more about fitting into a situation and reacting to other musicians playing it will be a bit more about approaches and ways of thinking than actual exercises. That said I do go over two ways of coming up with voicings, comping techniques and how to add melodies to your guitar comp.
1:43 Analysis 5:51 Why I don’t use diminished scale 6:58 Scales for a dim chord 9:50 Turnaround to the IV 11:26 Drop2 18:01 Triads 26:42 Comping and Interaction 30:53 Connecting the chords 32:54 Melodies in Comping 35:07 Techniques for melodic comping 39:30 Using Riff comping – focus on groove 45:39 Open Comp: Focus on color and melody 54:56 Conclusion and Outro
