When you solo in Jazz you use chromatic passing notes and enclosures all the time, it is really a part of the sound, and actually this is true for Jazz chords as well. There are many ways to use chromaticism in your comping or chord melody and it is a great way to add more movement and color to what you play.
In this video, I am first going to show you one way of adding chromatic passing chords that is pretty visual and easy to use and then later I am going to start creating chromatic melodies in the chords and this is a great way to get to know your chords a lot better and also gives you a lot of great-sounding options to add to your playing.
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09:40 Passing Chords And How To Sound Amazing With Them
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Functional Harmony is almost a secret weapon when it comes to reharmonizing or creating great sounding chord progressions. In Jazz, we sometimes forget that just understanding basic harmony is a very strong tool for creating new sounds, and in this video, I will show you how you can mess around with a simple II V I and get some fantastic results.
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Music Theory and Harmonic Analysis can be great tools when you want to learn jazz and figure out how to improvise over a chord progression. These videos help you get started understanding how to do that, understanding functional harmony, tonal centers, and the rich harmonic language found in Jazz standards.
The videos will give you examples of how to analyze songs and also how to choose scales from that analysis. You will learn a lot from analyzing the songs that you play.
Remember that it is more important to hear the changes and recognize the sound of the theory as it is to know the name, so working on the songs you already know well will really help you. A fancy name probably won’t.
Analyzing Jazz Standards – Understand what you play!
How To Analyze Chords and Progressions – This video uses the song There Will Never Be Another You as an example and discusses the progressions found in there.
All The Things You Are – Harmonic Analysis– All The Things You Are is a great Jazz standard that we all need to have in our repertoire. In this video I am going to go over a thorough All The Things You Are Harmonic Analysis.
Jazz Scales! The 3 You Need to practice and How You apply them to Jazz Chords– Jazz Scales can seem like a million options that you all need to learn in all positions and all chords, but there is a way to approach this that is a little easier than trying to learn all jazz scales in all modes. After all the Dorian mode is not as important as the Major or Minor key.
This video has a PDF download of the overview of the analysis – Click Here
Music Theory Is The Effective Way For You To Learn Faster – If you know you basic Music Theory well then you can easily start to add another level to how you analyze melodies and chord progressions which will help you work more focused and learn faster when you practice.
If you are trying to learn to play Jazz Guitar and especially comping songs then you have probably already found out that it is not only about knowing the right chords, there is a lot more to it.
In this video, I am going to show you how I comp a slow medium jazz blues. I have transcribed a chorus and I will go over the chords but I will also show you how I play the chords and make the comp more interesting by using melodies, arpeggios and other tricks to color the chords. In fact, it may surprise you how rarely I “just” play a chord.
The Blues Transcription
Let’s first check out my comping with the transcription, then I will break down 5 of the techniques I use to make it sound more like a piece of music and more interesting.
The next thing to do is to have an overview of the voicings. If I play through the blues with just the chords because that is the backdrop for what I am doing.
Just the chords
After that, I am going to talk about how I am using melodies and fills, inner-voices and arpeggiation to make it come alive and I am going to give you some easier examples to work with.
As you can see most of the voicings are really simple and for the most part chords you probably know already.
If there is a chord that you don’t recognize then try to play or imagine playing the root under it.
bar 1 Bb789,13) magic chord
bar 6 Edim
bar 8 Dø G7 – It is a II V, and the movement is done by moving the 7th(C) of Dø down to the 3rd(B) on G7(b9)
Melody is more important than voice-leading
The first two bars are more about the melody I am playing than connecting the chords. I am using the chords to fill in around the melody.
The first chord is just a color, after that, you get this melody and on the long note in bar 2 I add the rest of the chord but I arpeggiate the chord to create a little extra movement.
The same type of thing is happening on the Eb7 moving to Edim. First the chord, then a melody that takes me to a G, and under that, I add the rest of the chord.
Playing Jazz Chords One Note at The Time
In the previous example, you could see how I arpeggiate the chords and in that way get more movement out of a single chord.
This is something that I use quite a lot. Two examples in this blues are bar3:
and bar 7
Both are using the same basic Bb7 voicing and the notes are spread out across the bar.
In bar 6 I do this as well, but here I am adding an extra note while arpeggiating and in that way starting to have two melodic layers, something that I use to create almost a counterpoint in another place.
Notice how I actually use voice leading to go from the Edim to the Bb7 even though it is hidden by the way I play Bb7
Electric Counterpoint (in a Jazz Blues)
In bar 8 we have this fragment:
Here I play a sustained F as the melody on Dø, and then add the rest of the notes and that turns into a second melody under the F that yields the G7(b9) voicing. This is an example of adding the chord tones in arpeggiating and that gradually takes on its own meaning as a melody and I treat it like that as well, not just as an arpeggio.
Grab what is easy to get by
Being efficient is important when you comp, also because you need to be ready to react to what is happening around you.
One of the ways I use block chords in comping is to just change the melody and keep the same chord which is what I am doing in bar 9 on the Cm7.
Improvising with the harmony
Since you are improvising when you comp then you can also change the chords a bit. The final turnaround has two examples of this. The 2nd chord is written out as a Db7, though you would expect a G7 there I play (and think) Db7
Whenever you have a dominant chord that resolves then you can choose to use the tritone substitute. That is what I am doing here. And added bonus is that the Db is the #9 of Bb which makes it sound like a harmonized blue note. That is also why I have that note at the top of the chord. In Music context is everything.
In the last bar, I am also changing the harmony, but I am doing so by delaying the F7. II V cadences are very flexible and you can often get away with leaving out one of the chords or as I do in this case, leave the F7 until beat 4 and then use it almost as a chromatic leading chord for the Bb7 in the next chorus. The quarter note triplet rhythm also adds extra energy by being a sort of tension against the groove.
Learn some amazing drop2 voicings
The majority of chords that I use in this video are drop-2 voicings, and a lot of the other ones can easily be seen as derived from drop2 by being drop2 without a root note for example. So studying drop2 voicings and being flexible with them is very useful if you want to be good at comping and free to choose what to play.
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Playing Jazz Chords is a huge chunk of what you do when we play Jazz on the guitar. It is what we need for comping, chord melody arrangements and, chord solos.
Learning new chord voicings and especially learning to use new chord voicings can be very difficult and often a lot of time is wasted just playing inversions and exercises when that is not how you would playing the chords if you are playing a piece of music.
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Triads and triad based chords are fantastic jazz voicings! In this lesson, I am going to show you how you can get started with some triad voicings from what you already know and then go over 5 levels of how you can play some great sounding comping ideas using these voicings.
This is something I use all the time myself, and if you check out the Chord solos of Joe Pass he is also using this all the time.
Take The A-Train – Basic set of chords
Let’s start with taking the A-part on Take The A-train and play that with a set of chords that you already know:
Triad-based voicings
If we play these without the root then you have these voicings:
Converting the Jazz voicings and doing great things
I am going to show you two important things about these voicings:
#1 There are more melody options. You can change the top note and give us some options:
#2 All the voicings are triads
Cmaj7 without C is E G B = Em
D7 without D is F# A C = F#dim
Dm7 without D is F A C = F major
G7(b9) without G is (in this voicing) F Ab B = F dim
A7(b9) without A is Gdim = G Bb C#
Top-Note Melodies and Some Jazz Rhythm
First, you should look at the chords and find another melody note for each one. (this is powerful because you can make start making riffs and making things sound a lot more interesting.
Using Inversions of the triads
Since all the voicings are triads then you can also use the inversions of these triads. If you use the inversions as well then you have some options similar to this:
Chromatic melodies & Inner-voice movement
Of course, it is possible to use movement in the other voices, not only the melody. In fact, that is what I am doing on the D7 above.
The example below takes that a bit further.
I am also using some chromatic movement in the melodies most clearly in the top note melodies on the D7 and G7 chords, and in the inner voice melody on the Cmaj7.
Altering the voicings for more modern jazz sounds
And beyond changing the top note you can also experiment with changing notes inside the chord and in that way create some new voicings.
In the example below on the D7, you will see one such voicing. The first voicing on G7 is a similar construction.
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Some of the most common ways people tell you to reduce chord progressions are very likely to work against what you hear and the music you are trying to play. You need to apply the right type of harmonic analysis to not end up with complete gibberish when you reduce jazz chord progressions.
In this video, I am going to show you some of the places you can reduce the number of chords and talk about when that is possible.
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If you are learning a Jazz Standard then the analysis is a great tool. It is very useful to know how the chords work and how they sound in the key of the song. But in a Jazz Standards Analysis, you are likely to come across chords that are not just a part of a II V I and more difficult to understand.
This video is on 10 types of chords that are like that and how you learn to recognize and deal with them. It should help you take your harmonic analysis up a level and help make it easy to learn jazz standards quickly.
You need to check out a lot of different jazz chords and voicings when you want to learn Jazz, and you need them for comping and for chord melody arrangements.
In this lesson, I am going to show you some techniques that can really help you get more out of your voicings so that you don’t have to spend too much time practicing chords and help you use one voicing that you already know to create a ton of other chords that you then don’t need to practice as much.
A little music theory can really save you a lot of time!
I am going to do this in 3 parts – first look at finding similar voicings, then change the voicing and finally what other chords we can use this voicing for.
This is all about using what you practice as much as possible and getting the most out of what you have learned.
Part 1 – Connect the voicing to all the other things you know.
Let’s keep it a little practical. Let’s say you have learned a shiny new voicing like this Drop2 voicing for a C7(9).
It’s a drop2 voicing, but if we forget that and just look at it and associate it with other types of voicings then something great happens:
Below, you can see that it is coming from this voicing (bar2) and that it is also related to this voicing (bar3)
The reason that I am saying this is that it is important to tie see how the chord has different components from other voicings that we know.
That makes it easier to use it with other chords and for examplie having C-D top note melody.
Another thing that is good to notice is that it is related to this Drop3, this triad or this shell voicing.
We are just taking a look at how it works and finding things we can do with it.
Right now we can make a melody like this with what we just discovered:
or a comping riff like this:
Part 2 – Change The Voicing – Make a New Jazz Chord
This is really an important way to look at how to come up with more sounds and really explore what we can do with a chord.
To keep it a bit practical I am not going to change the 3rd and 7th of the chord because then we have a completely different type of chord and open up for a lot more information, that is possible and you should experiment with it, but my video would get too long.
If we explore changing the 2nd highest note, the G, then we have these chords:
So, of course, you need to understand where you want to use the chords to figure out what fits. A blues in C with C7(9,b13) chords may not be the sound you want (or are hired to play)
We can do the same with the top note:
And I am not going to go over the different combinations of this, but that can be fun to explore as well!
Part 3 – Using this voicing for other Jazz chords
Now we have connected the chord to a ton of other voicings and made a lot of variations on it.
If you look at the notes that are in the C7(9) voicing we have Bb,E, G and D.
If you order these in different ways we have:
E G Bb D which is Em7(b5) or You can look at it as G Bb D E which is a Gm6
So this means that the original voicing could be used like this:
These are two of the obvious choices, but you could also go through this in a systematic way and just check out what these notes are against any root.
They could work as a Bb6(#11) or F#7alt. Thinking of notes against a root is something that is also very useful for soloing!
If you use the chord as an F#7alt then you have this: Example 8
Connect the chords don’t just remember separate things
This way of thinking about voicings where you are looking at it not only within a system but also really connecting to other types of chords and voicings is a very good practice for developing and making your vocabulary more useable. If you want to see another video where I talk about this then check out this video where I am going over a 3 level process of creating and using jazz chords.
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Reharmonization! I imagine the word itself sets off alarms for some people thinking: “Crazy Music Theory will follow” and there are going to be the weirdest examples of chord substitutions and bass-notes over triads with extensions.
But it isn’t that bad. Reharmonization is a great way to add variation to both your solos and your interpretation of a song, for example in a chord melody arrangement.
In this video I am going to give you some basic reharmonization ideas to use, it is pretty basic and stuff you might know already but not use like this or maybe have played examples off. The video is not going to make you the best arranger of our time but it will give you some things you can put to use in a lot of places and if you are only playing the basic changes all the time then starting to work on improvising with the chords could be just the thing you should do to get to a higher level.
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