Ron Newman
In the Chord Flavoring I post I introduced the first and fifth tones of the major scale and how they “flavor” chord harmonies.
This issue: 6 and 9. What we’re doing here is building up some chord voicings that your hand can automatically go to as needed to match the melody or for different moods and effects. Eventually, your hand find these voicings on its own, the chord shapes having been engraved into your brain synapses.
That process of learning can’t be hurried, but it can be delayed by stress; so just play the chord voicings slowly and attentively and wait for your brain cells to adapt to new patterns. It’s that simple.
We’ll begin, as before, with our basic scaffolding, one of the two keys to improvisation, the 3rd and 7th…
and add the extra tones:
The Sixth
To my ear, this scale tone is similar to the fifth in that it is filler. It plugs empty spaces in the tonal spectrum and adds thickness to the sound. But it’s more distinctive than the 5th.
I use it in country music to add a little sophistication and punch to the sound when vamping. Country and folk harmonies are so simple that they can sound really thin, and you can feel all lonesome like, as if you’re alone on the stage with only a ukelele.
To man-up the sound just chop the chord, but add a sixth. It’ll sound much bigger.
However, the sixth sounds pretty crunchy next to the 7th, so instead we use it instead of the 7th. So our basic scaffolding is altered to accomodate:
Just like this it will sound open, spacey, and kind of like modern jazz. If that’s not what you want, just add back 5 and 1:
The Ninth
The ninth scale tone adds a real lift to the sound when added to a chord. Like the sixth, it doesn’t imply any particular tonality, major or minor, so it gives that quality of ambiguity, as if anything could happen.
You get to the ninth by continuing the scale past the usual eight notes of an octave. In the key of C, the ninth is a D. In improvisation, that means any D. Just think of the the 9th as identical to the 2nd, and it doesn’t matter how high or low it is played. In the key of C any D note is a ninth.
In fact, you can forget about 2nds. When you see a 2nd, you can safely think “9th”.
And yes, the ninth can and should be played with the sixth. They work well together. I’ll leave that for your experimentation, but just know that where you see one you’ll often see the other.
Ron
If you’re writing your own melodies from birth dates or other dates please share links to them on the YourSongCode Facebook Group.
Free Track: The Hero With A Thousand Faces
I’d like to give you another free track, taken from the CD Animal Dreams. This one requires a little explanation. The composer George Gershwin wrote a famous tune in 1930, “I’ve Got Rhythm”, the harmonies of which became the basis for many other tunes by other composers, such as “Anthropology”.
I decided to use the same chord progression without the melody, slow it way down and fit it into a rhythmic structure from Bali. There, gamelan bands play a unique style in which everything is divided up into ever-decreasing slices of time. For example, a big gong might play once every 16 beats, a smaller gong once every 8 beats, and so on until you get very fast repeating parts. This style arises out of their belief that the universe is structured in precise time, and the timing of events in everyday life is important.
I also wanted some improvisation. In this case it’s a Japanese Shamisen and a flute.
All instruments, the gongs, Shamisen, flute, various percussion, and harp, are actually played on a keyboard. Each instrument is recorded digitally so that it can be played from the keyboard, and then I can play each part separately, overdubbing what was played before until the entire piece is complete.
Finally, the title. It’s taken from the seminal book by Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces”, which explores universal stories of the human experience that he uncovered in myths from cultures around the world. George Lucas borrowed from Campbell’s work when writing the screenplay for the original Star Wars film trilogy.
Please download “Hero With A Thousand Faces” here. This track is edited for length from the CD version.
Ron
Ron Newman has a MME in Music Education and a MS in Computer Science from the University of North Texas, film and commercial credits and opened for Willie Nelson and Tricia Clark as a member of the Great Northern Band. more…
