May 17, 2010
Ron Newman
We’re been laying down the basics of music theory for improvisation. Now we can start bringing things together. Some of the drills I’ve given you in previous newsletters are meant to simmer on the stove, to cook in the back of your brain for awhile until they start to come easily.
When you find yourself playing the chord voicings given thus far without any trouble, I can now show you the next step that leverages those few voicings into many different uses.
Remember that I said 3 and 7 were some kind of key to improvisation?
We took them and added other tones to alter the flavor.
The naked 3 and 7 form a major chord, since they’re taken from a major scale.
Now it’s time to alter these same two tones so that we can multiply everything you know into three chord families: major, minor, and dominant.
It’s really straightforward. To make your chord minor, just lower the 3 by one half step:
If you have added anything to it like a 6th, 9th, or 5th, those don’t have to change.
To make it dominant, lower the 7th by one half step:
And, you can do both at the same time. This is called a “minor seventh” chord:
Trade Lingo: the term “7th chord” refers to a dominant seventh. Even though we’ve been playing the 7th in chords all this time in our 3-7 voicing, the convention is that if you say “7th”, it’s understood to mean “dominant 7th” or “flat 7th”.
If you want the regular 7th that appears in the major scale you have to say “major 7th”.
Play these, slowly, in every key, for a few minutes every day. If that gets tedious, it’s FAR better to learn them extremely well in just a few keys, like C, F, G, Bb, Eb, Ab than it is to rush through them. Also learn the key of E if you want to play with guitarists.
Sneak Peek: There’s another little doorway here into a whole new arena that you’re now ready to explore. Remember the newsletter on the 1 and 5 scale tones? I said that all of western music is built on the strong pull that 5 has toward 1. When you lower the 7th in a chord, making it a dominant 7th chord, that 5 to 1 pull is intensified.
It’s a flag, saying “I’m about to go to 1”. That’s one thing to know.
The other thing to know is that the dominant 7th chord is the place where you can hang all kinds of alterations. You can add a 9 but raise it one half step to make a “sharp 9”. Or lower it into a “flat 9”.
You can raise the 5, making it a “sharp 5”.
With these three alterations you get a lot more colors. Now, since you’re likely to want to use these colors, you don’t want to just have to wait until the places (usually at the end) where a song is going from the dominant chord back to the 1. That’s where we can use all sorts of tricks to insert dominants other places in the tunes. They have fancy names like “secondary dominants”, but all you need to know is the tricks.
Essentially, what we’re doing is delaying the resolution to 1, taking the listener on forays away from that final resting point. In my opinion, this is the fun part of theory: chord movement. It opens up all the ways you can mashup, mix and mingle and morph your tunes and anyone else’s to make them sound drastically different.
But that’s a subject for another newsletter.
Ron
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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 instrument 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 truths 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…
