Allan Holdsworth Chord Lesson

[m78w]

Hey Everyone,
I recently published a lesson over at Morten's Lessons site talking about some of the ways that Holdsworth plays and thinks about chords.

Allan Holdsworth lesson | Mortens Lessons


Check it out, thanks!

[guitarplayer007]

Matt,

Do you have any exercises for adding chord movement to 2-5-1's or 1-6-2-5"s other then just diff versions of the same chord?
Thx
Ken

[m78w]

Hey Ken,

yeah, check out this article on this site I wrote a while back, got a bunch of ways to spice up comping through progressions

Music Theory | Jazz Chord Turnarounds

[guitarplayer007]

You mean this link for Turnarounds? I guess what i'm looking for is ways to use maybe passing chords. For instance when you listen to Joe pass, there are alot of chords going by, is there a formula moving between changes?
Thx
Ken

[m78w]

Yeah, in that article are tons of ways to take a simple ii-V-I and add in a bunch of passing chords.

For example, this is one that joe uses a lot, if you have

Dm7-G7-Cmaj7

you can add an approach chord to spice things up

Dm7 Ab7-G7 Dbmaj7-Cmaj7

or

make the ii-V-I a iii-VI-ii-V-I

Em7 A7-Dm7 G7-Cmaj7

then add in the approach chords to really get things sounding like Joe

Em7 Bb7 A7 Eb7-Dm7 Ab7 G7 Dbmaj7-Cmaj7

or any combination of those

That's a good place to start, and you can mix and match any of those combinations from the turnaround article to get more options and variety for this sort of thing.

[brwnhornet59]

Originally Posted by m78w

Yeah, in that article are tons of ways to take a simple ii-V-I and add in a bunch of passing chords.

For example, this is one that joe uses a lot, if you have

Dm7-G7-Cmaj7

you can add an approach chord to spice things up

Dm7 Ab7-G7 Dbmaj7-Cmaj7

or

make the ii-V-I a iii-VI-ii-V-I

Em7 A7-Dm7 G7-Cmaj7

then add in the approach chords to really get things sounding like Joe

Em7 Bb7 A7 Eb7-Dm7 Ab7 G7 Dbmaj7-Cmaj7

or any combination of those

That's a good place to start, and you can mix and match any of those combinations from the turnaround article to get more options and variety for this sort of thing.

I dig it Sifu!!!

[guitarplayer007]

thx Matt!
Ken

[guitarplayer007]

Matt,

Do you have any examples of tunes with chord movement like you talked about above?
Ken

[m78w]

Take a blues for example, in F

So you could do something like this:

F7 B7/Bb7F#7/F7/B7

Bb7/Bb7 F#7/F7 E7/Eb7 D7b9/

Gm7 Db7/C7 F#7/F7Eb7D7Ab7/Gm7Db7C7F#7

I just snuck those extra chords in there to lead to the next chord in the progression. It's a bit much to use on stage, but it's a good exercise.

[NSJ]

Getting back to Allan's system, I posted the following comment there that I will re-post here (Thanks Matt for taking the time and effort to produce a clear, instructive lesson--FYI, John McLaughlin once went to Allan and said, "if I knew what you were doing, I'd steal ALL of it. But the problem is, I don't know what you're doing!".

Anyway, here's my comment/question:

"Is the process of moving each note of the chord to the next constituent note of the scale under Allan's system essentially a form of diatonic modal planing? Or does that refer to something else. When I say diatonic modal planing, I mean something like this, using C triad, first inversion as an example: EGC, moves to FAD, GBE, ACF, etc."

[m78w]

NSJ yeah that's what it is. The only thing that Allan does differently than other guys who like this planing technique is that he grabs any grip that suits him and moves it around, rather than using a defined chord like a drop 2, drop 3 or 4th voicing. So he creates the chord then planes it around the key in a modal fashion.

[NSJ]

Originally Posted by m78w

NSJ yeah that's what it is. The only thing that Allan does differently than other guys who like this planing technique is that he grabs any grip that suits him and moves it around, rather than using a defined chord like a drop 2, drop 3 or 4th voicing. So he creates the chord then planes it around the key in a modal fashion.

Thanks for the clear confirmation. That's what I thought, when I first saw a brief video of Allan explaining his, what he termed, chord note "families"--it wasn't a clear musical term, I must say (at least from my puny understanding), but he did attempt to clarify it somewhat when he said something like "which notes of a particular scale do I use to build my chords? Why, any of them". That had me thinking: key-centered---and the way to create a sense of seeming harmonic "variety" while playing on 1-2 chords is to use diatonic modal planing.

Your use and explanation of his first chord choice built on specific intervalic distances (5th, 2nd, 5th) made the "grokking" very grokkable. Thanks again.