The right path to good chord comping

[christianm77]

I don't think anyone should be learning "all their drop 2's" unless they know WHY they're doing it, in the first place. There are several good reasons to do so, but but they mostly aren't related to learning to play jazz chords in the BEGINNING or learning to comp at a BASIC level.

Far too many posts in the last several years from members who have learned drop 2's and don't know what to do with them. The amount of discussion about drop 2's in the last several years has led to an unintentional beginner assumption that this is the place to start, apparently.

I didn't know my drop 2's until 18 months ago and I have been playing gigs for 20 years.

It's amazing what people will do to avoid learning some fricking tunes and playing them with other people.

[christianm77]

I don't disagree with you, but I think the video is good because it teaches how to open your mind to voicings beyond the standard things you learn from "The Essential Drop 2's Every Jazz Guitarist Must Learn" videos and books. That video series actually does what you recommend, and that is to play for the soloist, and how to listen to your playing in context to others.

OK here's the thing. Books, videos etc won't teach you to comp. They can give you voicings etc, raw material.

What will teach you to comp is listening (to records) and playing. Also developing your sense of rhythm and groove.

This stuff goes on for ever BTW and is easy to write books on, I have literally enough stuff in books to keep me working on voicings for the rest of my life.

Even a sentence such as - "learn Drop 2's and 3's in all positions and keys for all 4 note seventh note chords, and then once that's learned practice replacing the chord tones with notes a diatonic step higher or lower" has a scope that could keep you going for several years. And that doesn't cover a load of other stuff.

You don't need books. You need time in the shed to master that. I could boil Vic Juris's book down to a couple of sides of A4 for example, but they had to get a book out of him for Hal Leonard. It's the publishing business.

But in practice you have whatever voicings you know right now, and you need to be able to apply them musically.

I am like a dog with a bone about this because the study of comping is not the study of voicings, any more than the study of soloing is the study of scales.

[eh6794]

OK here's the thing. Books, videos etc won't teach you to comp. They can give you voicings etc, raw material.

What will teach you to comp is listening (to records) and playing. Also developing your sense of rhythm and groove.

This stuff goes on for ever BTW and is easy to write books on, I have literally enough stuff in books to keep me working on voicings for the rest of my life.

Even a sentence such as - "learn Drop 2's and 3's in all positions and keys for all 4 note seventh note chords, and then once that's learned practice replacing the chord tones with notes a diatonic step higher or lower" has a scope that could keep you going for several years. And that doesn't cover a load of other stuff.

You don't need books. You need time in the shed to master that. I could boil Vic Juris's book down to a couple of sides of A4 for example, but they had to get a book out of him for Hal Leonard. It's the publishing business.

But in practice you have whatever voicings you know right now, and you need to be able to apply them musically.

I am like a dog with a bone about this because the study of comping is not the study of voicings, any more than the study of soloing is the study of scales.

True but if you are not ready, or in a position, to play with better musicians, you still need someone--even a teacher--to point you in the right direction. By the way, I don't think books or videos are the final, and best way to learn anything.

I am prepping to study physics in school. The text books are great, but I am finding real world problems to solve so I can actually internalize what I am supposed to master.

[christianm77]

True but if you are not ready, or in a position, to play with better musicians, you still need someone--even a teacher--to point you in the right direction. By the way, I don't think books or videos are the final, and best way to learn anything.

EDIT: a good teacher is a must, for sure. A couple of lessons might be enough even.

Anyway, going on here a bit, sorry:

I guarantee you most other musicians, at whatever level, do not give a stuff about whether or not you know all your drop2s/whatever.

Do you think many gigging sax players even know what a drop 2 is (apart from dimly remembered theory classes at jazz school)? Pianists on the other hand know all of this, and play it 1,000,000 times better than we could ever hope to, so the best thing we can do is stay the hell out of the way. And so on...

Yes, other musicians don't care about any of the guitar stuff. They probably like Grant Green better than Lage Lund (who they probably haven't heard of anyway if my experience is anything).

What they do care about, things like:

- how many tunes you know
- your feel
- how well you play with a band
- how well you listen to others
- how your reading is
- do you turn up on time wearing the right clothes?
- are you a dick

and so on

I'm not advocating against learning stuff - if that interests you, great, and it's good to be thorough, and it's great to develop you own language of harmony. Lage's great. But he'd be great if he played really boring voicings, tbh. He's a great musician.

But this is a thread about comping, and for me comping is application, music making.

Also I confident the other stuff the scales and the voicings, will happen anyway. It's just stuff. It's not the hard bit ;-)

Where many learning players (not you necessarily) need a bit of tough love here IMO is in GETTING OUT THERE AND PLAYING ;-)

Some of my favourite players play dead boring voicings, it's how they play them that counts. You've got to use what you've got.

Jim Hall.

[jordanklemons]

I know I'm a bit late to this thread moon, and it looks like there's a lot of responses and comments which I haven't read yet, but I imagine there's some great info in them. But I wanted to jump in as comping and harmony are very near and dear to me.

Sometimes it's hard for autodidacts to know what they should work on next , amidst all the unstructured information all over the net !
I used to play the very standard min7,maj7,dom7,min7b5 chords on standards all over the place , and i thought it was the right way to do it , right until i watched "learning tunes" lesson by bruce forman, who increased my awarness on the importance to restrict myself to play close chords with a nice voice leading in one area ! so that got me into knowing the Drop2 chords!
But i can't seem to find any structured book on comping using drop2, so i want to ask you guys is drop2 chords again just the tip of the iceberg in the comping department ?

Drop 2 chords are cool to learn, especially if you enjoy the sound of them. But are they just the tip of the iceberg? No... they're not even part of the iceberg. Drop 2 isn't an element of comping itself. It's an entirely separate (and useful) topic that does overlap with, and can be useful for, comping. It's not even a guitar concept. It comes from arranging. It's been used by arrangers LONG before guitar players started writing books about it. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't borrow the concept... but it's not necessary or a major part of making music with the guitar.

I'm not a big name dropper, I don't like it. I've been on this forum for I think around 2 years now, and I've rarely if ever done this. But I see people getting confused and stuck with drop 2, drop 3, drop whatever so often here... and to really emphasize how silly it is to get that stuck, I need to drop a couple of names for a second to hit my point home. I finished my masters degree about a year ago. During my program, I studied with Scofield, Peter Bernstein, and Brad Shepik. Since graduating, I hung out and talked music with Rosenwinkel. Prior to and during my program I studied with Dave Stryker, and I hung out and talk music/opened for for Wayne Krantz, Adam Rogers, and Ben Monder. I've literally never once heard any of these guys talk about drop anything. Doesn't mean they don't understand the topic. But while teaching music and while just hanging out and talking about music, they don't even bother breaching the subject. The only one who comes close was Ben Monder whose "method email" circulated where I believe he talked about knowing all of the inversions of drop voicings.

That said, during my masters program, drop 2 was discussed... but not by any guitar teachers. It was brought up and discussed during our arranging and composing courses.

Are they worth learning? Sure. I don't think about them at all and find the inversions of them to be slightly useful in application within my own playing... at best. But by all means, take the time to get to know them if you like how they sound. But far more important is to work on musical sounding ideas. Can you string them together through a progression to make them musical? Can you just outline them in time to comp with single notes? How about with dyads? Can you break apart the drop 2 chords into smaller more movable units? Can you add extra notes to make them larger and more dense for ballads or rubato sections? Can you alter the notes within them to get different types of harmonies?

I never would have gone along with it when I was first starting out, but looking back I wish I had focused more on harmony and comping for the first x number of years in my own playing... and that's generally how I recommend others to approach learning the music. Not only does that help give a more integrated understanding of how to improvise with single notes... but it also makes us better band members (not just there to shred when it's our turn, but there to comp and help everyone else sound better), plus it gives us stronger sounding chord solos (solos don't always have to be single note), it helps us learn to play solo guitar (which I think is essential to being a solid guitar player), it helps with opening our ears, and it helps with composing and arranging (and probably a lot of other things as well).

So yeah, I would say that drop 2 is such a small part of comping that I wouldn't even include it as part of the tip of the iceberg. To me, it's more like a chunk of ice from a different iceberg that broke off and is floating nearby the comping iceberg. It can be useful, and it is related... but it's not necessarily the secret passageway into becoming a great comper, and in my couple of years on this forum, it seems like it causes more frustration for more players than it does solve problems and help create real music.

what do i need to know in order to be able to create comping choruses with different melodies etc ?

This is a HUUUUUGE question that honestly can't be fully answered in a forum post. Different people take different approaches. I do it by utilizing triads. I see, hear, and organize melodies as triads with tension notes. Nothing more. I prefer to use the triads hiding within the melody to create chords that "properly" embrace the melodic information into the chords. So for instance, the melody for Tenor Madness starts off with a basic G minor triad. So a starting point for me in working with this tune would be to develop some voicings that take advantage of the G minor triad... that way my chords will help embrace and accentuate the melody, and therefore the vibe that Sonny was creating when he heard and composed the tune.

So I might come up with some shapes like:
6(553)XX
6X(533)X
6X(878)X
6XX(786)

Notice that within the parentheses is a basic G minor triad.

The melody to Tenor Madness starts with a basic 3 note motif. D-Bb-G-Bb
If you sing each of those 3 melody notes one at a time while playing a traditional Bb7 chord (drop 2 if you want)... the G note will ALWAYS sound/feel unharmonious because it will be rubbing against the Ab note in the chord. And that's fine. If you want to create a rub, you'll get it. But even if you want to, it's important to understand WHY it's there and to be able to manipulate it intentionally. If you sing the 3 notes of the melody one note at a time against the voicings I just posted, all 3 notes will sound in harmony with the chord. That's because the chords are built using those notes. This is why drop 2 feels like an unnecessary burden to me. I'm far more concerned with what notes are inside the chord and how do we use it musically then what order they come in. That's just where I personally choose to put my priorities. Doesn't mean I'm right and others are wrong. But I do think, for the sake of note getting lost at the bottom of a rabbit hole, to at least understand that drop 2 is simply an arranging technique that guitar players utilize because closed position chords are difficult if not impossible to play on the fretboard. It has to do with the physicality of the instrument and how to approach the fretboard. And while that can be helpful in terms of comping... they are two entirely different topics. You can be an incredible arranger who uses the drop 2 technique brilliantly and suck at comping. You can be an incredible comper and not really understand arranging (though that's probably less likely).

[matt.guitarteacher]

Great post overall,Jordan, but this....

So yeah, I would say that drop 2 is such a small part of comping that I wouldn't even include it as part of the tip of the iceberg. To me, it's more like a chunk of ice from a different iceberg that broke off and is floating nearby the comping iceberg. It can be useful, and it is related... but it's not necessarily the secret passageway into becoming a great comper, and in my couple of years on this forum, it seems like it causes more frustration for more players than it does solve problems and help create real music.

CLASSIC!!!

[matt.guitarteacher]

Reg uses very few voicings, mostly based around root position from 6th, 5th string roots. Rather than learning every iteration of drop 2, replacing roots with 9's etc., he'd say learn a few basic for each diatonic 7th chord from major, and then, work on using diatonic subs a 3rd above and below for each as well. For example, if you know some inversions of B-7b5, you already know rootless inversions of G9, because they're the same thing. In the same way, diatonic chords, subbed a 3rd below are 6th chords of the chord they're subbing for etc.

As already stated, when you start doing the math on (3 string sets) x (4 chord types) x (4 inversions) x (3 basic voicing types [drop 2, drop 3, drop 2&4]), you're at crazy numbers... 144 voicings? Is that really just the starting point? Reg would say, "what about melodic minor voicings? Are you really going to do all of that work on basic major/diatonic before even approaching altered chords?"

Learn some basic diatonic, and then learn to sub some basic diationic. Learn some altered, and then learn to apply altered and other outside subs to basic. There's a lot of work to be done, just in that. Every inversion of all of the drop voicings is great work for the rest of your life, but to some degree or another is "extra credit", compared to learning the overall skill of accompaniment.

Here is a link to a comping video of Reg's for "What's New": May 2016 - What's New

It's Latin and has a ton of movement - if you're looking at the number of voicings-per-chord - but the basic chord shapes are repeated throughout and are simply applied in different ways, to imply different types of harmony etc. It has a pdf with chord grids and time-stamp makings. Once you learn a few of these basic altered shapes, his videos are much easier to follow btw. This one is one of the more straightforward ones.

[MarkRhodes]

Reg uses very few voicings, mostly based around root position from 6th, 5th string roots. Rather than learning every iteration of drop 2, replacing roots with 9's etc., he'd say learn a few basic for each diatonic 7th chord from major, and then, work on using diatonic subs a 3rd above and below for each as well. For example, if you know some inversions of B-7b5, you already know rootless inversions of G9, because they're the same thing. In the same way, diatonic chords, subbed a 3rd below are 6th chords of the chord they're subbing for etc.

As already stated, when you start doing the math on (3 string sets) x (4 chord types) x (4 inversions) x (3 basic voicing types [drop 2, drop 3, drop 2&4]), you're at crazy numbers... 144 voicings? Is that really just the starting point? Reg would say, "what about melodic minor voicings? Are you really going to do all of that work on basic major/diatonic before even approaching altered chords?"

Learn some basic diatonic, and then learn to sub some basic diationic. Learn some altered, and then learn to apply altered and other outside subs to basic. There's a lot of work to be done, just in that. Every inversion of all of the drop voicings is great work for the rest of your life, but to some degree or another is "extra credit", compared to learning the overall skill of accompaniment.

Here is a link to a comping video of Reg's for "What's New": May 2016 - What's New

It's Latin and has a ton of movement - if you're looking at the number of voicings-per-chord - but the basic chord shapes are repeated throughout and are simply applied in different ways, to imply different types of harmony etc. It has a pdf with chord grids and time-stamp makings. Once you learn a few of these basic altered shapes, his videos are much easier to follow btw. This one is one of the more straightforward ones.

Great post, Matt! I hadn't seen this before. Glad to have it now.
What you are describing Reg doing---applying a small (manageable?) number of chord voicings in a variety of ways--is something Freddie Green did too, and Joe Pass, and Herb Ellis. Kessel too. It really keeps things moving, as you say, and it also keeps the sound balanced.

[christianm77]

Great post, Matt! I hadn't seen this before. Glad to have it now.
What you are describing Reg doing---applying a small (manageable?) number of chord voicings in a variety of ways--is something Freddie Green did too, and Joe Pass, and Herb Ellis. Kessel too. It really keeps things moving, as you say, and it also keeps the sound balanced.

It's not how much stuff you know, it's how many applications of the stuff you know.

[MarkRhodes]

It's not how much stuff you know, it's how many applications of the stuff you know.

Jimmy Bruno once said the major scale gave him all he needed. Of course, the way he knows the major scale is not the way a budding student knows it.

[wzpgsr]

I don't know if this is the "right" path, but here's something I started work on recently to improve my comping. I have started transcribing the rhythms of Hank Jones's comping on Cannonball Adderley's "Autumn Leaves" off of Somethin' Else. His comping is just so restrained and perfect. Deceptively simple, but rhythmically very interesting. So what I've been doing is to mark the rhythm of his piano hits and use that as a template of sorts. I've been working with Alan Kingstone's Barry Harris harmony book for a while, so I am pulling harmonic ideas from that. So while I might not be playing the exact same chords as Hank Jones, I am trying to cop his feel and use my own approach to the voicings. Hopefully some of that Hank Jones tastiness will rub off on me!

[rpjazzguitar]

- how many tunes you know
- your feel
- how well you play with a band
- how well you listen to others
- how your reading is
- do you turn up on time wearing the right clothes?
- are you a dick

Well said. After decades of playing, the thing I now focus on the most is whether the audience is moving -- tapping feet, dancing, or just swaying a little in their seats.

That's all going to be about feel and fitting in with the band.

---------------------------------

How does a new player get to that level most efficiently? Like everything else in guitar, there are multiple paths. However one guy did it, there will be another great player who did it differently.

That said, I'd recommend a tune-based approach. It's how I learned.

My teacher, Sid Margolis, in Brooklyn, got me a fake book and started with Don't Blame Me. He diagrammed a C6 at the 7th fret and circled the root. He told me to learn it in all keys. Next chord was a barre Bb6 at the 6th fret, and he circled the root. Next a barre A7. Etc.

Next tune was Moonglow. I learned my basic chords that way.

Carl Barry, my next teacher, did have me learn 4 string voicings, but applied them to tunes immediately. First one was In Other Words, with a new chord on every melody note.

Later, I learned about voice leading, and started finding ways to play fewer notes, but have them flow better. Still always based on tunes.

So, for the most part, this approach isn't mathematically systematic as a way to learn chords without missing any.

But, OTOH, you learn tunes, chord melody, voice leading -- it's all practical immediately.

Then, the only way to get good as a band member is to play as much as you possibly can with players who are more advanced than you. If they're willing to give you honest critiques of your playing, even better. It can be bruising to your self-esteem, but excellent for your playing.

I have some ideas on how to create this kind of situation which I'll save for another post if anyone is interested. Bear in mind, they also want to be the worst player in the room, so it can be hard to get them.

[pingu]

A good way to learn good comping is to
play some chord melody
It makes you learn the harmony of the tune

Rather than this chord then that chord etc
The music as described by the changes of the tune is like the movement of the lines behind
the melody
A basic ex
If you play a G note to an F# note
you're playing Am7 to D7

[plasticpigeon]

I am struggling with exactly what the original poster is struggling with. I have been for a couple of lessons with a wonderful player recently, but he is not really a teacher and gave me lessons as a favour. He can play great long chord solos on tunes that he has never played before as he says that after a couple of verses he can hear what is going on but from what I gether he has uncannily good ears. He says that I need to hear the bass in my head to get more movement.

I played for a short time with an amateur band. They thought I was ok as I played 3 note chords quietly (usually drop 3) on the e d and g strings, and played with my thumb so the sound was mellow. My problem was that I got no movement, just hitting some very basic grips using one voicing for the duration of that chord. I have now decided to continue with the simple approach but to try and get more movement into my playing using small simple chords, which hopefully will allow me to play with a band again, but add more than I did before. I hope once I can hear the movements I like with simple chords I can flesh them out a bit later on. For inspiration here is John Pizzarelli playing Rhythm changes. Whilst he is singing, all those chords he plays are very simple but to me it still sounds great. I think this is close to what is known as Freddie Green style. I haven't worked the chord solo stuff out in the middle yet but there are a lot of 9th chords in there and I'm sure there are no mental voicings, but it is fast and nicely played. Sounds a but gypsy to me. I'm more interested in the comping at the start anyway. I'm sure this style is a good thing to get to grips (sorry!) with.

[grahambop]

Check out Jonathan Stout's chord voicings:

Jonathan Stout and his Campus Five, featuring Hilary Alexander - Swing Guitar Blog - The 20 Essential Rhythm Guitar Voicings

You can create movement on one chord by playing the sixth chords with roots on the 1, 3rd, 5th and 6th, and by playing diminished chords in between, with roots on the 2nd, 4th, #5 and 7th.

Also worth investigating the Barry Harris sixth/diminished chord approach which uses the same method.

[grahambop]

Also check this out, the Teddy Wilson example should give lots of ideas:

A Comparative Study of Rhythm Guitar Styles