The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #51

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    Loved everything about Ben Monder's Luteous Pangolin, both the composition and live performance. I see no connection at all between this music and the little I've heard from Guthrie Govan.

    In an interview (I just glimpsed at) Ben says "there are particular influences that inform my music, foremost among them rock and contemporary classical". Ok so not bop, so probably why it sounded so refreshing

    Thanks for posting that!

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #52

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    Eb13b9#5 > Abma9

    Eb Db G B C E > Ab G Bb C Eb

    Simple move of Cma7 > Cm7 w/bass notes providing the V7 I context.

    Piano voicing, please don't ask me to demonstrate on guitar.

  4. #53

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    Quote Originally Posted by bako
    Eb13b9#5 > Abma9

    Eb Db G B C E > Ab G Bb C Eb

    Simple move of Cma7 > Cm7 w/bass notes providing the V7 I context.

    Piano voicing, please don't ask me to demonstrate on guitar.
    Thank you. That clears it up, I think.

    If you're playing a V I in Ab ... and the bass plays an Eb, you can treat the dominant as a Eb13#5b9. Since the notes of Cmaj7 are contained within it, they will work. So will any other combination of the notes contained within the chord. Eb Db G B C E, although the Cmaj7 arp may be more efficient in creating bitonality and thereby avoiding mud.

    When you get to Ab major you can play a Cm triad C Eb G to outline Abmaj7. If the tonic is Abm you'll have to adjust it to have a B instead of C. And, that will make an augmented triad.

    So, now maybe I understand Monder's point. He is pointing out that, to take one example, a Cmaj7 arp is contained within a number of other chords. That may be helpful in terms of finding multiple uses for a group of grips.

    If I understand that much, then he's approaching the harmony from the point of view of the substitution.

    That is, he doesn't begin by asking what can I play over an Eb dominant with certain alterations. Rather, he's answering the question, what can a Cmaj7 be played over? Which is not the usual question while you're playing a tune. But, if you have learned all those relationships, it should be useful.

    Apparently, he has found this approach to be fruitful. He's clearly a brilliant player.

    Where I end up with posts like these ("it would be an excellent idea to learn this nearly uncountably infinite number of associations") is that, with my brain, I'm stuck learning them one sound at a time. I have to be able to hear it, find it on the instrument, figure out where it can be used in the tunes I play and then remember it. Tomorrow, I can try to learn a new one, but I'll have to keep drilling the old ones.
    And, pretty soon, my dance card is full.

    If I can learn it by sound and remember it, I'll be able to find it on the fretboard without thought, but if I can't remember the sound accurately, then I have to learn it more mechanically in 5 positions and 12 keys.

    Reg said something earlier I want to support. I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to hear him live a lot lately and thereby be exposed to exactly what he is talking about regarding chord sequences. The concept, as he stated it, felt like a new way to look at things, even though I had been exposed to subsets of this idea before.

    He's talking, I think (and, hopefully, he'll correct me if I've got this wrong) about developing a vocabulary of chord "licks" (for want of a better term) that lead into a target chord. So, for example, if the chord in bar 5 is X, he's talking about a couple of chords played near the end of bar 4 which lead into the chord in bar 5 and sound hip, propulsive and jazzy.

    So, to take a trivial example, bar 5 is Cmaj7. Bar 4 is G7. You might play, quickly, in rhythm, say Ebm9 Ab13 Dm9 G7b13. It dresses up the movement to bar 5, propels the band and sounds jazzy. Of course, you have to pick the right lick for the context. Not every Cmaj7 is preceded by G7.

    Reg has an impressive vocabulary and the ability, I suspect, to generate more licks on the fly. The result is the ability to drive a band hard from the guitar chair, which is not easily done.

  5. #54

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    Superimposition is just another angle that arrives at similar content as does fully extending chords derived from scales. The advantage of this approach is if we know Cma7 well then we are already in a position to apply it, far easier on the surface than interpreting a Eb13b9#5 chord symbol, but the point that you raise is not insignificant, there exists an overwhelming abundance of relationships to internalize.

    Not so hard to visualize the interval between an individual note and a chord.
    It gets incrementally harder with a dyad, a triad or a 7th chord.

    Brett Willmott has an excellent book presenting superimposed 7th chords functioning within major, minor and dominant families. Overwhelming but periodically I go back to give it another go. I am decidedly undecided about what might be a best approach for me to internalize such stuff. Ben Monder was willing to put in the time and find a way.

    Also, Mick Goodrick has a cool segment in the Advancing Guitarist where he presents multiple applications of Cma7, Cma7b5 and Cma7+.

  6. #55

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    I can't recall ever having seen an Eb13#5b9 and I don't expect that to change. Note that has B, C and Db. Three consecutive halfsteps, so which octave you play each note in is important.

    What this comes down to for me is the idea that I can use my Cmaj7 arps against an Eb dominant.

    This is kind of a surprise. When I think Eb dominant, one of the things that crosses my mind is Eb9, Eb G Bb Db F.

    Cmaj7 is C E G B. Three of those notes, C, E and B, are a half step from notes in Eb9. Quite dissonant. In the right context, probably ear-twistingly beautiful.

    I think it's worth noting that this sort of thing is really for the very advanced player.

  7. #56

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    I can't recall ever having seen an Eb13#5b9 and I don't expect that to change. Note that has B, C and Db. Three consecutive halfsteps, so which octave you play each note in is important.

    What this comes down to for me is the idea that I can use my Cmaj7 arps against an Eb dominant.

    This is kind of a surprise. When I think Eb dominant, one of the things that crosses my mind is Eb9, Eb G Bb Db F.

    Cmaj7 is C E G B. Three of those notes, C, E and B, are a half step from notes in Eb9. Quite dissonant. In the right context, probably ear-twistingly beautiful.

    I think it's worth noting that this sort of thing is really for the very advanced player.


    I think these posts may have you curious and you may delve deeper in harmony .. using CM7 as a jumping off point..study the C augmented scale-
    you will find CMA (triad and MA7) Cmin Caug (same chords for Ab..and E) not bad for a six note scale plus every note can be the root of an aug triad..

    If you study the diminished scale you would find over 20 chords embedded in it..Major Minor Dom..Alt Doms (#5 #9 b5 b9) and of course diminished chords.(this one may make your head spin a bit)

    Im just saying that sometime a CM7 is just a CM7..but sometime its not

    I do hope these posts give you food for thought and may increase your love of music

  8. #57

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    Quote Originally Posted by wolflen
    [/I]

    I think these posts may have you curious and you may delve deeper in harmony .. using CM7 as a jumping off point..study the C augmented scale-
    you will find CMA (triad and MA7) Cmin Caug (same chords for Ab..and E) not bad for a six note scale plus every note can be the root of an aug triad..

    If you study the diminished scale you would find over 20 chords embedded in it..Major Minor Dom..Alt Doms (#5 #9 b5 b9) and of course diminished chords.(this one may make your head spin a bit)

    Im just saying that sometime a CM7 is just a CM7..but sometime its not

    I do hope these posts give you food for thought and may increase your love of music
    Put two augmented triads together, C and Eb, and that's the C augmented scale.
    I see that it's got those chords within it.

    As for diminished scales, there are 12 notes total, 8 of which are in a diminished scale. No surprise you can build lots of chords. It would be easier to identify the chords that aren't in it.

    But, how is this information applied? Might you provide an example from a tune?

  9. #58

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    Quote Originally Posted by bako
    Superimposition is just another angle that arrives at similar content as does fully extending chords derived from scales. The advantage of this approach is if we know Cma7 well then we are already in a position to apply it, far easier on the surface than interpreting a Eb13b9#5 chord symbol, but the point that you raise is not insignificant, there exists an overwhelming abundance of relationships to internalize.

    Not so hard to visualize the interval between an individual note and a chord.
    It gets incrementally harder with a dyad, a triad or a 7th chord.

    Brett Willmott has an excellent book presenting superimposed 7th chords functioning within major, minor and dominant families. Overwhelming but periodically I go back to give it another go. I am decidedly undecided about what might be a best approach for me to internalize such stuff. Ben Monder was willing to put in the time and find a way.

    Also, Mick Goodrick has a cool segment in the Advancing Guitarist where he presents multiple applications of Cma7, Cma7b5 and Cma7+.
    superposition has been the rule throughout the history of jazz, and remains IMO the best way of understanding what is going on in improvised jazz harmony from the 1920s to the present day. In a way it makes the most sense when thinking about jazz not as an object - ‘here is a recording/chart to analyse’ but as a process - ‘this is what actually happens on the bandstand’.

    Which is to say the bass plays one thing, the guitar or piano another thing, and the horn a third thing. Unless they all sat down and agreed the specific changes, superpositions naturally emerge. Even in the early days the soloists idea of the chord progression could be different to the changes stated in the piano and bass; some of these combinations lead to what we may think of as ‘extended chords’ (if we look at them written down) quite naturally through improvisation and discrepancies via the oral tradition… even without bringing in the influence of Debussy etc which is well documented decades before Bill Evans.

    I could cite some obvious examples but I feel people never bother to check out that stuff. (So for example we listen to the banjo play an Eb triad on After You’ve Gone while the melody sits on the notes of a Gm triad. The banjo does not play Ebmaj7… oh what’s that? You’ve gone to sleep???)

    What I will say is that understanding basic jazz harmony from the point of view of superpositions, for example Fmaj7 = an A minor triad on an F triad, really helps to get to the core of these sounds. The fact that F is dissonant on Fmaj7 can be read in any arranging book; but understanding the thing that makes an F maj7 an Fmaj7 is the Am triad gives a clearer way to hear it. The E defines the sound of that harmony which is kind of blindingly obvious when you think about it but we might (wrongly) think the F triad notes are more important if we were to look at it from the perspective of traditional chord construction from the root.

    That ‘up from the root, 9th/#11/13 of the chord’ stuff is kind of classical theory, where the sevenths etc are thought dissonant, when jazz ears tell us it’s actually the root that sounds dissonant as a melody note!

    it’s a basic difference in perception of the same musical object F A C E - how weird is that?

    (At some point I’ll do a boring video about how if we think of it the way the composer probably did, Stella actually contains no upper extensions in the melody, even though jazzers hear it that way, those notes are all dissonances - appoggiaturas. Once you hear it this way it stops being impressionistic jazz and starts to sound more like romantic music.)

    In this sense, we may also want to think of Fmaj7 not as an F Ionian sound but as an A Phrygian sound when it comes to voicings etc, which gives the correct emphasis and also the correct ‘avoid notes’ - F and Bb. It’s not the way I think of it, but it reflects the actual sounding nature of the chord much better than thinking from the root. I have heard Adam Rogers talking about this stuff and I wouldn’t be amazed if Ben Monder thought this way too. Probably Goodrick too.

    Anyway that’s a really simple example, but it can be generalised to everything. Think top down for three or four notes, not bottom up.

    so Cmaj9 —> G or Em7
    F9#11 —> G or Cminmaj7
    G13b9 —> E
    etc etc

    (Those us chords give a few scale options if you are into that stuff even when considering the lower chord tones… )

    doing things the other way around like in the Monder gives you possibilities outside the ones in the standard chord scale options. You also have the option of using scales that come from the upper structure chord but not the overall chord, so Ab Ionian on G7alt, that type of thing. They don’t always have to be ‘tidy’ from a vertical perspective. So long as you can hear them…

    Hope that also makes my earlier posts clearer.

    Anyway all of this stuff is I think well known by musicians whether intellectually or intuitively, but I’m sure theory books make it very clear.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 09-18-2021 at 07:33 AM.

  10. #59

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    As Christian said.

    Also using the ii over the dominant V then going up in m3rds. So -

    G7 = Dm, Fm, Abm

    Which you might notice gives the sus sound, the b9 sound and the altered sound.

    But personally I find the basic triad far too limiting and I'd rather find ways of making lines from them, whether dorian or melodic minor. There's only one note difference between those two but a #7 in the wrong place can sound very wrong.

  11. #60
    I don’t think that’s the idea of the pdf
    Its better interpreted as “it’s more productive to spend your time considering small things from every possible angle, than to try and absorb a thousand new pieces of information”

    That is to say, spending an hour learning every different way to name one voicing that you know well across the fretboard will yield more vocabulary than spending that hour learning a bunch of new voicings for a bunch of different chord types. i think the whole pdf boils down to this principal.

  12. #61

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    As a warm up, play a scale with the metronome on 20 (or lower, even 10) and play one note per click. Do this through every position of the scale, trying to be as accurate as possible. Try to be even and legato (even though you are attacking every note). Then put the metronome on 5 or 10 and have that be the first beat of an 8 or 4 bar cycle. Improvise over a tune this way and see how accurate you can be.

  13. #62

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    Quote Originally Posted by MatPetheny69
    I don’t think that’s the idea of the pdf
    Its better interpreted as “it’s more productive to spend your time considering small things from every possible angle, than to try and absorb a thousand new pieces of information”

    That is to say, spending an hour learning every different way to name one voicing that you know well across the fretboard will yield more vocabulary than spending that hour learning a bunch of new voicings for a bunch of different chord types. i think the whole pdf boils down to this principal.
    I don't even remember the pdf... but your last paragraph should be standard practice for most guitarist..LOL