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Hello, does anyone have any good concrete ways to practice comping and also voice leading maybe? Like inner movements in the chord and such. But just if you had some tips on comping practice exercises and good ways to comp in general it would be a huge help.
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08-08-2023 05:49 PM
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Memorize the ways to invert C major 7, C minor 7 and C dominant 7 across these four string sets.
xx4321
x5432x
6x432x
okay, have all those memorized? Great 11 keys to go.
Now hit up your metronome and play them up and down the fretboard in time. Go through major 7 first, then minor, then dominant.
Now instead of just the same chord, switch to a ii V I I6 and play that in time, within a 4 fret space. Oh also learn the inversions for a major 6th chord. It’ll be easy now.
Now you have the basics down. And when you’re running the ii V I stuff the voice leading will fall out of the guitar in some positions, that’s your bread and butter.
It took me a few months to get through all this, but it was worth it. On stage though, I still grab beginner chords.
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Comping is hard because it sort of assumes interaction with another person but you can always practice rhythm and time with whatever chords you’re working on. Choose a short one measure rhythm, maybe like two or three attacks in a measure. Try working it through at some different tempos. Try displacing it.
You can also try comping on some of your favorite recordings. Comp for Miles on Freddie Freeloader or something. Try and really feel what’s going on with the band. That time feel stuff is always the hardest thing to get going on and I don’t know if there’s any way to do it but get in there and copy.
Shell voicings can be really helpful for voiceleading. It’s just essentials: bass motion and then the third and seventh, which are really where the voiceleading really comes from. So you can really see it.
ii-V-I-VI progressions and blueses and tunes you’re working on.
And once you get comfortable with those, you can do rootless shells. So a third, a seventh, and an upper voice. That’s the Ed Bickert vibe.
I’ve been working a lot lately on those rootless shells. I’ve spent a lot of time on chords (not enough) but I think when I’m actually playing with a bass player and people are there, I seem to fall back on those more than anything else. So I figure I’ll lean into that for a while.
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Most bang for your buck:
Guide tones + one extention on D G B strings.
Probably should do:
Learn Drop 2 and 3 voicings and how they can be modified to sound more hip.
Jim hall and ed bickert. Red Garland w miles. Wynton Kelly. Medium swing is easier to get the vibe.
Best book:
Barry Galbraith #2 comping. All tunes are standards. Learn the tunes then read the comping examples. No long descriptions, just music.
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Yup or D G and E strings if you hybrid pick. Get the rest of those tasty extensions.
Originally Posted by bediles
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I like to record myself playing a solo with a click (or without) and then comping along afterwards. This has the added benefit of not relying on accompaniment for form and reminding me to add spaces here and there because you get a good idea of what you are like to play with….
Don’t comp with drop 2s because they sound like ass haha. Well they can be ok, but not always, they are specially bad with another guitar player.
Shells are good. Drop 3’s are ok too but include the problematic fifth, which is the first note we can replace or omit… by which time we are kind of back to shells. So start with those and guide tones and build up as Pamo and Bediles suggest.
One great exercise is practicing either oblique motion - so a whole chord progression with a pedal tone in the treble or bass as much as possible.
Another is chromatically ascending top note. So on guitar you may have noticed that on most standards the grips tend to slowly move down the neck. This is because backcycling chord progressions have descending voice leading. If you fight this tendency and use a top note that goes up each time you will find yourself playing all kinds of interesting things.
This is a very good video as well.
study this video (it’s based on) carefully. Pete is the master of taking familiar chord forms and applying brilliantly.
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if you twisted my arm, I would say Drop 2’s are mostly good on the top four strings. One advantage is that they tend to harmonise a melody line with a filled in tenth and as tenths are always a great option for two part counterpoint (ask Bach), they usually sound great for harmonising a line in parallel - even though pianists can play close voice they often opt for drop 2’s maybe for this reason.
And of course, Wes established this style on guitar. You might want to comp in this area sometimes, I find myself doing this with tenor sax and double bass a lot. Guitar, absolutely not.
Other Drop 2’s can sound cool in lower registers - especially in 1st or 2nd inversion, but given they are kind of the ‘default guitar voicings’ it’s easy to get locked into them and I think there are much better options. Even basic jazz guitar grips like x 3 2 2 3 x are a better choice than things like x 3 5 2 3 x; which is kind of a problematic chord. Again, better with the fifth omitted.
They are a brilliant soloing resource though. So this is not an excuse for not knowing them haha.
BTW you may well know this, but any drop 2 on the top four strings can become a drop 3 with the root on E by dint of realising your top and bottom strings are tuned to the same note
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That's about the fifth time I've tried to watch the Peter Bernstein video... There's so many chords going so fast, with the vaguest explanation of what's going on...
My takeaway is always, there are a lot of options to play rhythm changes, but I didn't learn a single one.
If OP could pull chords as they flew by in real time then they wouldn't have to ask how to comp, they would just pull changes off of records.
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The very simplest version of Pete’s thing is shell voicings as a basis and then tension and resolution. When the changes are slow or static, he might spice things up with some side-slipping and when the changes are cooking he might simplify to tonic and dominant or something like that. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
But he told me once (in the context of gently ripping me a new one about trying to play too many chords) that as long as someone can play the changes with shell voicings, play simple rhythms in time, and make judicious use of side-slipping, he’d hire them any day of the week.
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Am I wrong or is the comping book #3 in his series? Originally Posted by bediles
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
I watched the other video Christian posted and it gave me the a-ha moment, Peter was teaching broad concepts and I thought he was showing a dozen examples in 7 minutes.
Peter in the video just seems like the kind of player you want to casually jam with and talk through a song.
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Whew. Yeah. He really is. You’re not going to find a person out there who knows more about songs writ large. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
And yeah … I think until pretty recently (relatively speaking) I thought I was hearing players play lots of chords, or play complex chords. When really what I’m hearing most of the time is players who know how to not sit still. A lot of guys have a relatively small arsenal of ways to make a static chord feel like it’s moving. They’re really creative and rhythmic and confident with it and it gives a pretty simple thing the illusion of complexity. Pete doesn’t always explain it, but once you sort of get a handle on what he seems to be doing, it’s pretty wild.
(There are obviously exceptions to this — Ben Monder comes to mind, with his crazy finger buster close interval chords and whatnot.)
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Nicely put
As you say, a lot of it is simply chromatic approach chords, moving the whole shape by half steps into the target. This is primarily a rhythmic technique in fact - it’s all about ending up in the right place on the right beat. Pete adds in a little bit of contrary motion in the top voice to break it up. Like a great chef, he makes something amazing from simple but carefully chosen ingredients.
@AllanAllen i really don’t mean to come off as a patronising d-hole, but do you realise you can slow down YouTube videos using the settings? That functionality really helps with things like this.
I also like to download videos for study. There are third party applications to do that, which helps with looping and getting exact time references and so on, where YT is a pain in the behind.
I feel i get value out of stuff by focussing on small elements and apply everywhere i can.
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I just feel like I shouldn't have to slow down a lesson going over how to comp rhythm changes. But that's not what this video is, it's broad concepts and not a tutorial. I was just expecting the video to be something it isn't. Like I said, the other video you posted gave me that a-ha moment that I was trying to get the wrong thing out of it. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Hahaha. Not unreasonable. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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yeah he’s not spelling it out and he certainly didn’t when i had a lesson with him either (don’t know about Pamo). He outlines broad principles and explains stuff, but he’s not talking you through what he plays chord by chord. But the other video does. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
That said, I spent a lot of time going through that video btw. But I think that’s how it works. It’s good to get used to that…
I’d go as far to say jazz is not a pedagogical world, even today. I’m not sure anyone thinks it’s possible to teach jazz that way in fact.
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you know what? Originally Posted by pamosmusic
I spent years going to Barry Harris’s classes before I was able to hang on anything. But the class was full of people who were able to play every note. I later learned they’d been following Barry around the world for years. But I would get one thing out of the session and work on that, and I would get better and faster.
One can’t assume that a YouTube video or workshop is pitched at one’s level. Sometimes people are just a lot faster at picking stuff up than you, usually because they are more experienced. I think fretboard harmony is a good example; the more chords you know, the better you will be at learning new chords. What seems like cruel and unusual punishment one year can seem straightforward the next.
Otoh as a teacher I forget how much I know (I don’t want to sound big headed because there are people out there who know a lot more, Pete and Barry for example, obviously) but things that seem obvious to me are really not obvious to everyone. It’s quite hard to reign things in sometimes, when the enthusiasm gets going.
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That’s a big N-O from me. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
(PS my name is Peter. Last name Amos. I think folks read it as Pamo’s Music. Which is fine. But for the sake of keeping things 100 over here, I figured I’d make a quick note.)
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I know (you do sign off) but if I had said Pete it would have been confusing. So I dub thee Pamo. Or maybe Pamos which at least makes more sense. Sorry! Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I mean … yeah … I wasn’t saying that to be like “D***it Bernstein, slow down.” But I never do the slow downer stuff—probably out of sheer laziness. I’m sure I miss good things for it, but if I can’t figure it out, I try to just get what I can get and come back later. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I wish I had the patience, but such is life.
Yeah this is real. I think this is the lesser known half of the Dunning-Krueger effect. People tend to underestimate the amount of work required to achieve expertise. The novice because they don’t even know what they don’t know … the expert because they’ve been working so long they forgot how much foundation it took to make what they do feel simple.Otoh as a teacher I forget how much I know (I don’t want to sound big headed because there are people out there who know a lot more) but things that seem obvious to me are really not obvious to everyone. It’s quite hard to reign things in sometimes, when the enthusiasm gets going.
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DAMN. You’re right. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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if I start using it in a discussion of Wolfgang Muthspiel you have every right to get pissed Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Noted. Bet on it. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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A very good tool and way to practice is a DAW with a delay plugin that can be set up using the metre.
I only know Reaper so, here's what to do. Get Reaper, set up the metronome there.. like ".b.b" instead that default ABBB.
Add FX: Readelay. The only thing you need to do there is to set it up to exact lenght of your tune - thats "Length(musical)".
For example, 16 measures = "124". Then, play 1 round of comp for starters, then it gets played back and you play a solo on top of it,
then your solo gets played and you can comp again.
The beauty of such exercise is that IF you have any trouble, you'll gonna feel it painfully the next round
. When playing with recordings (a good thing too of course), you will not get to experience your own mistakes.
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My expectations reflect how I learn and what my goals are. I'm very much stage focused. If I'm working through a new tune and a new chord comes up, lets say an augmented, I learn one grip, then keep moving. I'll learn substitutions and inversions as I get more familiar, but to get it in my head so I can play it on stage, all I need is one grip. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
So because of that I was expecting one chorus of rhythm changes from a pro, but instead of being fed, I'm learning how to fish. Which is great.
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