The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #726

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    That's a beautiful summation of Mick's approach to playing and teaching. I can appreciate other folk with different paths, priorities and methods, but Mick's it the one that really resonated with me.

    I've done a ton of work out of the Advancing Guitarist, I'd recommend it to anyone longing for an unobtainable copy of the Almanacs.

    Best wishes to Mick upon his retirement!

    PK

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #727

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    or "I wonder if there's a way to connect chords so my familiarity with the fingerboard and those sounds within the zones of comfort can be tied together in a seamless and effortless way?"
    How long did it take you for this to click? You probably have been familiar with the cycles since your student days. I really plan on sticking with this but I'm seeing it will be a while before I feel like I've reached a new level. So far though, I'm enjoying the journey.
    Last edited by JohnoL; 07-11-2020 at 09:30 PM.

  4. #728

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnoL
    How long did it take you for this to click? You probably have been familiar with the cycles since your student days. I really plan on sticking with this but I'm seeing it will be a while before I feel like I've reached a new level. So far though, I'm enjoying the journey.
    I'd been working with the Almanacs for quite a while but it was also one of those things that I always knew there was more to. The COVID lock down in late April gave me an opportunity to choose some things and self promises that I never made good on. One was a deep immersion in the cycles. That's why this thread had been asleep for so long.
    As soon as I started to devote a couple of hours each day to them, unforseen benefits started to become apparent; and voice leading was just a small part.
    So I started to put together a logical, progressive, interactive and intuitive way to teach this to students. And the book project came to life coinciding with Mick's retirement from teaching.
    I will honestly say that if you prepare yourself with a knowledge of the fingerboard, work with a chord voicing with all inversions, that you'll be well prepared to use cycles to teach yourself about harmony, chord connexion, and learning to sharpen your own awareness of chords' individual voices and how the form the glue between chord progressions.

    By the way, I'm looking at There Will Never Be Another You as you are. Great way to create ways to move around counter to what you may have done previously. Descending harmonic flow? Use and chose a cycle that ascends, or after you start to see root movement as a lateral movement, start to navigate by chord voice or in ways you would have normally seen a month ago.

    A little bit goes a long way. A little more and the things a good piano player does is within your skill set. Bill Evans voicing. Yeah, they are on the guitar too.

    As far as when it clicked? It's still clicks a little more every day.
    An example: Working with cycle 6, I became aware in my ear and hands that chords could move in very subtle ways. So subtle that they didn't even sound like individual chords in a piece, but rather shifting textures in the harmony. One day I was playing a piece "On the Street where you Live" and I found myself seeking harmony in a descending bass line and things were fitting together in a beautiful way, a way where I wasn't even aware of the chords, just the movement to a chord I knew was there. My hands had become comfortable with movement in three voices. Only afterwords did I identify them as cycle 6 and cycle 3 movements.
    Another example: After immersing myself in cycle 4 and 5 for a week, the sounds of movements in 4ths started to open up options for me to choose from whenever I saw a piece's chord progress up a 4th (a lot). Now I have a lot of different options and with chromatic embellishment and passing tones, turnarounds have a freshness to them.

    One thing I've also started doing is introducing this approach, the Advancing Guitarist approach for lack of a better term, to my students early on. If I do this, with rewarding material and creative exercises, the payback may or may not be as fast as rote memorization of patterns or grabs, but when students reach even the most basic proficiency, their ability to play creatively, innovate, discover their own language, see and hear different harmonic textures, play melody that reflects personal intention... is much higher and easier than taking an approach of grabs and licks. The learning curve is steeper in the beginning, the payback can be greater when you get there.
    This is really evident in the cycles, because it's not just a pattern to learn, it's a rewiring of what you can do when you really learn the chordal options and what you might do with them. They really are little etude like studies of all possible 3 and 4 note chords in every harmonic intervallic movement. And once you learn one, all the others are much more familiar and accessible faster.

    So share your thoughts, these are just my own, some impressions of how they crept into my own playing.
    Last edited by Jimmy blue note; 07-12-2020 at 05:44 AM.

  5. #729

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    Wow! Having taken advantage of the pdf offer from Jimmy blue note and looking over all the material in volume 2 and volume 3, it looks to me like the third volume brings everything together and puts it all into perspective. It also answered some of the questions I've been chewing on:

    What about harmonic major?

    What about non-diatonic sequences?

    What about parallel chord planing?

    Great stuff!

    Thanks again to Jimmy blue note for keeping this thread alive and offering the material.

    .

  6. #730

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    Hi FwLineberry.
    Thanks seconded, and I strongly agree!
    The introduction to Almanac 2 offers a ton of important (and highly condensed) information, while in Almanac 3, the 'Analyse This' section is almost an entire book, just in itself. Is anyone else here working from the ' Analyse This' part of the collection? For me, it really ties the whole set of these amazing books together so well.
    Best wishes
    MW

  7. #731

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    Mick Wright,
    Was there anything from the Van Eps books that you were able to carry over into working with cycles, like embellishments?

  8. #732

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    Hi JohnoL

    A great question, thanks, and I could write all night if I were to give you a really thorough answer. The ear training and hand training that the Van Eps method provides is invaluable. In short, yes, there are many aspects of the Van Eps Harmonic Mechanisms system that usefully port across to the Almanac cycles.
    The most significant thing, for me, to carry across from Van Eps's books is his highly sophisticated left-hand fingering. The repetitions of this, through all the keys and with important variations, reinforces independant finger skills, and deepens fretboard knowledge. These are the guitar equivalents to Czerny’s piano books, and Van Eps’ attention to fingering detail is breathtaking: in a three-volume set similar in size to the three Almanacs, any exercise that needs it has fingering instructions. This is important because he will alternate the left fingers as much as possible, and will also make use of each of the left-hand fingers as a barré, occasionally, to stop several strings on the same fret.
    I love Van Eps’ orderly concept of ‘string sets’, which categorises the adjacent and non-adjacent sets of strings used for his voicings. He also likes his dissonances and says ‘let tones clash sometimes’. I found that getting very familiar with the harmonised melodic minor and harmonic minor scales was similarly great study material with regard to ear-training.

    You mention his ‘embellishments’ - I can’t find this word used in my Van Eps books, but I think you might mean his satellite, displacement, and stagger concepts, and the various ‘reductions’? And, for greater complexity, he’ll then set a chromatically shifting triad sequence against an added cycle of fifths in the bass voice: I’ll try doing that, beneath Mick Goodrick’s 3-part fourths some time soon, and you’ve now set me thinking about other correlations - there are lots of these.

    The three volumes of the Harmonic Mechanisms somehow feel a little simpler, weighed as ’information-per-page’, but I suspect that the Almanacs might simplify too, were we to have a mega-version where each cycle was repeated and written in all keys. I thought that the commentary was very scant when I did my most sustained work with these books, (Van Eps' and Mick Goodrick's) but I now think that both writers' commentaries are sufficient, but highly condensed.

    There’s a lot of similar work being done in the Harmonic Mechanisms books as in the Almanacs, and the contrasts, differences, and overlaps are fascinating, particularly at the end of Van Eps's Volume 1, and in Volume 3. When I first got these books, My teacher quoted Barney Kessel’s comment about needing to be on Alcatraz to get the most out of them. Well, 'Now’s the time', as they say.

    I’ll re-phrase Mick Goodrick’s important warnings – about the serious risk of ‘career-ending’ hand damage – if demanding material such as this is mis-used. I’ve hit my own danger-point, a number of times, where interest & enthusiasm sends ‘clock-time’ out of the window. Other players I know have also had this happen, and subsequently hurt themselves working with these books. Please do be careful with this potent material: it’s like gymnasium free-weights. Take care!
    All the best,
    Mick W.

  9. #733

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnoL
    Mick Wright,
    Was there anything from the Van Eps books that you were able to carry over into working with cycles, like embellishments?
    I worked with the smaller Van Eps book many years ago. It was crucial to my development of harmonized chord facility. I loved that book. I can't speak for the larger volumes myself, but in the experience I had the Van Eps was a lot more detail and specific oriented. It gave very definite guidance in covering the options exhaustively.
    The Almanacs are very open ended as far as dictating how the player handles the material, and how much time they want to spend developing the facility. For some people, that responsibility is off putting, the need to imaginatively and responsibly formulate and practice-make the transition from the notes to the fingerboard-is work. But personally I've found that having to take control of learning it has given me a broader concrete and globally intuitive insight into the layout of the fingerboard.
    It's purposely specific on the concepts and notes, movements and layout, but very open to letting a player find, say fingerstyle or picking style, to translate-to find the music within.

    Great treatments of huge bodies of knowledge. Quite compatibly complementary. In my humble opinion.

  10. #734

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    Hi JimmyBlueNote. Nice one!
    Yes, the smaller Van Eps book is his 'Guitar Method'. This was rushed out by Epiphone in a couple of months in the late 1930s to pre-empt an ex-student who was about to publish a plagiarised version Van Eps's teaching material — the full story is in his biography 'Guitar Man' (written by Harrison Stephens and published by Amazon print-on-demand). His 'Original Guitar Solos' (full of great voice-leading) followed some years later, and then the three huge 'Harmonic Mechanisms' tomes emerged, forty years later, in the early '80s.
    These later works really are massively complementary to the Almanacs, and although specifically notated and fingered, they're written in a similar spirit, and are well worth a close look at. They work even better when considered in the light of what the Almanacs offer. Van Eps's text commentaries are a useful parallel to any work on the Almanacs' cycles, and they discuss many of the same matters. Harrison Stephens says that they teach 'techniques to expand abilities in whatever direction a student's taste leads ... essentially it is a book of concepts. Expansion of the mind is as important to Van Eps as development of physical techniques'.

    Where I feel that the Almanacs make a great leap forward from the Mechanisms, is in their magical combination of the voice-leadings, cycles, and MSRP. Does anyone know of another composer/theorist who ever did anything 'theoretical' that is close to this, before Mick Goodrick? There are hints in pieces by Bach, and in Fernando Sor's Etudes, but I've got almost nowhere, in the past decade or so, asking various academic music theorists and historians about it. Does Mick Goodrick attribute the source of the MSRP's core idea ('scales/cycles/voicings = MSRPs in canons' idea to anyone else? Is there a link to American part-singing traditions? I've a strong feeling that he uniquely owns it. Any input on this topic here would be very welcome indeed.

    And back to JohnoL's question — other small practical guitar details come to mind, which might help with some of the more 'wide-open' Almanac voicings:

    One is what Van Eps calls his 'fifth finger principle'. He used the first fleshy pad, just after the knuckle but on the inside of the index finger, to play the high E string one fret lower than the fret that the same index finger's tip is playing - so two notes, two frets, with one finger. This is useful both for voice movement generally, and also for efficiency, when playing the big major seventh voicings (e.g. drop 2&4 voicings with the root on the sixth string: 8 10 x 9 x 7), or for the major seven #11 chord (with the root on the fifth string, x35452 where the left hand thumb can't easily reach).

    Each of Van Eps's left-hand fingers could stop pairs, and bigger groups, of strings, and he would frequently use 'flat-fingered' small barrés, to free up other fingers for voice movement. This approach really comes in handy, too, for Almanac chords such as the 'double-drop 2 drop 3' C major seventh (8 x 9 x 12 x 12) where the left pinky can get both the G and the E top notes.

    Then there is a cool syncopation/polyrhythm section in Mechanisms Vol. 3, called 'Odd Against Even', where basses are played against top notes of triads in various ratios: 2s against 3s, or 3s against 4s, or 4s against 5s etc. All of these are eminently applicable to the Almanacs' palettes of ideas and sounds.

    'Hardly scratching the surface of the surface' Van Eps says...

    All the best,
    MW

  11. #735

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    Jim Hall spoke highly of the little Van Eps book, he said it was a big moment for him when he realized he could take what he learned from moving a triad (E-G-C) through the scale and do it with other structures (D-G-C)


    PK

  12. #736

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    I have the three Van Eps books, but the almanacs are sure easier on my eyes.

  13. #737

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    I still remember my total shock, on opening the box containing Almanacs 1 & 2, at seeing the pink, yellow, and blue paper that most of the pages are printed on — and then an even bigger surprise, seeing what was in the books and their unique page format. And yes, much easier on the eyes. It really helps, much further than simply separating the three scale types used. The major key 'pink' looks more orange in this photo, below.
    After Paulkogut's very interesting Jim Hall anecdote, (thanks PK!) tonight I've enjoyed exploring these three-part fourths cycles, from Almanac 2. Transposing to a few different major keys, trying to play as much from memory as possible. Picking out various patterns in each group of chords, all played against the same low A string as a drone sounds good. Just change the F to F#, or change to F# and C#, etc. I'm shifting octaves a lot more than usual on this sequence, but there are third steps throughout this anyway, (which can also be 'filled in' with the passing tones) and, with the drone, to my ears it seems to remain musical and is full of useful possibilities.
    Attached Images Attached Images Anybody use the Goodchord Voice Leading Books?-img_2307-jpg 

  14. #738

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    Why does the example above start with D in the bass instead of C? Just to start with a quartal voicing?

    Are there any examples in book 2 that start with C F B? I think it works as a 1 chord. I saw that there was a mention of voicing C F B E in book 2 or 3. I need to go back and reread that.
    Last edited by JohnoL; 07-17-2020 at 10:46 AM.

  15. #739

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    Hi JohnoL. Well spotted!
    All of the three-part fourths cycles start on D chords. When we get to the four-part fourths they revert back to starting on a chord with a C root (i.e. four-part fourth CEFB).
    These are written without chord names (the names come along in Vol. 3), and while the C note is present in the first chord and this makes it a little more confusing, the three-part sequences begin from what sounds very like a D tonal centre. The 'C' chord you identify (the three-part fourth CFB) is the final chord of each 'stave'.

    On page 10 of Almanac Volume 2 (err... there are no page numbers, either) Mick Goodrick gives us playing tips in the 'More About Fourths' section, saying that these sets of cycles work very well with a Dorian mode focus, and are particularly 'guitar-friendly' when played with the low E tuned down to D.
    They certainly are guitar-friendly, and as well as Dorian modes, they also sound good in mixolydian and lydian contexts as well.
    all the best
    MW

  16. #740

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnoL
    Why does the example above start with D in the bass instead of C? Just to start with a quartal voicing?

    Are there any examples in book 2 that start with C F B? I think it works as 1 chord. I saw that there was a mention of voicing C F B E in book 2. I need to go back and reread that.

    Obviously, C F B is seen as the 2nd 5th 1st of the Locrian scale, yes maybe it would be have been easier if the 1st 4th 7th scale degrees were used, but you can do that as an exercise yourself.


  17. #741

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    Your question is one I thought about myself, which 4th chord sounds
    the most like the I chord in the key. Quartal chords by nature are more ambiguous than tertiary ones.

    Candidates for a I chord:

    C F B // D G C // E A D // F B E // G C F // A D G // B E A

    I wouldn't hesitate to play any of these as a I chord starting in the
    middle register, however the F note points towards dominant or
    subdominant function or a suspended I chord sound.
    Perhaps Mick explains his choice in Advancing Guitarist, I don't
    remember. D G C voiced as C G D open or C D G do make for
    pretty convincing I chords. As Guy points out you can start anywhere
    you want, choose your own numerical assignments.

  18. #742

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    Quote Originally Posted by bako
    Your question is one I thought about myself, which 4th chord sounds
    the most like the I chord in the key. Quartal chords by nature are more ambiguous than tertiary ones.

    .
    Right. The reason why there are no specific chord "names" for chords like these is because they are very textural, ambiguous and if one were to say "This is the a chord built in 4ths with the root or tonic on top", it would prejudice one from hearing, and using it in another way.
    As for why the cycle begins there, you probably realize these are cyclical, they are rather like a barber pole spiral that continuously repeats. That's why I posted the roman numeral post in a linear perspective where you could begin at the II, the VI, where ever you want. When you start hearing harmony as not having a clearly defined starting point, especially in these cycles, one might (I certainly did) see these as moving textures that impart an overall sense of movement even more than a harmonic identity.

    As to "Why begin with the root on top?", well that is a strong conventional sense of tonal centricity, though ambiguous as it is in its suspended sound; note supported by the dominant tone supported by its dominant tone.
    But really, the whole "exploring ambiguity" is why volume 2 is unique. None of these chords have a strong enough tonal identity that they can be fixed as one particular interpretation with one undeniable root. It's a quantum ear leap to learn to use these in a strict tonal context because they are kind of atonally tonal. They have textural sounds and how and where they are used (and they definitely can) is up to the user to find. In other words, freed from the strict definitions of what and how the chord is used, any number of players can find their own contextual application, and one person studying this cycle might hear another player's sound and say "I love what you're doing! What IS that?", so different the sounds can be.

    This is why I've said you need to live with one of these pages long enough for your ear to catch up. It's not a complete plant you can bring into your living room. You have to plant it, live with it and watch it grow.

  19. #743

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    Quote Originally Posted by bako
    Your question is one I thought about myself, which 4th chord sounds
    the most like the I chord in the key. Quartal chords by nature are more ambiguous than tertiary ones.

    Candidates for a I chord:

    C F B // D G C // E A D // F B E // G C F // A D G // B E A

    I wouldn't hesitate to play any of these as a I chord starting in the
    middle register, however the F note points towards dominant or
    subdominant function or a suspended I chord sound.
    Perhaps Mick explains his choice in Advancing Guitarist, I don't
    remember. D G C voiced as C G D open or C D G do make for
    pretty convincing I chords. As Guy points out you can start anywhere
    you want, choose your own numerical assignments.

    In AG, he just shows diatonic 4ths starting with C F B. No explanation is given.

    Anybody use the Goodchord Voice Leading Books?-mick-goodrick-advancing-guitarist_page_45_crop-jpg

  20. #744

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mick Wright

    Where I feel that the Almanacs make a great leap forward from the Mechanisms, is in their magical combination of the voice-leadings, cycles, and MSRP. Does anyone know of another composer/theorist who ever did anything 'theoretical' that is close to this, before Mick Goodrick? There are hints in pieces by Bach, and in Fernando Sor's Etudes, but I've got almost nowhere, in the past decade or so, asking various academic music theorists and historians about it. Does Mick Goodrick attribute the source of the MSRP's core idea ('scales/cycles/voicings = MSRPs in canons' idea to anyone else? Is there a link to American part-singing traditions? I've a strong feeling that he uniquely owns it. Any input on this topic here would be very welcome indeed.
    Yes, as far as I've known, this observation turned codification wasn't a part of anyone else's methods or body of analysis before Mick. Or more to the point, it was something he arrived at on his own. He's always had the highest sense of balance between the freedom of expression and the most, almost obsessive presentation of an exhaustive body of possibilities. It's just his personality. He, as a player would find freedom in the feeling of fresh exploration with each solo (those who are familiar with his playing as a soloist remark that every single solo is almost totally unlike anything else he'd played) so having command of options was a must for him.
    Schillinger, Slonimsky, and others have devoted their lives to treatises on possibilities. Mick's at the time was 3 and 4 part harmony. Later he would turn his sights to rhythmic possibilities in 2-4 measure phrases. But when he began to assemble the voice led cycles within limited voicings, he noticed melodic motifs (MSRP) and he saw them as one way to organize the layers of melody that make up orderly harmony. As to why and how to use this knowledge, he's elusive about how one might apply this aspect but one thing is for sure, learning to hear an MSRP within a cycle is a great ear training exercise, and facility in this ability is a great contributing factour in spontaneously playing cycles in real time. Intuiting the melodic rhythms of 4 simultaneous melodies is a great awareness expander, and really trains one to think in 4 voices, hear the movement and know when a voice moves and to what effect.
    It's just one way to navigate harmony.

  21. #745

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    When you start hearing harmony as not having a clearly defined starting point, especially in these cycles, one might (I certainly did) see these as moving textures that impart an overall sense of movement even more than a harmonic identity.
    Maybe oversimplifying, but can this (playing cycles over a progression) be viewed as playing horizontally instead of vertically?

  22. #746

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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnoL
    Maybe oversimplifying, but can this (playing cycles over a progression) be viewed as playing horizontally instead of vertically?
    Yes, that is an essential concept.
    As a slight aside, I do remember in listening to a Beethoven symphony, or later, Mahler, and thinking How DOES he do that? The sheer complexity of texture and imagination, the individuality of each line. It's still a beautiful and mysterious wonder, but it was a revelation to realize just how much the world changed with Debussy. Before Claude Debussy, the world really didn't think vertically, it was primarily a confluence of melodic voices in coincidence with cadential harmony (forgive the simplification), but after Debussy, the role of harmony as a dominant force asserted itself. Especially with jazz being chordally supported lyric line (Tin pan alley as vehicle for spontaneous composition) the shadow of that harmony/melody duality was ever present.
    Bill Evans brought harmonic voice leading into the genre with a vengence, but on the guitar, it was considered by many to be elusive at best, impossible to many. The Almanacs are not how to method books, but they are a dense compendium of voice led harmonies of every possible intervallic permutation, and in their study, can be unlocked, the way to see horizontal movement with the proficiency needed to improvise.
    That's one thing that it might do when you work with it.

    I might add that the Almanacs are NOT sequential, and they are NOT intended to be treated as one body of knowledge intended to be "gotten through". In fact some of the most proficient musicians who actually use them work with maybe 2 or 3 pages, sometimes just 1 particular page, learning the aspects within by immersion and self realization. Once you have one page down, the other 1200 are MUCH more accessible.

  23. #747

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    Nice one, everybody! - a great discussion, and this is exactly why I enjoy this epic thread so much (and we've still got another 1001 pages to go!)
    I sometimes think of the horizontal thing as applying more to modal sections of tunes (even short passages in the standards) than to the stronger cadential points where vertical forces and tonal gravity take over, and there's clearly room for both in many jazz tunes, including the standards, especially if you can strip down the harmony without vandalising the piece (e.g. using two bars of Am and two bars of Gm, and adding a few quartal sequences, in the first four bars of 'Have You Met Miss Jones'). Pedal-tone basses for 'mixolydian' tinged sections in bop tunes are another useful location (like the turnaround in 'Moment's Notice' maybe?), and I'm also hearing some fainter 'guitar versions' here, of the mighty piano-shaking quartals that McCoy Tyner played on the later Coltrane recordings.
    Mick Goodrick observes that the 4th based harmony is the other side of the coin to 3rds: 'Tertial harmony and quartal harmony are pretty much exact opposites.'
    The 'one' chord discussion is great food for thought. While he starts his quartal chords with CFB in Advancing Guitarist (p.50), in Almanac Vol. 2 (page 10, '3-part fourths, continued') he compares the intervals in the CEG triad with the intervals in 3-part 4th DGC. Is this something to do with avoiding having the tritone on chord one, in favour of the two perfect 4ths, perhaps?
    Last edited by Mick Wright; 07-17-2020 at 01:58 PM.

  24. #748

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    C major

    B E A ma13

    E A D ma6/9

    D G C add9

    A D G ma6/9

  25. #749

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    Quote Originally Posted by GuyBoden
    Obviously, C F B is seen as the 2nd 5th 1st of the Locrian scale, yes maybe it would be have been easier if the 1st 4th 7th scale degrees were used, but you can do that as an exercise yourself.
    Thanks GuyBoden, I'd never paid as much attention as I should've to the 'Intervallic voice-leading' and 'functional voice-leading' panels at the left hand side of each page.
    So, as it says on the page, while the three-part 4th voicings are each constructed on the 1st, 2nd, & 5th of each scale degree, the four-part 4th voicings use 1st, 3rd, 4th, 7th (which then brings the close-voiced quartels back inside the one octave range). Lots of pennies still to drop here but this really helps.
    All the best
    MW

  26. #750

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mick Wright
    ... I'd never paid as much attention as I should've to the 'Intervallic voice-leading' and 'functional voice-leading' panels at the left hand side of each page.
    Yes, this speaks to the ways these cycles can be visualized; and heard. To really use these voice led lines in real time, you've obviously got to get it "off book" meaning developing your own system of internalizing movement.
    One can find the next chord by knowing where the next (closest) reachable root is and utilizing the most appropriate inversion to accommodate that movement. This is a very good way to visually guide oneself through a complete cycle if you know all your diatonic roots (Roman numerals on the fingerboard)
    The information on the left and the MSRP at the bottom of the page also offer good ways by which you can use your ear with the perspective of the overall key and by the individual voice of the present chord itself.
    Intervallic voice leading tells you how far each voice will move. So if you develop an awareness of what each voice in your chord is (as opposed to just thinking of a chord as a "grab" with only one point of reference as is common) then knowing that, say the third of the chord moves up a second and becomes the root of the next chord, simplifies the processing power needed to assimilate the movement of all voices.
    Too, if you're presently on one chord and you can hear which voice is closest to the root of the next chord in the cycle, you can "hear" yourself into the next chord and by using the appropriate inversion, you move all voices without thinking about it any further. The ear guides you.

    Now this brings up a HUGE elephant in the room. If your ear is not really good with diatonicism and with intervallic identification, then I dare say that your work will be much more difficult here. It is WELL worth it to make the effort to acquire instant intervallic and diatonic ear skills/training, both for voice leading, but for all aspects of your playing no matter what you're doing or what method you're using.

    I'll note here that since YouTube videos on how to play things have become more, much more prevalent, the level of proficiency, especially in young kids, has gone way up. It has not necessarily corresponded with a marked increase in ear/aural abilities. This is a trend I've noticed a lot with incoming students at the local music school here. Great chops. Bad ear skills.
    All this is to say, these cycles are great ways to develop your ears if you open that part of your brain to that training. And if you don't have those skills, get and master them ASAP. Ear training is essential and somehow elusive in many students' education.

    Those graphics on the margins of the cycles, they're aural and functional guidelines to the movement you're trying to master in the cyles.