all right so today we're going to continue our series on how to play the real book Christmas
edition with "Christmas Time Is Here" we're going to go through some of the techniques we use to
interpret what's in the real book, and we're going to kind of go over stuff in a way where
we're assuming you watch some of our other videos. (uh) so definitely check some of those
out especially our "Someday My Prince Will Come" video, if you want to have a better understanding
of some of the stuff we're talking about today but let's dive into "Christmas Time Is Here"
so, just like with the other songs and arrangements we've done, we start with a basic default setting,
of what our baseline is, when we're reading the Real Book or a lead sheet in general, and then we
have our 10 enhancements, that (we're gonna) you're gonna see us pepper throughout the arrangement
down here. let's go ahead and take a listen to the first phrase of the song here and see what we got
A couple phrases there. so let's go back, and break down (what we) what we saw. what we used here. so we're
starting off, in that first measure, (with) with an open voicing on the left hand. like we've
talked about a lot, this open voicing is a great thing to have in your arsenal, especially as it
relates to left hand voicings because, it kind of makes you immune, like we've said before, to that
low octave limit. certain intervals just don't sound good in the left hand's neighborhood of
the keyboard. But what always will sound good are fifths and octaves, and stuff bigger than that.
and that's what this open voicing affords us, is the opportunity to kind of play it wherever
we want. so you see that right off the bat in measure one. on the third beat of measure one,
we've introduced two things, with this chord right here, this (uh) rootless voicing, with the
introduction of tension 9, still on the Fmaj7, just kind of (uh) changing up the
voicing of the chord, and introducing a tension. we have a whole series on on rootless voice things
(shameless plug), so check that out if you want to learn more about those. they really do offer
a really cool sound to your playing, so you should be using them if you're not already. And tension 9,
always a great tension, safe to add 99 times out of 100, you're never going to have an issue with
tension 9 being added to the chord. In our next measure, on this Eb7#11,
we have a simple "root plus one guide-tone" voicing on the left hand. guide-tones, again being the third
and the seventh of your chords. so here we have the root and the seventh, that's our guide-tone.
and then, over here, later on the measure, well, throughout the entire measure really, you have
this layer effect, that we've talked about before, where you see the keyboard kind of from the
perspective of a set player. In the third measure, we're harmonizing the melody with chord tones from Fmaj7.
it's always a safe bet if you want to harmonize your melody, just grab a chord tone
or two, and you're good to go. let's keep going here with our arrangement though here (um.) All
right, so measure five is our root and guide-tone on the left hand, once again down here, but this
is where you're going to see this throughout the arrangement, where we sort of play with this notion
of even-eighth-notes versus (uh) uneven-eighth-notes, and we have like two sort of interpretations
of uneven-eighth-notes, or a shuffle (as we would probably normally refer to)
so the eighth-notes in measure five, they're not quite even eighth-notes. they're kind of
(like) "sticky". right? But they're not really a shuffle either, the shuffle we have going on in measure six
is a closer (sort of, more true) interpretation of a shuffle...
so again, these four perspectives of how to play the eighth notes throughout the piece uh the
even eighth notes the slightly late eighth notes the legit two to one Shuffle and then like the
slightly late version of that and then like little iterations of those four too but I don't want to
get too much into the leads with that just kind of use that and by the way this really kind of works
for this piece because it's a ballad so we have that kind of space and time to play
with it this isn't something you can kind of just always do with the eighth notes so
let's keep going here we talked about the different ways we're shuffling the eighth
notes Here you see that sort of indicated in the music notation at the edge you hear you
see here like a really legit even use of the eighth notes down here [Music] on the right
hand our first instance of an upper structure upper structure Triads chordals and pentatonics
are a great way to introduce these great Jazzy colors to your voicings here so what we have is
a c chord over an F major seven highlighting the major seven and the tension nine of this chord
foreign
[Music]
foreign [Music] so yeah there's that upper structure voicing we talked about again on
the downbeat of measure nine at that c chord on top of F major seven in our next measure
we have another upper structure used here this d flat augmented on top of E flat seven again
creating this cool separate sort of entity sound and color and texture to the chord voicing while
highlighting some of the tensions and our next bar we have this Shuffle feel kind of featured
heavily on the right hand but also um this our first instance of a rhythmic variation you can
see in the original this whole time we've had like the original Melody up here on top in case
you haven't noticed so you can kind of compare and contrast we do these with all the arrangements by
the way you can compare and contrast in real time what changes we're making and where we're making
them as it relates to the Harmony and the melody and here you can clearly see how we've shifted
the melody later in the measure and as a result of that had to implement a rhythmic variation
in order to kind of squeeze in the melodic idea into the fewer beats that we created
why don't we just take a quick listen to that so you can hear exactly what it is I'm talking about
foreign
we have this hesitation to that melodic idea
while while swinging those notes pretty pretty uh pretty hard there
that embellishment into the next line would sound like this [Music]
all right so here we are measure 13. there's another rhythmic variation in the melody and our
first instance here of a uh well this is another embellishment but our first instance of a tilde
you play the given note you go up to the next note the key back to the given note down to the next
note in the key and then back to the given note this flat sign above the tilde is just telling you
to flatten that above note that we talked about so listen to that again real quick embellishment
there's that tilde and now we have a melodic variation on on measure 14 right what's going
on here at the end of this measure is just an arpeggio of a flat minor seven
right you know what I'm talking about that a flat minor seven it's just an
arpeggio right but in this context and it being a chromatic sort of
I don't know passing chord or stepping stone between these two guys here make it sound
really cool so at the end of this phrase here we just have a B flat over c as as in the original
Arrangement and then our upper structure C over F major seven one more time go ahead and listen
to the end of this phrase here and then talk about the next one [Music] foreign [Music]
here in measure 18 we have this g flat 7 with a rootless voicing again on the left hand tensions
9 and 13 in that voicing and the sharp 11 is in the melody what's going on at the end of
that measure down here in the left hand is just a means of like filling in this space
there was nothing going on here so we just took the fifth in the root of the chord broke them
apart created a cool little moment on the left hand there there's this glissando in the next
measure combined with this upper structure right we have an A flat add nine on top of the G flat
7 chord that's in the arrangement and kind of breaking the chord very quickly to create that
that role effect that glissando effect into these even eighth notes let's check
out that line one more time real quick and we'll listen to the next one [Music]
uh yeah we're just kind of having these three
uh notes approach our our Melody after that D7 on the third beat there's a D7 flat nine but
you'll notice uh we're using the sharp nine in the voicing and that's because like we've talked
about before the flat 9 and the sharp nine are interchangeable tensions it's such like a a truism
I guess that we didn't even bother reflecting that that re-harm like in the arrangement because it's
so there's those two notes are so interchangeable it almost doesn't matter whether you say flat nine
or sharp knife so just know that you can always swap out a flat nine for a Sharp nine and vice
versa in the next measure we have another use of Grace notes leading us into our Melody note of
B-flat again with this Shuffle feel uh question mark designation so I believe this one was like
a slightly late interpretation of the shuffle Shuffle field let's listen to that real quick
right it's kind of like a lazier Shuffle than uh normal that g is just like a hair after
where you would expect it to be if you were like playing a two to one ratio against a metronome
[Music]
laughs I also want you to notice it's also not in the arrangement the use of Dynamics
here how much terrorist Dynamics were were here were present right these first two
bars in your face epic loud and then the reiteration of the idea in the last two
bars is just backed off on and really quiet and subtle don't forget about the Dynamics
when you're playing your arrangements or interpreting your real sheep foreign
[Music]
beautiful arpeggio at the end with our upper structure but let's go back to measure 29 first
because that's where this phrase sort of begins so here you can kind of see like the arrangement is
abandoning the melody somewhat right and it's it's done so by leaning into uh chord tones a
lot right and that whole sequence we just went through culminating here in this last measure
with this B flat over C which is just kind of a different way the five chord of the key it's
kind of a different way of just notating a five seven sus4 you get all the s and civil 5 7 sus4
when you put the four chord on top of the root of the fifth of the key if that makes any sense
it does to me and in the last measure we have our handy dandy arpeggio to end any sort of song
Especially a ballad while we've been pedaling this whole time by the way you're going to
hear that continue throughout this little outro here again featuring our upper structure Triad
the five upper structure five major Triad over one upper structure highlighting the ninth and
7th of the voicing so let's rewind back to the beginning of the song take a listen to that ending
in the context of the whole song as well as all the other stuff we talked about if you'd like to
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let's go ahead and listen to the arrangement one more time and we'll catch you next time foreign
[Music]
thank you foreign [Music]
foreign [Music]
thanks for hanging out with us today thanks for sticking around through the
whole video YouTube seems to think you're gonna like one of these two
videos here so why don't you hang around and catch some more of our content don't
forget to check us out on mdx.com also catch you next time foreign [Music]