There are a few voicings jazz piano players know and use all
the time. These are somewhat related to the quartal voicings that we showed you
on our last video (on quartal voicings). If I play these on "When I Fall In Love"...
...you can hear how cool that sounds, and that's because I'm using these standard Jazz voicings.
Today, I'm going to show you a specific method to, not only practice these voicings, but to also come
up with all kinds of voicings like these. This method is based on using a pentatonic scale to
build voicings. We're actually planning on creating a nice series of videos to show you the method ,
applied to different pentatonic scales, and ways to practice these voicings, so that you can get this
sound on your playing, and experiment on your own by expanding on it. By the way, stay until the end
of the video, where I'll show you how to get a PDF to practice today's concept. Let's say we
start with the minor pentatonic scale. Let's start by playing the minor pentatonic scale using skips
This is the C minor pentatonic by skips. So instead of playing C Eb F G Bb, play
C F Bb Eb and G. See? we're skipping every other note and we get that chordal voicing that
I showed you on our last video, a quartal voicing, 2 notes on the left hand, and 3 notes on the
right. So, when you look at it that way, it can also be seen as a pentatonic voicing. If I do the same
thing, but now starting on the second note of the scale we get: Eb G C F and Bb. Now it's not
a quartal voicing anymore. Yes, it has a quartal inside, but the building block is not a quartal,
even though it's using the same pentatonic scale, and the same principle to create it.
Of cours,e these are all inversions of each other. And that's actually another perspective
that you can use to find them. Let's keep doing that until you get back to the C
on the bottom. These are all cool sounding voicings, but they all come from the same
structure: the minor pentatonic. Don't worry yet about where to use these voicings. I'll
show you that later. For now, just try to play these voicings up and down like this...
Pretty cool, right? And you can use these voicings
to harmonize melody-notes, like I was doing in "When I Fall In Love"...
So yeah, which pentatonic scale do you use over each chord? Okay, some are pretty obvious.
Like on an Ebmaj7, I can use the C minor pentatonic, which is basically an Eb69.
Or, on Fm7, we can use the F minor pentatonic. But, what am I playing here, on this C7?
This is not a voicing from any minor pentatonic. How do I know that? Because
there aren't any tritones in the minor pentatonic. But there's a tritone here...
So, what is this? This is a transformation of the minor pentatonic. I call it the minor pentatonic b1,
because I'm just thinking of an F minor pentatonic and flattening the F to an E
So, if we use the same method to build voicings out of this minor pentatonic b1, we get this...
By the way, I don't really like this voicing here. And it's probably because of where the
b9 sits in the voicing. I can't imagine this voicing working ever, but hey, I'll let
you decide that! Anyway, the cool thing about this scale, is that it offers the tritone, which isn't
present in the minor pentatonic. So it's a great way to build voicings for dominant
chords. For this video, I just wanted to mention how we can transform the pentatonic into other
pentatonics to get all those spicy standard jazz piano voicings, and many more, by using the same
principle. In this video, Let's concentrate on learning the minor pentatonic voicings. We'll
look at other pentatonic voicings on the next video. So don't forget to subscribe and hit the
notification bell, so that you don't miss out on those. Now, you can still come up with really nice
voicings for dominant chords using the minor pentatonic. You just need to know which minor
pentatonic to use over the dominant chord, like the one I played on the Bb7 chord.
Here, I'm just using the C# minor pentatonic. This works because when you put all the notes
against the Bb7, you get C# (the #9), E (the #11), and F# (the b13, or
#5). Ab is the b7, and B is the b9. Basically, we've turned Bb7 into
a Bb7 altered, which is always allowed on dominant chords, and it sounds amazing...
So here's how we're going to practice. And we're going to structure this in a
way so that you can learn these voicings really fast, and start
using them right away. Step 1: play the minor pentatonic on both hands...
then, on the right hand play the same modern pentatonic, but starting on the
fifth. This is going to help you big time, because your ears will
learn what the top note should sound like, when you build these voicings...
and finally, play each voicing on every degree of the scale...
play slowly, and notice how you're playing all perfect fourths on your
left hand ,except for the voicing starting on the second note, which is a major third.
Now take a further spin through all keys chromatically...
Step 2. Play the first voicing in all keys, and notice all of the intervals that you're playing:
all perfect fourths, except the top interval is a major third, and then, the chord on your right hand,
is a major triad in second inversion. And don't think of these as chords, they're just voicings
for now. Don't try to put a name to them, just learn the shapes...
Step 3. Play the voicing starting on the second note. Now the third is at the bottom...
Step 4. start on the third note. The third is in your right hand
(here), and now you're playing a minor triad in first inversion on your right hand.
Step 5. Start on the fourth note. There are no thirds, it's a pure
quartal voicing. It's just made out of perfect fourths...
Step 6. Start on the fifth note. The third is the gap between your hands
now, and the right hand is playing a perfect quartal yet again
Step 7. By the way, this should be your daily challenge, once
you've mastered steps one through six. Use a 12-tone row, which is nothing more than all
12 notes in random order without repeated notes. Choose any of the five voicings. Use
every note in the row as your bottom note, and play the same voicing from note to note.
Practice with really slow tempos at first, and then increase the tempo gradually over time.
See how far you can take it without making any mistakes. It's a great practice routine!
I hope you enjoyed the lesson. Start practicing, because on the next videos, we'll take a look at
these voicings as upper structure petatnoics. Thanks for watching. As always our exclusive
members have access to the PDF featured in today's videos, along with all sorts
of other stuff. If you'd like to become a member, click on the JOIN button, and
don't forget to check out our website mDecks.com, for all sorts of other awesome music related
stuff. YouTube seems to think you're gonna like one of these two videos here so do us
a favor, hang around and check one of those out. We'll catch you next time. Thanks for watching!