>> We're going to deal with
our first contact with open position voicing,
and let's first define that term.
Open position would mean a situation where
all the notes of the chord are
not found in the same octave.
We're very accustomed to thinking of
chords as are being built from the root up,
for example, root 3rd,
That's the way we ordinarily visualize chords,
but obviously in music they're not used that
way necessarily and what are the possibilities,
of course, is what we referred to as open position.
So our first contact about open position will be
with what we call the drop-two voicing.
So let's take a look at that together.
What I have done here is sketch out
a two minor 7571 major 7 progression in the key of C,
which of course would be the chord's D minor 7 to
a G dominant 7th to a C major 7.
And what I've done here is first
write them out the basic chords,
meaning there is no tension used on the chord.
So here's your D minor 7 voice lead
to the G dominant 7th and
invoice led to the C major 7
with the roots of the chords in the bass.
And when we add tension notes,
we add the 9th of the chord to the 2 minor 7,
which would be the note E instead of the D,
we're using the note E. And then on the G dominant 7th,
we're using both the 9th and
the 13th and the
on a G dominant 7th and the 13th is
the note E. And so what we're left with on the G7,
then is the 7th of the chord F and a 3rd of the chord B.
And then when we voice lead into the C major 7,
we once again want to use the 9th of the chord,
which is the note D,
and that D then is added to
the C major 7 and replaces the root of the chord,
which is C. The thinking is that,
the root of the chord C will be in the bass anyway.
And the number 9 essentially,
identifies the interval from
the bass note to that note of the chord.
So the interval from the C in the bass up to
the E in the chord is an interval of a 9th hence,
that's why the note is identified as the 9th.
So as we look at
our first contact with open position chords,
what we're going to do is drop
the second voice of the chord.
When it's in close position,
we're going to drop that note one octave,
and we must be careful that we do
drop that one octave only,
it must be one octave.
So the second voice of our D minor 7,
as you see here in both cases,
were the note F. So what we do is we take that note F
and drop it one octave so instead of being this F,
we drop a one octave to this F. And so we have
our first open position chord in which the F is
found in a different octave
than the other three notes of the chord.
Why bother to do this?
Well, because the sound of
an open position chord is generally bigger sounding,
I think it probably generates
more overtones and this note
being positioned where it is,
does generate more overtones
of both and you get a bigger sound.
The G7, the F would be once again
the second voice and so we're taking
that F and we're dropping it one octave,
which would again put it down here, one octave,
lower it to this F,
which I've located in the bass clef.
And then the C major 7,
the second voice was the note E and that
E is been dropped one octave to this E and so forth.
So that we have what we call drop-two voicings,
for the G7, C major 7th.
The sound quality is
bigger than these voicings there are,
these would be a smaller sound.
These open position voicing will be a larger sound.
So lets look at the drop-two
voicing in a variety of keys.