as a piano player you've surely come across chord symbols in jazz standard lead sheets
these chords are embedded with huge amounts of information and trying to interpret the
actual meaning of these chords could sometimes be a little overwhelming
the main objective of this course is to give you the most effective set of voicings for almost
every single chord that you're gonna find in any jazz standard lead sheet every voicing in this
course is a rootless four note voicing in closed position which you can play with only one hand
what are rootless voicings well a rootless voicing as the name implies is a voicing in which the root
of the chord is not present for example a c major seven rootless voicing could just be the notes e
g and b there's going to be one exception in this course the minor 7 flat 5 chord which will always
include the root and no tensions this chord sounds best when the entire chord is played why
are rootless voicings useful as a piano player you are in charge of providing the harmony or
even when playing alone rootless voicings allow you to play the essence of a chord while giving
the bass player the freedom to create interesting bass lines without clashing with your notes
if you're playing alone you can provide the bass line on your left hand and use rootless voicings
on your right hand also when played on the left hand rootless voicings give you the ability to
improvise on your right hand and still provide the harmonic progression or create even more
interesting chords by adding upper structures and or short phrases on your right hand while copying
what are closed voicings in a closed voicing notes appear in order without gaps and are usually
contained within the octave which makes them easy to play with one hand for example a c major 7 is c
e g and b if we play the notes in that order or any inversions such as e g b c or g b c
e without leaving any gaps the voicing is said to be closed and it will fit within one octave
on the other hand if we play c g e and b then the voicing will expand across two octaves these types
of voicings are called open and both hands are needed to play them so why four note voicings
there are many reasons why you should learn and play four note voicings although two note
and three note voicings are also effective four note voicings provide a well-rounded
interesting coherent harmonic context they're not too ambiguous while still allowing the bass
line to flow nicely even when the bass player introduces inversions or reharmonizations also
four note voicings are very easy to understand and play since as we're going to see later they're
just an evolution of a simple seventh chord what are the prerequisites the only thing you need to
know to start is four seventh chords shown here using c as the root c major seven c minor seven
c seven and c minor seven flat five building four note rootless voicings the concept that we're
going to use in this course is actually quite simple you take a seventh chord and substitute
the root with the ninth and in the case of dominant chords you'll also substitute the fifth
with the 13th that's it when we use substitutions we're going to consider the chord scale that best
fits the chord's function this is a vast topic and we're not going to look at chord chord
scale pairings in detail but just know that the different substitutions are not random they have
a reason behind them to make it easy we're just going to use two progressions a 2 5 1 to a major
target and or a 2 5 1 to a minor target in the key of c major 2 5 1 is just d minor seven g seven
and c major seven for d minor seven substitute the root d with the ninth e
for g7 substitute the root g with the ninth a and also the fifth d with the thirteenth
e for c major seven just substitute the root c with the ninth
d and in the key of a minor two five one is b minor seven flat five e seven and a minor six
for b minor seven flat five we're not going to substitute any nodes as we mentioned earlier for
e7 substitute the root e with the sharp ninth f double sharp also known as g and the fifth with
the flat 13th b with c and for minor targets we substitute the root a with the ninth b it's worth
noting that in this course we're not gonna study the minor six and minor major seven variations of
minor chords by reducing these two variants we're gonna drastically reduce the amount of voicings
and possibilities thus making our goals that much more achievable these are all the voicings that
you're going to need if you've never played these types of voicings before you will find
some of them to sound odd or even incorrect you're going to need to get used to the sound of rootless
voicings as you continue to utilize these voicings your brain will learn how to provide context
we're also going to explore later on how some inversions of these voicings are more applicable
than others next we're going to look at which inversions work best all of them
are worth knowing but in this course we're only going to concentrate on the most effective ones
you