Learning the Maj 7 b5 and Maj 7 #5 ArpeggiosThese are two chord/arpeggio structures that come up pretty often once you stray far from the major scale. They also sound great, so they're well worth committing to memory. Superaugmented Scale IdeasThe Superaugmented Scale is a major scale with every note raised by a semitone except the 1 and 7: 1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 7. It came up a couple of times in the lines in my recent Scriabin-inspired post so I thought it might be worth digging deeper into. Lines from Xenakis's "Mists"I had more fun than anticipated with the results of raiding Scriabin for vocabulary, so I did it again with another piano piece I'm very fond of: Xenakis's "Mists". Some Random Scriabin-Derived LinesHit by a bout of insomnia last night I ended up listening to Scriabin's Piano Sonata No 7 and stealing bits from it to turn into jazz lines. Here are the slightly deranged results. "Star Eyes" Harmonic Major ReharmYes, I'm on a reharmonization theme at the moment. Here's one using the Harmonic Major subs suggested in this post. In each case the original chord is subbed with one or two chords made from the appropriate Harmonic Major mode using the ones in the mode that aren't in the original chord. "Have You Met Miss Jones" ReharmAll the hip cats are playing "Have You Met Miss Jones" because the B section has major third root movement very similar to "Giant Steps". That's fine but the A section is pretty vanilla. Here's my attempt to spice it up with the same kind of movement. "What Is This Thing Called Love" Simple ReharmI was playing this tune in the practice room today and came up with a very simple approach to it that gives the A section a more modal sound. Nothing radical but you might enjoy it. Scale-Covering Seventh PairsI'm revisiting another old blog post (this one this time) to put together some more chord substitution / superimposition ideas. Of course the same concept can be applied to much more exotic scales but these should get you started. Chromatic Tetrachord CoversI recently revisisted this post and decided to smarten up some of the presentation. The idea is to take a common seventh chord and find all the ways to divide up the remaining 8 notes that aren't in it between another common seventh chord and some weird combination of the leftovers. A few ii-V-I subs for the weekendI've been messing about with various chord subs and voicings lately. Here are a few things I've been playing. They're mostly based on Coltrane changes, but they're not exactly that. I've written them out with voicings so even if you don't like the sub ideas themselves there might still be something to steal. |