Chords

Early twentieth century harmony was characterised by (among other things) the whole-tone scale. Here I consider one idea, from Alexander Scriabin's Poem of Ecstacy, involving some chords that will be familiar to jazz musicians but in a somewhat different context, and of course expanding the idea to see where it takes us.

I haven't played much with Sucharitra but today I worked out a few basic harmonizations -- in thirds, fourths and seconds, basically -- and I liked the sounds.

I've always enjoyed Messiaen's chords without really knowing what's going on with them, so today I looked at an article about them and cooked up some chords of my own inspired by it.

OK it's not really a "trick" but I've been using this a lot lately so I thought it was worth a note. The idea is that on a C minor you can pivot to Eb minor, and in general substituting "the minor up the minor third" sounds nice and unexpected.

I've been revisiting some Derek Bailey recordings lately and realised I never really worked on one of his most distinctive sounds: combining normal fretted notes with natural harmonics. These fascinating effects can be harsh, percussive or shimmeringly beautiful, and the technique can be applied outside Bailey's own very idiosyncratic style.

These 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.

Yes, 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.

All 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.

I 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.

I'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.