Chords

I'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.

Here's something I picked up from Yusef Lateef's Repository: stacking chords where each voice is from a different scale. Interesting results -- check it out.

I've been working on the Wayne Shorter tune "Nefertiti" lately, and have a few ideas for scale superimpositions that sound quite interesting. What I'm presenting here isn't somethng finished; consider it ephemera from the woodshed. I find this quite a useful way to practice a tune with tricky harmony and you might, too.

This is a quick note on a John Stowell video, giving a summary of the idea he describes and then extending it a bit. It's pretty much the same general approach I advocate in my Arpeggio and Scale Resources. Commenters on the video express some confusion about the presentation so I thought it might be helpful to boil it down to a summary and then couldn't resist adding my own twist.

A while ago I posted some general information about harmonizing chords in fourths. In this post I want to follow up on that, focusing on melodic minor modes in fourths as a way to create surprising voicings and give your chords some harmonic motion.

In a previous post we made a quick survey of the possible trichords according to Forte's classification. Trichord 3-3 (C-Db-E) and 3-3I (C-D#-E) is, I claim, the most interesting of all. This is because it's the only one that isn't found in the major scale except (a) the cluster of two semitones and (b) the augmented triad.

Following up on a previous post grappling with stacks of semitones, here's a quick set of related fingerings. The first two are stacks of sevenths, then we do stacks of ninths, and finally a "bonus" set made by putting a second on top of a ninth.

This post collects up some chords I've found by deliberately adding "wrong" (i.e. unexpected) extensions to common seventh chords. The results are often very strange and beautiful, and are sometimes heard in jazz settings such as big band arrangements where you can get away with very crunchy harmonies.

In my last post I talked about some ideas for using Add 11 chords, and this time I thought it'd be fun to attack another under-appreciated added note: the flat 13.

Adding the natural 11 to a major triad is considered rather outré in the jazz world; usually a #11 is expected and 11 is considered an "avoid note". On the basis that one player's bum note is another's hip new sound, that makes these chords worth a look.