The Secret To Learning More Complex Chords

hi everybody and welcome to Amy Nolte music today's video will be kind of short because I just got a quick concept that I want to impress upon you and I don't think it'll take that long to tell you the truth I remember the first time that I became aware of this concept and it was in college and I was watching somebody else sight read something and there were all these complicated chords all these altered dominant chords and and the kid that I was watching played the piano was just nailing them like super fast like rootless voicings two-handed beautiful and I had to say to him like how are you getting these voicing so quickly it always takes me a second to figure out how to voice them when I say voice them I mean which order to put the notes in you know and he was like oh well he's like you know you see C7 with a sharp nine and you just play the third and seven with an E flat Triad over the top boom and he's like if you see a C13 with a sharp 11 it's just same thing third and seven but you gotta D Triad on top and he showed me like six or seven different voicings right there all using thirds and sevens with the left hand and Triads with the right hand and that's the way he thought about chords I kind of wished that somebody had taught me that way I don't know in hindsight if I wish that but at the time I did because man he was nailing those chords a lot faster than I was and somehow he had memorized them a lot better than I had so I'd like to take you over to the piano you can learn to play like Jeremy Matthews I also like Bill Evans and uh Keith Jarrett and many many other piano players who have utilized upper structures in their playing for decades and decades let's do it foreign structures right off the bat using the tune beautiful love I want to teach you about what these are upper structures come from Triads that you can make out of note that are above the seven so if we're talking about C7 we get these extensions right we have the nine we've got 11 or sharp 11 and 13. we also have flat nine sharp nine flat 5 sharp five or you can call you can call it sharp 11 or flat 13 depending on how it's spelled but we have all of these possibilities with notes that are Beyond these four notes and like I said you can see the name of a chord bam maybe it's C13 flat 9 and if you know this trick you know that the flat 9 is here the 13 is there and you can play this chord foreign by playing basically C7 on the bottom in a major on the top you see how that happens so we've got the basic structure of C7 but we have flat 9 3 and 13. now you might ask me why we're doubling the three sometimes in these upper structure Triads we are going to double one of the notes that we've got down here and it's just kind of the nature of the beast but doubling tends not to be a problem so much when you've got a Triad going on any kind of Triad our ears loves we like we just love Triads and so anytime you hear one of these beautiful extensions [Music] foreign even though they might have some crazy name associated with them as long as we're talking about Triads on the top our ears are going to love them they're gonna like make room for them in the Harmony and also as long as we resolve them in a pleasing way or a way that is close to where we've come from and where where we're going all right so I want to tell you how I think about this the easiest way I think for me to get it across is to take a C7 that's our basic framework of C7 right like a shell voicing we have the third which makes it dominant this the flat seven that makes it dominant also change either one of these and we've got some different kind of chords so they're the most important notes we've got root third and seven and later on if we've got a bass player we can drop that root and only play Third and seven and we can play three or seven in either inversion we can kind of explore together Triads that will work over this three and seven or this tritone to be some kind of C7 of course this one will work but it's really really boring now let's just go up a half step and see if it would work [Music] any time that we have an F in in one of these trials that we're making it's going to be no bueno because if we've got an F all of a sudden it's not a dominant seventh chord anymore it would be some kind of a sus chord plus we have this horrible interval of a minor knife which is just really hard to work with almost all the time so d flat is not an option those two notes would have been cool right it's the flat nine and it's the sharp five but the f is no good now how about if instead we decided to do a Minor triad d flat minor yeah that's really hip and it works but right now we're talking about major Triads okay so let's try the next one up instead of d flat which we have just seen does not work let's try d oh it sounds great doesn't it and I think you've already seen me play it today we've got nine Sharp 11. 13. so this is that chord I was telling you about C13 with a sharp 11. it's awesome all right so so far I mean we've got this boring one we've got this very interesting one let's raise this and see what happens this might look problematic for you because it looks like it's the minor third but when it happens up here above the seventh instead of thinking about it like a third we can think about it like a nine so it's the sharp nine and it's it's a great sound I mean it's the it's the Hendrix chord you you hear it a lot in popular music as well as in jazz it's a crunchy chord and a really cool chord now if we have this G that's the five which is fine and then we're doubling we've got the flat seven again so this is the most exciting part of this upper structure but it works great all right now let's try an E major chord anytime we're gonna see a b note in all of these choices we're trying out it's going to be a problem because this would make it a major seven chord we don't want to mess with three and seven in that way like we don't want to mess with this note we don't want to mess with this note actually those happen to be another tritone don't they check it out we also get that terrible minor knife interval so any chord that ends up having an F or a B in it is one that we don't want to use we just should know it automatically so we've got C we've got D we've got E flat and we do not have e we can't have F right it's got an F let's try F sharp how we're getting a little bit far spaced here so I might if I was going to use that one I'd probably play it in this inversion F sharp Triad major Triad how about flat nine flat five and then that minor seventh or dominant seventh it's a great sound so anytime you've got C7 flat five flat nine you can think all right what is you know a tritone away from C it's F sharp there you go all right next one g no good because it's got a B in it how about a flat let's check it let's let's put it in another inversion because again we want to space this sound sound like a stack dude my chords are stacked all right sharp nine sharp five and root great sounding chord let's check out what happens if we try a major doubling that three we've got the 13 in there which is really cool we've got the flat nine that one works as well all right and how about B flat uh no good because we've got an F in there how about B no good because we've got a B in there so all of a sudden we have many options for Triads to play over that tritone or three in dominant seven of C7 all right let's check it out looking at it like this I've got my little whiteboard I have crossed off every Triad that we've just said won't work and let's just start to name the ones that do work so C try out over that tritone in the on the bottom is just C7 if we have D like I said we're going to call this D13 sharp 11. E flat will work right it's C7 with a sharp nine F sharp will work we've got C7 with a flat nine and also a flat five so we always want to write the lower number first there we go a flat I'm gonna have C7 with the notes a flat c and e flat so that is sharp five and sharp nine very cool a a is the 13 right and then that third note in the a Triad is a C sharp or the flat nine I know it might be a lot to wrap your head around um all right so since this is a a and that's the the 13th we've got C13 with a flat nine and now we've got how many chords we've got one two three four five super cool chords that we can make using Triads it's over that third and seven now another thing to consider is that we could take minor Triads and see what else we can come up with so let's do that really quickly Here We Go Again C minor what does that give us gives us a sharp nine chord not bad all right so we've got that one now let's try d flat minor hey this one seems like it'll work it doesn't have that pesky f in it right so we've got flat nine and sharp five now that's a combination that we didn't have above very cool all right so by using d flat minor we can get flat nine sharp five now if we do D Minor no good because we've got an F how about E flat minor this would give us the sharp nine and the flat five which is also a combination we didn't get before so E flat minor gives us flat five sharp nine E minor would give us a B natural that's no good F minor would give us the F how about F sharp minor that would give us flat 5 13 and flat nine very cool we'd probably put it here I love that one that gives us C13 with a flat five and a flat nine if you look above we already had this one but without the a in it right F sharp gave us C7 with a flat five and a flat nine but not with the 13. G minor that works out just fine it's it's also kind of boring but it's just a C9 a flat minor doesn't work because it has that major seven of C in it um a minor that works fine C13 B flat minor has an F in it so no good B minor has a b in it so no good so look at that by looking for minor Triads as upper structures we've come up with one two three four five six more iterations of C7 that's crazy right all of a sudden we've got 11 really cool chords that we can build simply by trying out Triads so like I said my friend Jeremy he had them all memorized and he could just play them at the drop of a hat I don't know if my brain would have worked better this way had I been taught this way I kind of wasn't taught this way I was kind of self-taught so if I saw C13 I was gonna play it like this and if I saw a C13 with a flat 9 I would just flat the nine or sharp the nine right or flat the five or sharp the five just keeping my third and seven and thinking about them one at a time like that and it's a I mean it's a Vibe it's a sound and and my playing has that sound in it and so do a lot of other jazz piano players but it doesn't mean you have to learn one or the other I've got both now I've I have learned to to think about all of these kinds of voicings in my own playing and I love to use these upper structures I hope that you will too thanks for hanging out learning about upper structures with me I hope it helps your playing don't forget to subscribe and follow me over on Instagram too I'm uploading to Instagram just about every day now and lots of just fun little short lessons I'll see you next time on Amy Nolte music

Channel: Aimee Nolte Music

Views: 84,643

Keywords: piano, amy, nolty, jazz, theory, harmony, chords

Id: S21TYlzbxYc

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023