Why I Stopped Using Scales

[Music] most of us were taught how to play chords in relation to some kind of scale so if we have a big G7 altered that's based off the altered scale right if we have like a F7 sharp 11 with a B in there that's based off the lydian dominant that's how a lot of us were taught especially these days it's not how it was was all the time right there was a time where the chord was sort of the foundation and we can move the notes of the chord around in a way that had nothing to do with any particular [Music] scale it frees us up to create things like counter Melodies inner voice movement voice leading just plug in notes from any scale that we might choose can be a good way to get started with this but the older I get the more I realize that this hinging concept that we're working on today a similar concept to what someone like Barry Harris might have taught with his six diminished it really is an an amazing way to get even more voice leading even more inner voice movement now the cool thing is with this concept is that we can start very very simply in fact the most simple way you could start is with simply 1357 it's that easy right that's where we begin just 1 357 in our chords it sounds like [Music] this but very quickly this 1357 starts to move [Music] everything I'm playing here is just 1357 moved around though Isn't that cool that's what we're playing today my name's Adam Anis this is Open studio let's get to [Music] work there it is today we are working on a hinge chord workout this is brought to you by Open studio go to Open studio jazz.com if you want to go on a deeper dive on any of this there is a PDF you're going to want to download that that is in the description that has everything we're working on today uh and if you're liking what you're seeing here on Open studio hit that like And subscribe this is a guided practice session so we will be practicing together get to your piano uh and we and get comfy get settled in because we're going to be working for a minute here I'm going to show you what to play how to play it we're going to be working with our metronome which is uh from drum genius that's a kind of an Al Foster style drum beat from backseat Betty and that's going to be our metronome today and we're about ready to get some work in oh there's our PDF so here's what we're going to be working on today we're going to be working on first basic chord scale Theory so I'm going to show you how you may have learned how to build chords and then we're going to talk about hinging what is it and what's the difference between hinging and using chord scale Theory to build our chords we're going to talk about root 357 plus Bas that's going to be the foundation for everything we're doing we're going to be talking about moving the hinge around this is where it gets real soupy this really gets really incredible and then we're gonna be talking about drop two concepts all right let's first talk a little bit about some chord scale Theory so this is how if you're probably under the age of of 60 you might have learned how to build chords we start with a scale like a C major scale right and then if we skip a note of that scale right we get these seven notes by skipping a note we get these chords and this is where you hear things like a C major 13 it's based off of this right where we have the C major 7 and then these upper extensions the 9 the 11 the 13 right and then you can reorder them so they're in various shapes there's various ways you could play a C major 13 right but we're essentially using this this system of taking a block of the scale uh and then we can do the same thing with like a Dorian which is the second degree right again just skipping the notes you get the basic chord the 1357 and then all of the extensions and then of course you can do things like D Minor 11s D Minor 13s and again we're thinking about well that's from the Dorian right if this were from the aolon the 13 would be different right it' be a B flat so we're changing the notes depending on what scale we play it gets a little more complicated when you get into things like Dominic chords here and if you saw say on a chart if you saw G13 flat 9 sharp 11 when you can get to the point where you get uh knowledgeable enough about this where you see that and you say oh they're thinking a half hole diminished kind of sound right they're thinking this scale is where this is derived from right because you have the flat n you have the natural 13 you have the sharp 11 uh and if it said G7 altered you would know that it's oh it's probably this sound right if it said G7 sharp 11 oh that's probably based off the lyan dominant scill so it can be useful especially when you're improvising melodically to know when you see a you know a chord change a specific chord change says G7 altered I can use the altered scale if it says G7 sharp 11 they probably mean lydi and dominant so this is kind of like the post like Berkeley Mark Lavine style of chord scale theory of linking these things together you know like it's and it can be very handy I'm not I'm not dogging it it's how I learned it's how I still think about a lot of Music Theory but when I started to get a little bit older and a little bit more experienced and I started to to get a more varied uh uh experience of instruction with varied instructors I came across a couple of people that were talking about this differently and those people were Barry Harris and Russell Garcia now you've most likely heard of Barry Harris we talk about him all the time here on Open studio uh we have the great Chris Parks who was a protege of berries here teaching in Open studio I love Barry's Concepts I participated in a few of those master classes and had a amazing time learning from this incredible musician and in I will say Musical music intellectual one of the greatest of his generation uh for for compiling the ideas of bbop into a way to to talk about it it was incredible Russell Garcia is of that same generation but he's more of a of an arranger and an orchestrator and he wrote this incredible book that I just somehow stumbled upon called the professional arranger composer and I was reading through this book it's like a time capsule it's like how to arrange for a dance band in the mid 20th century but I started to notice we were getting a lot of the same places that you would get with Barry Harris's six diminished but he wasn't calling it The Sixth diminished or with Barry Harris's six chords and borrowing and the six from the fifth there was a lot of this happening in Russell Garcia's book but he was getting to it from kind of a different place getting to the same results from a different pathway and I thought this is fascinating also Russell Garcia not talking about well here's the scale that this chord goes to much like Barry Harris starting with the chord itself and then we start borrowing away uh from that chord and so I started teaching this here at Open Studio Pro and one of our students said well we can call this hinging because we're starting with a baseline cord and we're hinging so that's when things started to change for me and that's why I don't really think about chords from scales anymore I think about it from this basis here is the hinge so if we look at just a regular C major 7 chord right we have the root the three the five and the Seven now instead of thinking well I have all the notes of the C ionian mode available I'm just going to think about each of these tones as available to move around and when I move say the root up to the two here I'm not thinking well now this is a C major 9 I'm thinking this is still root 357 but that root is now represented in the D like that c is now represented in the D this is a is like a revolutionary way of thinking if you've only thought about this in terms of like my scale choices because it does a couple of things a it keeps the voice leading intact you're dealing with four voices always and it keeps the Integrity of root 357 so these important notes that make up the like solid foundation of the chord when we start hinging them they're still attached to their foundation and we can start creating things like gravity to these important notes this is where you hear things from from arrangers and pianists right you can't notate all of those in a scale with a chord change right that's just uh that was just a 251 where we're hinging the important bits chromatically in in uh scale motion and we create these beautiful sounds if you ever heard anything like this like right that's what scale would that G7 be where you have like a natural 13 and a flat 13 there's really nothing right you'd have to change the chord with every you have to change the scale with every chord it doesn't make sense when you're trying to write just some great voice leader so we are going to work on this today we've kind of developed at Open Studio Pro various systems for working on This Isn't that cool is just a great way to think about it and we'll go deeper into that as we get to it let's do a little warmup though this is a guided practice session as I mentioned so what we will be practicing and I like to spend the first couple minutes just warming it up uh and actually before we even touch the keyboard I want to warm up our ears and let's take about 10s seconds take a big deep breath and just listen to whatever is in your AAL space in this moment take a big deep breath for me I love doing this because sometimes practicing can be very intellectual and this is going to be an intellectual practice for sure as we're talking about numbers and things but it always needs to be connected to what we're hearing someone in the comments from the last GPS I did where I did this sort of 10 seconds of Silence said oh we're listening to traffic for 10 seconds yeah if that's what's there we need to hear everything that's going on in our space be accepting of everything that's part of the sound that we're a part of and then we can really engage with it if we just are blocking things out it's not part of what we're doing and we're we're kind of ignoring some very important things that are here with us so I love starting the practice like that we've got our metrome we've got Al Foster beat here on back seat Betty let's do uh some 16th notes we're going to start at C2 and C3 we're just going to do a chromatic scale up and down four octaves with 16 so kind of a slow tempo let's do it one 2 3 [Music] again turn those ears on for [Music] this let's do it again we're just getting in contact with the instrument we're just warming up a little bit one two da da da [Music] all right Shake It Out take another big deep breath now we're going to get started here with the meat of our workout with the hinge workout itself here is the chord progression we're going to be working with this is a 1 4 3 6 2 5 1 and we got a little five going back that's what we're going to work on it's a very common chord progression you might see in any kind of number of style of songs specifically Jazz standards or Great American song book standards this is the basis of our of our hinging exercise notice that all of the chords in the right hand are otk 357 and then notice at the left hand I have marked base so one of the features of this is that the chord Ro 357 and the base are separate entities so the base is going to be usually the root but it doesn't have to be it could be the third or the fifth or the seventh but it's not a part of the harmony it's its own thing it's the base the chord the fourn note chord voicing is rooot 357 it does not include the base which is a separate thing it's an advantage that piano players have we can put that Bas somewhere else it's a way to think about the four note Harmony that's a little bit different You've Got Your Bass movement and you've got your your voicing movement uh but you'll you'll see where this can kind of pay off here in just a little bit let's look at this very basic thing this is going to sound the worst out of all of them because it's just rot 357 it's going to sound fine but it's going to be a little vanilla so let's just play this a couple times just to get it in our ears this is the foundation all of these voicings our root3 57 our C major 7 < TK 357 and we got the base in the left hand our F dominant 7 right < tk35 and then that dominant 7 which is a minor 7 right our E minor 7 right root 357 Got That Base there our A7 another dominant 7 root 357 just stacked our D Minor 7 otk 357 so just different inversions of root3 57 G7 Runk 357 C major 7 root3 57 and then 357 so different inversions of our root 357 and then our base in the left hand let's do it 2 3 [Music] 4 feel free to add Rhythm to anything we're doing today or some chromaticism in the Basse that's what's about great about having that base on its own really make some music out of this use your ears this is not bad you [Music] know again the the dominant seven voicing specifically are a little vanilla little plain everything else is kind of nice do one more time just to get this in our [Music] ears this isn't that great all right the beat is a little loud so I'm going to turn down one notch uh so that's kind of where we're starting now the first thing that we're going to do is to practice hinging the root so if you see here our first example right at the upper left here we've got our C major 7 and that c is the root and we're going to hinge it up to D now again this D is the we're representing the root with the D so at any time we can kind of hinge back and forth on this if we were to do like the G7 right this root of G we can hinge up in a bunch of different ways that sound great and you hear all the time right the flat nine the natural nine the sharp nine this is why you might hear something in an arrangement by someone like Russell Garcia of like right this what scale is that from you know the chromatic scale it's like anything is available we're using our ears and we're using chromaticism as gravity so let's play our our Top Line there our second example going through our changes it's the exact same chord changes and the exact same voicing but we're going to hinge each of the roots up to the nine in this specific case it doesn't always have to be the nine a whole step up but we're going to do it here because it sounds pretty good let's try it three and and notice I didn't change the chord symbol on any of these flat nine on some of the dominant seven chords right sounds really good you could do that on the major chords too and the minor chords but it's not going to sound as as [Music] good but notice right we're still thinking about these things as attached to the root [Music] isn't that [Music] awesome let's do it one more time I didn't change the chord symbol because I want you to realize that even if you see like a D Minor 7 you can hinge that route up to the nine and it's okay last [Music] time so good okay so this is just the start like using these as a way to create voicing so now we do have a beautiful C major 9 voicing here just by moving one note up by hinging that note and we're going to see other versions of this where we can create great sounding voicings by hinging any of the other notes that we want from that root 357 as long as root 357 is represented in whatever we move around we're good to go and what we're about to see is that if it's represented we can now create things like inner voice movement like voice leading uh so easily we're going to start to get some superar sounds let's look at the number three down here move the hinge so right from the get right we're here on our C major 9 where we've hinged up to the D let's move it back same thing on this F7 let's move it back right to the root to create some movement on that E minor let's start with the root the E and move it up to the nine listen what happens here like we're creating these Melodies inside of our chords just by moving around just the roots of them in the harmony so what I just did There Was You know I have our E minor 7 the root moves up to the nine and then on our A7 right the top note is a g so you get this like movement and then on the A7 we have the 9 flat nine and that resolves down to the fifth of the D this is where great voice leading can happen let's try playing this so you can hear how this sounds this sounds amazing two 3 and [Music] do it [Music] again come on I mean we are two steps away from being route 357 is that amazing I love this so much I still get so excited about this because after years of like just trying to build chords in a block right in this vertical fashion having this horizontal way to build chords is like so [Music] liberating ah you know what I mean that is so beautiful and joyful that's we are literally two steps away from [Music] being it's incredible and this is just the beginning because we can start there with moving the root but we can also hinge the third so here on this C major 7 at this third you can go down to D you could also go down to to D sharp or E flat you can go up to F you could also go up to F sharp if you wanted to but we're just noticing that we can move this e anywhere we want so here on our hinge the thir at our first chord we're going to hinge down that e to the to the D now there's no third in that chord right we've moved it but the third is represented by the D on our F7 we're going to move up to that sharp 11 we could have moved up to the B flat we're moving up to the B right it's really our choice we can move these anywhere I'm picking voicings that I think sound good on our D Minor 7 we're going to move up to the 11 on our D our G7 now that's like a G7 sus again I'm not changing the chord symbols because I want you to know you can do this on your own to create great sounding movement and great sounding voicing our C major is now a C major 7 sus 4 right same thing G7 sus let's play it through this is going to be a little jarring because the thirds are usually what ground us to the harmony but it's all going to pay off when we start moving these around let's just hear how it sounds as big blocks though one 2 three and it's great way to get some good ideas to start hinging the root 3 57s around in various [Music] ways try that again try playing the right [Music] note [Music] sorry I don't what's going on here let try again there we [Music] go one more time see if we can hear [Music] it these are beautiful especially those dominant chords but even that major chord what a great way to play a major chord to sus that for if you had the melody that was on the fifth or the melody that was on the on the route you could of course do this very easily a little bit more tricky but certainly like in the realm is if the melody is on the third to put that sus in there so you have the third and the sus four in there especially if you're going somewhere where you can resolve it so okay this is fine but let's hear how it sounds when we start moving these around so now we're going to move the third around and actually we're going to move both the third and the root what we did before we were moving the root now we can move two notes the root and the third and let's hear how that might sound if we have our C major right so here's the third and the RO moved up hinged up and then we resolve it same thing here hinged up on the F7 hinged up here hinged up that flat nine down to the third like this is like a A7 sus to the flat nine the root and the third here hinged up on the D Minor 7 this is a great little exercise so here we're just hinging our root and our third almost always up and then resolving it down let's try it three [Music] and this is where it's going to start sounding very similar to something that Barry Harris might teach right we have a lot of borrowing from a six diminished concept but it's coming at it from a completely different way which I love so much I mean this alone is so [Music] beautiful let's do one more time here one more [Music] time [Music] so I mean when I say it's like we're starting to get into Barry Harris territory if we look at our first chord right in our right hand d f g and B what is that that's a G7 chord right when we hinge our roote and our third up that's like a the G7 shape it's like a borrowing that fifth it's a six diminish thing that's happening here now right but we're coming at it from a little bit different place uh and now that we have this going you know that's a lot of movement to happen in one hand what if we were to do this in drop two so all we're going to do is we're going to take the second note from the top of our right hand we're going to drop it down an octave we're going to put it in our left hand so now we have three notes in our right two notes in our left and one of those voices has moved down an octave the one that's on every single chord the one that's the second note from the top top so this is the same movement but drop two right so in our first chord that g gets down in our second chord that movement the F7 the G the F goes down I'm also going to move some of the base notes down in octave to give ourselves some room so there are some ninths here to stretch no tens but some nines that you might have to reach for let's try playing this whole thing in drop two listen to this one 2 three and [Music] how great is that these spread voicings can be very handy especially if we're accompanying someone if we're uh putting some voicing under a Melody you can think of what we have here on the top note as a melody [Music] one more [Music] time so the exact same chord voicings the same progression as moving the thirds and The Roots but just in drop two okay we have one more that I want to do we're not going to do the seventh because there someone in the chat here says hinging the seventh is kind of awkward you can do it especially on minor chords but on all the others it's a little bit awkward so we're going to avoid that today and just work on the root the third and the fifth so the fifth is one of the most most I think expressive notes in a chord that you can hinge around it's kind of the most boring note on its own as the fifth there are there whole you know schools about just leaving the fifth out of chords but when you hinge it you don't want to leave it out because it's going to give you some really really rich textures again in traditional chord scale Theory things like the 13 the flat 13 the sharp five the sharp 11 these are all from the fifth right we're just kind of moving around the fifth so here in our C major right that fifth is G it could be an F sharp it could be a G sharp and again now we know we can also it could be all of them as we move it through on the G7 little G9 voicing I have here right with the 7eventh 9 third and the fifth right that C sharp is the sharp 11 or the flat five got that flat 13 natural 13 so many the that that change that I did in the beginning that's the 13 flat 13 but again we're not thinking about that in the block sense we're thinking about that's the fifth hinged right the fifth just moving around chromatically that's how Russell Garcia would think about it that's likely how Barry Harris would think about it is borrowing right from the major of a of a six diminished so let's hear how this would sound if we hinge some fifths up our C major back to our four notes on our right our C major right that five we're going to hinge up to the to the six right our F7 we're going to hinge down to the sharp 11 our E minor we're going to hinge down to the 11 our A7 I love this voicing going to hinge up to that F just a half step D Minor 7 hinge down our G7 going to hinge the fifth down to the sharp 11 again we can have we can do whatever we want our C major we're going to hinge up to that a and our G7 this little cluster thing here let's he on these sounds two three [Music] and [Music] these are great but let's start moving around because this is where it gets really kind of amazing right so if we are moving the hinges now if we can move the root the third and the fifth around what happens here I'm actually going to stop this cuz I want you to just look at the first chord so here we have the the first chord is d f a flat and B right again that's all everything hinged right the root is hinged up to the D the E the third is hinged up to the fourth the F the fifth is hinged up to the a flat a half step and that that seventh is the same but everything else is hinged up now again Barry Harris would say well that's the diminished of the six diminished but you know the point is is Russell Garcia say well maybe you could do the a a flat to the G you know what I mean like there's there's kind of infinite possibilities when you can consider that you can move around chromatically and Barry would talk about borrowing in that sense as well but it's just interesting to get to this same place so now the c major it starts as a completely different chord our F7 we're going to hinge that fifth up to the D and back down check out our E minor 7 here right that fifth is hinged up to the C creating a a moo chord sound this is where it just gets absolutely stunningly beautiful now I just want you to notice too on all of these root 357 is represented right this is root 357 right hinged up this is root 357 hinged up up this is root 35 sorry root 357 hinged up this isun 357 literally hinged up but this is this is uh root 357 hinged up this is root 3 57 roote 357 you know what I mean everything is repres it's like a Sudoku puzzle like something has to have a square like something has to be a part of it let's play this number seven here two 3 right play with [Music] me how great is that how great is that this is like the beginnings of really true Mastery of inner voice [Music] movement when you get good at this and you can do this around a Melody imagine accompanying a vocalist or a horn player and they're doing they're singing like a a g there and you're able to put these underneath them it's just a beautiful beautiful way to [Music] accompany one more time just cuz it's so damn [Music] beautiful okay now let's do the same thing we're going to go right into it the exact same chord progression in drop two listen to the the subtle difference now we have these big wide spread voicings Let's Hear It 2 3 [Music] and there we [Music] go two more times with me two more times with me you got it [Music] [Music] that is it for us today there it is thank you to the great Barry Harris great Russell Garcia for being amazing communicators of these sounds that we love so much isn't that incredible uh the the different ways to get to the same place the different ways to think about it you know again there's nothing wrong with traditional traditional with chord scale Theory as it's been taught for the last 50 or 60 years or so it can get you into some really cool areas some really amazing places but also like learning how to build chords and build Harmony that isn't reflective of some kind of like scale that you must adhere to but rather uh to the to the you have to adhere to the to the weight of the harmony itself of the voices as if you're writing for a choir as if you're writing for a string quartet these kinds of exercises these ways of thinking about it can just liberate us from the things that we've just been very uh very rigid on and for me it's it's enlightening so thank you everybody for the work today I will be back here live in two weeks and yeah thanks everyone cheers peace

Channel: Open Studio

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Id: nUkBkqFEzo4

Length: 38min 51sec (2331 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024