Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Question about voicings

I ma chiefly a sax player but have learnt a bit of keys./ On sax only one note at a time of course.
Now I do know my chords and scales etc and I have managed to get my fingers going on the blues in any key and improvise.
I realise though that all my playing is triadic with rh blues scales too.

I need to find a methodical way to understand how to voice chords.

What I already know is:

3rds and 7th are key to voicing a chord
Bass player usualy provides the root in a band;
a chord can be voiced 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15
from this a voicing can be taken stasrting from any chord tone.


bUT HOW DOES ONE GET TO TTHE STAGE WHEN ONE PLAYS DIFFERENT VOICINGS IN CONTEXT?

hey zerozero,

check out the jazz study group: autumn leaves thread here in the adult beginners forum. i think a lot of what you are asking is addressed there.

ZeroZero - If you are interested in playing solo piano, and enjoy playing standards, check out sudnow.com


Barb

You may also want to pick up a book called Jazz Keyboard Harmony by Phil DeGreg:

Jazz Keyboard Harmony

It is very thorough and gives lots of drills and suggestions on how to learn proper voicings. It is all a process, so you begin with the drills. Then you pick pieces you want to learn and you actually *write out* the voicings. Then when you get really good, you can do voicing on the fly. But that takes a while.

Dave, have you seen Voicings for Jazz Keyboard by Frank Mantooth. It's an oldie. I just dug it out from the back of my stack of books I put away when they were a bit ahead of me some time ago. It's got some really good stuff on "detertializing" voicings, and good voice leading. I'm working through the section on generic voicings, which stacks major chords down from the 5th or root, and minor chords down from the 3rd, in perfect 4th intervals, allowing for a lot of common chord tones being retained...dominant 7ths are stacked down the same as majors in the right hand, but in the left hand, the 3rd and 7th are utilized. These are 5 note voicings...2 in the left, 3 in the right.

Very nice, and this time I get it.

The next lesson is on the "miracle voicings" (something Willie Myette also addresses in his online course), 5 note chords which are stacked down by a major 3rd and perfect 4ths and end up creating a chord which serves 5 different functions.

I love this stuff, ever since I figured out that there are really only 3 diminished 7th chords, all the other ones are built on inversions of the first 3.

nikalette,

no, i haven't seen that mantooth book. but from what you've described of it, it sounds likes it's pretty good.

i got most of my voicings from records. i did get some too from playing through transcriptions--especially bil evans transcriptions.