Tuesday, December 13, 2011

28 Ways to Love Your Open Voicings

George Shearing - Master of  Gorgeous Voice-Leading
My previous post discussed Open Voicings and the staggering number of chord voicings that are possible when you starting really looking at the various combinations and permutations of the 4 notes of a chord.  Now we get serious - How many different open voicings  can we practically squeeze out of a four-part chord if we look at EVERY possibility?   As you gathered from the header, 28, and here they are posted below.  

28 voicings of 10 different 4-part chords ( see previous post ) in 12 keys will create 3360 different open voicings.  Notice that every line of 4 successive voicings represent  inversions of the voicing that is shown in the 1st bar of that line. 

   Practicing these voicings will transform your playing if you are stuck in a rut, and most of us have plenty of ruts, and will empower you to get away from the playing ordinary "root-on-the-bottom" voicings.  Harmonic progressions that are much more interesting come from this familiarity.  

The example shown below uses an Em7(b5), one of 120 different basic 4-part chords (sus chords excluded for now). 
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1 comment:

  1. pianomanslcDecember 13, 2011 at 10:00 PM

    I love that you used George Shearing. Check out his recording of "Winter Wonderland" - his harmonies are tasty ear candy.

    I have several hundred Christmas cds... my obsession is less about Christmas music and more about how many variations of the same material musicians are capable. Yes, there's plenty of banal stuff (always the stuff you hear on the radio), but there are some great reharmonizations and clever arrangements out there as well. George Shearing is one of my favorite examples of this. So are a lot of the vocal jazz artists out there.

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