PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Woodshedding - Learning to Play! Chords don't tell you what you need to know

I will wade in here at suggest that you take the freebie Introduction to Jazz Improvisation from Berklee, taught by none other than Gary Burton.

It's free. It's Gary Burton. It's also hard for someone who hasn't studied jazz before.

But then again, it's free and it's Gary Burton teaching the class. Yes, that Gary Burton.

https://www.coursera.org/course/improvisation

Session starts February 2, 2015. No excuse not to join in, no spam, and Gary Burton teaches you jazz improvisation and deals with exactly the topic of this thread. Eventually.

IMHO you need to get to the point where you just play and not have to think whether you have to play an F or F# in a certain spot. IMO you tend to over-think some things and that will get in the way of your actual playing. Ray

Thank you for your advice Ray. I am sure you mean well. See though, I have always analysed everything, its in my DNA, this is not to say your approach is not valid of course.

Mind you I can play off the cuff

This is me, completely off the cuff, new song new band, no time to think of chords or key,first take...

(Sax)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2nahzybzmr3q3uh/Red%20House.WAV?dl=0

Thanks for the tip on the Gary Burton Berklee course. Excellent!

Ron...

I generally avoid discussion of theory since it's not critical to my everyday functioning in music.

However....

When you look at the written sheet music, you are given everything you need to know. Assuming you can read the music. You have the key signature which tells you the key and indicates the sharps or flats that are in the music. Knowing that, you play the correct notes.

If a note is intended to be one of the "avoid notes" but the composer intends you to play it, that too is indicated by use of an accidental.... a sharp or flat symbol placed immediately in front of that note.

Chord symbols are there in sheet music for other folks, mainly guitar players who can not read the notes on the staff. If you're using them to play the song, your accuracy is going to be diminished from someone who can read the music.

I took piano lessons for a number of years and had a piano teacher who could look at a piece of music she had never seen before and tell you all about that particular piece of music..... key, chords, inversions of the chords, whether it was a major or a minor key and so on...

If you are having difficulty with something, before you make the assumption that the system is broken or incomplete, learn more about it because 99% of the time, it's not a broken or incomplete system, it's a lack of knowledge. This was brought home to me in a real way when I bought a pistol and shot it.... I thought the sights were off.... the gunsmith at the store told me to "go learn the right way to shoot before you start messing with the sights".... and he was correct. It was me lacking the knowledge.... so too with music and long established musical systems be it the Nashville system or do, re, mi, or whatever else.... all those systems were developed over time to allow people to use them to play music that someone else had composed and to do it relatively accurately.

I'm not trying to bust on you..... just saying that perhaps a bit more study with a teacher or mentor who understands them would be helpful. If you have a teacher who doesn't understand those systems, there's no way they can teach their students the proper use of those systems.

Well said Herb. +1 Ray

Hi Guitar Hacker,
With respect, you make my point.

The title of the thread is "Chords don't tell you what you need to know", I still hold this is true. I was meaning when used for improvising. If your trying to play along to a new song and you come across a chord you cant tell what notes are going to be 'in' and what notes are going to be 'out' by looking at the chord symbol. The example I used in the original post is an A7 appearing in a C progression. You have to make some calculations to realise that the C# needs to be handled with care.

Just because a system has been around for a long time it does not mean its a good system. yes its true, that as you study music sometimes it can reveal that the complexities of the notation system are there for a purpose, but not always. There are lots of things that could be a lot easier to understand.

Music is a language, similar to 'natural' languages, like English or Chinese, it has evolved from a number of diverse forms and usages. As these languages evolved in various ad hoc settings, for purposes that are now sometimes defunct they bring with them redundancy and unnecessary complexity.
We use words to spell, but there are lots of illogicalities in the English spelling system that make it hard for learners to master the art. Similarly in music there are lots of attributes that make it hard to master reading and writing music. They are simply historical anomalies.
The problem is that even if you can invent a new system that does away with the problems, it's hard for such a system to gain universality - e.g. Esperanto.

If a person simply learns English, in order to speak it - to perform the act of listening and speaking - then they might not realise that the system they are using is full of contradictions, they simply use it. Its only when its pointed out that cough and bough and bow are inconsistently spelt, that it comes to their notice. If a person points out the illogicalities in music it does not necessarily mean they simply have to understand its rules better.

When improvising, sight reading a series of chords, if you come across an Am7 chord it does not tell you that it is a Phrygian, Dorian or Aeolian minor, so you have to calculate it's context to find out what kind of ninths and sixths to use. If you use the wrong kind, they can stand out like a sore thumb. All this takes time and effort.
As an off the cuff example, If the chord symbol was simply AP(for Phrygian) or AD, or AA you would know both the scale and the chordal tones and would be able to improvise more freely and quickly.

The whole system comes from the needs of medieval monks scratching church modal needs onto parchment, gradually a uniformity of script was built, and this was extended and modified.

Imagine a learner, looking at a note on a staff. The note is on the middle ledger line. What note is it? Well that's a legitimate question in my book, but...

It could be a B - if its treble clef, or it could be a D if its bass clef. Its even possible that it could be the French Violin Clef, or The C clef or the Sub bass clef - each giving different notes. Additionally, it can raise a semitone, or lower a semitone, and this can either be indicated next to the note or elsehwere. It can even be raised or lowered a tone by the presence of a double flat or sharp.

If the instrument is a transposing instrument, for any one of these clefs, it could be termed a "B", or an "A", but it actually might be another note entirely, so that when you as an Alto sax player refer to a specific note, then your tenor sax friend refers to the same pitch using a different name from the same system, your French Horn player again something different and your pianist yet again some other pitch, using the same term.

The student's question was a simple one, "what note is that?" but the answer is unnecessarily complex, in the same was as bough, bow (bend) and bow (ribbon).
It's my personal view that the system we have handed down to us, often does not tell us what we need to know, or makes it obscure so we have to derive simple essential information (like what note is this) by calculation.

IMO

Z

I'll grant your point on the "chord chart only" kind of musician. While I tend to fall into that category myself, preferring the chart to reading the notes. My sight reading skill is poor at best on piano, and non-existent on guitar. Oh I can look at the notes on the staff and figure it out if I need to, but essentially I do not read music. Not at a functional level.

Absolutely, I know and understand that the chord charts only give me a portion of what's happening but for what it does, it does it well. On guitar, mostly I am playing a chording pattern behind the other instruments anyway.

IF I, or any other chord chart user really wanted or needed to know what was going on 100% with the sheet music, I, or they, would need to learn to sight read that music on our instrument. And yes, I do freely admit that it is my lack of knowledge and skill in sight reading that is the problem in my case. However, I see no immediate or pressing advantage to spending the time to learn to sight read. For me, if and when I need to provide guitar in some circumstance where sheet music is used, I do one of two things.... I either read the chord charts for the chords I play, or I play by ear knowing from looking at the sheet music the key of the song from it's key signature.

I do believe that ALL needed information can be given through the sheet music including the feel of the music and pauses and other nuances, through the symbols that are used to indicate such things.


An interesting side note to this: I played guitar for many years in the church orchestra. There was rarely ever a part of the songs where the guitar did anything other than play chords. We had several really well classically trained piano players. Several of which who could play anything in any key you put in front of them on sight. And play it like they have known that song all their lives. However, if you asked two of them to play following a chord chart or an impromptu jam in C major and they were totally at a loss on what or how to play it.

I still believe that the time tested musical staff and notes gives the most and the best information to the players involved. Perhaps someone will develop some other better, more efficient system but for now, no.... that's the best we have.

The other systems, such as you mentioned, and in particular, the Nashville chord chart system were developed to fill a particular need and were not intended to be the cure to the music world's ills. Nashville musicians needed a charting system that allowed for ease of understanding and was translatable into any key instantly and thus developed that system for studio use. What it does, it does better than the lines and staff but yes, it lacks in other areas, however, the information it doesn't provide is generally not needed anyway in that system. It filled the need in a particular area of music and that's what mattered most.

Perhaps to be able to understand music fully, the way the composer intended it to be played using our current systems is impossible. However, I believe we can get to the 99.9% mark using the systems we have.

I happen to agree completely and understand Zero Zero's point. I am like guitar hacker in that my sight-reading is poor, and quite frankly, I'd much rather learn to solo over chords than READ solos over chords. It seems to be common for many people that they take one road or the other, and don't have enough sets of "10,000" spare hours to master BOTH.

So that said - as a person that wants to solo from chord symbols, there is nothing that has been created for that to give me a little more of the information I need regarding which scales/notes will and won't work in the context of a song.

Now - it would seem to me that explicitly indicating the particular scales or notes would be the most straightforward way to do this, but that would require and ADDITIONAL nomenclature 'line' along the music for such - I can't see how that would REPLACE the chord symbols, I can only envision a supplement to them for the purpose we mention.

I'm in the process of taking many, many lessons from a really good teacher, who's teaching me EXACTLY what ZeroZero describes as missing from chord charts. That said...there are actually MANY options that can be used, and this would require additional Nomenclature specifying the particular scales/tones to include or not include.

To really analyze a tune an know what scales / arpeggios / extenstions / substitutions will and will not work - well, I guess that's what separates the level of player you are.

I would love to see some additional lines under each measure indicating which scales/chords..etc. to use and the REASONING behind each from players that have studied this.

Maybe for those interested, we could share such charts, as a way of learning and sharing together in the process of improving this aspect of the art of soloing.

And for those that think of using entirely different exotically named scales for EACH chord listed - for me at least, that is way beyond my level of processing for the purpose of an improvisation in real time - it may be an analytically structured way to do it, but there's probably few that have committed the whole, e.g. Abercrombie chart in their head and can play through a new set of changes in the real book thinking this way. I didn't say NOBODY could do it - but my guess is very few musicians can do this of the entire bunch in the world.

One of the big problems with any sort of system other than the tried and true musical staffs previously mentioned is the sheer number of variables upon variables that exist in music.

Joe alludes to this in the post above.... For any given chord.... there are numerous scales that could be played over it.... and variables of each of those.... you could practically "write a book" on each measure as to all the options available... or the layers of depth you might wish to explore.

In most cases, that isn't even close to being feasible or practical. Especially for most of the music we play. If you want that level of awareness, there are music theory and music appreciation classes that will take you there. All I need to know is that I'm in a given key, if it's major or minor and what chord I need to play or solo on. My choice of scale will be dictated by the key and how I intend to play that part because as was pointed out, I have the option to NOT stick to the major scale if that's what I'm hearing and feeling in my soul.

[The title of the thread is "Chords don't tell you what you need to know", I still hold this is true. I was meaning when used for improvising.]

Zero, the above statement of yours tells me that you need to do more studying. A7 tells me exactly what I need to know to improvise. To say that the C# in the A7 needs to be handled with care because the key you're playing in is C, is baloney. You need more study, from a good teacher. You're trying to analyze to the point of "ad absurdum". You're analyzing the wrong things. Ray

Ray - can you point to a single book or two that would explain what ZeroZero (and myself) have missed ? With the abundance of pedagogical materials out there, surely you can point us to a good reference on the topic.

I have been following this thread with great interest but I haven't commented until now.

The scale syllabus should help:
http://jazzbooks.com/mm5/download/FREE-scale-syllabus.pdf

Here is my view:
1-Learn scales, chords and modes as much or as little as you want
2-Learn what scales and modes go with chords as in the syllabus
3-do not let the above get in the way of your playing

That last statement may sound confusing to some. I suggest you play what you feel from your heart then go back and analyze what you have played, if you want too. In other words don't let theory get in the way of your leads and jams, i.e. nothing is worse than a player running scales as a solo with no melody and/or feel. If everyone had stayed within the boundaries of theory we would still be writing and playing like Bach!

On the other hand the more theory you have the more your musical horizons will expand. That is if you have the ear for it. Remember the same 88 keys were under Bach's fingers and were under Monk, Peterson, or Coreas's fingers.

Learning notes contained in chords is what I would start with first. For instance XeroZero's C# statement, a C# is in the chord A7. A C# in a C chord would be written as a Db and the chord might be C7b9 or a C add b9.

I believe that if you base chords on the major scale of the chord's tonic note then all will become quite clear. If you need help on this just let me know.

I am not an expert on theory but I do know some.

http://www.jazzbooks.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=JAJAZZ&Category_Code=AEBPUB

The above is a start. The Music-Minus-One series would be good too. Just google Jazz Improvisation for lots of sources.
Accomplished players just do not think of chords the way you are trying to. A7b9 tells you all you need to know. How you play the chord is determined by what came before and what comes after. Ray

http://jazzadvice.com/two-five-progressions-made-easy/ More stuff to check out.

http://www.jazzbooks.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?screen=fqbk

This free book should give you a lot of info. Ray

The A7 in the key of C in a I,VI,II,V,I converts the Am (6th chord) into a V chord of the II minor.
This briefly brings the chords out of the key signature, but because the IIm then goes to a V and a I of C we rapidly return.

Z

It's apparent that Ray knows his stuff - thanks for those sources Ray. The best places to find sources is from somebody that knows their stuff !

What you say is absolutely correct and a good analysis of the A7b9 function in the key of C. But a simpler way to approach a flat 9 chord, regardless of the key is to look at it as an alt chord. That makes available all the neat tensions (b5, #5, b9, #9, etc.).

What lk says is entirely correct. Don't think of A7 as going out of the key of C. It's just a chord to play on. Ray