Play Shell Voicings Like a Pro

[00:00:00]Hey there everybody. My name's Jeremy Siskind. I'm the author of the Jazz Piano Fundamentals series. There's three books with that. The author of Solo Standards for piano. Two books right now. Third one coming. I'm the author of Playing Solo Jazz Piano and lots more stuff, but don't worry about that. Um so today I wanted to talk to you about next level shells or next level bass shells depending on what terminology you're using.

[00:00:24]And so people often ask me, you know, when I'm demonstrating some technique in the right hand, they ask, "Well, what are you doing in the left hand?" That seems like the easiest way to play solo jazz piano. And the answer is that I'm using shell voicings or bass shells. And what this refers to is a voicing just in the left hand where I'm putting the root on bottom the vast majority of the time.

[00:00:47]I'm then adding either the third or the seventh or both of those notes.

[00:00:53]So, it might be two notes. It might be three notes, but I have the root and then third some combination of third and seventh. So, for instance, if I'm playing C major 7 I might have just the root and seventh.

[00:01:09]I might have [music] just the root and third. I know that not everybody can reach a tenth. I can lead you to some videos where we talk about what to do when you can't reach that tenth. I could play the third and seventh above the root like this.

[00:01:22]Or I could, if I have a nice big hand, play the third and seventh above the root like that. So, there are several positions, several different ways to do it.

[00:01:35]But, what I want to talk about today is not the basics of these bass shells cuz on on some level it's somewhat easy and intuitive, but I want to talk about really trying to make as much music as possible with this device. Um because I think for a lot of pianists it feels limiting. Well, okay, I really only have one place I can put my hand. So, I thought we'd look a little bit at this tune Tangerine. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this tune.

[00:02:09]>> [music] [music] >> Kind of a fun one. Um got a lot of character, got a lot of spunk.

[00:02:27]And so, if I were using bass shells here, I'm going to keep it really simple.

[00:02:32]I'd probably use the root and the seventh. [music] And resolve that to the root and the third here.

[00:02:40]>> [music] >> And then, you know, this would drive your counterpoint teacher nuts, but we can >> [music] >> just use roots and sevenths. I'm using the changes in parentheses. I think they're much more interesting.

[00:03:03]>> [music] [music] >> Actually, it's so nice. The third complements the melody so well, right? If we have the root and third, then this ends up with the melody in added to it, sounding much more like a diminished >> [music] >> seventh. Now, I want you to notice something here that I think is really interesting, um which is that the melody is highlighting the seventh of the G minor and then the third of the C7. And so, if I were to do this, it's not really going to harmonize the melody very well.

[00:03:48]Because you can see that I have a doubling. And so, really it's only going to sound like I have two notes, two unique notes, instead of three unique notes, even though it's a two-note voicing plus a one-note melody. Um So, this is the time when there's kind of, I think, a much better choice, which would be to use the root and third. Oops.

[00:04:13]of the G minor and the root and seventh of the C7, cuz it just harmonizes melody better.

[00:04:22]And then here we get into the same problem, cuz the third is in the melody.

[00:04:27]And so, if I use the root and third, even though that's the kind of natural resolution here, right? What do I mean? I mean this B flat wants to pull down to A, but it's not a very good voicing.

[00:04:40]>> [music] >> So, one thing that I might do, and and I guess Well, we'll we'll get to this later, but I'm going to jump to the root and seventh.

[00:04:51]>> [music] >> And then just root, seventh, root, seventh. Now, this kind of style, by the way, you know, it's going to work better, by and large, when it's a fast tune, because we generally like hearing thicker sorts of voicings um when we have slower tunes. And these are very thin voicings.

[00:05:19]I realize you can just see the top of my head. Really good camera work, Siskin.

[00:05:23]Um so, here's how I might play this, just given these bass shells.

[00:05:28]>> [music] >> Not bad, right? I'm doing a little bit of call and response.

[00:05:43]Um I'll do Do a little slower. [music] >> [music] >> Doesn't sound quite as interesting slower. Right? You kind of almost need >> [music] >> Okay.

[00:06:15]So, notice the first thing that I hope you take away from this is that we're finding complementary notes. When the melody has the seventh, I'm trying to use the third.

[00:06:26]Okay. Um now, let's talk about how you can get to that next level. So, first thing is we can add in some tension notes or I sometimes think of these as suspensions, even though technically I don't think they would count.

[00:06:43]And I love working on this with bass shells because it requires you to really understand the harmony with just to manipulate it with just two notes.

[00:06:50]So, three things that we could do and I kind of have one for each primary chord type.

[00:06:57]For dominant seventh chords, we could move the fourth to the third. So, instead of starting on the third, for instance, for a C7, we could start on the fourth and kind of suspend it before resolving to the third.

[00:07:20]>> [music] >> It's not incredibly interesting here.

[00:07:26]>> [music] >> It's a little bit uh nicer. You can hear the the sound of it a little bit more if you add that seventh on top.

[00:07:34]>> [music] >> Okay, but there's something we can do for dominant chords.

[00:07:39]For minor seventh chords, we can start with the major seventh and resolve to the minor seventh. So, let's look at this first G major seven.

[00:07:49]To make it a little bit more interesting to add motion, we can go from a major seventh to a minor seventh.

[00:07:56]>> [music] >> And notice that the linking these two devices actually really works well cuz that F ends up being repeated and that's going to happen anytime you have a 2-5.

[00:08:10]>> [music] >> And for a major seventh, I'm not intending anything by writing in green. I was just using green before. We can move the seventh to the sixth.

[00:08:29]So, we can make this E feel like it's resolving down to a D.

[00:08:38]>> [music] >> And I'm going to skip ahead and say it's also really nice to fill this in chromatically.

[00:08:52]Kind of depends how much time you really actually have.

[00:08:57]>> [music] >> It would be nicer to do that if we had two measure two measures to really deal with that. Um And notice, you know, why did I do why did I use the first two measures and then that second to last measure as an example? Because we have a full measure for the chords. I don't I'm not trying to stuff um my teacher Fred Hersh said, "You don't try to stuff 5 lb of into a 4-lb bag."

[00:09:29]>> [laughter] >> Um so, if I only have two beats, it's probably not going to be as much to do.

[00:09:34]Okay, so that's the first thing that we can do. We can do tensions and suspensions. Second thing we can do is add tritone subs and this is going to be really effective here.

[00:09:43]So, when we have a dominant chord, instead of just doing the dominant chord, we might do the dominant chord and then the tritone sub of the dominant. And I'm I'm kind of looking at this as an interesting place to do that because we we already kind of need an excuse to move downwards.

[00:10:02]Okay, so the C7, the tritone sub would be G flat 7.

[00:10:07]And so I'm going to add the root and the 7th there.

[00:10:11]>> [music] >> Um >> [music] >> Right, and those two chords are for all our purposes, you know, those are really the the same chord in a certain sense.

[00:10:29]We could do that as well here. If if we didn't want to do this suspension, let's say we think that's kind of lame.

[00:10:34]>> [laughter] >> We could move from C and E, the root and third of C7, >> [music] >> to G flat and E, the root and 7th of G7.

[00:10:52]>> [music] [music] >> And here, too, if we want it, we could add in a little passing, {quote} {unquote}.

[00:11:07]>> [music] >> I think that's definitely getting into the stuffing the bag too full territory, but just for an example.

[00:11:20]All right, and then beyond that, a third thing that we can do is add in side steps and tonalization.

[00:11:31]Right, side step means that we're going to be moving a chord by a half step.

[00:11:34]Tonalization means we're going to be adding a dominant seventh before the next chord. Um, so let's see, how would we do that here?

[00:11:44]>> [music] >> So, let's say we wanted to do something even more dissonant more active than that suspension.

[00:11:54]We could delay the resolution to the G minor by first implying an A flat seven or an A flat minor seven, you really can't quite tell. Actually, it would have to be an A flat seven cuz that A represents the flat nine.

[00:12:05]Then why an A flat seven? Well, that is the tritone sub of D seven, >> [music] >> which is the tonalization for the G minor.

[00:12:17]All right, do you see how now we've added a lot of things? It doesn't feel like we've totally, you know, reharmonized to where we can't hear it anymore, um, but it's getting really nice and interesting.

[00:12:30]>> [music] >> And what did I just do there? I made this melodic, so I ornamented. Ba ba ba doo ba. I'm thinking of this top line as a melody. Ba doo doo.

[00:12:42]Um, that's not a rhythm, but you can kind of see what's going on.

[00:12:47]>> [music] [music] >> Um, I made that a little bit of a melody, so it's more interesting.

[00:13:01]And you might wonder, well, why there?

[00:13:03]Why not later? Well, we have this big gap in the meld, right? We we're waiting. We need something to fill that in. So, it's such a natural place to add a little ornamentation.

[00:13:20]>> [music] >> And here's the fourth thing you can do, and then maybe this should have been higher on the list cuz it's simpler is include both versions of a shell by which I mean the root and third and the root and seventh. And this is such a great place to do it right on this A flat minor or A A flat diminished, however you want to think about it. Um because I want to both emphasize the connection from the A and G as well as then give that nice note that harmonizes the other two notes well. So, I'm going to do both versions of that shell.

[00:14:07]>> [music] [music] >> And here again, because there's a gap in the melody, I I love to do something um my instinct is to go borodo a little ornament.

[00:14:33]>> [music] >> It's kind of not the most comfortable fingering thing.

[00:14:37]I could do that. That'd be nicer.

[00:14:39]>> [music] [music] >> Um and if I wanted to do something different here, instead of using this G flat 7, which sounds fine, I might think in terms of a side step. So, targeting this G minor 7, I could add in notes a half step above.

[00:15:05]>> [music] >> And check out, this would actually be really fun. We could add two side steps in here cuz the melody is so nice. We totally demolish that C7.

[00:15:19]And we go >> [music] >> It sounds a little nicer here if you can get the seventh in there as well cuz you can just hear the harmonic intense a little bit more clearly.

[00:15:38]>> [music] [music] >> And what I just did instinctively there is another you could call it a side step or a tonicization leading into the C7.

[00:16:08]>> [music] >> So it was like a D flat 7 leading to C.

[00:16:17]All right, so I hope that I've demonstrated that you really don't need all of these really rich color tones to add a lot of harmony solo piano. And in fact, I think that it's a great test of how well you can know and treat harmony to try to make it really interesting and rich and varied with just two notes or maybe sometimes with three notes. I think you can find out how well you actually understand the underlying harmony of the tune by taking the simple simple concept of bass shells and trying to make that this tune really harmonically rich even with just that limited number of notes.

[00:17:01]All right, if you enjoyed that, you'd probably really enjoy playing solo jazz piano. And there's some interesting things that are related, things like tonicization in jazz piano fundamentals book two as well. If you um If you made it this far since we're talking about a tangerine, comment with a a rarer fruit. Um you know, not an apple, an orange, a banana, but you know, something a little more a little more interesting. Maybe a kiwi, maybe a durian.

[00:17:29]Um give me your give me your rare fruit.

[00:17:31]And uh thank you very much for watching, everyone.