Float Chords: The Secret to Modern Jazz and R&B

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Jeff Schneider here and today we're going to talk about why when you go to play jazz and R&B chords, you sound a little hokey, a little corny, [music] when you want to sound more modern and contemporary. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because you don't know about float chords yet. But first, let's talk about why you're getting that corny sound. It has to do with one of the three main chords that you're playing when you go to play jazz and R&B. Those three main chords are your major 7 chord, your minor 7 chord, and your dominant seven chord. Of course, there are others. There's your half diminished and fully diminished seven and all kinds of other variations, but for the most part, it's those three chords. Now, I'm going to play all three of them, and I want you to think to yourself, which is the one that sounds the most corny or oldtimey. So, here are the three chords. C major 7 first.

[00:00:47]Okay, here's [music] C minor 7, and here's C7 or C dominant 7.

[00:00:54]Now, to me, it's that third one that sounds the most hokey. That one has that very oldtimey [music] kind of cheesy jazz sound and it's because of the interval between the third and the seven. That's a trionee right there. It's very dissonant and the other chords don't have it. The major 7 chord doesn't have it and the minor 7 chord doesn't have it either. And it's got so much [music] dissonance there that it's kind of like a a hot sauce or or a hot pepper that you could incorporate into a dish that you're cooking. Uh if you're skilled and you know what you're doing, you can use that spice effectively. But if you're a beginner or even an intermediate player, you might lack the finesse to incorporate that sound and you lose that modern contemporary soulful feel that you want. So the thing to do to get around that issue is to learn something like a float chord. If we have a five one progression, if we have a five chord going to a one, for instance, if we're in the key of C major, the five chord would be G7 [music] and the one chord would be C major 7. And I have my chord scale charts up on the screen. They're totally free and they're a great resource for learning how chords and scales relate to one another. Highly recommend you check those out. I have them in all 12 keys. Very comprehensive.

[00:02:05]Check them out. Linked in the description. But as you can see, we have the five chord going to [music] the one chord. Instead of playing G7, what we're going to do is use a float chord instead. I'm still going to keep this 51 in the bass. I want that sense of arrival as we land on the one. But instead of playing this [music] voicing here in my right hand, I'm going to actually play the four chord, F major 7.

[00:02:25][music] And when I put the G underneath there, I get this beautiful floaty sounding chord. And the technical name for it is actually G13 sus. Some people might call it [music] F major 7 over G.

[00:02:36]You can call it whatever you want. and it's got that floaty sound and when you resolve to like a C major 9, you get that really contemporary modern jazz sound or R&B sound and it's a lot less jarring than because you don't have the the dissonance of that trionee right there.

[00:02:55]You can also use these float chords as a way of modulating to another key or even better to a distant key. So a modulation is basically a key change. And what I mean when I say distant key is I'm talking about keys that are far from one another in terms of the notes that make up those keys. Let me break it down with an example. If you take a C major scale and then you play say a G major scale, there's only one note different between those two scales. But let's say we're going from C major to E flat major.

[00:03:30]Now we have three notes [music] that are different. So it's a a key that's further away from where we started as compared to say C going to G. And sure, you could use like a five of the E flat to help get us to that new key. For instance, if we do C major, [music] we could go to a B flat 7 and then go to E flat major 7. And that kind of works, right? If you look at the E flat major chord scale chart, you can see that B flat 7 is the five chord and it resolves nicely to the one. But when you put it all together with the C major 7 [music] and then the B flat 7 and then this it's a little jarring again going to that B flat 7 chord, [music] it sounds kind of abrasive and it doesn't have the smooth contemporary sound that I'd prefer. So what we'll do instead is the float chord. We'll do a B flat 13 sus, also known as the four chord.

[00:04:24]over the five or a flat major 7 over B flat. Take a listen to what that sounds like.

[00:04:33]So much smoother as compared to this.

[00:04:39][music] It's not the sound that I want when I'm playing a more modern contemporary style of music, whether it be jazz or R&B. Now, there's actually a really great song that uses a very similar progression. It's Roy Hargrove's band RH Factor. Back in the early 2000s, they had an album called Hard Groove, and I believe the track is called Liquid Streets, and it goes something like this. Check it out. It's in the key of C major, but it starts in the four chord, F major. Um, something like this.

[00:05:11]So, let's just pause there for a second.

[00:05:13]We start on that four chord, [music] F major, F major 7, and then it goes to E minor 7 or the three [music] chord in the context of C major. And right here, here's that B flat 13 sus chord. Same thing I did before, [music] but a slightly different inversion. And that resolves to E flat major 7. And then it [music] goes to A flat major 7. And then it goes to the G13 sus to get us back to the key that we started in. And then it does like something like that. It's it's a great [music] song. Liquid Streets. Go check it out. So what you can also do is just float around from one float chord to another. For instance, G13 sus, B flat 13 sus, F sharp [music] 13 sus. You can just take this voicing and, you know, just go all over the place with it. But let me show you one more thing.

[00:06:05]If you take these 13 sus chords and you start moving the notes around a little bit, you can get some pretty cool alterations. Here's that uh G13 sus. If we take the C and we move it down a half step, [music] you end up with a G13 chord. This is a little bit more like the G7 chord. Now, that sounds pretty good. It's a good voicing. We're starting to use that dominant seventh sound now with more of that finesse I talked about earlier. But we can also move that A down a half step. And now we have a 13 [music] with a flat nine. E is the 13. A flat is the flat N.

[00:06:44]We can move the E down [music] a half step as well and get a flat 13.

[00:06:50]And that's a really nice sound. So al together you could do something like this. G13 sus G13 with a flat 9 [music] resolving to C major 9. Really nice sound. Or like they do in that hard groove tune, you could do G13 and then instead of going down from A to A flat, [music] you could go G up to A flat like this.

[00:07:15]That's a really [music] nice sound as well. Let's talk about how to solo over this 13 sus chord. How to solo over a float chord or even just compose a melody. It's actually going to be a very similar scale [music] to what you might play over a regular G7 chord. You can just play G mixelyian.

[00:07:32]Now, you might be thinking, well, isn't that B going to kind of clash with [music] the C in the chord voicing a little bit, but it sounds kind of nice. [music] Doesn't bother me at all.

[00:07:53]It actually sounds kind of hip. So, another way you can approach this is by using a triadic approach or triad pairs.

[00:08:00]So, we have a it's [music] essentially Gsus, the holiest of chords, and then you can use like a a G triad and then an F major triad and use those two shapes to solo with.

[00:08:16]That's a great sound, too. Or you can do this kind of a thing. I love the uh the 4315 sound. 4315.

[00:08:26]That's cool, [music] too. You could throw in a little B flat there, like a blue note. Lots of options, lots of possibilities. But that'll get you started with float chords. And if you want more of my favorite voicings, you got to check out sick chords volume 1.

[00:08:37]There's a link on the screen somewhere in the description. If you click on it, there might actually be a sale going on if it's if it's still going on. So, be sure to check that out and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you guys for watching. Take it easy.