learning new voicings

[sudeep]

hi guys,

 

i had a questions about you guys learn new voicings. I tend to learn a voicing, play it a couple of times might even get around the circle of 5ths, but it never really feels natural and often i end up forgetting it. Any ideas?

 

Also when you play voicings (especially complex ones) do you normally think in your head the name of the chord or do you just memorize how to play it? ive gotten into a bad habit of learning how to play a chord ie. to play f-7 i play an Amaj7 etc. i think this makes me a lot slower.

[timwat]

Good question here.

 

I found early on that I discovered a new voicing and just stuck with it everywhere...everytime I saw that flat 9, I'd play my one known voicing...no matter what key, no matter what tune.

 

This of course led me to be one-dimensional, making me feel like I had hit a dead end. I'm sure my playing partners felt the same way with me, I'm grateful they put up with me.

 

Don't know if this works for anyone else, but I had to go back and rethink the whole voicing issue purely from a music theory perspective. What I mean is to go back to the drawing board apart from the keyboard (albeit, apart from what I knew so well and I automatically fell back on like a crutch), and work through tunes methodically, with pencil and paper, in terms of voice leading, harmonic alternatives, tritone substitution, stacked fourths, changing modalities. This led me to try to completely abandon the composer's changes, seeing how far I could restructure the harmony, remain true to the original melody, and recast the whole composition in a fresh way.

 

A lot of what comes out at first is garbage, but I learned volumes from that too.

 

The bottom line is that it took several months to feel like I could collate and use what I had struggled through as an expansion to my harmonic vocabulary. But that's the joy of it, to struggle and fight and sweat to expand our tools...isn't it?