Re: Inversions piano
reed kotler ( (no email) )
Sun, 03 Nov 1996 16:59:48 -0800
At 05:08 PM 11/3/96 -0700, you wrote:
>I think my take on piano voicings is similar to Reed's, but I would not
>word it as extremely. That is, I agree one need not exhaustively practice
>voicings. However, I do think there is more to it than simply using the
>chord tones minus the fifth plus the melody note as you see fit to produce
>good voice leading. There are simply too many things that are extremely
>unlikely to occur to you unless they are pointed out to you as such -
>either by your reading about them, being taught them, or transcribing them
>and analyzing them yourself. And I don't see any of these methods
>inherently better than the others - given that, anything learned on paper
>needs to be practiced with both hands and ear in order to become musically
>useful.
>
Marc,
I didnt mean to imply that one would figure out everything yourself
from just playing shells (r, 3, 7).
But that is certainly a place to start, and in fact by just adding
the tension tones after that, one can build a surprisingly large
percentage of what is played.
Certainly there are voicings one is not likely to think of if you
are never told about it.
For expample the "so what" chord [D G C F A] for Dmi11 or perhaps
[D A E F C G] for Dmi11.
However, one needs a framework to begin and I think that the shells
are in essence a complete harmnonic system which is a good
foundation.
reed