My point about chord systems, etc. is that from my experience,
top players use a suprisingly small amount of information to play.
That's why they can do what they do.
Unfortunately, people can dream up all kinds of chords and put
them in a book and now you have thousands of voicings to learn,
instead of just what is really usefull. Even if some good
ones are buried in there, you have no way to no which ones
are important and how to conceptualize them so that they become
useful.
The information explosion makes someones paltry half a dozen
voicings seem not that valuable, for example if you can go to
the store and for $11.95 get a book with a 1000 jazz chord voicings,
how much can a few voicings be worth?
The ones I posted are extremely important. I don't really care that
much if nobody else thinks they are. For me that's their loss.
If you transcribe you will realize that what people are doing is alot
simpler than you think.
However, transcribing chords is fairly difficult.
So I hope it doesnt seem like I'm being a jerk or trying to get
people to say the voicings I posted are wonderful or anything.
That's not my point or purpose at all.
However, I know how valuable they are and won't post the rest in
that system if nobody is working on them. I'm not charging any
money for them but I'll tell you that you could take lessons for
10 years and never have anybody lay things out for you in so
simple and direct a fashion.
What you realize after a while is that there are not a lot of things
you can really do in music and have it all still work.
To me it's amazing that such variety comes out of such a small amount
of things.
For me, I realized at one point that you can have r, 3 and 7 or just
3 and 7th (in rootless situations) for the basic part of the chord. Then
you don't want to double anything but the melody note (in general).
Then what else can you do? You can add 9ths, altered 5ths or 13ths!
That's just two more notes.
So for rootless voicings, they are 4 notes. On the guitar because of
the structure of the instrument, drop 2 voicings are the ones that
are going to work the best.
So if you realize that, you'll see why those voicings are so crucial.
Any jazz musicians who can play well will come up with the same voicings
because you can't do anything else and still have it work. That's why
no books have them but all the players play them. The players didnt learn
from books, they just did what I did , basically.
I'm simplifying somewhat here, but for the guitar, this is pretty
much what you can do. On the piano you have more fingers so it's a little
more involved.
SOmething else about rootless voicings and that is that they have
to have the 3rd and 7th on the bottom or they wont' function properly.
For example, Dmi9 rootless voicing = [F A C E] which is the
same as Fmaj7.
However the only two inversions of Fma7 that will work as a rootless
voicing for Dmi9 are the one with C on the bottom and the one with
F on the bottom.
In some cases, you can add the root to the voicings I gave and then
you all of a sudden have an even large percentage of the total
jazz guitar voicings.
reed