Fundamental Voicings on All The Things You Are

Today, we’re going to look at piano chord voicings on a famous and favorite jazz standard, All the Things You Are. 

And while there’s no one way to play chord voicings in jazz piano, there are definitely some best practices that can help you get the best out of your playing. In our Jazz Piano Fundamentals course, Josh Richman takes you 150 minutes worth of instruction to help you hone your jazz piano skills. In it, you’ll learn more about chord voicings, scales, alterations, and more. If you’re interested in seeing Josh play anything we talk about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video Fundamental Voicings on All The Things You Are.

Now let’s get playing! 

Contents

Finding our voicings

Filling it out a bit

Adding some more activity

Finding our voicings

Our first chord is Fm7, but in our melody, we have Ab. The first thing we should ask ourselves is: what is Ab in an Fm7 chord?

Identifying voicings based on the melody voice

Well Ab is the 3. What voicings do we know that have the 3 as the top voice? How about 1-5-7-3?

This is a perfect voicing to play for the first chord of All the Things You Are. It has all the things you need, with the melody in the top voice, which is generally what we're going to want. 

Now on to our second chord—Bbm7 with Db in the melody. What is Db in this context? It’s also the 3, so we can play the same thing. And this is a big lesson—we don't need to over complicate it!

We’re already up to our third chord Eb7, with G in the melody, which once again is our 3.

And our fourth chord is Abmaj7. You can do all this stuff a bunch of different ways, but for now, what is the melody note on beat one of the fourth measure? G—which is the 7 of Abmaj7. What's a voicing we know with the 7 in the top voice? How about 1-5-3-7?

Ab, Eb, C, G, and we can reach up to play the next note in the melody and come back down. 

Going back to the beginning, we now have 1-5-7-3…1-5-7-3…1-5-7-3…1-5-3-7.

This brings us to Dbmaj7, which has the F in the melody, once again our 3. So let's play the same thing we've been doing—1-5-7-3.

Now we’re on to G7 with an F as the downbeat of beat 1. F is the 7, so we can do 1-5-3-7 here. We reach up and then reach back down.

On to Cmaj7, we have E in the melody, our 3 again—1-5-7-3.

So for the first eight measures of this tune, we can use only two different chord voicings. Granted, it’s nothing earthshattering, but it sounds pretty good, and it sounds pretty legit. There’s nothing wrong with these voicings—you have everything in there and nothing's too big of a stretch. 

Filling it out a bit

For those of you who want to thicken this progression up a bit, there’s a really easy trick. So we have our first chord, Fm7. Let's move the left hand down an octave.

Now this created a bit too much space in between the middle voices, so this voicing doesn't sound great. What we can do is double the 3. Some people are really against doubling, especially with the 3, but it can work as long as you're aware that you're doing it, and that is the sound that you're going for. 

In this particular instance, we’re doubling the 3, but this doubling helps fill in the chord nicely. Then if you want, you can even add a 9 right below this 3 that we added. You don’t have to add the 9, but we can use this voicing for the minor chords, and even this dominant chord here, we’ll add the 9 to fill it in a little bit more,

Adding some more activity

Now if we want to play around with it some more, we can make our playing a bit more active.

Start by moving through the bass a bit.

And at the end, we’re just taking that same voicing up diatonically.

Or you can also try some more interesting alterations, like a #11. This gives it a whole different sound.

Well that’s all we have for today, but if you’re interested in going further on this, make sure to check out our course, Jazz Piano Fundamentals. And if you want to hear how Josh played through any of the examples from today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video Fundamental Voicings on All The Things You Are.

We’ll see you next time!