You don't need more chords... You need better chords! (feat. Luther Allison)

Oct 12

5 min read

If you’re looking to start playing things that sound cool and thick, you’ll have to practice your chords in a structured way, and that's going to come down to concepts like learning shell voicings and understanding their importance, how to add color to your lines and to your harmony, adding altered extensions like your #9, b9, and b13, learning rootless voicings, harmonization techniques such as side slipping and tritone substitution, playing and understanding sus chords and susb9, the art of voice leading, diminished chord application, upper structure triads, comping behind a soloist, and that's exactly what we're going to dive into today.

And if you want to go deeper into these concepts, check out Luther’s new resource, Better Chords Bootcamp. This resource features overhead recordings of him playing through all of this stuff, along with transcriptions, so you can follow along every step of the way. And if you want to see how Luther plays through anything we talk about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video “You don't need more chords... You need better chords! (feat. Luther Allison)”

Now let’s get playing!

Essential chord harmony

Suspended chords

Harmonizing lines

Essential chord harmony

Here we're going to discuss adding more color to your chords and more color to your harmony. Let’s talk about the significance of tertian harmony and quartal harmony.

Both of those terms can sound a little bit daunting when you first hear them, but it's actually very simple. So tertian just means that we're dealing with thirds. We're building the chord in thirds.

So if I were to take a Cmaj7 voicing voiced as 1, 3, 5, 7, that's tertian harmony, right?

But if we were to voice this chord based in fourths, that's quartal harmony. (Not to be confused with CHORDAL).

Now it’s not to say that one is better than the other, it just depends on the context. Remember, these are all devices/sounds. These are all things that you can use and be thinking about.

Think about the song and make choices that fit. Quartal harmony can have a more suspended sound in some ways, which can potentially clash with your harmony. You might also want some cluster, but still kind of rooted in thirds, right?

Move that diatonically, starting on a Cmaj7.

Now do the same thing in fourths, all rooted in the C major scale.

Now let's do it in Db. You could do the same thing in thirds.

Suspended chords

Now let’s talk about suspended chords. So suspended chords are some of Luther’s favorite sounds. This is a very beautiful sound that you hear played differently across genres of music. In pop, CCM, or gospel settings, you'll hear the suspended sound being used in what you could call its rawest form, which is to say a triad, but the third is moved up a half step to the fourth.

It's something you would hear maybe Elton John playing, or somebody else in more of a pop style. Whereas when you hear pianists, maybe like Herbie Hancock, or Keith Jarrett or Mulgrew Miller, you're hearing a different approach to playing off of suspended chords.

So if we take that F#sus sound, we might treat it like a C#m7, right? We’re in the key of B major, so even over the suspended sound, you kind of see a bit of play between B major and C# minor.

You can see in this playing, Luther is trying to be very melody-driven. Thinking about “what is it that you're hearing? What's the top note that you're hearing of each of these melodies?”

Maybe just one note at the top of the chord progression, and you're painting between these two sounds. The play between the B major and the C# minor is giving us a little bit more motion and movement through this tonality.

And we’re getting into the susb9. We have our G natural in the sound, and this is a beautiful sound to lay into. Sometimes we might be playing around with B major to C# minor over the F#, which is giving us the suspended sound.

Suspended b9 is definitely a little bit more mysterious of a sound, and assigning different sounds or different feelings to chords is also going to help you to internalize that sound even more. This helps you know when you want to use a certain sound and how you might leverage it to create emotion.

This kind of playing is reminiscent of Coltrane's quartet, where they just sit on these vamps, and you hear McCoy going back and forth between these two sorts of sounds.

It's a really beautiful way to start a song, to end a song, maybe a vamp within the middle of a song before you get to a very chord heavy section, and you want to sit on one sound and just milk those sounds for some time before getting back into the song itself.

It’s a very beautiful device to use arranging-wise and compositionally.

Harmonizing lines

Here we're going to talk about harmonizing very small lines. This is a great skill to have for accompaniment. Whenever you listen back to recordings, try to really focus on the arrangement behind whoever's singing or whoever's playing on classic records like Charlie Parker with Strings, Cannonball with Strings, or any of the early singers. There are so many great singers who have incredible orchestral arrangements behind them, people like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Julie London, Jerry Southern. Even listening to the arrangements of piano trios behind some of these vocalists, like Blossom Dearie, who plays piano on a lot of her recordings, or Shirley Horn, who also plays piano on a lot of her recordings. Listen for the arrangement that's happening behind the melody, and seeing how there's small lines and small movements within the cracks, or sometimes underneath the melody, that are helping propel and support the melody, whatever's being sung or played by whoever's out front.

It's important to pay close attention to that part of the song as well, because that's what's helping highlight the melody of the song or the melody of the soloist. So, for example, some very small things we can do over a ii-V-I chord progression.