This month I’d like to explore several
approaches to generating new voicings on
the guitar. Harmony is often a mysterious and
clouded subject for guitarists. We know the
importance of playing interesting and supportive
voicings, but the way to go about finding
these isn’t always obvious. When I first started
getting seriously into jazz and learning how to
comp, I was really committed to learning as
many voicings as possible. Often I would refer
to Ted Greene’s seminal book, Chord Chemistry,
as the all-encompassing source of cool chords
and unusual shapes. As I worked through the
book I ran into a conundrum. I would learn
interesting chords, but I wasn’t sure how to
apply them in a playing situation. It was as
though I was always looking for the right place
to try them out. More times then not, the
result sounded like I was forcing the chords
onto the music—whether it needed them or
not—rather than allowing my ear to lead me
into the appropriate harmonic territory.
On my newly initiated journey to discover
the inner workings of harmony, I came across
a few key concepts that really helped me
to understand harmony as a living breathing
organism rather than a fixed theoretical
concept. It started to seem that voicings
were no longer something I had to learn and
then apply, but rather the consequence of a
deeper understanding of the tug of war that
exists within harmony’s gravitational force.
This realization came largely from a lesson I
learned from vibraphonist Gary Burton.
In response to asking him about comping
and voicings, he told me that he learned
the most about how to construct voicings
from guitarist Jim Hall. I was amazed that
another instrument looked to the guitar for
harmonic direction—we always seem to
be the last to know how this stuff works! I
was fascinated by what it was he took from
Jim’s approach. Because Gary plays with
four mallets, he found that the structure
of his voicings had more in common with
what guitarists play than the larger-structure
approach used by pianists. Both vibes and
guitar have similar restrictions and therefore
note choices become increasingly important.
Gary proceeded to show me an exercise he’d
developed after checking out Jim Hall, which
quickly became an invaluable tool in teaching
me how to build stronger voicings.
The first step is to pick a tonality—let’s
say A major. With this key in mind, you
set the metronome to a comfortable tempo
for quarter-notes, maybe something like
100 bpm. With these parameters in place,
you practice alternating between closed and
open voicings within the chosen key.
Just as a reminder, we think of closed
voicings as being built with intervals of a
third or smaller and open voicings using a
fourth or larger. You are essentially improvising
chord shapes the same way you improvise
melodies. The key to this exercise is that any
note in the A major scale is fair game. It isn’t
necessary to always play the root, 3rd, or 5th
of the chord, and in reality, if you are playing
with a bass player or other accompanist, you
usually don’t need to double these fundamental
pitches. The only guideline to keep
in mind is that whenever you double a pitch
an octave above or below, it usually has the
effect of canceling out the fundamental overtones
and results in a weaker overall voicing.
In Fig. 1 you can see an example of something
I might improvise using this idea. I
began with a closed voicing (B–C#–E) and
then move to an open voicing (A–E–B–G)
and then alternate between the two all while
staying within the key of A. When I first
began to practice this, I started to see the given
tonality light up across the entire fretboard. It
was like all the notes of the scale were bright
red and were equal candidates for expressing
the given tonality. From this perspective, any
combination of notes you play within those
seven pitches becomes available to you and
keeps your chords sounding fresh and agile. If
you improvise voicings like this for 10 minutes
a day for a week, two weeks, or a month, you
will start to have a completely different sense
of how flexible harmony can be, as well as an
appreciation for just how many harmonic possibilities
exist on the guitar.
Another exercise that helped me to perceive
harmony as a flowing and moving
phenomenon rather than a static event,
involves looking at things from a purely
mechanical point of view. Not only is it
important to hear the way harmony works,
but it can be helpful to train your hands to
feel comfortable with adjusting to constantly
changing harmonic terrain.
In Fig. 2 we begin with a chord shape, in
this case Cmaj7. Again, we set the metronome
to a comfortable tempo and practice moving
one note either up or down every four beats.
Like a spider crawling up the neck, the goal
with this is to work your hand all the way up
the neck and then back down in a fluid manner.
Move all the way to the top fret of your
guitar and then back down to the 1st fret. Play
around with moving your fourth finger up one
fret, then moving your third finger down a fret.
Then you can move your first up, your second
up, and then your fourth down. It is kind of
the fretboard equivalent of taking two steps
forward, one step back, however, with this you
are encouraged to try different combinations so
as to not ever get stuck playing a pattern.
The bonus is that along the way, you
might find some cool shapes that you haven’t
played before. And when this happens, one
thing you can do to maximize the results of
your discovery is to isolate the newly discovered
chord, find out what tonal center it
belongs to—often there are many—and move
it diatonically through the appropriate scale.
For example, in Fig. 3 we start with a
D–G–B–F voicing, which can be seen as the
9th, 5th, 7th, and 4th degrees, respectively, in
the key of C. You can then move each note up
one step in the scale and continue this sequence
up and down the scale to find as many new
voicings as there are notes in the scale.
One final idea to play around with when
working on new voicings: Apply octave displacement,
as shown in Fig. 4. I learned this
from the great guitarist Steve Kimock, who in
our lessons used to have me practice voicings
in all the possible octaves of the guitar. This
contributed to my understanding the fretboard
and allowed me to see that every voicing can
be totally transformed by simply relocating
to a new register. Additionally, you can play
around with moving only one or two notes up
or down an octave to alter the sound. Variation
is the heartbeat of creative chord construction
and this lends itself beautifully to the guitar.
For an example of how all of these concepts
can be applied to a tune, in Fig. 5
I’ve illustrated how I might comp over the
form of Elizabeth Cotten’s masterful classic,
“Freight Train.”
The key that unlocks all these methods
of exploring harmony on the guitar is
understanding that chords don’t ever have
to be final. Every chord can be viewed as
arrested motion—or melodies in transit. A
four-note voicing is really four melodies that
are coming from somewhere and on their
way somewhere, and if you let the melodic
development of each internal voice suggest
what chord to play next, your harmonies will
always be relevant to what came before. This
approach will help your comping sound like
an integrative musical statement in and of
itself, independent yet supportive of everything
else that is going on.
Julian Lage is one of those rare musicians who
feels equally at home in acoustic and jazz circles.
He has been a member of legendary vibraphonist
Gary Burton’s group since 2004, and
also regularly collaborates with pianist Taylor
Eigsti. Lage’s latest album, Gladwell, reflects
his wide-ranging musical interests and talents
by incorporating chamber music, American folk
and bluegrass, Latin and world music, traditional
string-band sounds, and modern jazz. For
more information, visit
julianlage.com.