Tuesdays – Melodic Ear Training
1/26/21
We often talk about polytonality on Tuesdays, but not always. I actually do cover it in today’s jazz guitar lessons daily episode, but the focus here is really on the practical ear training steps of isolating the ‘tension 6’ note, learning to hear it in relation to the basic major triad, and then being able to express bluesy, soulful, lyrical, melodic phrases with it.
This sound SHOULD be familiar to you. I know our melodic triads theory and the funny names I use to talk about “new” concepts can sound complicated and like we’re reinventing the wheel sometimes. But ultimately, these are simply words and idea I use to point out very specific sounds already present in the music… to put them under the microscope, notice their quality more deeply, and learn to control those sounds in their simplest form so that we can internalize them and make them part of our spontaneous vocabulary.
The tension 6 note offers us a really hip emotion to use in our phrases. It’s like the feeling of lobbing something up into the air. It reminds me of the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeves. There’s a scene before he moves to Metropolis where he’s hanging out on a football field. He’s upset because nobody knows he has powers and all of the cool kids at his high school are making fun of him. Out of frustration he picks up a football and punts it. The camera shows the ball go flying into the air and get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller…
It never comes back down to earth. It just shoots off and disappears into the sky. That’s the emotional quality of the tension 6 to me. Play around with it and see what it feels like to you. No interval singing, no nursery rhymes – just emotion, memory, visualization. Listen and connect with it personally like you would a new friend that you wanted to get to know.
Once you can hear and feel this note and understand how it likes to resolve (down to the 5th of the triad or up to the root), then it’s time to start playing around with it to create simple phrases. Check out the tunes I mentioned in the video – Tenor Madness, Billie’s Bounce, and Blue Monk. All of these are classic standards we should all know that take great advantage of this tension 6 in their melodies. Sonny, Bird, and Monk were not simply running 6 chord arpeggios. They were giving us phrases with personality and life and humanity. THAT is what we should be striving to develop in our playing. Arpeggios are important to mastering an instrument, developing dexterity, and infusing into our lines. But the real heart and soul of this music is strong phrases. See what you can do with this note. Check out how the masters use it in these tunes. Check out how I’m using it in the video.
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