Formation of major triads and tritones (tutorial)
Good day everyone. Hope our day is coming up well.
We started considering tritones and tritone voicings again because a lot of folks still seem not to get around it.
The RH chords to go along with the LH tritone pairs can be of any chord quality. Mostly, you would be using major triads, minor triads, dominant 7ths, major 7ths, minor 7ths, dim 7ths, min7b5, dimMaj 7ths, etc [that's almost the whole 9 yards ;-)].
But in this post, we will deal with MAJOR TRIADS ONLY.
There are 2 primary ways to go about this -
- Melody driven - this always has the melody on top
- Harmony driven - this does not bother about the melody being on top. The melody can be anywhere it like and it can even be missing from the entire voicing. What matters here is that the harmonic progression is pleasing to the ears without much distortions.
We will touch the 2 to give us an idea of how both works. We will use a simple [and perhaps known] song to drive the ideas home - As The Deer... in key Fmaj.
The first phrase of that song, together with the melody, says [remember in key Fmaj]...
As - A
The - C
Deer - C
Pan... - A
...teth - G
For - F
If we are to use chord progressions to harmonize [some of] these melodies, we may end up having this:
As - 1 chord - A
The - C
Deer - C
Pan... - A
...teth - G
For - 6 chord - F
If we look at the space between the 2 chords used, we may decide to add some cyclic moves to get to that 6 chord. Perhaps, a 7-3-6 would be okay:
As - 1 chord - A
The - C
Deer - 7 chord - C
Pan... - 3 chord - A
...teth - G
For - 6 chord - F
Let's use some simple diatonic chords first, keeping the melody on top too.
Legend is LH/RH:
As - 1 chord [Fmaj] - F/CFG_A
The - C
Deer - 7 chord [Emin7#5] - E/DGC
Pan... - 3 chord [Amin] - A/CEG_A
...teth - G
For - 6 chord [Dmin7] - D/ACF
Note these 2 things:
a. CFG_A means play CFA but gracing into A from G.
b. Emin7#5 wouldn't look like a diatonic chord to you - not until you look at it as Cmajadd9/E i.e. Cmajadd9 [CDEG] but with E as the lowest note instead of C. Convinced? I think so Moreso, it uses notes entirely seen in the scale - no note is chromatic or foreign to the scale.
But these are not where we are headed to. So let's try using tritone voicings for some chords we will get to know what they are after we construct them:
- Melody driven - Our main chords are the 1 and the 6 chords. We employed the 7-3 as means to get to that 6 chord. Now let's use the melodies there to conjure up some chords.
. First, remember we are to use some major triads. So we look for major triads that have those melodies as their notes. A major triad is formed by a 1+3+5 intervalic formation. So this means we are going to look for major triads that have our melody as either their 1, 3 or 5th notes.
Our first melody is ....C. Yes, a C note. C is the 1 of Cmaj, the 3 of Abmaj and the 5 of Fmaj. So the 3 possible major triads to use are Cmaj [CEG], Abmaj [AbCEb] and Fmaj [FAC].
b. Secondly we voice these 3 chords to have the melody on top:
Cmaj becomes EGC, Abmaj becomes EbAbC and Fmaj remains FAC.
c. Third step is to find the LH tritone pairs to go with these RH triads. To do this, we will use only 2 simple approaches [for now. There are more. Trust me]. The first approach is to get the first note of the tritone pair by moving DOWN A WHOLE STEP FROM THE ROOTS OF THE MAJOR TRIADS. The second approach is the get the first note of the tritone pair by moving UP A WHOLE STEP FROM THE ROOTS OF THE MAJOR TRIADS. Once you get one note of the tritone, the other note that makes up the pair is easy. We already dealt with that on the first part of this series.
So with approach style 1:
Cmaj has it's root as C which is a whole step above Bb and a whole step below D. That makes our tritone pairs BbE and DAb.
Abmaj has its root as Ab which is a whole step above Gb and a whole step below Bb. That makes our tritone pairs BbE and CGb.
Fmaj has its root as F which is a whole step above Eb and a whole step below G. That makes our tritone pairs EbA and GDb.
So putting both the LH and the RH together, we get these:
EBb/EGC which is C7 i.e. CEGBb
AbD/EGC which is E7#5#9 i.e. EG#CDG
BbE/EbAbC which is C7#5#9 i.e. CEG#BbD#
GbC/EbAbC which is Ab7 i.e. AbCEbGb
EbA/FAC which is F7 i.e. FACEb
GDb/FAC which is A7#5#9 i.e. AC#FGC
We can see all these 6 chords are dominant chords, some unaltered and some altered.
If we do same for the second melody, which is ... an A note. we would get these:
Amaj as C#EA, Fmaj as CFA and Dmaj as DF#A.
Adding the LH tritones, we get these:
C#G/C#EA as A7 i.e. AC#EG
FB/C#EA which is C#7#5#9 i.e. C#FABE
GC#/CFA which is A7#5#9 i.e. AC#FGC
EbA/CFA which is F7 i.e. FACEb
F#C/DF#A which is D7 i.e. DF#CA
EBb/DF#A which is F#7#5#9 i.e. F#A#DEA
Now we have a couple of tritone voicings of chords to throw into that 7-3 part. We'll notice that some chords showed up on both sides, so we won't be repeating a chord used on one side on the other side.
Let's try them out then...
As - 1 chord [Fmaj] - F/CFG_A
The - C
Deer - 7 chord [C7/E] - EBb/EGC
Pan... - 3 chord [F7/A] - EbA/CFA
...teth - G
For - 6 chord [Dmin7] - D/ACF
OR
As - 1 chord [Fmaj] - F/CFG_A
The - C
Deer - 7 chord [E7#5#9] - AbD/EGC
Pan... - 3 chord [A7#5#9] - GC#/CFA
...teth - G
For - 6 chord [Dmin7] - D/ACF
OR
As - 1 chord [Fmaj] - F/CFG_A
The - C
Deer - 7 chord [Ab7/E] - GbC/EbAbC
Pan... - 3 chord [C#7#5#9/A] - FB/C#EA
...teth - G
For - 6 chord [Dmin7] - D/ACF
Or any other mix. Note that even though some of those 7 and 3 chords do not have E or A as their lowest notes in the voicing, yet they are still labelled a 7 and 3 chord. That's because the bass plays the 7 and 3 notes i.e. the E and A which is why the name of the chords are written as a slash chord to indicate the lowest note [of the overall voicing - piano + bass]
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