How to use tritones in music Lesson 3

We have looked at how to use major, minor and augmented triads, and major 7th tetrads on the RH and the tritone on the LH as the base in voicing certain dominant chords. Today, we'll look at the continuation of the voicing of chords using a tritone base and a diminished or suspended triad on the RH.

A. Diminished Triads

A plain dominant 7th chord is diminished triad on the 3rd over the root for e.g. F7 is FACEb which is Adim [ACEb] over an F. One way to voice this dominant chord would be to play the diminished triad over the tritone shell as ACEb/AEb over an F bass.
Another is the popular 7b9 altered dominant chord. This altered dominant chord is a dim7 of the 3rd over the root for e.g. F7b9 is FACEbGb which is Adim7 [ACEbGb] over an F. The dim7 is a nesting of dim triads - Adim7 contains Adim, Cdim, Ebdim and Gbdim. Any of these dim triads can be played on the RH over the shell, however, we'll use the ones that have the b9 so as to use its flavor e.g. CEbGb/EbA or EbGbA/EbA or GbAC/AEb. We could also use the other tritone pair in this chord to voice it e.g. ACEb/CGb. All of these are over an F bass note.
We could also play the dim7 tetrad on our RH, in any of its inversions, over the shell on our LH, and the root as our bass note e.g. G7b9 ad GBDFAb voiced as FAbBD/FB/G.

B. Suspended triads

This is the second popular voicing, next to the major triads.
A dominant 9 chord is a good one to voice like this e.g. A9 which is AC#EGB, can be voiced as BEA/GC#.
BEA is Esus4 or Asus2.
We could change our major triads to sus2 triads too. For e.g. CEG/DAb can be voiced as CDG/DAb and the RH can be changed to a quartal voicing as DGC/DAb over the same bass notes of E or Bb.
DGC/DAb/E is still E7#5#9 i.e EG#B#DFx [enharmonically EG#CDG]
DGC/DAb/Bb is Bb9add6 i.e. BbD[F]GAbC
More to come.

#pianolessons #chords #scales #piano #chordprogression #inversions #tutorial #music #tritones #jazz #lesson #mouvement