social/reddit
[https://reddit.com/r/jazzguitar/comments/m4cpnh/deleted_by_user/gqtoh5o/]
Link to the etude PDF: https://lapompeband.com/public/days_of_wine_and_roses_etude.pdf
Info —
My teacher had me learning drop 2 voicings (highly recommended!!) for all the different chord types, and I wanted to start applying them to making my own chord melodies. Just finding nice voice-leading between different voicings already sounds great, but I figured in the long run it would be more useful (and probably stick in my head better) to learn the voicings with actual tunes. Plus, just playing the changes is missing the more difficult part - playing a specific melody at the same time!
If you limit yourself strictly to drop 2 voicings, it turns out that the process of coming up with a chord melody for a tune is pretty systematic - for every chord, from all the possible voicings, there’s really just one voicing that has the specific melody note you need in the top voice (though it could be played in multiple places on the guitar).
By sticking strictly to drop 2s, and by sticking strictly to the melody and chords as written, the result is a little boring - it’s more of an etude than a performance-ready arrangement. But it’s great for learning, because you end up seeing the same voicings again and again (and the ones you see are the most common ones for real music!), and these etudes could be used as a basis for a more elaborate arrangements.
After doing this by hand a few times, I realized that I wasn’t learning much from the process of “find the voicing with this melody note in the top” - at least not at this stage, while I’m still getting familiar with the voicings and shapes. But since the process of making the etude was so systematic, I figured maybe I could get a computer to do it for me instead! So I made this tool to help me (and maybe you) —
The tool takes in a leadsheet in MusicXML form (can be exported from most major sheet music software), and spits out the full arrangement in PDF form, with chord diagrams and tabs/notation for the melody. It’s pretty deterministic right now, but there are a few options (how to handle triads, whether to output tabs vs standard notation, orientation of the fretboard diagrams).
The attached PDF is an example of what comes directly out of the process.
Regarding the video —
It’s not supposed to be an amazing performance, I’m still learning, but I think it’s amazing in it’s own way how good something so simple can already sound just by using these voicings. I think they’re like magic!
The video is mostly (say 95%) the etude exactly as written, though I made a bit of my own intro/outro to keep it interesting (though still loosely based on the voicings from the PDF).
If you want more info about the tool, or especially if you’re a jazz guitar educator and would like to try it out and would be willing to give feedback on how to improve it, please send me a message! I’d like to make it into something that could be useful for everybody.
If I come up with any other tunes that seem worth recording I’ll post another video!