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Rootless Voicing/Shells
This is broader than a “website improvement” notion, but I’ll put it here. I’ve taken up the 30-Day Rootless Voicing Challenge, convinced by the recent podcasts and other lessons to drop everything else because it is the next essential step for me (most of us?) — as you convincingly insist. Doing the practice drills and occasionally “cheating” by trying to incorporate some while deploying the solo system, it clearly is. But, as you say, they are “hard” and the problem for me (all of us?) is really one of memory (besides the eternal muscle-memory quest). You’ve already identified the main issue — “randomization” in actual tunes, and being able to find the voicings more fluidly.
But through your JPS system overall, the main premise is that we can build things up step by step (unlike our “past” efforts at bouncing around shiny things ;). It seems to me that you have suggested a path to this, but it isn’t quite as explicit as it might be (or at least I haven’t seen the segment on the site that makes it so).
Somehow, I think that you could help the world bridge this gap by helping us to think about rootless voicings as “filling in” the shells — along the lines of the harmonization steps of the solo system. You’ve mentioned this idea in passing, but I’m wondering if you could actually think about and present a full “pedagogy” of going from knowing the shells (3-7 for structure I; 7-3 for structure II) and “just” adding in the 5/9/13s. It _seems_ to me that if we have learned the shells, then when we “look” for the rootless voicings we could conceptualize or visualize them in this way.
I have tried to do it this for a couple of days, but I’m not confident enough to say–yes, that works. If you were to step back and “look at it” this way, do you think it might be a sub-step in the JPS path that you might make more clear? If you do, I’m thinking it could possibly be the basis for a YT Podcast or even new substeps in the whole program.
Here’s what I mean. The solo system seems to be built for this step. We learn the 3s, 7s, 10s, shells, then filling those with 5s and 8s, then extensions — but there is still something of a gap in articulating how the same process, perhaps a bit more formally, would give us the way to “find” the structure I and II rootless voicings by first identifying the shells (which we’ve presumably learned in the previous step). Frankly, I think you are on the edge of explaining something in a way that no one has clarified in all the jazz education out there.
This is more of an intuition. That’s why I ask you if you think it might be worth exploring. Cheers, D.
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1 Reply
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Hi,
Rootless 2-5-1’s do take a lot of practice to learn! I find a good way to get muscle memory and cement the sound of each chord is to isolate them.
For example, only do all the rootless 5’s (Dominants) through the circle of 5ths. Then, play all the 2-5-1 progressions through the circle of 5ths to “set” the chords into memory. Next, vary the exercise and play only the 2’s or, only the 1’s right through the circle of 5ths. It will start to become automatic.
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