Cycle [2, 3, 4, etc.] Exercises

[RunningBeagle]

Hey all - have seen some discussion of Mick Goodrick's material on here recently and was wondering if the concept of cycles had been discussed before as pertains to voice leading. I did a search and didn't see anything. I'd love to know what others are doing to extend this concept.

Here is a video I made introducing the concept for a jazz education website I am working on. Not live yet but figured the video was fine to share. Very basic version of this concept, but you can obviously take it in a lot of directions:

Merry Christmas Eve too.

[pcjazz]

Hey all - have seen some discussion of Mick Goodrick's material on here recently and was wondering if the concept of cycles had been discussed before as pertains to voice leading. I did a search and didn't see anything.

There's a humungously long thread here: Anybody use the Goodchord Voice Leading Books?

[Jimmy blue note]

Sometime around the new year, maybe before, maybe shortly thereafter, I'm going to be posting some approaches to learning and studying this material.
I got a request from Mike Stern a little while for Mick and I to write a book on "What do I do with this?", and I'm going to post some of the many practical ways others and myself have used the Almanacs.
That'll happen on the aforementioned thread... a humungously long thread!

[Jimmy blue note]

Hey all - have seen some discussion of Mick Goodrick's material on here recently and was wondering if the concept of cycles had been discussed before as pertains to voice leading. I did a search and didn't see anything. I'd love to know what others are doing to extend this concept.

Here is a video I made introducing the concept for a jazz education website I am working on. Not live yet but figured the video was find to share. Very basic version of this concept, but you can obviously take it in a lot of directions:

Merry Christmas Eve too.

Beautiful! It might be noted that your cycle 2, while showing cycle in spread triad voicings, is in parallel voicings, and the chords don't voice lead; they follow up the scale. The voice led triads in the almanac are really cool because while the cycles go up (Cmaj Dmin Emin Fmaj...) the notes come DOWN. SO COOL!

CGE descends to AFD which descends to GEB which descends to FCA...etc.
This is the going up while going down that intrigued Mike Stern when he saw Julian Lage playing. He asked Jules "How did you DO that up and down thing?" to which Julian said It's Mick's Almanacs. And Mike called Mick shortly thereafter. Now we're doing the project.

[RunningBeagle]

That's rad. I'll give that a whirl. TBH this stuff is mostly from memory since I once had Mick's book but over the course of several moves I guess I've lost it. I was always taught you go to the closest next voicing so for cycle 2/7 it was just parallel triads. But obviously going down while spelling up is more interesting. I have vague recollections of being taught that too.

So C-->A, E-->D, G-->F, all descending, yes?

[Jimmy blue note]

That's rad. I'll give that a whirl. TBH this stuff is mostly from memory since I once had Mick's book but over the course of several moves I guess I've lost it. I was always taught you go to the closest next voicing so for cycle 2/7 it was just parallel triads. But obviously going down while spelling up is more interesting. I have vague recollections of being taught that too.

So C-->A, E-->D, G-->F, all descending, yes?

Yes but here's the trick,
1) know all the inversions
2) know each of the voices within each chord
3) your 3rd is always the closest voice to the next root if you descend. If you're playing a C triad going to D minor, the 3rd of C (E) becomes the root of the next chord. You don't even have to figure out where the other voices go, you merely use the inversion and chord quality, follow the scale down from E to D and your hand knows the inversion that fits.
That's ONE way to follow the cycle sequence.
Another is to know the roots, and as they're tossed from one voice to the other, each cycle has a distinct passing of the root from one chord to another.
Another is to hear the scale descend through one voice to another, and simply apply the inversion that makes the previous voices flow smoothly.
Those are different approaches based on fingerboard position, or voice location, or ear.
How you navigate says a lot about how you see chords: By fret position, or hand position or ear.
When you really know it, it's all these things at once.

[Christian Miller]

Sometime around the new year, maybe before, maybe shortly thereafter, I'm going to be posting some approaches to learning and studying this material.
I got a request from Mike Stern a little while for Mick and I to write a book on "What do I do with this?", and I'm going to post some of the many practical ways others and myself have used the Almanacs.
That'll happen on the aforementioned thread... a humungously long thread!

nice one dude, hopefully that’ll coincide nicely with my having some practice time.

i revisited the cycle 3 exercise I was out onto by a teacher years ago and realised I’d become much more fluent with fingerboard harmony in the interim.

I think the more ways you practice fretboard harmony the better and more flexible you get.

[RunningBeagle]

Yes but here's the trick,
1) know all the inversions
2) know each of the voices within each chord
3) your 3rd is always the closest voice to the next root if you descend. If you're playing a C triad going to D minor, the 3rd of C (E) becomes the root of the next chord. You don't even have to figure out where the other voices go, you merely use the inversion and chord quality, follow the scale down from E to D and your hand knows the inversion that fits.
That's ONE way to follow the cycle sequence.
Another is to know the roots, and as they're tossed from one voice to the other, each cycle has a distinct passing of the root from one chord to another.
Another is to hear the scale descend through one voice to another, and simply apply the inversion that makes the previous voices flow smoothly.
Those are different approaches based on fingerboard position, or voice location, or ear.
How you navigate says a lot about how you see chords: By fret position, or hand position or ear.
When you really know it, it's all these things at once.

Man I am sitting here in Park City, UT for another 6 days without a guitar and dying to try this stuff. Have been trying to find a rental but no luck. But I'm visualizing all of this and it makes sense. In fact it feels really familiar so I'm wondering if I didn't study this directly at one point in time.

Easiest way for me is just to grab the nearest inversion based on the ascending or descending scale root. I think that's the bolded part of your reply, but did you "hear the scale ascend" in this particular example since we'd been talking about moving the voices down while spelling the scale up? I remember distinctly singing the solfege up while moving the chords down so yeah this was definitely practiced a lot many years ago...

I always sensed there was a "trick" to finding the next root visually but never formally worked it out so that's interesting to try too.

Sounds like you know Mick G. and Mike Stern - are you/were you Berklee faculty/alum? I took a class w/ Mick back in 2010 or '11.

[Tal_175]

This seems similar to the one of the ways I work on tunes. Start with a triad (or inversion), always go the the next chord with a minimal voice movement (ascending or descending). Triads can be root triads or upper extension triads. You can play a different type of triad on each chord (different extensions) and not always use the primary chord tones. Then I improvise based on the triads I worked out and voice leading within them.

It's a great way to learn tunes, come up with melodic ideas that go through the changes, study the fretboard, find interesting voicings for comping etc.

[Jimmy blue note]

This seems similar to the one of the ways I work on tunes. Start with a triad (or inversion), always go the the next chord with a minimal voice movement (ascending or descending). Triads can be root triads or upper extension triads. You can play a different type of triad on each chord (different extensions) and not always use the primary chord tones. Then I improvise based on the triads you worked out and voice leading within them.

It's a great way to learn tunes, come up with melodic ideas that go through the changes, study the fretboard, find interesting voicings for comping etc.

Exactly. Given any chord, we know that you can play a scale within the fret 'neighborhood' of that chord. Each scale note is the root of another chord that can be voiced in a way that either moves in a certain direction or uses the notes of the original chord. This gives you voice leading.
The cycles of the Almanac systemize this movement into canonic and consistent movement, and each cycle has a distinctive pattern of root movement. Some cycles like cycle 4 are faster moving and some cycles like cycle 6 share many of the same notes and impart a very subtle feeling of movement.
Knowing the cycles gives one a very controlled and detailed knowlege of melodic/harmonic movement across the fingerboard. The Almanacs can be used as exercises in ear training, in fingerboard mapping, in voice recognition, in kinesthetic dexterity in 4 voices, in arpeggiated lines that don't sound overtly 'block chord' oriented, in combining cyclical harmony over a given chord structure of a piece to create intricate movement (pianistic or orchestral) with the minimum of "figuring it out on the fly".

Basically, it's a system for getting to know the guitar in 4 voices. Where the Almanacs really move to new territory is systemizing chords that are NOT triadic or tertiary in nature. Learning all the permutations of 4 note chords in a non-tertiary context opens up harmonic textures and shadings that are not a part of traditional jazz and too, being able to move in and out of the familiar allows much broader emotional potential and impact.

More on this on the other thread though.

[Jimmy blue note]

Sounds like you know Mick G. and Mike Stern - are you/were you Berklee faculty/alum? I took a class w/ Mick back in 2010 or '11.

Hmm, maybe you were there about when I was too. Did you happen to coincide with the time Julian Lage, Kenji Herbert, Andrew Marzotto, Andrew Cheng or Sung-Ho Choi or Mike Bono were there? All students of Mick. I might have even met you.