GUITAR
Dan Pitt is a guitarist, composer, and improviser based in Toronto with a focus in improvised music ranging from a multitude of genres such
as jazz, folk, rock, pop, and contemporary. He has toured and performed in Canada and the U.S., working with musicians such as Dave Young,
Terry Promane, Andrew Downing, Tim Berne, Michael Formanek, Ben Monder, and David Torn. Dan’s recent trio CD entitled
Fundamentally Flawed is available at www.dan-pitt.com.
By Dan Pitt
Expanding Harmonic Possibilities
Through Diad Writing
Ex. 1a
Ex. 1b
Ex. 2a
Ex. 2b
As
many musicians know, there
are several ways to approach
composition and all of them
have different values to cer-
tain people. Some will say “write the melody
first” and not to simply come up with a chord
progression to write over. Others may find a
rhythmic or bass obstinate they like and write
around that. While musicians write in all of these
ways and are able to come up with incredible
works, one approach I was given during my
studies was to write and try to hear both the
melody and harmony at the same time.
Now, hearing that all at once can sound in-
timidating and extremely challenging to some.
What you can narrow it down to is the relation-
ship between the melody and the bass note. hear which note you are putting underneath
it. Play them both to confirm that it’s the sound
and diad you hear. Then continue forward one
note at a time. Consider where the melody is
leading and if the bass note changes or is held
over several melody notes.
Eventually, once you have sketched the two-
part movement between the bass and lead,
you can imply more specific harmony with the
middle voices (Ex. 1b). I find this gives you great
harmonic freedom with the quality of chord
and implied harmony you create that moves
through the composition.
If you want to dive into this concept further,
you can try applying this over a jazz standard
where the harmony is open to substitutions and
reharmonization.
Ex. 1a shows an example of this in a piece of
mine written using this process. Start with
a single melody note, play it, and then try to Ex. 2a is the first four bars to the Sammy Cahn
composition “I Should Care.” For this example,
we are using the harmony implied by Bill Evans’
trio recordings. An exercise I like to do for this, as
well as other standards, is to take these four bars
(or more) and have a chromatic melody pushing
through the harmonic progression.
Moving chromatically forces you to hear
more dissonant movements, which can allow
for a more creative progression when the rest
of the chord is added in Ex. 2b. Here, I chose to
substitute an F bass note for where the B usually
is. The harmony and sounds here can open the
ear to accepting more harmonic possibilities
over exiting and new compositions.
These are a few means of generating new ideas
and implying different harmonic sounds over
your music and other compositions in the jazz
idiom and beyond. They have helped me break
out of some habitual ways of composing, im-
provising, and comping and I hope they can do
the same for you.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 25