Side slipping is a common comping concept that a lot of players use to make a single chord sound more interesting. If you're not familiar with it, side slipping is simply moving a chord up or down a half-step temporarily.
If you want to be a little more clever about this concept you can get some nice chromatic, contrapuntal lines happening by shifting the voicing you're using a little. For now I'm just posting Major 7 chords, though this concept works with any chord type. Also, for those of you who are not familiar with jazz shorthand, the triangle in the chord symbols means "maj7".
So for example, the first chord (Bbmaj13) has the 13th on top, shifts down a half step to Amaj13, then shifts back up to Bbmaj9 while the top note continues down to the 5th. There are a number of ways to do this. Using these same voicings, you could use Bbmaj13, up to Bmaj9 with F# on top, then move down to Bbmaj9. In this case the counterpoint is between the 13 of Bb moving down to the 5th of the rising Bmaj9 voicing. Play with as many variations as you can and ultimately let your ear be the guide of what you think sounds best. I find that I like different possibilities depending on the context.
I've included several other examples for you to explore and some suggested rhythms in case you are not familiar with this sound. You may have to click on the image to expand it to see all the examples.
I hope you find them useful!
Eric
If you are interested in some private instruction either in Chicago or via Skype, please contact me though my website: www.klotzguitarstudio.com
Message to Readers
My original goal with this blog in 2008 was to build a guitar lesson blog that progressively got more advanced as it went on. I'm now scrapping that idea to hopefully share more useful, less published information on various musical ideas and exercises that I find interesting. In the interest of continual documentation of these ideas, these posts may be hand written and a little less professional looking, but the information will be useful if you take the time to work with it. At the very least, it will serve as documentation for the things my students and I find useful. Hopefully you will get some use out of them as well. Please feel free to share or comment if you do.
Thanks,
Eric
Saturday, February 1, 2014
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