Barry HarrisThe method

Chris Parks · Stage 6: Line devices

We Don’t Know D7

Episode 97 · 13:17 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris argues you never fully know a dominant scale and shows how much is left in D7. He runs Barry’s drills (scale, thirds, triads, chords, half step below), moves them onto the ‘and’, adds chromatic-scale half steps, tests pivots from any degree, and finds three diminished chords that belong to D7.

Step by step

  1. 0:00Run Barry’s D7 drills: the scale up and down, then in thirds, triads and chords, each up and down.
  2. 1:15Put a half step below the first note of each third (C sharp, D, F sharp), then do the same with triads.
  3. 1:56Put a half step below each chord, sometimes as a triplet, as Barry does.
  4. 2:34Start the half-step-below triad on the ‘and’ instead of the beat and hear the new feel.
  5. 3:58Play the triad from the fifth with the half step below on the ‘and’, add two half steps and come down the C major arpeggio on the flat 7th.
  6. 4:42After every triad or chord up, add two half steps using Barry’s chromatic scale, from each degree.
  7. 6:03Practise pivots: hit the root, then drop the rest of the chord an octave, from every degree.
  8. 6:43Call out degrees in random order and pivot from each at once.
  9. 7:29Do thirds with a half step below, always starting on the ‘and’.
  10. 8:55Use all three diminished chords on D7: the usual one from the third, G diminished, and G sharp diminished.

Chords and notes in this video

Tap a time to jump to it in the video.

D70:39
𝄢♯♯
C3DC4D♭G♭
  1. C#
  2. D
  3. F#
D76:03
𝄢♯
C3DACG♭
  1. D
  2. F#
  3. A
  4. C

Barry’s own words on this

6.7 Pivoting6.6 Chromatic pickups and the well-placed half step6.2 The augmented arpeggio and the diminished on the third of the dominant14.2 Every key, every degree, every way

In the course

The scale every way: up and down, thirds, triads, chordsBarry’s chromatic scaleFeel the ‘and’Eighth- and sixteenth-note triplets in linesThe three important arpeggios of a dominantPivotsHalf step belowCome up a diminished from the thirdSmall things

Transcript

  1. 0:00Hello and welcome to episode 97 of Things I’ve Learned from Bear Harris. And today I thought we would kind of stay on our theme of looking at smaller things, but in particular we would talk about D7. Because I’ve been practicing D7 and I realize there is no knowing D7 fully. There’s always something else to discover in it. So one of the, I’ll show you what I mean, one of the exercises that Barry has as practice for a D7 for instance is, he’ll say, okay let’s play the scale up and down.
  2. 0:39So I’m playing D7 scale or D mix a little dance scale. Then he says play that same scale in thirds. Triads. Chords. Everything up and down. So if you do thirds up, you have to do thirds down. Triads down, chords down. Then he says sometimes put a half step below. Let’s do thirds again, we’ll put a half step below the first note.
  3. 1:15So instead of D, F sharp, you’re going to play C sharp, D, F sharp. And you’re going to go up the scale like that. Same thing going down. Or you could do the first note again. Which is beautiful. Then you do the same thing with the triad. put a half step below the triad. Same thing, this is pretty coming down with the half step below the highest note of the triad.
  4. 1:56And then a half step below the chord, and Barry sometimes does it like with a triplet, so he You would say one, like a triplet. Now that’s just a couple of things you should know just for D7. And then there’s a million other things. But one thing I started looking at for myself, which I discovered, I’ve never practiced this. I took the half step below the triad.
  5. 2:34So normally I would say, if we started, we said one, two, three, four. That’s starting on a beat. And then it occurred to me to try it on the end and what that sounds like. So listen to what it sounds like on the end. One, two, three, four. Totally different feel. One, two, three, four, five. Different feel.
  6. 3:21I’ve never played it like that before, ever. So I said, let me see if I could challenge myself to come up with phrases using that idea, that concept of the half step below because I’ve done it half step below starting on a beat so one two three four I’ve done things like that with you I did the triad from the fifth a half step below and I started on the beat one two three four which is pretty and I put one half step but now if I did that same phrase and I started it on the end well what would it sound like so let’s start
  7. 3:58on the hand. One, two, three, four, one. That time I added an extra half step so when I got to the second, that was on the beat so I used two of Barry’s descending half steps between the second and tonic, tonic and flat seven. So here’s the example of the first one again. One, two, three, four. Or one half step. Then I came down the important arpeggio on the flat 7, which is C major. Or I could do it this way, which is starting on the end, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1.
  8. 4:42Also pretty. And I have never played those before. Never. So now, OK, I said, OK, I did this thing where I did two half steps. So that means every time after I do the triad, I’m going to do two half steps, whatever the two half steps are. And I’ll use Barry’s chromatic scale to do those. So we’ll say, start from the fifth, we’ll say one, two, three, four, one. So now I’ll do a chord up from the sixth. And now the third is the highest note, so I’m just gonna do two half steps again. So one, two, three, four, five.
  9. 5:20Now I’ll start on the seventh, flat seventh, and then we’ll say. Now we get to the four. Now there’s no half step in between four and three, so we have to jump up to five. So let’s say... Now we’ll do the tonic. Let’s see. That’s a nice one. I mean, these are all totally different things. The point of me making this video though really is that just when you think you know D7 or you’re comfortable with a scale, C major scale, whatever, you don’t really know it.
  10. 6:03You don’t really know it. Because it’s really impossible to really know it. Because there’s so many millions of things you could do with a scale to really make it sound beautiful. Even before you put half steps, just ways that you could break up a scale to make it sound wonderful. like Barry’s pivots, which are so fantastic. In case anybody hasn’t worked on pivots, what a pivot is, is let’s say we did the chord up from the root, which has four notes, D, F sharp, A, C. You’re going to hit the D, and now I need F sharp, A, C to be an octave lower. So then I’ll do that from every degree.
  11. 6:43Second. third, and so on, and you keep going like that. So you have to know from every degree. So the way I’ve been practicing it recently is, no matter what note I’m thinking of in D7, I say, okay, can I pivot from that note? So if I said, let’s do it from the seventh, one, two, three, four, that’s a pivot from the seventh. If I say sixth, one, two, three, four, but I don’t want to do them in order. So let’s say second. Let’s say fourth. So you have to know right away. The pivots are fantastic. And I thought I
  12. 7:29really knew pivots, obviously learning them so many years ago and thinking like I really had them in my hand. But you really don’t know them unless you can do them just like that, where you call out a degree of the scale and you’re able to. That’s another thing I thought I knew, which I don’t really know. And also these little exercises, which are so beautiful. Like we did triad. We did a triad on the beat, and we also did a triad on the end with the half step below. One, two, three, four. Now we did thirds before. So what’s nice is we’ll do half step below the third but always on the end one two three four one
  13. 8:17those are really beautiful also something that I don’t do often so you take a thing that you’re really comfortable with doing and maybe try to do it on the end of the beat instead of on the beat and you’re gonna find even Even though it’s the same notes, it has a totally different feel to it and causes you to do something else after it, maybe that you’ve never done before. So the other thing I was thinking about in terms of D7... Oh, somebody else brought up something really interesting.
  14. 8:55In that D7 has a diminished found on the third, on the fifth, or every dominant has a diminished found on the 3rd, 5th, 7th, and flat 9th. So that’s nice. We know this diminished from D7 to G7 or G major, whichever way we want to do it. Start from the 3rd or from the 5th or from the flat 7 or from the flat 9. Those are all beautiful. But there’s two other diminishes.
  15. 9:28There’s F sharp diminished and I’ll say G diminished. Now G diminished, as one of my students pointed out, very smart that he pointed this out to me because I never thought about this. But we have the D7 diminished scale that Barry talks about. And that has a D7 and also an E diminished, which means we can use that E diminished, which happens to be the G diminished. So the way that you would figure it out is, let’s see if we were playing it and we said...
  16. 10:07So I just used the diminished on the way down, so it’s like... It has a beautiful sound to it. That’s that diminished. That’s G diminished. Then you have G sharp diminished, which you could think of as kind of like... it’s the third of E7, at least this is the way I think about it, it’s the diminished that’s found on the third of E7 which kind of takes you back to A minor and if you want to think about D7 as A minor that’s a nice way to look at it. So now if we said D7, let’s see one two three, that was that G sharp
  17. 10:52diminished. So let’s see. Oh, let’s do it from, let’s see. Let’s see. Ah, let’s see. One, two, three. Let’s see. That’s a nice one. That’s a nice one. That’s using that diminished. So So you can even say... Also pretty.
  18. 11:26So look at that. There’s all three diminishes that you can use as part of D7. Somebody pointed that out to me yesterday. Really interesting. So the end result is... We really don’t know D7. And if you think about it that way, think about what improvising is. Improvising is soloing over something like this chord moving to this chord. So movement. So D7 moving to G7, or D7 moving to G major, or D7 moving to D flat major, or D7 moving to G minor, or whichever way you want to look at it.
  19. 12:09That’s a movement. But the first thing I think we have to do as improvisers is say, well, what do I have to say on D7 before we even move to someplace else? And if you really ask yourself that, like, well, how much do I really have that I can say on D7 that I feel I can stand on its own? So if somebody takes my solo, not mine, but yours meaning your own, a person’s solo, and says, okay, here’s a D7, let me see what they played on D7, and just clips that out, would they find something of substance? And that’s a question you have to keep asking yourself as an improviser is, is this, is my solo worth listening to?
  20. 12:51And I think the only way you can get to the point where you say yes is if you really put in the time to say I’m really going to develop D7. I’m really going to learn how to play D7 really, really well. As best as I can. Anyway, hope you enjoyed that little video about D7 and how much we have to work on it. Until next time, thanks.