· 3 min read

How To Practice Jazz Piano Voicings in all 12 keys

Learn how you can easily practice any jazz voicing in MidiStickers with backing tracks.

How to Effectively Practice Jazz Piano Voicings

Mastering voicings for complex chords is one of the most demanding tasks in learning contemporary harmony. Being able to recall differents types of extended chords and their positions in any key is of paramount importance to musicians working in any style.

In this article, we will share a structured approach so you can learn faster and better.

First of all, before delving into more complex voicing work, it’s important that you master all basic triads and tetrads. For that, you can use the some methodology exposed here, with help of the MidiStickers software.

From Basic to Advanced

Before delving into complex voicing work, it’s important to have some groundwork. This is an possible progression in your voicings journey:

    1. Basic triads and tetrads
    1. Open voicings
    1. Open voicings with extensions
    1. Rootless voicings (Type A and Type B)
    1. Quartals, So What, Upper Structure
    1. Exotic/Idiossyncratic

Books and reference

These are our favore books on this topic:

  • Dan Haerle - Jazz Piano Voicings
  • Phil DeGreg - Jazz Keyboard Harmony & Voicings
  • Mark Levine: The Jazz Piano Book
  • Ted Pease/Ken Pullig: Modern Jazz Voicings
  • Jamey Aebersold: transcriptions from their Play-Along series

Got any other? Let us know!

Using MidiStickers to unleash your 12-key Piano Voicing training

MidiStickers Pro offers you an unique methodology for mastering Jazz Piano Voicings in all 12 keys with auto-accompaniment tools using the Voicings Explorer tool.

The Voicings Explorer lets you browse through different types of voicings for each chord type, filtering them by tags. When MIDI is set to On, playing a chord on your MIDI controller will auto-select that chord and display voicings for it. Click the MIDI button to set this behiavor to Off, so you can experiment voicings without changing the currently selected chord.

Voicings Explorer
When you hover a voicing, additional buttons will apear. Clicking the button will launch the Voicing Viewer tool, transposing it to all 12 keys:

The Voicing Viewer tool displays the voicing in all 12 keys in different patterns (“Chord Order”). The default order is chromatic transposition, which emphatizes moving the chord to nearby positions and will help you getting a feel for the different hand positions of that voicing.

The  Play button starts the practice session. During your practice, an auto-accompaniment will be generated in a variety of musical styles and your progress on correctly playing through all the voicing transpositions will be tracked. During the practice session, you won’t be able to see the music notation before you acuratelly play the voicing, so that the focus is on hands-on transposition and not note reading.

Once you master moving the voicing chromatically, we suggest using the “Seconds” pattern. Playing by seconds is a greater challenge than playing chromatically and will improve your tactile memory.

At this stage, you might want to try playing the voicing around the Circle of Fifths, by using the “Fifths” pattern. This is the most difficult pattern, as it will require moving your entire hand position and immediate recall of the voicing. For best results in complex voicings, try breaking the voicing in chunks, ie, left hand plays a fifth starting on the root, while right hand plays a fifth starting on the third.

Once you are confortable playing through of the Circle of Fifths, we suggest you to try the “Random” ordem, which will generate a different random order each time it is selected. This mode will be the ultimate recall test!

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