Ornaments Over Major Third

 In my post on playing jazz piano from a lead sheet, I shared some melodic substitions rules that I learned from Shan Verma. If you have a melodic passage outlining a major third or minor third, up or down, Shan has some ornaments you can put there to add some movement and variety. His riffs were called triplet major (up/down), triplet minor (up/down), chromatic major (up/down), and standard minor (up/down). Now, I was a little bothered that I didn't know a Verma riff called standard major up or down. If he has one, it's not available in his free materials. Maybe if you pay for his courses. There also isn't a free chromatic minor up or down, but that didn't bother me as much. I want to know the standard stuff first.

So I made up some more riffs for major thirds. Suppose we're in 4/4 time and we go from C for two beats, up a major third to E for some amount of time, let's say also two beats. We'll replace the C with four eighth note and keep E with the same duration, giving us a new rhythm of [e e e e h]. Here are some pitch options and what I call the riffs: 

[C B C D E] # standard major

[C D B C E] # enclosed major

[C D E Eb E] # neighbor major

I like all of these. What's more, if you play them in reverse, going from E down to C, I still like them, and continue to think the names are appropiate.

To put these and the other Verma riffs into code, I wrote some functions. One of them does diatonic offsets, i.e. given a pitch and a scale, it takes you up or down the scale by some number of notes. If the given note isn't in the scale, the first offset gets you back onto the scale on the nearest note in the direction  you want to go (i.e. the nearest note changes depending on if the offset supplied to the function is positive or negative). I also wrote a function that finds chromatic offsets, which mostly just feeds a chromatic scale into the diatonic offset function.

With these functions, we can define the riffs relative to the start note in terms of scalar motion and chromatic motion. This is kind of cool because the riff can adapt depending on where you are in the scale: it doesn't have to have a fixed intervallic structure, though it also could. Like, if you're doing a riff over an ascending minor third in C major, the diatonic middle note could be a major second or a minor second up from the starting note.

[D, E, F] : [M2, m2]

[A, B, C] : [M2, m2]

[E, F, G] : [m2, M2]

[B, C, D] : [m2, M2]

And things get even crazier if your scales are microtonal.

In the major riffs I shared in terms of pitches, the standard major, the enclosed major, and the neighbor major, most of the pitches could be thought of as diatonic in C: neighbor major has a chromatic note, but the rest could come from a C major scale. But some of the B notes below C, maybe I should think of those as a chroamtic offset below the starting pitch. This is the difference between a standard major triad riff up on G in the key of C major looking like:

     [G F G A B] or [G F# G A B]

I intend to try interpreting the B notes in both Standard Major and Enclosed Major as diatonic or chromatic offsets and see which one I like better.

Maybe later I'll come up with more riffs or minor third, or even augmented or diminished thirds. We'll see.

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