I'm Adam Manus, and this is the You'll Hear It Podcast.

Okay, today we're going to work on sussing it out.

I want to talk about real quick here, a brief session all about sussing out your dominant chords. Would you like to be

able to do this? Would that be something you might be interested in? What is that? That's something

that I directly ripped off from our own Peter Martin. Don't tell him that I ripped it off because I don't want him to sue me or anything. But when I first started working here at Open Studio, a lot of my job here was transcribing what Peter was playing and putting it on our lessons and trying to break down what he was doing for the students. And this was one of the first things that I saw Peter do that I recognized. I

recognized actually from a pianist that Peter knows, but I don't think is like one of his people,

Bill Evans does this. And so I immediately locked onto this. And then I heard people like Hank Jones

and Barry Harris do a very similar thing here. So I thought, okay, this must be a very common thing that all these great players do. It's sussing out your dominant seventh chord. Say if you're in the key of B flat here and you have an F7. So sussing it out means you suspend the third. And actually, you might think, oh, you spend it up to the fourth. But no, actually, you can go either way.

We were kind of talking about this in real time over on Open Studio Pro.

And if you notice, a lot of the suspended chords in jazz have both a suspended second and

a suspended fourth.

So the third splits almost.

Here's a perfect voicing to demonstrate what I'm talking about here.

So if you have an F7s, in my left hand I have F, B, flat, and E flat.

In my right hand I have G and C.

Now you can do this, you know, two notes in your left, three notes in your right, whatever

is comfortable really.

But notice here we don't have the third of F, right?

We do have the G, which is suspended down from the third, and the B flat, which is up.

So it's almost as if this third splits apart both ways.

And you hear most suspended voicings, at least amongst jazz pianist, is this.

If this were like Elton John, you might hear something like this.

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