Barry HarrisThe method

Chris Parks · Stage 9: Sixth chords and the scales of chords

A Minor 7 Flat 5 Is Beautiful

Episode 86 · 15:05 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris treats A half-diminished as Barry does, as C minor 6, a chord in the C minor 6 diminished scale. Using the A half-diminished in Autumn Leaves, he moves through that scale in drop 2, thirds, contrary and oblique motion and single-note runs, urges guitarists to improvise when comping too, and shows Thomas Echols’s idea of laying Barry’s chromatic scale over the scale of chords.

Step by step

  1. 0:00Name A minor 7 flat 5 as Barry does: C minor 6; diatonically it is only the VII chord of B flat.
  2. 1:18In a minor II-V to G minor, treat it as one chord of the C minor 6 diminished scale, so it can move.
  3. 1:54Learn C minor 6 in drop 2, drop 3, drop 2 and 4, thirds, triads, octave chords and broken drop 2.
  4. 3:20Find the A half-diminished in Autumn Leaves and hear it as C minor 6.
  5. 3:56Move through drop-2 inversions mixed with thirds, ending on D7’s tritone, A flat 7.
  6. 4:45Use contrary motion within the C minor 6 diminished scale, then oblique motion with one note held.
  7. 6:56When comping, keep improvising with these sounds instead of the stock chords every guitarist plays.
  8. 8:39Play a single-note run straight up C minor 6, come down a half step and end on D augmented.
  9. 9:19Try C minor 6 in thirds, and mix in drop 2s around a chord.
  10. 10:57Try Thomas Echols’s idea: apply Barry’s chromatic scale to the C minor 6 diminished scale, in chords and contrary motion.

Chords and notes in this video

Tap a time to jump to it in the video.

Am7b58:39
𝄞♭♭
CGACE♭E♭
  1. C
  2. E♭
  3. G
  4. A
  5. C
  6. E♭

Barry’s own words on this

9.6 Half-diminished = minor with the sixth in the bass; major -> relative minor -> minor/69.5 The minor 6th diminished scale and its diminished partner11.6 Comping9.4 Playing the scale of chords (block chords up and down the 6th dim scale)

In the course

Barry’s chromatic scaleThe tritoneSixth chords rule: minor 7 is major 6, half-diminished is minor 6Barry’s four scales of chordsThe minor 6 diminished scaleEvery chord belongs to a scale of chordsDrop 2, drop 3 and drop 2 and 4The elevator: Thomas Eccles’ floorsParallel, oblique and contrary motionComping with movementFreedom and your own voice

Transcript

  1. 0:00Hello, and welcome to episode 86 of Things I Learned from Barry Harris. And today I thought we would discuss, since in one of the previous episodes, we talked about A minor 7. I thought we would talk about today A minor 7 flat 5, or A half diminished, or as Barry likes to refer to it as C minor 6. So, A minor 7 flat 5. this happens only in one key. The key of B flat is the seventh of B flat. Not to say
  2. 0:36that that’s the only place you’re going to use it, but it only happens in one key B flat. So when we did A minor 7, I think we only talked about two places, but an A minor 7 diatonically is on the second of a key which is in G. It’s on the third of a key which is an F, but it is also on the sixth of a key which is C. So there’s three places where there’s a minor 7, which means they’re different. A minor 7 is not A minor 7 in all those different keys. There’s a different reason to play it. A minor 7 flat 5, it’s the 7 of one key. That’s it. Diatonic. And the key of B flat, it’s found on the 7th degree.
  3. 1:18Now, a lot of times, it’s used for if we’re doing a minor 2 5, or if we’re going to play a 2, going to a 5, going to, let’s say, in this instance, it would be G minor. Now, the benefit of knowing that this A minor 7 flat 5 is not just A minor 7 flat 5, but one of the chords along Barry’s C minor 6 diminished scale of chords is so that you can do things like... It’s not just one stagnant chord. You’re able to move it. So the first thing that you have
  4. 1:54to know about A-7-5-5 is that it’s C-6. C-6-6-7-5-5. So you have to know A-7-5-5, you have to know it in your drop twos, which is what I’m playing now, four consecutive strings. You have to know it in drop threes. You have to know it in drop two, drop four. Oh, sorry, minus six. These are really beautiful. You have to know it in, I mean, everything, everything we practice. So for instance,
  5. 2:41C-6 you also have to know it in thirds. You have to know it in triads. This is a hard one. You have to know it in octave chords. You have to know it in a bunch of things. Drop broken, drop two chords. So the reason that you have to know it in all those things is because Because now, when you see on a piece of sheet music an A minor 7-flat-5, you could say to yourself, okay, I’m immediately transposed.
  6. 3:20Since I’m a Barry person, I’m immediately transposing it to one of my four scales of chords. And the one scale of chords that it’s going to transform into is that minor 6. So that would be C minor 6. So now let’s say we’re playing Autumn Leaves. There’s your AF diminished, right there. So right from here, we say, okay, what can I do as either a accompanist, or somebody who’s comping, to make A minor 7-5-5 interesting,
  7. 3:56or to actually, to better put, to improvise on A minor 7-5-5. Now, again, if I just look at it as a stagnant chord, I can’t do much with it. But if I look at it as this chord that comes from this eight note scale, there’s a lot I can do with it. For instance, I can play just a couple of inversions up and drop two and it sounds pretty. So let’s do it again. So that time I mixed up playing it in drop twos. I threw in some thirds.
  8. 4:45And I ended on a D7, but the tritone D7, which is 8-fold-7. But do you see, so now I’m moving within a scale. And I was doing it all with the scales, with the chords before it too, but I just want to primarily focus on the A half diminished. And that was just moving parallel motion in drop twos. I can also do contrary motion, which is where you take one note, move it up, but at the same time you’re going to move another line down, which is really beautiful. So maybe I’ll do, I’ll try contrary motion this time.
  9. 5:38So that’s how I did contrary motion. That’s all contrary. totally contrary but contrary of the c-minus-six diminished or so that’s really beautiful contrary motion is beautiful uh i could have also done oblique motion which is where you keep one note still and then you move some notes around it but you keep that same note so so maybe we’ll we’ll do this note okay let’s try that
  10. 6:15and then we’ll say it wasn’t the greatest thing but That’s oblique motion. One note moves, one note. So we did parallel, where we were moving all the drop twos. We did contrary, where we played a note down and played a note up at the same time. So you start to see all the little things that you can do on that A half diminished.
  11. 6:56The thing is that’s strange that I’ve been talking to people about is, I don’t know why this happens, but it happens all the time. When we’re soloing, if we were soloing on Autumn Leaves, that’s when it’s really our time to stretch out and to really try to make a statement, soloing in single notes, which is great. But for some reason, when it comes our time to accompany somebody doing that, we end up playing our same thing the way that every single guitar player sounds. I don’t know why we do this
  12. 7:30it’s very nice, there’s nothing wrong with it if that’s exactly what you want to hear but what’s funny is if you listen to every guitar player you can listen to 100 guitar players and they all seem to do that same thing meanwhile they’re all wonderful guitar players individually they’re fantastic so why should we not be improvising and making beautiful sounds while we’re accompanying somebody if you put in some of those things like on this C minor 6 that I’m talking about. No matter who’s soloing,
  13. 8:03it’s not like they’re going to say you’re doing something bad or you’re taking away from their solo. It’s only going to make them sound better. So the whole idea of improvising when you’re soloing, but then all of a sudden when you’re not soloing, you just become this robot that just plays the same chords in the same way. It’s not necessary. we could be doing much more and we should be doing much more and that’s what Barry’s four scales of chords gives you it gives you total freedom and by freedom I mean if I know this a half diminished is not just one stagnant chord but
  14. 8:39actually comes from one of his four scales of chords and in this case it comes from C minor six that means everything I know how to do C minor six I can put into here everything as long as I resolve it into D7 which then resolves into G minor 6. Totally fine, but the idea is still the same. So look, here’s, let’s say maybe I just wanted to do like a single note run. I’ll do a C minor 6. So here’s my A half diminished. I’m going to play C minor 6 straight up. C flat 3rd, 5th, 6th. C again, flat 3rd. I came down a half step and I ended on a D augmented.
  15. 9:19So let’s see if I can do that. It’s beautiful. Now, if you comp like that behind somebody soloing, there’d be nothing wrong with that. So now, maybe I’ll do, let’s do thirds. Maybe I’ll do thirds. I should have done, um, that’s C minor six and thirds.
  16. 10:16So sometimes you’ll even play a chord And then put in some drop tubes around it But every one of these notes that I’m playing Comes from that 8 note scale C-6 diminished So it’s just, it’s limitless There are so many fantastic things that you can do with it And every person that knows about this system That plays, what’s amazing about it is I can hear them play and I know what they’re doing in terms of what scale they’re doing but maybe I haven’t practiced that that way or maybe they know thirds better than I do or maybe they
  17. 10:57know their triads better than I do and they do something really unique with the triads maybe they borrow a note on a triad or something I mean there are so many so I talk about this guitar player Thomas Eccles who has this wonderful channel called Labyrinth Limitations he showed me this thing where he took this scale and he used barry’s chromatic scale on top of it so he took the scale and put barry’s idea of his chromatic scale which is whenever you get to a half step you use it but
  18. 11:35then whenever you um have a scale tone and there’s no half step in between you jump up to the next scale tone. So his C-6 scale, which is would then be this, which is beautiful. Wait, did I do that right? Oh wait, that’s it. So it’s really beautiful, but he does it with chords. Oh wait, so it would be this.
  19. 12:17Oh. Let me do that again and not mess it up. So pretty. So you could think of doing, here’s A half diminished. Here it is here. I’m going to try to do that. I mean, you could use it.
  20. 13:05He also does it when he plays, if he does contrary motions. So he’ll say. Also beautiful. Let’s see. I mean, just beautiful. So anyway, the idea is he put those things together because he really believes that A half diminished is really comes from C minor 6 diminished scale. So all you have to do is convert
  21. 13:41your thinking. And you know the beautiful thing about Barry’s method is every chord diatonically, you can do this with one or more of Barry’s four scales of chords. So he has his four scales of chords, major 6 diminished, minor 6 diminished, dominant 7 diminished, dominant 7 flat 5 diminished. but diatonically you only have a major minor minor major dominant minor minus 755 and then major again but you can apply one or more of various scales of chords to all these things which gives you freedom on every chord which means every change you play depending on how well you know
  22. 14:19the scale of chords you can come up and improvise all these beautiful new ideas all the time and will all sound different, every one of us. That’s where the individual comes in, where a person has nice face. I just gave a lesson where this person, he showed me something I never saw before. And that’s what’s going to happen. This is exactly what’s going to happen. So as far as A-7 is beautiful, because you should think of it as C-6 diminished scale. A-7 flat 5 is also beautiful, because you should think of it as C-6 diminished scale.
  23. 14:56so just keep that in mind anyway until next time have Have fun practicing your minor six scale of chords. Till next time.