Module 24 mini-test

1. What are the three principal layers of solo ballad piano?

2. Why should dense voicings generally be avoided in the low register?

3. What is a practical LH texture for a slow ballad?

4. What is the difference between rubato and unstable timing?

5. Why are suspensions especially effective in ballads?

6. What should happen to arrangement density over the course of a performance?

7. Why can sparse voicings sound sophisticated?

8. What is an effective borrowed-chord ballad ending in C?

9. What is the primary rule for fills?

10. What should remain in the foreground no matter how rich the harmony becomes?

Answers

1. Melody, inner harmony, bass.
2. Closely spaced low frequencies become muddy and obscure harmonic detail.
3. Roots, root+5ths, wide tenths, or a sparse broken root–5–10 pattern.
4. Rubato intentionally reshapes timing while preserving the larger phrase; unstable timing changes unintentionally.
5. Slow tempo lets listeners hear the dissonance and delayed resolution clearly.
6. It should usually vary—often growing toward a climax and reducing afterward—rather than remaining uniformly dense.
7. The ear has room to hear register, resonance, voice leading, and harmonic color.
8. Fmaj7 → Fm6 → Cmaj9/C6/9
9. Fill the melody's space without competing with the melody or its next entrance.
10. The melody.

The core lesson of Module 24 is:

Jazz-ballad playing is the art of making every note feel important enough that you don't need very many of them.

Next, Module 25 — Blues will deliberately move in a different direction: the 12-bar form, I7–IV7–V7 harmony, minor/major blues vocabulary, ♭3→3 and ♭5→5 inflections, left-hand patterns, turnarounds, call-and-response, and how blues logic differs from the cleaner chord-scale relationships we've been using so far.