Bossa nova
The thumb-and-fingers pattern drawn from samba, seventh chords with tensions and chromatic voice leading.
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Content under musical review. It may contain inaccuracies.
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The thumb-and-fingers pattern drawn from samba, seventh chords with tensions and chromatic voice leading.
Applied
Bossa nova emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s. It takes the rhythm of samba, distils it onto the guitar and a soft voice, and combines it with jazz-like harmony: seventh chords, ninths, thirteenths and chromatic lines in the inner voices. The nylon-string acoustic guitar is its central instrument.
A ii–V–I in C major with tensions, bossa nova style:
The thumb keeps the bass steady on the beats; the fingers play the chord in syncopated spots, sometimes ahead of the beat:
Voicings usually have four notes, no doublings, with the bass on the sixth or fifth string and tensions on top:
Loop this progression at a relaxed tempo. Play the bass with your thumb on every beat and try pushing the fingers' chord half a beat early, onto the previous offbeat:
I – vi – ii – V with sevenths Metronome in 2/4 with sixteenthsFirst practise the thumb alone, in quarter notes, for a minute. Then play the chord with your fingers only on the offbeat of each beat. Finally move one of those strokes a sixteenth earlier. The thumb must stay steady, like a metronome, while the fingers shift.
Faria shows how chords are linked by keeping most notes and moving one by a half step: for instance, a minor chord whose root falls to the major seventh, then the minor seventh, then the sixth. It's the same idea as the jazz cliché line, and it gives bossa nova its smooth motion inside a static harmony.