The idea
Counterpoint is not "two things at once." It is two things that each survive being heard alone. Cover the left hand and the right hand is still a melody. Cover the right hand and the left hand is still a melody. If either one collapses into accompaniment when you isolate it, you wrote one voice and a cushion.
The source course puts the test in one line: a second voice shadowing the first in parallel thirds gives you "one voice fattened, not two voices conversing" (Source course, Lesson 6). That sentence is also the whole reason a riff doubled in fifths by a second guitar is still one riff. The doubling is a timbre decision. It is not counterpoint, and calling it counterpoint is how bands end up with four players and one line.
You have a specific reason to start here. You told Greg your left hand is "very non dexterous" and that syncing it to the right is the hard part. Species counterpoint is the fix, because it refuses to let the left hand be a pad. Every exercise below makes the left hand carry an idea, at a tempo slow enough that you cannot hide.
Watch
Why Every Jazz Pianist Should Learn Bach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa_BpDisgFs)
- The three pieces Greg keeps in his own routine: the G minor Gigue [00:09], the C minor Minuet [00:30], the A minor Prelude [00:46]. Pick one and start it this week.
- His reason is mechanical, not repertoire: Bach is "what I do for technicality, just to get an understanding of the key bed and where the notes are and how they sound with each other in different context" [01:31]. You are learning the keyboard through two independent lines, which is the fastest way to learn it. How to Learn Classical Music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4n7_T7sqfo)
- The physical method, which governs every exercise in this module: wrist over the center of the key, slight arm drop, lift, reposition [01:53]–[02:57]. Take the fingering off the chart rather than inventing it [02:07].
- Why tension matters more here than anywhere else: "in Bach you're dealing with four different voices in your hands that are all counterpoints, and if you have tension you'll kill yourself" [12:31]. Jazz players get hurt when they take up Bach because in jazz "you're often just executing one and then comping" [13:07].
- The demo to copy: over Autumn Leaves he holds the melody on top and adds a counterline moving in sixths beneath it [13:26]–[14:36]. That is Exercise 5 below, transposed to your own tune.
- The perceptual point that pays off in L13: "when you jump around like that your mind is putting together the lines of the closest notes, so you're hearing these different lines like you would in something like Bach" [15:42]–[16:12].
Why Every Jazz Pianist Should Learn Bach
- why Bach lives in the daily routine at all, and which three pieces Greg actually plays
How to Learn Classical Music
- the wrist-drop method, why tension is dangerous in four-voice writing, and the counterline-in-sixths demo over Autumn Leaves
Listen
Bach, Invention No. 1 in C, BWV 772. Three passes, in this order, from the source course's Invention protocol (Source course, Lesson 7).
- Follow only the right hand. Hum it. Learn the first two bars by ear before you look at anything.
- Follow only the left hand. It is the same tune, an octave lower, starting two beats later. Hum that.
- Hear both at once. Notice the moment your attention flips from one to the other, and that you cannot hold both with equal weight for long. That flipping is what a listener does with any real counterpoint, including a two-guitar band.
Armstrong, "Hotter Than That" (1927). Trumpet, trombone, clarinet. Pass one: follow Armstrong only. Pass two: follow Johnny Dodds's clarinet only, which stays above the trumpet. Pass five: listen for what keeps them apart. The source course's answer is that each line is coherent alone, each moves differently in rhythm from the others, and the intervals between them are mostly consonant with passing friction (Source course, Lesson 6). No one in that room had read Fux.
Sing the clarinet line for eight bars. If you cannot sing it, you are hearing texture, not voices.
The comparison
The parallel. Fux's species system and the modern practice of writing a bass line against a riff are solving the same problem: how to make a second line audible as a second line. Both answer it the same way. Control what happens between the voices on strong beats, keep the two rhythmic profiles different, and prefer contrary motion. The source course ranks the four motions for independence in exactly that order: contrary, oblique, similar, parallel (Source course, Lesson 6).
The acoustic reason for the parallel-fifths ban transfers intact. A perfect fifth is loud in the harmonic spectrum of the note below it, so two voices in parallel fifths fuse into one tone with a reinforced overtone. The course says this plainly and then says the thing most theory books will not: "This is not a moral failing. Parallel fifths are a perfectly good sound when you want blend, as any power chord on a distorted guitar demonstrates" (Source course, Lesson 6). That is the whole rule. Fifths blend. If you want blend, use them. If you want two voices, do not.
Where it breaks. A cantus firmus is a line of whole notes with no meter of its own worth speaking of, no harmony under it, and no drums. A riff-based ostinato is the opposite. It is metrically active, its accents define where the bar is, and in a band there is a drum kit asserting a grid underneath it. So "strong beat" is not the same object in the two systems. In species, the strong beat is a position in a bar. Over an ostinato, the strong beat is wherever the ostinato's own accents fall, and those may not be beat one. When you write against a riff, mark the riff's accents first and treat those as the strong positions, not the barline. That single adjustment is what makes species usable in your idiom.
The second break is harmonic. Species assumes a diatonic field where consonance and dissonance are stable categories. A drop-tuned riff on one string is often not stating a harmony at all, so "consonant against the cantus" has to be redefined as "consonant against the pitch the riff is sitting on right now." Write the riff's pitch content out as a single line and treat that line as your cantus. Ignore the distortion.
At the piano
Set the metronome to 50. One click per beat.
The ostinato. Left hand, D Dorian, four bars of 4/4, quarter notes only:
| D3 A3 C4 A3 | D3 A3 B3 A3 | G3 D4 C4 A3 | F3 E3 D3 A3 |
Fingering: 5 1 2 1 / 5 1 3 1 / 4 1 2 1 / 5 4 5 1. Learn it hands alone until it runs while your attention is somewhere else. Greg's rule from the lesson applies here: if you feel tension, shake it out and place the hand again, gently, using the arm's weight for the press.
The counterline. Right hand, one whole note per bar to start, then one half note per half bar, then one quarter per beat. You are climbing the species ladder over a fixed bass rather than under a fixed soprano, which is the arrangement you will actually use as a composer.
Start the counterline on A4 or D5. End on D5. Between those, the only pitches available in first species are the ones that make a third, sixth, fifth, or octave with whatever the left hand is playing on that beat.
The transfer. Once the two lines work at the piano, put them into Sibelius on two staves, then re-voice them for bass and guitar: ostinato to bass, counterline to guitar in the octave that keeps them at least a sixth apart. Register separation is the cheapest independence there is.
Exercises
1. First species over a jazz cantus
Do. Take the melody of "All the Things You Are" and play it in whole notes, one per bar, at 50 bpm, left hand. Write a counterline above it, one whole note per bar, using only thirds, sixths, fifths, and octaves against the melody note. Begin and end on a perfect consonance. No parallel fifths, no parallel octaves.
Done when: you can play both hands together through the first sixteen bars at 50 with no hesitation, and you can sing the counterline alone from memory.
2. First species over your own ostinato
Do. Use the D Dorian ostinato above. Write four bars of counterline, one note per beat, consonant with the left hand on every beat. Then write three more versions of those four bars. Keep all four.
Done when: all four versions are playable at 50 bpm, and at least two of them move in contrary motion against the left hand on more than half the beats.
3. Second species, and the passing tone
Do. Rewrite version one of Exercise 2 with two notes in the right hand for every one in the left. The note on the beat must be consonant. The note off the beat may be a dissonance if it is approached by step and left by step in the same direction.
Done when: you can point to every off-beat dissonance in your line and say out loud which two consonances it passes between.
4. Fourth species, and the suspension
Do. Write eight bars where the right hand enters on the second half of each bar and ties across the barline. The tied note is consonant when it arrives and becomes a dissonance when the left hand moves under it. Resolve it down by step. Build a chain of at least four suspensions in a row.
Done when: you can play the chain at 50 bpm and hear the moment of dissonance on every downbeat without looking at the page.
5. The counterline in sixths, from the video
Do. Take a tune you already have in your hands. Play the melody in the right hand. Add a line beneath it moving mostly in sixths, exactly as Greg does over Autumn Leaves at [13:26]. Then rewrite that line so it is not in sixths for more than two consecutive notes.
Done when: you can play both versions back to back and state which one has two voices and which one has one voice fattened.
6. The rhythmic-differentiation test
Do. Record thirty seconds of Exercise 2 with both hands playing quarter notes. Then rewrite the right hand so it moves in a different rhythmic density from the left, and record it again. Listen to both.
Done when: you can hear the two voices separate in the second recording and fuse in the first, and you can say in one sentence why.
Compose
Write a piece of thirty-two bars for piano alone, two voices only, one note at a time in each hand. One ostinato of four bars in the left hand, repeated eight times without change. A single right-hand line over it that never repeats a four-bar unit exactly.
Constraints: one key or mode, chosen before you start. At least four suspensions. No parallel fifths or octaves anywhere. The right-hand line must have a highest note, it must arrive once, and it must arrive after bar twenty. Both hands must be playable by you at 60 bpm by the end of the two weeks.
Then arrange it for bass and one guitar and print both parts from Sibelius. Nothing changes except register and instrument.
Checkpoint
- Play the D Dorian ostinato at 60 bpm for two minutes with the hand visibly relaxed and no drift against the click.
- Play and sing the first-species counterline from Exercise 1 over sixteen bars of "All the Things You Are."
- Play a four-suspension chain in fourth species and name the dissonance and its resolution on each downbeat.
- Hand over a thirty-two-bar two-voice piece, notated in Sibelius, playable by you.
- State the four motion types in order of how much independence each produces, and give the acoustic reason parallel fifths destroy it.
- State one place where species rules do not transfer to writing against a riff, and what you do instead.
Read
- Source course, Lesson 6, The Foundations of Counterpoint (/library/garnett-course.pdf). The five species, the four motions, the acoustic argument, and the jazz-standard-as-cantus-firmus adaptation. This is the lesson the module is built on, and its exercise is Exercise 1 above.
- Source course, Lesson 7, for the three-pass Invention listening protocol you use in the Listen section.
- Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). You do not need to read it. Know that the five-species ladder you are climbing is his, that it is a teaching order rather than a description of how music sounds, and that Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all learned from it.
- Bach, Invention No. 1 in C major, BWV 772. Get a score. You will use it in L13.