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Chords are the most important aspect of music to come to study, since chords are the backdrop to every moment of every piece of music you've ever heard. Scales are the raw ingredients of music, and are very important to understand, but you won't be playing scales over 'real' music. You could if you wanted to, but it would just sound like someone playing scales. It wouldn't be music.
The most basic chords are the simple triads. Plain old chords, such as C, or G or Bm, or C#m, are triads. Even if you play a six string barre chord version of any of those chords, you will still only be playing 3 notes in each case. Those 3 notes are, of course, the 1-3-5 of the scale they come from. In the case of the minors, the 3 is the flat3. Basic stuff.
You can add more notes to the 1-3-5, and the usual method is to add the next 'third', meaning 'skip a note and add the next'. So 1-3-5-7 creates a chord, a major 7th chord.
You can also add the flat7 to the 1-3-5. When you do that, you wind up with a 'seventh' chord, without the word 'major'. (These chords are often referred to as 'dominant seventh chords'. They're called that because usually they're extended dominant chords (the V chord), which uses the flat 7. However, in modern music, sevenths can be and are used in cases other than V chords, so the term is not always correct. '7th' is the best way to name them.) Seventh chords can have notes added to them also, and the same 'skip a note and pick the next' rule applies. So: 1-3-5-b7-9.
How can there be a ninth note if the scale is only seven notes? I hear you ask. Good question too, it had me wondering for years.
If you think of the scale notes in a circle (
see last week's lesson), then imagine going around a second time. The original 1 (starting note, root, tonic) can now be seen as 8, the original 2 as 9, etc. So it's like saying 'add the 2 note in the next octave to the 1-3-5-b7.
You can learn a very important lesson studying the "scale clock" image shown here (using the C scale). Notice that because the scale is an uneven number of notes (seven), when you go around the second time using the 'skip a note' formula, you wind up using notes NOT used the first time around ... ).
OK, so far so good. To recap, a 9th chord consists of 1-3-5-b7-9. It goes without saying that the 1-3-5 are there, and the flat 7 is understood to be there, even though it's not mentioned.
The movie above shows me playing a series of chords. I start on a D7th. D7 is the V chord of G, so it's natural tendency is to resolve to the G chord. That's what V chords are good at: resolving back to the I chord. I do eventually get to the G chord, but first I move through a series of other chords. Here is the tab for those chords and their names:
The '-' means 'flat'; the '+' means 'sharp'.
You can no doubt hear that they all sound the same except for the high note. It sounds like I'm playing a melody on top of a chord, and that's pretty much what I am doing. It's easier to see what's happening by looking at the images below. You can see that the bottom chunk of each chord is identical, shaded green. It's a 1-3-b7. It just stays there. On top, I go from a 1(8) to the next fret up (flat nine) to the next fret up (nine) to the next fret up (sharp nine) to the next fret up (a new 3, so we're back to a plain old D7th), then back down, ending on the G chord, the resolution our ears are hoping will come.
I change my fingering for some of them, but really, all that's happening is that I'm holding the 7th part of the chord down permanently (shaded green), and adding the -9, 9, +9 notes to it. Hopefully you'll hear that they're all basically 7th chords. They all have the same 'take me home to the G chord' feeling about them. If you were really stuck, you could in fact just play the D7th chord throughout.
Notice that sharp nine note in the +9 chord, the Jimi Hendrix chord, is the same as minor 3, so BOTH minor and major thirds are being played, which is the reason it has such a dissonant sound. The only reason you can get away with playing both in the same chord is that they are in different octaves.
There are other positions on the fretboard for these, of course, but this voicing is by far the easiest to get your fingers AND brain around. Notice that in this 4 string version, there is no 5 present in any of the chords. This is OK. 5's a neutral sort of chord tones and can be dispensed with quite easily. All of these shapes are moveable too, of course.
Hopefully, this lesson will reveal a little of the logic that is music. It's all numbers. The design of the guitar tends to make it difficult to follow them logically, but once you do see through the complexity of the fretboard, they will never let you down. You will probably never use the chord progression I show in this lesson, but it's a good way of demonstrating how all these bits and pieces fit together.
If you did want to play along, here are the midi files.
Full speed midi | Half speed midi
There are "major 9" chords also, but they don't use the b7. They are simply 1-3-5-9. A good exercise would be to figure out how to play a major ninth chord. So, take any major chord, figure out what the ninth note is (see scale clock above) and add that note to your major chord shape. Hint: you'll have to replace one of the existing notes to do that ... I'll make a lesson of 'major 9' chords soon, you can see if you got it right.
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