Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright (Howard@jmdl.com)
Chapter 8 : 'Add' Chords and Chromatic Notes
8.0 : 'Add' Chords and Chromatic Chords
- Just to recap, here are the triads and chords I've covered so far:
Major, minor, sus2 and sus4 triads and chords.
Major 7th, flat 7th and minor 7th chords.
9th, min 9th, maj 9th, 11th, min 11th, maj 11th, 13th, min 13th, maj 13th chords.
All other chords fall into the series of chords with 'added' notes or
chords with altered notes.
Added chords
Chords with '
added' notes are just what they sound like.
They are usually written as something like
Cadd2,
Cadd4 etc.
Simply start with the '
base' chord (
C in this example) and add
the appropriate
note. You can of course add to any 'base' chord
whether it's major or minor or
whatever.
-
Be sure you understand the difference between add2 and sus2 chords,
and add4 and sus4 chords - the sus chords have the 3rd replaced with another note. The 'add' chords simply add to the triad, so Cadd2 would be:
-
Cadd2 = C triad + 2nd = 1st, 2nd, maj 3rd, 5th
Csus2 = Csus2 triad = 1st, 2nd, 5th
Similarly there is an important difference between '
add9' and '
9'
chords. A
C9 chord
must have the
flat 7th in it (see above), but the
Cadd9 chord will not - it's just a
C major triad with a
9th added.
You can carry on adding as many notes as you want. If you play around
with
alternative tunings you could quite easily come across chords
like
Aadd2add4, but most of the time you'll just have one added note.
You can of course add a note to a chord that isn't a simple major
or minor chord - you can have things like
Csus4add9 etc.
Altered chords
These are chords with
chromatic alterations.
The
5th,
2nd,
4th,
9th etc can all be chromatically altered - i.e. moved up or down by a
semitone (
half step).
Examples of this are chords like
E7#9 and
E7b9.
The
9th of a normal
E9 chord has been sharpened in the
E7#9, and flattened in the
E7b9.
-
So what are the notes for these?
Well, starting with the 'E7' bit:
-
E7 = 1st, maj 3rd, 5th, flat 7th = E, G#, B, D
Now add the #9 (count up 15 semitones from E) - G.
So E7#9 = E G# B D G.
Similarly E7b9 = E G# B D F.
There are a few different ways to write these chords.
'
-' and '
+' signs are sometimes used to mean '
flat' and
'
sharp' respectively, but '
b' and '
#' are used as well.
You might even see '
dim' and '
aug' (
diminished and
augmented)
used too for the same thing.
So
E7#9 could be written as
E7+9 or
E7aug9,
and
E7b9 could be written as
E7-9 or
E7dim9.
With these
chromatically altered chords there is almost
no limit on the number of chords you can create - most
of these will be used in
jazz, but some (like the
E7#9)
appear quite a lot in
rock music too.
To work out the notes to these types of chord it's best to
start with the '
basic' chord, then add the
chromatic notes
to this. So, as above for
E7#9, start with
E7, then add the
#9.
You may find several chromatic notes in one chord - like
A13b5b9 - treat it just the same way - build up the
A13 chord, then swap the
5th and
9th for the
flat 5th and
flat 9th.
Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright
Reformatted and noded (with permission) by Space Butler
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