Things I wish my music teacher had taught me at school: Part 1
Chords
When I was growing up, my musical education was entirely classical: classical piano, classical violin (played very poorly I should add!) and classical music theory.
All that time, I could hear the harmonies in pop music and jazz, and they sounded great, but I wasn’t able to make sense of them. This made them hard to copy and to build on; I didn’t really even try.
Many years later, I think I finally got to grips with it. It turns out that just a couple of small pieces of knowledge would have made a huge difference. In these short articles, I’d like pass on those small nuggets which I wish I had known earlier.
How do you build a chord?
Suppose you were sitting down at a piano right now, and I asked you to play a C major chord. What would you play?
As teenage me, this is what I would have given you:
That’s C, E and G: the root, third and fifth of C major. This chord structure even has a special name, derived from having three notes: the triad¹.
That’s all fine and dandy, and it all makes perfect theoretical sense.
The problem is: it sounds, to put it politely, lame.
Why does it sound lame? Well, there are two reasons.
Firstly, the bass note is too high. But if you play it down an octave, it sounds muddy: the notes are too close together for this low pitch, and your ear can’t distinguish them properly.
The second reason is the presence of the C-G interval, the perfect fifth. For reasons of physics, the perfect fifth contains many of the same harmonic frequencies as the root. Therefore, it just reinforces the root, whilst hardly adding any colour of its own. Try playing the fifth by itself, and then the octave, then both:
They sound almost identical. The perfect fifth doesn’t add any character to the chord, making it superfluous.
A different approach to chords
So, if that’s not a great way to build chords, what’s a better way? Here is the simple solution I learned from jazz courses years later.
- Put the root low down in the bass.
- Add the third and the seventh note higher up (in either order).
In order not to sound muddy, the lower of those two notes shouldn’t really go any lower than the E flat below middle C.
And that’s it. Really? Really.
Given that there are two types of third (minor and major), and two types of seventh (ditto), this gives four fundamental chord shapes:
In jazz scores, you may see these as C∆, C7, Cm7 and Cm∆ respectively.
As I said before, you are free to make the seventh lower than the third. Try it: they work just as well.
Guide tones and voice leading
The third and seventh are known as guide tones, and they work remarkably well just on their own, with a spacious and airy feel. Take a bass line, add a piano or two solo instruments playing nothing but guide tones, a lead instrument and some rhythm, and you have the basis of a real and satisfying arrangement.
One reason it works so well is when you see how the thirds and sevenths can follow each other. Take the chord sequence Dm7 — G7 — C (which will be recognisable as a cadence to all you music theoretics out there). Write it out using guide tones, but choose the thirds and sevenths which are as close to each other as you can. One possibility looks like this:
The first chord is Dm7 with the seventh below the third; the second is G7 with the third below the seventh. This gives a pleasant “descending-in-semitones” path to the inner voices, in effect a simple inner melody, known as voice leading. It’s very natural and satisfying.
If you’re playing a piano without a bass, you can even get away with just the root note and the third or seventh in your left hand (that is, the lower two notes of the voicings shown above) — known as “Bud Powell” voicings.
Building up chords
Although these simple chords work really well, there’s more you can do and more interesting sounds to be had. How do you build up richer and more complex chords?
That turns out to be extremely easy too:
- Start with the guide tones.
- Add as many of the other notes of the scale as you like, in whatever way you like. (Keep either the third or the seventh as the lowest note though).
It’s really that simple, and it really works!
There’s just one exception: don’t play the perfect fourth over a major chord. You can find out why if you try it:
Add the 6th over a major chord — nice. Add the 2nd (or the 9th if you prefer to think of it that way) — nice. Add the perfect fourth: OUCH! It’s that octave-plus-a-semitone interval which grates².
I also had this sound described³ to me using the story of “Aunt Dolly”. Aunt Dolly is one of those relations you don’t see very often. She’s not very musical, but when she comes around at Christmas and has had a few drinks, she sits down at the piano to play her rendition of “Jingle Bells”. Here’s how it goes: note the repeated major triad in the left hand. You need to play it to get the full effect.
By this point, everyone is yelling “Aunt Dolly, STOP!”
Anyway, returning to that simple Dm7-G7-C cadence from before: by adding more notes from the scale to the third and seventh, you can build scrunchy chords like these that fit into one hand (perfect for your left hand when improvising with the right):
Or you can build wide, spaced-out chords with four or five notes or more, spread across two hands. The possibilities are endless.
What’s a scale?
Just now, I said you can use “any notes of the scale” in your chords. But what scales are there, and what notes do they contain?
That will be the subject for part two of this series. Thanks for reading.
¹I could have gone into more theory, like the triad “inversions” — putting the third or fifth as the bottom note. It’s not really relevant here.
²Still, tastes do change over the years. A century or two ago, the minor 7th over a major chord was considered dissonant, but now our ears are accustomed to it. Maybe this will sound fine to future generations.
³Heard from the late, great Michael Garrick.
