All about chords
Why are chords important?
Music is built using many elements, but the three most essential are rhythm, melody and harmony.
Rhythm give music the pulse that drives it forwards. Rhythm is so essential that it is hard to imagine any music without it.
Every song has a melody, which is the sequence of individual notes sung by the singer. Instrumental music will usually have usually have something that you can recognise as a tune.
A melody is always a sequece of single notes - or pauses - one after another. In music theory that would be called monophonic. Music without a melody sounds like a backing track, rather than music in its own right.
Wheras the melody is a sequence of notes played one after another, harmony is formed by notes played at the same time. Harmony enriches the melody, giving it emotion and depth. Harmony can make the melody sound happy or sad. Harmony can build tension, and resolve the tension.
A solo instrument or singer without accompaniment does not - on the face of it - have any harmony. But as the melody unfolds, the relationships between the notes suggest some underlying harmony which the listener can feel, even if it is not played by any other instruments.
Chords are the building blocks of harmony
A chord is by definition a set of notes played together. This means that each step in a harmony is a chord.
The harmonic sequence, or simply the chord progression, and its timing, build the harmony of a piece of music. More than just the individual chords, the harmonic sequence defines how a piece of music feels.
Why are chords interesting?
Chords are interesting for all musicians, but in particular for guitarists and pianists or keyboard players.
The guitar, the piano and electronic keyboards are polyphonic instruments, which means that they can play more than one note at once. This makes them ideally suited to playing chords. These are also very common instruments.
A lot of music - in particular classical music - is written out in musical notation in great detail, but that is not the whole story. However a lot of musicians play from a minimalisic song notation.
For pop and rock music, there are countless websites which give you the lyrics of a song, along with the chords, written above the words. If you want to sing the song, this assumes that you know the melody. This is not unrealistic, because many people find a melody easy to remember.
For jazz players, it is very common to use a lead sheet. This is usually a single page, with the melody and with chords above the music.
A particularly well know source is the so called Real Book, which - although illegal - became the standard work for many jazz musicians, including jazz pianists.
The common requirement, is that you understand and know how to play the chords.
What is so mysterious about chords?
Millions of young people know a few chords on a guitar. If you use a chord dictionary - as a book or online - you can learn more chords, and learn to play more songs.
The thing is, that learning the shape of a chord or a guitar doesn't teach you much about the how the chord is constructed. It's easy to learn the shape of a G chord, without any understanding of which notes you are playing, and why those notes form a G chord and not a C chord.
There are lots of different chords. If you look at chord dictionary, you will find a selection of different chords, like G, G7, Gm, Gm7, GΔ7, Gsus4, G6, Gdim, ...
Now if you want to play a song, which contains a Gdim chord, you can learn the shape of the chord from a chord dictionary, but that doesn't give you any understanding of what the chord is, and what notes it contains.
Going a level further, here is a screenshot of the chord menu in the App iRealPro. (iRealPro is an App to generate a backing track from a chord progression, to practice your instrument.)
iRealPro is an App to generate a backing track from a chord progression. It is used by instrumentalists to practice with.
This screenshot gives a feel for the number of different chords that can be used, particularly in jazz.
What is our approach
The screenshot from iRealPro is, at first sight, overwhelming. To get to grips with range of possible chords, we break it down in four categories:
- triad
- seventh chords
- added note chords
- extended chords and altered chords
This builds a logical sequence from the simplest to the most complex chords.
Along the way, we introduce a lot of terminology, like interval, octave, chord factor, scale, etc. We take very little prior knowledge for granted.
Illustrating chords on the piano and the guitar
Simply explaining the notes in a chord, for example that a C-major-triad contains the notes C-E-G, does not convey much understanding.
To explain chords, we need some way to illustrate them in a visual manner. Three ways spring to mind:
- using musical notation
- using a piano keyboard
- using a guitar fretboard
We do not use musical notation at all. Musical notation can be very precise, but for a lot of people is difficult to read. In particular, chords written in musical notation can be difficult to read.
Instead of using musical notation, we willustrate chords using the piano keyboard and on a guitar fretboard.
On the piano keyboard
On the piano keyboard, we mostly illustrate chords with the root note C.
For example, we might illustrate C-dominant-7 chord as
Both the numbers and the colours indicate the so called "chord factor", which is explained in the articles. The specific colours are random, but the same colours are used consistently in all diagrams.
On the guitar fretboard
On the guitar fretboard, we take a slightly different approach, based on two ideas:
- show movable chords
- show a conceptual shape and a playable shape
The simplest kind of guitar chord are so called "open chords". These are played at the base of the fretboard and some of the strings left open.
In contrast, movable chords do not use any open strings. (If you are not holding a string down, then you must not play it.) The great thing about movable chords, is that you can move them up and down the fretboard to play the same kind of chord, but with a different root note.
When we describe a chord, we show the notes in certain order, starting with the so called root note and working upwards. When you play a chord, you usually keep the root at the bottom, but it's ok to mix up the order of the notes. This is explained in the articles.
Starting with 7th chords, we show chords on the guitar in a conceptual shape, with the notes in ascending order. For example, a B-dominant-7 chord would look like this:
As with the piano keyboard, the numbers and the colours indicate the so called "chord factor", which is explained in the articles.
This diagram gives a good illustration of the notes in the chord, but would be difficult to play, because the notes are spread so far apart. For that reason we show a second playable version of the chord, for example:
In this version, the numbers and the colours still indicate the "chord factor", but you can see that they are now played in a different order.
For the guitar, we go one step further and show the shape with the root note on string 6, 5 or 4.
For example an E7 chord, with the root note on string 5
and an A7 chord, with the root note on string 4
Because these are movable chords, you can of course move them to, for example:
G7
F7
E7
In the diagrams, we always place the root note on fret 7. This is just for practical purposes, because it gives us enough space to down the fretboard (when we show the notes in ascending order).
The articles
The guide is broken down into four articles:
This article introduces the basic ideas about chords and explains the basic terms chord, interval, octave, root note, inversion and voicing.
It introduces chords with three notes known as triads. There are 4 kinds of triad, built with a technique called stacking thirds. The triads are described in detail, and illustrated on the piano and the guitar.
Finally, it describes the suspended-4th chord, which is another chord with 3 notes, but not technically a triad.
This article introduces more terms, like scale and key and starts to explain chord symbols.
It introduces 7th chords, which are chords with 4 notes which - like triads - can be built with the technique of stacking thirds.
Finally, it introduces some less common 7th chords, which don't fit technically fit the scheme of stacking thirds.
This article introduces added note chords, which are basically triads plus another note, but NOT the 7th.
It briefly introduces extended chords, to illustrate the differnce between extended chords and added note chords.
Extended chords take the idea of stacking thirds to the extreme, and can theoretically include up to 7 notes.
In terms of chord factor (which we introduce in the first article), these can be 1 (root), 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Of these, the chord factors 1, 3 and 7 are always included, but the others are optional.
Altered chords take this one stage further, by moving any of the optional notes up or down one semitone.
History of word games
Word games start to develop after two critical preconditions have been met.
- Widespread literacy. Obviously, people who can't read and write do not play word games.
- Cheap printing and paper production, which enabled the production of newpapers and other periodicals.
Word Ladder is an early example of a word game which was published in a periodical.
Word Ladder was invented by Lewis Carroll (the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and published in the British magazine ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1879. He called the game "Doublets".
Learn more about the history of Word Ladder on the page:
Games published in periodicals are an important category. 34 years after Doublets, in 1913, the first crossword is published in the 'New York World'.
But for the most part, the history of word games mirrors the history of games. Puzzles in newspapers, board games, radio games, TV games, computer games. In each new category, somebody will probably invent a word game.
Read more about the history of word games on the page:
Even before the age of mass literacy, ancient scribes seem to have played with words. Two curiosities have survived from the ancient world:
- palindromes
- word squares and specifically, the SATOR square
Read more about these on the page: