Vocabulary for Guitar
Mar. 22nd, 2006 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperI'm going to make an analogy here that may get a bit strained by the end, but let's see where it takes us.
If you're playing rhythm guitar, as opposed to a lead line, the basic vocabulary of the guitar is described by the left hand and the chords that you're playing. If you think of a chord as a word, a chord progression as a sentence, and a song as being a very short story, that's the basic analogy that I'm desperately attempting to draw here.
Now if you only know three chords, say the perennial favorites, C, F, and G, there are only a certain number of sentences that you can construct. Add Am and you suddenly have the basis of the four-chord rock/folk progressions and a lot more things that you can say musically. But with only four chords, you're still likely to find yourself in a rut. So how do you get out of the rut?
Like English, the guitar has a number of ways of saying the same chord that sound slightly different. I can think of at least three ways of playing something that I'd call "Am7" at the first position and they're all differently nuanced, much like snow, sleet, and hail are all different words for "frozen crap falling from the sky when it's supposed to be spring". (Ok, so I'm a bit tired of the cold weather.) As you move up and down the neck of the guitar, there are more ways of playing Am7. So you can increase your guitar vocabulary by learning more chords and more ways to play the chords that you already know.
I have frequently joked about the Nate Bucklin Chord-of-the-Month Club, where each month, Nate will send you a new guitar chord to learn and use in a song. As far as I know, Nate will not send you guitar chords by mail. But there are a lot of ways that you can learn new guitar chords.
One way is to learn some new music by a performer that you like, whether a filker or a pop star. If you go to your local music store (or maybe your friendly filk dealer), you're likely to be able to find a songbook for guitar with chord diagrams in it. As you learn the songs, you're quite likely to add some new chords to your vocabulary that you'll be able to use in your own music.
There's also the Columbus System of Chord Finding -- otherwise known as discover the chord and land on it. If you're writing a song, you may well find that this chord isn't quite right and that chord is just wrong, but if you put this finger there, something good happens. Congratulations! You've found a new chord! And if you go to websites such as ChordFind, they'll -- probably! -- give you a useful name for it, so that you can call it something other than C^. (Sorry,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
catalana. :) )
Finally, there's the Mad Scientist Method. This involves picking up something that's not a properly movable chord form -- because it has open strings -- and playing it at some other spot on the neck to see what you get. Sometimes you get garbage. Other times, you get a perfectly fine chord. For example, the first-position C7 can be played quite happily at the 3rd and 5th frets. So can the first-position Fmaj7. (I must go higher than the 5th fret soon. Maybe next week...)
And with all those new chords, you've got a much better chance of getting out of your rut and finding something new to say.
Which is part of the fun.
If you're playing rhythm guitar, as opposed to a lead line, the basic vocabulary of the guitar is described by the left hand and the chords that you're playing. If you think of a chord as a word, a chord progression as a sentence, and a song as being a very short story, that's the basic analogy that I'm desperately attempting to draw here.
Now if you only know three chords, say the perennial favorites, C, F, and G, there are only a certain number of sentences that you can construct. Add Am and you suddenly have the basis of the four-chord rock/folk progressions and a lot more things that you can say musically. But with only four chords, you're still likely to find yourself in a rut. So how do you get out of the rut?
Like English, the guitar has a number of ways of saying the same chord that sound slightly different. I can think of at least three ways of playing something that I'd call "Am7" at the first position and they're all differently nuanced, much like snow, sleet, and hail are all different words for "frozen crap falling from the sky when it's supposed to be spring". (Ok, so I'm a bit tired of the cold weather.) As you move up and down the neck of the guitar, there are more ways of playing Am7. So you can increase your guitar vocabulary by learning more chords and more ways to play the chords that you already know.
I have frequently joked about the Nate Bucklin Chord-of-the-Month Club, where each month, Nate will send you a new guitar chord to learn and use in a song. As far as I know, Nate will not send you guitar chords by mail. But there are a lot of ways that you can learn new guitar chords.
One way is to learn some new music by a performer that you like, whether a filker or a pop star. If you go to your local music store (or maybe your friendly filk dealer), you're likely to be able to find a songbook for guitar with chord diagrams in it. As you learn the songs, you're quite likely to add some new chords to your vocabulary that you'll be able to use in your own music.
There's also the Columbus System of Chord Finding -- otherwise known as discover the chord and land on it. If you're writing a song, you may well find that this chord isn't quite right and that chord is just wrong, but if you put this finger there, something good happens. Congratulations! You've found a new chord! And if you go to websites such as ChordFind, they'll -- probably! -- give you a useful name for it, so that you can call it something other than C^. (Sorry,
catalana. :) )Finally, there's the Mad Scientist Method. This involves picking up something that's not a properly movable chord form -- because it has open strings -- and playing it at some other spot on the neck to see what you get. Sometimes you get garbage. Other times, you get a perfectly fine chord. For example, the first-position C7 can be played quite happily at the 3rd and 5th frets. So can the first-position Fmaj7. (I must go higher than the 5th fret soon. Maybe next week...)
And with all those new chords, you've got a much better chance of getting out of your rut and finding something new to say.
Which is part of the fun.
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Jazz chords
Date: 2006-03-23 12:24 am (UTC)1) Most jazz chords are just showing off ;-)
2) Many jazz chords are indeed just ways of playing boring chords with a couple of notes changed to make it more interesting
3) Unless you've learned a lot of jazz progressions, or are insanely talented, it's pretty much impossible to just jam along adding jazz chords
4) Any time you play two or more notes so they are all sounding, you're playing a chord (and many of them are totally horrible!)
5) A lot of "jazz" chords are there to get you from one chord to another (so when you go from a C to an Am, you go from x32010 to x02210 via, say, x20030 and then perhaps from there to a G ... notice that the base/bass note goes C->B->A (x3,x2,x0)) it's this sort of "movement" within the chords that makes catchy chord accompaniements ...
6) There is the concept of chord "substitutions" (and I start to get lost here) which is where you can swap a plain boring chord in the song for something more interesting that has many of the same notes
7) Combining points 6 & 7 you pick substitute chords that allow you to either play the melody or move the bassline in interesting patterns, or both. For most people this is a process that takes sitting down and working it out (either on guitar or on paper) rather than making it up on the spot ... and as I'm a much more intuitive player, that is something I have trouble doing.
And no, nothing startling or insightful here, but it might help someone else reading this to understand what jazz chords are and what they are doing ... and many of the same things apply to Celtic backing (play the normal chords the first couple of times around, then go for the substitution chords and moving bass lines to add interest)
As Bill says, sometimes you can add interest by playing a very similar chord further up the neck (e.g. move the standard E chord up the neck five frets and you've got most of an A chord (particularly if you leave the fifth string open) ... similarly playing something like x02200 is a nice chord, but move it up the neck as x24400, x46600, x57700 etc. and you get some nice stuff (or use x35500 instead of x46600) ... (I think those are right, I don't have a guitar at hand to check them) ... if the x02200 is some kind of A (Asus2 or similar) then x24400 is some sort of B, x35500 is some sort of C, x57700 is some sort of D and x79900 is some sort of E (so you can definitely play that as 079900 ... in fact that's EEBEBE which is an E chord with no 3rd (sometimes called, I believe, "open E", "E modal", E powerchord, E5 or just Eno3rd) which plays nicely against either an Em or an E. So anytime you could play an E or an Em, then you can play the Eno3rd.
In particular I like move the E shape up the neck (like a fake barre chord) for 577600 (some sort of A) and 799800 (some sort of B) and the Eno3rd for standard three chord songs of the E/A/B7 variety (I/IV/V7 as they are sometimes known). Add in the C#m barred at the 4th fret and you've got your standard I-VIm-IV-V(7) progression (the C-Am-F-G type)
Re: Jazz chords
Date: 2006-03-23 01:57 am (UTC)Re: Jazz chords
Date: 2006-03-23 02:34 am (UTC)