You've Probably NEVER Seen This Chord Before!
Pay attention to the questions below, as there will be a quiz at the end:
Do you like learning about new chords that you’ve not heard before?
Better yet, do you like learning about new chords that you’ve not heard before, that actually sound good?
Better yet, do you like learning about new chords that you've not heard before, that actually sound good, and then learning how to use that chord in your music?
And as promised, here's the quiz:
Where most music theory book/teachers stop answering the questions above?
... but of course, if you've been on this newsletter for a while, you know exactly the answer:
Most music teachers stop at the first question.
They’ll just teach you new chords that may or may not even sound good, and then proceed to provide zero explanation of how to make that chord work in your music.
That just won't do!
If you want to use more complex and sophisticated chords in your songs, you need to learn
what makes them work,
when they should be used,
and how to transition in and out of them.
Do you want to see how all this looks like - while learning a brand-new chord - and then also how to it in your songs?
Then watch the video below and I’ll explain all of this to you in depth:
Want to learn more things that you probably don't know about harmony and chords on the guitar? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course to immediately start improving your knowledge of chords!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! I want to show you today a chord that you probably have not seen before. Probably because the moment I say that you haven't seen before, some of you is going to go around and scour all the corners of the Internet, okay, and plump the depth of all the search engines until they find an example of the chord.
Why good for you, okay? If you find that somebody else already used this chord, I'm pretty sure, I mean, I've heard it around, so, but I don't think it's been explained and I don't see, I haven't seen videos explaining that, so, let me see what it is.
It's the chord progression I played before, okay, I was actually half improvising it, so, but the important part is this. I'm in the key of C major, okay, and I'm playing this chord here. C major, okay, super simple, and then I'm putting in this mystery chord, okay, yep.
Of course, the automatic transcription system in there tells you it's an A minor 6th with a bit of bass of C, which is correct. But it doesn't tell you what comes after. There's more than one thing I think that can come after that, okay?
And indeed, if you just call it an A minor sixth with a bass of C, which is really not a great name, you're going to see in a moment why, okay? It's hard to think, to understand what comes after that, okay?
So what is this chord? Let's go to the whiteboard, and let's figure it out, okay? The first chord I'm playing is a C chord, okay? On the guitar, actually not on the guitar, but yeah, it's on the guitar, you know, I'm going to do it this way, whoop, whoop.
On the guitar, I'm just playing the C chord, 3, 5, 5, 3, C major chord, yay, okay? If people who don't play guitar, that's a score for it. Simple C major chord in good position. The second chord I'm playing is this.
So 2, 5, 2, and 3 here. This chord contains those notes. It's a C note, it's a C note, an A note, an E note, and an F sharp note. And yes, again, very tempting to call this a minor sixth with a bass of C.
It would even be correct. If I were to put this on a score, I would actually write this because this is easy to play and think about. And if people don't understand what to play, they will just play a minor with a bass of C, and the chord will still sound good.
Okay, but it will miss the F sharp on top here, which is kind of a fundamental note. Okay? It is a fundamental note, because if you actually turn this around and you start organizing it, you discover that this chord, technically...
Technically, it's an F sharp, minor seventh, flat fifth, with a bass of C, so in second inversion. Okay. Or, even better, you can think of this chord in an even better way, which is, you think of it as a D9, like, there is no D inside here.
Yeah, I know. Think of it as a D9 with a bass of C and no root. Okay? That will actually be the best way to think about it, okay? Because it tells you where it results. This chord can easily resolve to G, like D9.
The D9 will be like something like... That will resolve to a G. Okay? This strange chord... resolve to a G, and the only interesting thing would be that since the bass is C, this bass will move down to a B, so I could resolve this chord to this chord here, 2033, which is B, G, E, G, which is, okay, not a B minor 6, it's made a G over B, okay.
It's a G chord in the first inversion, so this name actually tells you that it can resolve here, okay, but this is still, I mean, you look at how those names are super complex and they really don't tell you much, okay, so it's actually better to think of all these in a completely different way, okay, it's actually better to think of where are those notes going and what they are doing when I'm playing the C major chord, yeah, the C major chord, my notes were C, C.
E and G. And when I play this other chord, my notes were C, A, E and F sharp. So what you see is that the C and the E stay stable and this G goes down to F sharp. That's exactly what happens when I was playing them before.
Yes, the A, the C goes down to A too, but that's an internal voice and we don't really care too much about that. This movement is more salient. And so it makes sense to continue this movement chromatically.
And it also makes sense to keep the bass exactly where it is and then we just adjust the middle voices regardless, okay, and just make it work so that you have the C at the bottom and the top, then C, F sharp, then D, F and it would be nice to finish with a C and an E, okay, which is exactly what I did before at the beginning of the chord progression.
So this keeps going down to E. Okay, now notice I don't care about the name of the chord. I care about how those voices move. And so the whole thing, the name of the game here would be the C stays stable and the top voice, G, F sharp, F, it goes down chromatically, okay, and then the rest, okay.
It's trying to accommodate that and then in reality what I did was I kept the F longer and then went down to E. Okay, what did I do here? Okay, I could have filled these in several different ways. I chose to fill it this way.
I chose to put an A and a D here and then, sorry, a C, and then I put an A flat and a D, okay, and then here I put the C, G and the G. I could have done many different things, okay? So let me write the chord here.
Okay. Then I put this as an F with the bass of C. You see that's an F triad and bass is C. But again, the real reason is because I wanted an F and I also wanted to keep the A constant just to give a bit more continuity to the whole thing.
Okay? And then here I wanted to keep the F constant and I wanted to change those notes. So I move the C up to D and move this grammatically. So I have this little movement here, A, A flat, G. So I don't really care about the name of the chord.
That's what I want to impress, is that the name of the chords are nice to communicate, but I don't tell you really what's going on. What tells you what's going on is all those. All those voices that you see the succession of chord makes, it's the voice leading of the progression telling you what's going on.
And it also tells you what else you can put, okay? What other thing you can put after the chord. I could have put, for instance, C, A, D here, or C, A flat, D immediately, because my main thing was this G going down to F sharp, going down to F.
So I could have gone with this chord, then this chord, and then directly with this chord here, and it would have worked perfectly, and then back to a C major chord. Okay, now, if you really, really want the name, that's an F with a bass of C.
Sorry, that's an F. Ah, let me do it again. F with a bass of C. And these, you could call these a D diminished triad with a bass of C. Okay, you could totally call these instead. D minor 7, flat 5 with a bass of C.
Okay, good, sure, whatever. I mean, it's just a bunch of notes that try to create, to hold this F and create a chromatic line here, really. Okay, then, my point here is this, you can experiment with this chord and try to join this chord by moving the notes up and down, rather than thinking about the name of the chord.
Okay, so that's one way. Or the other, another thing you could do here would have been, for instance, rather than keep going down, go back up with the F sharp. I mean, I could go back to the same C chord.
Okay, and just the same as the first chord. Let me just go. But I'd rather go the F sharp, up to G and this C goes down to B and now I'm going to simply put D, G. Okay and so this is a G with a bass of B if you really want the name.
Okay so simply because again this F sharp wants to come back to this G. By then going down chromatically I can have I can step chromatically out of the key and come back in key but I like to hear some more movement here.
Again I could have simply gone C major, D strange chord and C major again. Absolutely possible. Okay so and you can use this chord here in many situations so again you can think of this chord in many ways okay.
But essentially, just after a major chord in your key, you can play this chord here with the same intervals. Major 6th, major 3rd, and sharp 4th over the root, and you can make it work there. So for instance, one thing you could do is this, you could play a C major here, F and F major, and here you play the equivalent, essentially, of this chord, it's the same intervals as before.
Okay, so let me just write down what I just did, okay? So what I was playing here is this, I started with the C major chord, C, E, G, C, great. Okay, F, C, F, A, and yeah, I definitely play a B note here.
Just to make this transition a bit more sweeter. Then I played my mystery chord here, made by the note F, B, D, A. Okay, again, the transcription system says D minor 6th to the bass of F, or you could think of it as a B minor 7th flat 5th with the bass of F, or you can think of it in as a G9 without the G with the bass of F.
It is a G9, I mean, a G9 will have the chord, the notes G, B, D, F, and A, take away the root, put the F at the bass, and you see that you have all the notes okay so this chord can function like a dominant chord and indeed in this case it does because after this I'm playing a C chord only with a bass of E so I'm gonna play C G and I'm gonna play a G here a C and a G okay so C major chord, F major chord, C major chord with a bass of E and however you want to call it mystery chord here.
And notice how sweet this sound okay and then from here of course you can do whatever you want because you have several several options you continue your chord progression however you want okay then This chord here, which is very hard to name, because again, it's the minor 6th with an inversion of a minor 6th chord, or an inversion of a minor 7 flat 5 chord, okay, so, and people again tend to recoil when the chord has a complex name, but it is really not as hard as it seems, okay?
So, have a look at that, if you want the tablature, I'm just gonna write very fast a tablature for what I just played, okay, so you had it, but I just played these, okay, so the C major was 8 9 8 8, the F was 8 10 10 10, my 10, yep, sorry, my mystery chord was 8 9 7 10, not as hard to play, okay, just get the shape under your finger, and then my C with the bass of E was 7 5 5 8, okay, that's the chord progression I was playing before in tablature, but that's an interesting chord, okay, and I am fairly sure you haven't seen it before, you may have heard it before, okay, it just sounds good, okay, of course, if you have seen it before, yeah, more power to you, okay.
I'm not trying to get the precedence over anybody, now, if you want to know more about this chord, another kind of chord, and understand how all those relationships and how this voice leading work, and how you can leverage these to forget about the name of the chords, but still know where the chords go and how to create the chord progression you have in your mind, okay, I recommend you guys get a look at my course Complete Chord Mastery, okay,
The complete course that teaches you everything about playing chords on the guitar, where to find them, okay, over all the fretboard, how to think about them, how to play them, how to combine them, how to extend them, alter, substitute them, etc., to create chord progression, and also how to create.
Specific guitar parts that work in different styles. So how do I make those chords sound funky? How do I make those chords sound jazz? How do I make those chords sound pop? How do I make those chords sound rock?
Okay, and how do I create different styles of accompaniment or playing in general in all those styles? Everything is in complete chord mastery. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com and until next time, enjoy.