📜 chords that break the "rules"

Part Four of the 🟢 Start Here series

Josh Skaja

May 24, 2023

The 🟢 Start Here Series

In Part One, we gave names to the sections of songs—verse, chorus, etc
In Part Two, we talked about our musical ruler of time: beats & bars.
In Part Three, we looked at our musical ruler for pitch: the major scale
Here in part four, we’ll take a deeper look at chords.

👉 Also: don’t forget to check out the missing manual for music’s most important skill.

Last week we talked about the major scale.

We saw how it’s the “measuring stick” for western music:

We saw that chords are built by stacking every other note…

…and that these flavors of chord show up in the same order in every key:

I, IV, & V are major — ii, iii, & vi are minor — vii° is diminished

This week we’ll look at chords that break from the expected.

Weird chords are fun.

Am7♭5. Emaj9. G9♯11. F/G.

All of these spicy chords have little lessons to teach us. Let’s start with the basics.

Two rules for naming chords:

The major scale is our ruler, and
every chord is the center of its own universe.

In other words:

We describe everything in relation to the major scale, and
we measure from the chord’s root (and not the key’s root).

So this is an Am7:

This chord shows up diatonically the keys of C, G, & F…
…but that doesn’t matter!
That’s because we measure from the chord’s root note—the A.
- (And the chord’s root is the same no matter what key we’re in.)
Notice those scale degrees—♭3 and ♭7.
We measured these from the major scale—they’re a half-step (one fret) below the 3 and the 7.

To drive this idea home, let’s modify our Am7 into an Am7♭5:

Do you see how we lowered the 5 to get the ♭5?

That’s the basic idea: learn to describe chord tones by degree, and you’ll be able to build (or name) every chord ever.

These ten E chords will show you how

Start with this “C shaped” E chord:

Notice how the root (the “1”) is redundant?
Redundant notes are super common in guitar chord voicings. They beef up the sound & make it easier to strum.
Redundant notes are usually the first ones we replace when building spicier chords. For example…
A half-step (one fret) below the root is the 7…
…and 1 3 5 7 = a major 7 chord:

If you had a short-scaled guitar and really long fingers, you could “flat the seven” by dropping that down one more fret:

ouch! don’t injure yourself—there’s an easier way

Luckily for us, there’s a far friendlier alternative:

You’ll notice that our redundant root is back…
…and that we’ve ditched the 5 to make room for the ♭7.
That’s ok—the 5 adds some nice heft to a chord voicing, but it’s not as important as the root, the 3rd, or the fun extensions (like the ♭7)
The addition of that ♭7 makes this a “dominant chord”—E7.
We’ll review all the different 7 chords in a minute, but first let me show you this…

We took that redundant root and replaced it with the 2…
…but now the 2 is called the 9?!? 😬
If the chord name has 9, 11, or 13, it’s telling us it has the 7 too.
An easy way to remember this:
- 9 = 7 + 2
- 11 = 7 + 4
- 13 = 7 + 6
For example:
- Emaj9 = Emaj7 chord + the 2
- Em9 = Em7 chord + the 2
- Em11 = Em7 chord + the 4
- E13 = E7 chord + the 6

When the 7 is present, it’s normal to call these scale degrees 9, 11, & 13 instead of 2, 4, & 6.

Let’s do one more chord-naming convention: alterations.

9, 11, or 13 implies that the 7 is also present…
…so we don’t usually have to write 7 in the name of an “extended” chord…
…except when the “extensions” (9, 11, 13) are “altered” (♯’d or ♭’d).

Geez! What a word salad! Why so many arbitrary rules?

This is one is actually pretty simple:

Writing the 7 in the chord name separates the ♯s & ♭s from the root:

E♭9 is built from the root note of E♭, and
E7♭9 is built from the root note of E (it’s the 9 that’s flatted).

This is important! If I write “E♭9” when I actually mean “E7♭9”, the keyboard player & I are collectively gonna play this awful sounding mess:

1×

0:00

-0:03

This might help

Here’s a visual to help you make sense of the whole maj7/m7/7 thing:

you should play that Em(maj7) just to hear how tense it is

It’s better to learn these from real songs.

It doesn’t matter how clear a theoretical example is.

It’s still not going to stick until you see it used in a real-world context. I’m working on a new GuitarOS course that does exactly that, but in the meantime…