ESSENTIAL 5: CHORD CHART NAMES FOR HARMONY
#3a LABELING HARMONY
(CHORD CHARTS)
We have covered musical notation of pitch and rhythm, both traditional and non-traditional. Now it’s time to move on to harmony, so let’s talk about chords. Most worship musicians, especially guitarists, are already pretty familiar with chord charts. So this might come pretty easily for many of you. However, even things we think we know we don’t really know well. Exactly WHY is this chord labeled that way? That’s what we will be introducing today.
Chords are the vertical sonorities created when two or more pitches sound together. In Western music, the first thing most of us hear is the melody, but we are using chords with it almost all the time. Some of these combinations sound terrible together (like this..) and some sound very pleasant. Some sound more empty, and others sound quite full. Some sound more happy somehow, and some sound more sad. Some work better in one key than another; in fact, the chords help to shape the key of a song.
Do you know that virtually every combination of pitches that comes up with any regularity in music has a label. Two notes, three notes, four or five notes, with any random addition, someone has thought of a label for that chord. However, to make things simple, we’re going to point out that the vast majority of chords are made up of 3 or 4 notes, stacked in thirds. For right now, we don’t need to worry about how the chord is created; for now, we are learning the labels. So, here we go.
Every chord has a root. Usually it is the bass note that we name the chord after. So that is the first part of the chord’s name: C, Bb, F#, A. This is the primary identifier.
You know that you have the chord in its root position because the notes will stack on consecutive lines or spaces. So we invert or move the notes around until they line up properly. They call these pitches the root, third and fifth.
Now we’re able to confirm that the bass note, in fact, is the name of the chord (the pitch of record, if this were a court of law).
Now that we have stacked the notes like that, we get to the next part of the name of the chord: whether it is major or minor. The next note up when they are stacked in consecutive lines or spaces is the third. Most often, that pitch is 2W up (4H), they call it a major third, and therefore call the chord a major chord, which is so common that it needs no further label.
So, what could be more simple: Here is a C. F. G. This simple one-letter label is sufficient for more than half of the chords you will see in contemporary pop music. [60% of the CCLI top 20 in 2016]
But wait! Just when I start to predict it all, it gets confusing. Try doing this with a D. This is a D chord. But if you look carefully at the distance between the notes, you see that the third is only 3H above the root. It sounds different, too, doesn’t it? Yes. This interval they call a minor third. So we label this chord a D minor (Dmin). Same experience with A and E. …So now we have C, F, G, Dmin, Emin, Amin. About 10% of chords in CWM are minor, which means we’re 70% of the way toward having chords labeled.
The only other thing we need to know right now is that sometimes there is a fourth note in the chord. It is almost always ADDED to the simple triad. And most often it stacks above the three notes as the next third on top. If that’s the case, it is a 7thabove the root (use G), so we simply add a number at the end of our nomenclature: G7. Unless it’s a minor chord: Em7, Am7, Dm7. Notice in all of these cases that the seventh is a whole step below the root. That’s important eventually. But now we have labels for 80% of the chords you will ever see. [Another 10% of the chords are slash chords, which means it is a normal chord but with a bass note that is not the root of the chord. These are more complicated to figure out, but really quite simple to read. If you add these chords to the pile, then 90% of the chords you will ever see are covered in this short video.]
Time to celebrate and nail down what you know.