It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Sorry for my naive question to some maybe but can you guys explain something to me? These two chord shapes are the same but they can be seen as two very different chords. Why? Am I Missing something?
This is a G9 Chord which I use a lot :-
https://i.imgur.com/uUwcBpi.png
This is a Bm7b5 chord (Minor Seven Flat Five Half-Diminished?
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
G9 - G B D F A
Bm7b5 - B D F A
That’s why we can use a half diminished chord from the 3rd of any dominant chord. It’s just it’s extensions.
Hope that helps a little.
Em7b5 would give us a Gm6
Fm7b5 would give us a G7#5b9
All excellent stuff, this is someone who knows their stuff. Well done @Brad
@hotpickups A desire to want to know this kind of stuff is the starting point. Then it’s a case of time and effort, learning lots of music and learning/playing with other musicians, getting info from books. It doesn’t all happen at once (well not for me anyway), but if I can wrap my head around it believe me, anyone can!
A wise friend once told me ‘discipline leads to freedom’. I always try and hold on to that when my motivation wavers. It’s important to keep at it with this stuff.
If I may, I can share what was once explained to me in hopes of building on Brad's excellent explanation, particularly the way he outlined the shared notes of the respective chords but also how we decide to name a chord "this" or "that" depending on the context, i.e where it falls within an overall chord progression.
While there are things like "borrowed chords" that could be a monkey wrench in our understanding, the gist of it is that, in Ionian/major mode, a vii chord is pretty much always interchangeable with a V chord (a V7 chord especially). This is true because the vii chord is effectively an inverted V7. In this case, the Bm7b5 is basically a first inversion G7 (B being the third of G). The piano shows this more clearly. There's a variety of B, G and D chords just waiting to be played right in that one spot pictured by the op, with some version of E, A and C chords just a fret or two away. It's amazing how subtle the differences can be between chords, even to the point where they're identical, as with the original premise of this thread.
When Brad used the Am example, since Am is the relative minor of Cmaj and they share the same chords (despite the new tonal center and thus the chord numbers being reordered now that the Bm7b5 is the ii chord and the Gdom is the VII), it effectively changes nothing about the interchangeability of the Gdom and the Bm7b5.
Diminished chords are super versatile in their ability to either be themselves or be inversions of three other chords, depending on how you want to use them.
Inversions are inversions whether there's a bass player or not. As I heard Jacob Collier once explain, once we settle down on how we want our chords to sound by way of what feeling the harmony ought to convey, then any melody can potentially run alongside any bass note, and we can call it darn near whatever we want.
Whilst voicings can be thought of as different chords, and the bass note does set the context.
The volume of each string and it's tone plays an important factor in it's effectiveness. I discovered this playing chords on a Bass VI with flat-wounds - chords usually used for skank funk on a strat are full sounding and rich jazz chords on the Bass VI, same goes for playing on a proper bass - you'll probably want the root on the G string. (no sniggering ;^)
Eric Kershaw, a jazz/dance band guitarist (and music professor) writes about ranges of the fretboard - these are focused on notes with a root on the E and A string. I think every voicing (although moveable) really has a finite range of effectiveness in a band context and a little bit more for solo work. Up and down the fretboard and across strings
Adrian Ingram said of Wes Montgomery - "he probably only knew about 80 chords but he knew every single way of using them". Mickey Baker's Jazz guitar book - reuses about 23 voicings he used in his professional career in bands and film sound-tracks. They're strong safe sounds.
If you're interested in learning voicings for other uses, two good books are:
Brett Wilmott's Harmonic Extensions
Scott Henderson's Jazz Chord System
As time goes on, I've been thinking about Yvette Young's attitude of using altered tunings to find uncommon chords - her history is Piano (before Covet) - for me, I'm taking all this stuff and applying it to 8-string, tweaking the tuning is refocussing my fretboard understanding along strings - it's pretty interesting