Major chords and inversions
In the last post I discussed triads and talked a little about the major triad, i.e. any chord built with the following formula: root, major 3rd, perfect 5th
Most guitar players probably know a few ways of playing major chords — chords using just the notes of the major triad. Usually, at a minimum, most people probably know how to play half a dozen or more open position chords in the first position (using the first 3 frets). You can play C, D, E, F, G and A major chords easily here.
On top of that there are ‘barre’ chord shapes formed by barring the first finger across 5 or 6 strings an effectively creating a new set of ‘open’ strings that can be moved about up and down the neck. The E shape and the A shape are by far an away the most commonly used.
These two movable barre shapes are going to be completely familiar to any rock player and most will have the notes on the E and A strings memorised so that they know where to play, for example, an Eb major (11th fret with E-shape barre or 6th fret with A-shape barre) or an F# major (9th fret with A-shape barre or 2nd fret with E-shape barre) and so on.
Jazz players, however, don’t really use barre chords that much. Why? There’s a practical reason: it’s just easier to play non-barre chord shapes when you are playing at speed, especially if you are going to be playing chords with sevenths and extensions — 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, etc. There’s also a musical reason: barre chords often repeat the same note more than once. In the E-shape the root note is played 3 notes — on the 6th, 4th and 1st strings. From the point of view of outlining the harmony of a tune, these are redundant, each note only needs to appear once, and the note repetition can make the chords sound ‘busy’ and out of place in a fast moving set of changes. We’ll see in a later post that you can outline the changes to a tune pretty effectively playing just two notes per chord — the 3rd and the 7th — and the root is often redundant when played just the once, never mind played 3 times!
So, here’s a more ‘jazz’ shape [still based around the E-shape above]:
This shape still repeats the root note but it’s more mobile and much easier to work in the 7th or extensions, something we’ll see in a later post.
Just playing this chord could get pretty boring, though. A lot of swing or jazz tunes can feature up to four bars of the same major chord and just chunking along on one chord shape can get tedious. Here’s an mp3 with 4 bars of G played with this shape.
One way to make the basic major triad more interesting is to play inversions, chords with a note other than the root note on the bottom. Here’s a standard inversion of the G major chord:
This chord has the major 3rd on the bottom [B played at 7th fret on the E string]. An easy way to remember the position of these chords and to know which one to play is to look out for the root note on either the E, A or D string [the ones most guitar players will already know the note names for]. For this inversion the root is on the D string, 5th fret.
Here’s another:
The easiest way to remember this one [which has the 5th in the bass] is to remember that this chord is played at the same fret as the A-shape barre. The G root is at the 10th fret on the A-string. the note might not be getting played, but knowing where it is helps locate the chord.
Here’s the same four bars using these inversions to make sticking to one chord more interesting.
Finally, swing players don’t usually play the full chord. It’s too slow, and generally the chunky rhythm sound sounds best playing on just the four lowest strings. Here’s the same inversions but with the B string left out.
The basic 3-note swing voicings are central to getting that rhythm sound down, also, because they are easy to play they make it possible to play fast chordal passages with lots of colour notes — 6ths, 7ths, etc — added in [something for a later post].
Here’s the same four bars using simple 3-note swing voicings and randomly choosing one of those three shapes.
Add in a couple of colour notes — the 6th and sometimes major 7th — these inversions and a few passing chords and you can play interesting stuff over a single major chord for ages. More later!
Swing To Bop: Swing, RnB and Jazz Guitar 