Fun with the B diminished Chord
Yesterday I experimented with the G Major chord, changing notes in it and analyzing what chords were produced. Today let’s take a look at the B diminished chord.
Fun with the G Major Chord
Starting with a G Major chord (G - B - D), we can modify each note one by one and produce different chords. This is a good exercise to help figure out what kind of chord you’re looking at when you know a base chord.
The Chords of a Key
What chords are going to sound good in a particular key? We’ve gone to the trouble of figuring out what notes are in that key, you figure, probably chords that are built out of those notes are gonna sound good.
You’re right. So let’s start in the key of C and build ourselves some chords.
Building Major Scales
A major scale is a collection of seven notes, related to each other in a fixed pattern of intervals.
We’ll start by examing the good old key of C major, which uses only the white keys on the piano (that is, it contains no sharps or flats).
Suspended Chords
Suspended chords are those beautiful chords that sound like they want to go somewhere. Unlike the dominant 7 chord, which "wants" to resolve to another root (for example, G7 - C), a suspended chord resolves to its own major chord.
There are two types of suspended chords, sus2 and sus4. sus4 is the more common, and is sometimes indicated simply as sus.
Interval Inversions
An inversion is when you keep the same note names but flip the registers of the notes. For example, C - E is a major third. E - C is the same note names but now we’re travelling a longer distance…in fact, it’s a minor sixth.
Perfect intervals remain perfect intervals. Unison remains unison, and an octave remains an octave. A perfect fifth, when inverted, becomes a perfect fourth, and vice versa.
Seventh Chords
If you’ve read up on how to figure out the notes in the basic chords, let’s continue with seventh chords.
A basic chord is composed of the root, the third, and the fifth. The seventh chord adds one more note, the seventh. Again, we’re building by stacking thirds, so if you’ve memorized that cycle of thirds you can get the letter names fairly quickly. Then you need to figure out which notes (if any) are flatted and/or sharped.
How To Quickly Figure Out the Notes of a Chord
In the last article I described four basic types of chords. Now I’ll tell you my system for figuring out what notes go into a chord.
I started by memorizing the "cycle of thirds." Chords are made by stacking thirds–in other words, by skipping notes. It helps to memorize this list so that you can quickly get the first step of naming the notes in a chord:
Four Basic Types of Chords
In general, chords are built by starting on a note and taking every other note from there. The basic chords are three notes, and can be major, minor, diminished, or augmented. The fact that you skip notes means that chords have a root note, a third, and a fifth. What kind of chord you have depends upon the type of third and the type of fifth. I wrote about intervals in a previous article.
Intervals in Music
An interval is the distance between any two notes. There is a standard way of naming all the distances from one note to another.
The notes can be stacked up, as in a chord, or played one after another, as in a melody.