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Chords - An Introduction -
Part 3 |
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| Note – This column takes it for granted that you are a right-handed player. Can you believe it? I wrote this months article and then after I had completed it I promptly deleted it by accident. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re trying to do twenty things at once. So here goes, attempt number two. Hope you enjoyed playing with the Major and Minor chord shapes I gave you last month. Now that we’ve got started, I thought I’d tell you about an ‘illegitimate chord’ that many of us have used at one time or other. In the world of guitars there exists the most commonly used chord – the barre chord. Now, for those of you that don’t know much about our smaller six stringed cousin, I’ll tell you about the barre chord. There’s a chord you’ll find in all the guitar chord books called E Major. One of the ways to finger the E Major chord is to hold down the B on the A string, the E on the D string and the G# on the G string and then strum all six strings. Doing this, you’ll strike E (root), B (the 5th), E (octave), G# (the 3rd), B (the octave 5th), E (2nd octave). What all guitarists do is transpose this chord shape by placing their index finger across all of the strings while retaining the same finger shape thus they can effortlessly play E Maj, F Maj, F# Maj, G Maj and so forth all the way up the neck. I once saw a guitarist playing barre chords for the entire evening – he probably only started playing that week! I’ve never seen a barre chord shown in any self respecting guitar chord book. In the bass world we have our own equivalent of the barre chord – it’s called the 5th chord. The fifth chord consists of the root, the octave and the 5th – I’ve also never seen this chord shown in any bass chord book but it’s so versatile you can use it to cover the entire range of all the Major AND Minor chords as the fifth remains the same in both categories – try it for yourself. Ask your guitarist or keyboard player to play something in a major scale and play the chord sequence using fifths – it sounds GREAT! Now try the same thing over a minor melody and you’ll get a similar result. Now that we’ve had a bit of fun, it’s time to get back to the serious stuff. This month we’re going to cover the Major 7th chord. There are six examples here – more finger position possibilities than any other chord I know of. Have fun and I’ll see you here next month to wrap up our introduction to chordal playing.
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