{"id":28678,"date":"2024-02-01T17:59:18","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T22:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=28678"},"modified":"2025-01-29T13:39:01","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T18:39:01","slug":"identifying-added-note-chords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2024\/identifying-added-note-chords\/","title":{"rendered":"Identifying added-note chords"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords<\/a>; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scales. It is intimidating to try to learn to distinguish between C7, C9, C13, C7sus4, C9sus4 and C13sus4, but they are really just different combinations of the notes in C Mixolydian mode, and they all convey a similar “Mixolydian-ness”. But before we get to those, let’s start with extended chords you can make from regular old C major.<\/p>\r\n

Major scale chords<\/h2>\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Sus4 chords<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

To make a sus4 chord, you take a major triad and raise its third up a half step to the fourth. In classical music, the idea is that the third is being lifted up to the fourth temporarily, and that it will soon return back to its proper place. In rock and pop, that might also be the case, but sometimes the sus4 chord is itself the “real” chord.<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

“Jack Straw<\/a>” by the Grateful Dead begins by serenely alternating E and Esus4.<\/p>\r\n