The ever present chord

Hello again.

News from Tamborine Mountain, Australia:

I have set up the PlaneTalkers Forum, a place where buyers of my book, video or online version of the course can come and discuss the technique. 216 so far have signed up, so if you're one of the 7000+ who have bought my book, come and join in.

A reminder that last month I moved my many sites to my own hosting company I have set up, and that if you're looking for affordable hosting, drop into http://hosting.tamborinemountain.net

OK, this week I'm going to talk about -- guess what? -- Chords! I know, I know ... that's all I ever talk about, but that's all there is really, when it all boils down.

I have often mentioned in my articles that even if there is no chord being played in a piece of music, it's there anyway, setting the rules. What do I mean by that? "Happy Birthday" is a good example. We all know the tune, we can all sing along whether or not there's a piano or guitar being played. Its chords go:

I - V - V - I - I - IV - V - I ... so in the key of C:
C - G - G - C - C - F - G - C. As usual the V chord can be the 7th.

If there are a couple of musicians in the crowd singing, they might add a harmony or two so that the chord materializes, but it's there one way or the other, setting the rules. This is why it's so important to learn all you can about chords: They are also melody and harmony. In fact, apart from the time element of music, chords encapsulate everything ... melody, harmony, scales, modes, double stops. All can be viewed against the chord, all follow the chord's rule.

We tend to see guitar chords as those little clusters of notes you see in chord diagrams, and of course that's one way of looking at it, but in fact a chord is a specific selection of notes which are scattered all over the fretboard. It just so happens that they conveniently group themselves together in little clusters that our hand can reach in one go and that we can turn into a diagram of a memorable pattern. That's thanks to the way the guitar is tuned. The best way of thinking about a chord is to project it the whole length of the fretboard. The way these notes lay themselves out is constant, learnable, reliable and logical. Major, minor, augmented, diminished, 7th ... whatever flavor you can think of, all follow a specific pattern as they march up the neck. Once you can "see" them there, you can play them, either as chords, or broken down into harmony/melody.

When I was writing PlaneTalk, which describes in great detail the "trick" to seeing your fretboard in this manner, I asked a fantastic jazz guitarist what he did mentally to keep track of his improvisation. His way of putting it was "I follow the chord, and it's always there for me under my hand, no matter where I am on the neck". That's exactly right too. When you join all the positions up, there are no blank spaces. The chord, no matter which one, is always there, ever present.

Which means of course, if chords=melody/harmony, that those aspects are ever present also. A great exercise which was a huge breakthrough for me and my way of perceiving music on the guitar is posted at my lessons page at http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com . It's called "stretching exercise". I remember it being shown to me years ago by a friend and getting that big bright light bulb go off in my brain. It changed my whole way of thinking about how the guitar works, and it tripled my muscle memory.

If you want to learn the trick to it all, drop in to http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com and read all about it. There are lots of lessons there too, slide, dropped d, movies, all kinds of good stuff.

That's it for this week. Twang on!

Kirk
http://planetalk.thatllteachyou.com
http://www.guitarforbeginners.com
http://www.bottleneckguitar.com

A local archive of Kirk's columns is located here.