Music Theory Crash Course
Alternate Chord Voicing
September 12, 2022
MUSIC THEORY | OTHER CHORD VOICING
OTHER CHORD VOICING:
So far we’ve only spoken about major, minor and diminished triads. In this video, I’ll first take you through the process of creating modifications to a chord by inverting the notes, and why you might want to do this, then I’ll show you how to get smooth and jazzy with 7th and 9th chord voicings.
Let’s start with Inversions. Just as the name implies, we’re flipping the order of the notes to create a different feeling without changing the notes used in the chord. So looking at the C major triad, we can create the first inversion of this by simply moving the lowest note of the chord up an entire octave so that it sits above the third and fifth. This can be done easily in Ableton Live by clicking on the midi note, holding shift, and then pressing the up arrow once. This is now a C major chord 1st inversion. We can make this a second inversion by moving the lowest note again, which is the third of the c major chord, up an octave by repeating the previous technique. Now the Fifth of the chord is the lowest and our chord is now a C Major 2nd inversion.
You might wonder why we’d want to do such a thing. Well, it’s a useful tool for smoothing out the movement between notes in a chord progression. Typically it’s the most pleasing to the ear if a note doesn’t have to move a great distance to get to the next chord. Using the 1 5 6 4 progression as an example, we could invert the first chord and the last chord to bring all of the notes a little closer together and this is what we get. In comparison to what is was before… It sounds smoother, doesn’t it? We can make quite a few variations to this progression by simply inverting the notes of the chords.
Okay, lets’ get jazzy. So we know how to create a triad, which is a chord made up of 3 notes. The root, the third, and the fifth; Skipping a degree between each note of the triad. Now, what if we continued this pattern to the next available note in our scale? This would be called adding the 7th to the chord, making our C major triad into a C major 7 chord. It sounds pretty jazzy, doesn’t it? The added dissonance of that added 7th gives that chord a chill and vibey quality.
Let’s continue the pattern even more by skipping a degree again to add the 9th. This is now a very complex chord that contains 5 notes! The dissonance of these added notes can really be seen when you drop the 7th or ninth down an octave. Referring back to the interval chart that hopefully you’ve printed and have next to you right now, you can see how these notes are creating some minor and very dissonant intervals.
If you were to create a chord progression using only 7th chords, it might be a great start to your next Chill-hop banger ;)
Finally, let's talk about augmented chords, which are similar in action to a diminished chord but instead of stacking three notes 3 semitones apart, the augmented chord is made of three notes, each 4 semitones from one another. An augmented chord can sound dreamy, or mysterious.
That’s it for this video, in the next one, we’ll talk about beat subdivisions! See you there!