From: whale@leland.Stanford.EDU (Stephen Schmidt)
Subject: Re: CHORDS!!
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 92 17:28:56 GMT

>In article <32288@darkstar.ucsc.edu> indigo@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Adam Schneider) writes:
>   About those "/"'s in chords: that's easy.  "A/C#" means an A chord with
>a C# bass note.  In playing the chords on the guitar, those bass notes often
>don't make a whole lot of difference unless the bass is a note that doesn't
>normally go with that chord, such as "A/G#" or "A/B".  These goofy bass notes
>can also be important in playing parts with running bass lines, such as:
>G | G/F# | Em .

I want to briefly tie two threads together here as someone mentioned inversions
a little ways upthread. Chords contain three notes, the root, the 3rd (major
or minor) and the 5th. Ordinarily one plays chords with the root as the 
lowest note as the chord is more stable and resolved that way. That's why
most people don't play the low E string in an open A chord. (In fact, the
chord sounds most stable if the root is both the top and bottom note, as in
the open E chord. That's why a lot of guitar music is written in the key
of E, so you can resolve on a well-voiced chord.)
   However, there's no reason not to play the chords with other notes in the
bass. If you put the third as the lowest note, this is called the first
inversion of the chord: if you put the fifth as the lowest note, this is called
second inversion. These chords do not sound very settled compared to the
normal chord voicing, so one rarely ends a song with them. In classical
music, only the first inversion of major chords was ever very popular.
I'm not a jazz player but I presume that in jazz the other inversions are
much more frequent. The only chord that comes quickly to mind in first
inversion is the variant of D where you use your thumb to fret the low
E string at the 2nd fret, so that that string sounds as F#. If you play
all 6 strings of an open A, that gives E in the bass so it's in second
inversion. Or you can play the open A string in a D chord to get the
second inversion of D.
    Putting other notes in the bass can have two functions. One, it can
create walking bass lines, as in the example Adam gave. (Whether one should
call the G# in his example a note of the chord is philosophy.) Or, it can
alter the chord. For example, if the guitar is playing a C major chord
C E G and the bass player plays an A in the bass, the chord is now heard
to be A C E G which can be written as C/A but is really Amin7. Or, if the
guitar player also plays an A, it can be thought of as Amin7 or Cadd6, with
the bass player's choice of A or C determining which it is. Because listeners
tend to hear the lowest note of a voicing as the chord note if they can, the
bass player usually gets to define which chord is being used when there are
two chords with otherwise identical notes. That's one reason why bass can
affect music in more subtle ways than other instruments can. It's also a
reason why bass players (like me) tend to be more up on music theory than
other instrument players (at least, I've heard that rumor and it's true
in my very limited experience.)

In article <1992Apr8.112522.23740@spider.co.uk> keitha@spider.co.uk (Keith Aitken) writes:
>
>How about the following chord?
>
>    E 3
>    B 3
>    G 0
>    D 2
>    A 2
>    E 0
>
>I would've called it E/G, but from the above, I guess that's wrong.
>
>(Example of usage - Neil Young's "Heart of Gold")
>
>Keith

The notes are: E B E G D G   which makes it an E minor 7th chord. The Led
Zeppelin song "Gallows Pole" uses an A minor 7th in the opening lick, that's
another place you can hear it.
Or, per the discussion above, you can think of this as a Gadd6, since E
is the 6th of G major. However, with the E in the bass (and appearing
twice in the chord) it's going to be difficult to hear this as a G chord,
so I would call it E minor 7.


-- 
Steve Schmidt              <><             whale@leland.stanford.edu

Why is it that the revolution always gets this far and then everyone
chickens out?
Newsgroups: alt.guitar