Do these chords exists? Any different name for them?

[JimmyDunlop]

Which means in the case of a IIm-V7 progression, you're playing IIm7b5 to V7b9. For example, Gm7b5 [G-Bb-Db-F] to C7b9/F#7b9 [G-Bb-Db-E (Fb)].

As far as the OP's questions are concerned, it sounds like many of the voicings he's trying to name are not discrete chords but rather the result of polyphonic voice-leading.

they are just chords to harmonize the melody of a brief musical passage. each note of the melody is a chord. does it help?

[Mick-7]

they are just chords to harmonize the melody of a brief musical passage. each note of the melody is a chord. does it help?

I suspect that many of these voicings are not discrete chords but rather voices moving within tonal centers (for example those I've underlined) so they could be given a few different (enharmonic) names.

Bm7/A Cmaj9 Am/E Am/E } ----- D9 D9/C G6/B D7/A} -----Gmaj9 C6/F# Am/E C/E}----- Am7/G Am7 D7/B C6/G }

[Christian Miller]

In my admittedly narrow mind, a 6b5 chord is a 6b5 chord. When I play it (which is fairly often), it's almost always replaces a 7b5 and all I've done is lowered the 7 a semi-tone and I'm still using it for the same purpose.

Figure that bass. Roots are a lie!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Christian Miller]

they are just chords to harmonize the melody of a brief musical passage. each note of the melody is a chord. does it help?

If you want to get into functions it makes sense to treat that chord as a iim7b5.

Unless you are bass guy like our Jim. I like the cut of his jib.

In practice to me it’s sounds so different from the root position ii V I that I don’t think of them as really being the same thing, even though in terms of the notes in the chords - they are the same.

Anyway, riddle me this, what kind of terrible monster would combine this

G G+ Cm/G G

with
F6b5 E7 Am

and then
Cm

There ought to be a law against it!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[JimmyDunlop]

I suspect that many of these voicings are not discrete chords but rather voices moving within tonal centers (for example those I've underlined) so they could be given a few different (enharmonic) names.

Bm7/A Cmaj9 Am/E Am/E } ----- D9 D9/C G6/B D7/A} -----Gmaj9 C6/F# Am/E C/E}----- Am7/G Am7 D7/B C6/G }

If you want to get into functions it makes sense to treat that chord as a iim7b5.

Unless you are bass guy like our Jim. I like the cut of his jib.

In practice to me it’s sounds so different from the root position ii V I that I don’t think of them as really being the same thing, even though in terms of the notes in the chords - they are the same.

Anyway, riddle me this, what kind of terrible monster would combine this

G G+ Cm/G G

with
F6b5 E7 Am

and then
Cm

There ought to be a law against it!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

so you mean there are 2 type o chords? discretes and voicing chords? , i thought there was just one type of chords, those that just sustain and support a leading melody, thats all. whats a discrete chord, please explain?

[Jim Soloway]

Figure that bass. Roots are a lie!

Not always. Sometimes they are the truth. If I'm going from D9 to Ab7b5 to Gmaj9, then the second chord is just the b5 sub of the D. Ted Greene encouraged me to also think of that as the bII leading to the I to encourage more freedom in voicing the passing chord. If I lower the b7 a semi tone to a 6, it still serves as both the flat five sub to the D9 and the flat two leading to the Gmaj9, I've just changed the color a bit but the function remains the same so why change the way you notate the chord? That just succeeds in hiding the function of the chord in creating root movement from the V to the I.

[Christian Miller]

Not always. Sometimes they are the truth. If I'm going from D9 to Ab7b5 to Gmaj9, then the second chord is just the b5 sub of the D. Ted Greene encouraged me to also think of that as the bII leading to the I to encourage more freedom in voicing the passing chord. If I lower the b7 a semi tone to a 6, it still serves as both the flat five sub to the D9 and the flat two leading to the Gmaj9, I've just changed the color a bit but the function remains the same so why change the way you notate the chord? That just succeeds in hiding the function of the chord in creating root movement from the V to the I.

I don’t know if I’m being a bit dim but I’m not sure if I understand how the example you gave disassociates root from bass. Which is what I meant.

In any case what I feel have learned from figured bass is that the concept of root is theoretical. It has no concrete existence beyond being a theoretical concept to unite a set of apparently diverse sonorities which may be useful, for example Rameau’s ‘fundamental bass’ that we today call ‘roots’.

This is something I had to unlearn because we learn roots from day one. Anything not in root position is a slash chord and hence a special case. For CPE Bach (and by extension his dad£ this would have seemed absurd (although Bach did have the concept of inversions he did not accept Rameau’s ideas). Bach understood the harmonic world as being contextual and normative not theoretical. Do this when the 6 4 chord moves this way, do this when it moves another way.

But it’s way we organise our music today because inversion is often down to the initiative of the bass player. AC/DC and Megadeth being of course obvious examples. The guitar is playing an A5 power chord and the bass played C#. That kind of thing. Slash chord, baby.

Anyway in the real world we write chords down in the way that seems most familiar, no? I would write Cm6/Eb (or maybe Am7b5/Eb) not because I think that’s the best way to write that chord but because that’s what I’ve seen in charts.

But this uncertainty in my head whether to write Am7b5 because of the root progresion in fourths which is theoretically satisfying or Cm6 because it looks less cluttered to me and something something Barry Harris mumble mumble shows how theoretical this whole thing can be. Rameau thought it was all physics of course; a man of the Enlightenment with all the good and bad that came with it…

Eb6b5 neatly sidesteps all of this guff.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Christian Miller]

Not always. Sometimes they are the truth. If I'm going from D9 to Ab7b5 to Gmaj9, then the second chord is just the b5 sub of the D. Ted Greene encouraged me to also think of that as the bII leading to the I to encourage more freedom in voicing the passing chord. If I lower the b7 a semi tone to a 6, it still serves as both the flat five sub to the D9 and the flat two leading to the Gmaj9, I've just changed the color a bit but the function remains the same so why change the way you notate the chord? That just succeeds in hiding the function of the chord in creating root movement from the V to the I.

In the case of functions we enter another level of abstraction. What precisely does it mean that Gb6 (or for that matter Gbmaj7#11) retains the function of Gb7?

I suppose one could argue that the removal of the leading tone C# renders the function of the chord to be no longer dominant. subdominant. Em in the key of C is a dominant function according to Reimann and so on (it has the B.)

If I understood, in your example it’s standing in for a dominant so its function is normative. I think most jazz musicians mean function in this sense. It a practical definition, not a closed theoretic one. More like the way grammar of a language evolves rather than some immutable fact of nature the way Rameau and his followers imagined it.

(There’s a lot of this grammatical evolution in jazz that I’d love to track more. How exactly did the maj7 go from being a chord that needed to be prepared and resolved in earlier jazz to being considered a consonant tonic chord for example?)

So it’s not a cut and dried concept. You are distilling some aspect of it being different and another of it being the same. So it’s subjective, not objective. And that’s kind of interesting. I think subjectivity is underrated.

[Christian Miller]

Oh interesting … I guess half diminished off the #4 gives you a 6b5 … given the context I always thought of it as a #11, but it is a nice voicing.

Historical context

To relate to and I guess flip over what Jim said, we chromatically alter the 6th raising the 6th and you have French Sixth/Tritone sub/whatever moving to the dominant of IIm. Which is Realbook Days of Wine and Roses. The original chord is the one Michael discusses in the video. Which Schumann stole from the Bee Gees, of course.

The augmented sixth idea is more contrapuntal. So we have in F, C C# D. But I think most jazz guitarists would voicelead the C# to C. Which is bluesy.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Jim Soloway]

In the case of functions we enter another level of abstraction. What precisely does it mean that Gb6 (or for that matter Gbmaj7#11) retains the function of Gb7?

I suppose one could argue that the removal of the leading tone C# renders the function of the chord to be no longer dominant. subdominant. Em in the key of C is a dominant function according to Reimann and so on (it has the B.)

If I understood, in your example it’s standing in for a dominant so its function is normative. I think most jazz musicians mean function in this sense. It a practical definition, not a closed theoretic one. More like the way grammar of a language evolves rather than some immutable fact of nature the way Rameau and his followers imagined it.

(There’s a lot of this grammatical evolution in jazz that I’d love to track more. How exactly did the maj7 go from being a chord that needed to be prepared and resolved in earlier jazz to being considered a consonant tonic chord for example?)

So it’s not a cut and dried concept. You are distilling some aspect of it being different and another of it being the same. So it’s subjective, not objective. And that’s kind of interesting. I think subjectivity is underrated.

I suspect my way of viewing these things is quite a bit different than most people I encounter in these discussions. You said "It (is) a practical definition, not a closed theoretic one" and truthfully, practical definitions are all I really care about ... and even that is limited further by the additional condition of being practical to my own vision of playing music. Over time I have come to accept that my vision may not (does not?) coincide with a lot of others. There are certain ideas that are central to me that would probably be rejected outright by most musicians and yet they seem to work for me so I am happy to live by them. The deeper I get, the more I find those ideas are both expanding and becoming more entrenched ... simply because they work for the way that I make music. The byproduct of this way of thinking is that I get further out on my own little isolated evolutionary branch. For the most part I'm very comfortable with that, especially when I just keep to myself and accept that my way is not the accepted way of many others.

[Mick-7]

If I'm going from D9 to Ab7b5 to Gmaj9, then the second chord is just the b5 sub of the D. ... If I lower the b7 a semi tone to a 6, it still serves as both the flat five sub to the D9 and the flat two leading to the Gmaj9, I've just changed the color a bit but the function remains the same so why change the way you notate the chord?

This is different than your previous statement and example, which was Am7b5 to D7/Ab7b9 (A-C-Eb-G > A-C-Eb-F#). That is, lowering the 7th of the m7b5 gives you it's relative Dominant (7b9), m7b5 by itself does not sound dominant, e.g., Am7b5 > Gmaj.7 Lowering the 7th of Ab7b5 would give you a Fm6/Dm7b5, which also is not dominant sounding.

[Mick-7]

so you mean there are 2 type o chords? discretes and voicing chords? , i thought there was just one type of chords, those that just sustain and support a leading melody, that's all. whats a discrete chord, please explain?

Sorry, by "discrete" I simply meant serving a definite harmonic function, as a subdominant or dominant chord, etc., versus being a passing chord - say an alternate voicing for the previous chord in the progression.

Christian asked: "Anyway, riddle me this, what kind of terrible monster would combine this: G G+ Cm/G G, with F6b5 E7 Am, and then Cm."

Maybe a very stoned Willie Nelson? (i.e., more so than his usual state of intoxication).

[Jim Soloway]

This is different than your previous statement and example, which was Am7b5 to D7/Ab7b9 (A-C-Eb-G > A-C-Eb-F#). That is, lowering the 7th of the m7b5 gives you it's relative Dominant (7b9), m7b5 by itself does not sound dominant, e.g., Am7b5 > Gmaj.7 Lowering the 7th of Ab7b5 would give you a Fm6/Dm7b5, which also is not dominant sounding.

I don't think I said that. Perhaps there was a typo in my post somewhere but I don't think I referred to lowering the 7th of a m7b5. I did refer to lowering the 7th of a 7b5 but I was referring to a dominant 7b5 not a minor7b5.

[Mick-7]

I don't think I said that. Perhaps there was a typo in my post somewhere but I don't think I referred to lowering the 7th of a m7b5. I did refer to lowering the 7th of a 7b5 but I was referring to a dominant 7b5 not a minor7b5.

Sorry, Jim, still not following you, lowering the 7th of a 7b5 chord will give you minor chords, as in the examples I gave, not a different Dom. 7th chord.

D7b5 with 6th lowered = D-F#-G#-B. Ab7b5 (6th lowered) = Ab-C-D-F.

P.S. - Perhaps you mean, lower the 9th of a dominant 9th chord with no root?

Example: Ab7 (no root) = C-Gb-Bb-Eb, lowering the 9th (Gb/F#) gives you: D7 = C-F#-A-Eb - or vice versa (raise the 5th of the D7 = D7#5b9).

Yes, that must be it, in your last post you said: "If I'm going from D9 to Ab7b5," but this is the same as Ebm6-Ab7b9.

[starjasmine]

If we want to skip formal study of music theory that defines functional harmony very specifically, we can say that function pretty much comes down to what the listener hears. Separating function from chord-spelling can aid in adopting this mindset; i.e. chords are "sound colors" and spelling a chord slightly differently does not necessarily prevent it from adopting a particular function.

For example if you play D- G7 C, the listener hears G7 having a dominant function because it is V leading strongly to I.

If you sub the tritone of G7 and play D- Db7 C, the Db7 has a dominant function, as well, even though it is not the V chord in the key.

So lets say you play these progressions a few times to set up the listener's ear to expect that G or Db chord to be a dominant-functioning chord that leads to I. Then, for a little variety, you play Dbma7 instead of Db7 or G7; i.e. D- Dbma7 C. The listener still hears that Dbma7 as leading strongly to I; i.e., it functions as a dominant even though it is not a dominant sonority (maj triad with minor 7th.)

Similarly, you could swap in G-7 for G7 after setting up the listener to hear that spot in the progression as a dominant, and they'd hear G-7 function as a dominant, even though it is not a dominant sonority; i.e. D- G-7 C. (Not a great example, since G-7 would be the v in c natural minor, but we still hear it going to I [borrowed from the parallel major], even without the leading tone that harmonic minor would give us.)

TBH, the setup may not even be all that necessary, as a lifetime of listening to pop, rock and jazz have conditioned modern listeners' ears not to hear out-of-key chords and non-functional harmony as "weird" or "wrong."

[Jim Soloway]

Sorry, Jim, still not following you, lowering the 7th of a 7b5 chord will give you minor chords, as in the examples I gave, not a different Dom. 7th chord.

D7b5 with 6th lowered = D-F#-G#-B. Ab7b5 (6th lowered) = Ab-C-D-F.

I don't think I said anything about lowering the 6th. I said lower the 7th a semitone to the 6th.

D7b5 at the 10th fret = D-X-C-F#-Ab=X
lower the 7th and you get D-X-B-F#-Ab-X

It is technically no longer a dominant because it no longer has a flatted 7th but it now has no 7th at all so it's status as a dominant is no longer really defined and the context will determine how the ear hears it. As a passing chord from the Ab7 leading to the Dbmaj7, the ear will it as a dominant.

[Mick-7]

I don't think I said anything about lowering the 6th. I said lower the 7th a semitone to the 6th.

D7b5 at the 10th fret = D-X-C-F#-Ab=X
lower the 7th and you get D-X-B-F#-Ab-X

It is technically no longer a dominant because it no longer has a flatted 7th but it now has no 7th at all so it's status as a dominant is no longer really defined and the context will determine how the ear hears it. As a passing chord from the Ab7 leading to the Dbmaj7, the ear will it as a dominant.

Well, you made it a Abm7b5 chord, which only has one note different than a Gmaj7 (Ab rather than G) and doesn't sound dominant to me.

But I suspect you're using good substitutes but misunderstanding the theory behind them, i.e., you know what to play but not necessarily why you play it. I did that for many years, didn't understand the theory behind a lot of what I played until much later.

[Jim Soloway]

Well, you made it a Abm7b5 chord, which only has one note different than a Gmaj7 (Ab rather than G) and doesn't sound dominant to me.

But I suspect you're using good substitutes but misunderstanding the theory behind them, i.e., you know what to play but not necessarily why you play it. I did that for many years, didn't understand the theory behind a lot of what I played until much later.

Perhaps you're right. I admit freely to being very results driven but when you have a V-bII-I progression and you don't notate the middle chord as a bII, it feels to me like you've removed the plot line from a very powerful story. Just my opinion and I don't expect anyone to agree with it.

[JimmyDunlop]

Perhaps you're right. I admit freely to being very results driven but when you have a V-bII-I progression and you don't notate the middle chord as a bII, it feels to me like you've removed the plot line from a very powerful story. Just my opinion and I don't expect anyone to agree with it.

I think you people are emphasizing something that is 5% or less of music, which is the nomenclature of the chords. That shouldnt be the Focus. You even can use tools to identify them ,etc

[Christian Miller]

Sorry, by "discrete" I simply meant serving a definite harmonic function, as a subdominant or dominant chord, etc., versus being a passing chord - say an alternate voicing for the previous chord in the progression.

Christian asked: "Anyway, riddle me this, what kind of terrible monster would combine this: G G+ Cm/G G, with F6b5 E7 Am, and then Cm."

Maybe a very stoned Willie Nelson? (i.e., more so than his usual state of intoxication).

Of course, it’s the verse of All by Myself, which is a lift from Rachmaninoff but even Rach didn’t put the IVm there because he thought ‘maybe it’s too much, I’ll hold it back just this side …’

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Christian Miller]

Perhaps you're right. I admit freely to being very results driven but when you have a V-bII-I progression and you don't notate the middle chord as a bII, it feels to me like you've removed the plot line from a very powerful story. Just my opinion and I don't expect anyone to agree with it.

I’ve also noticed quite a hip modern jazz thing to replace dominant chords with ‘non dominant’ sounds (ie they don’t contain both the b7 and 3 of the V chord.)

So you have Eb/G or Db/G on a G7 instead of a G7b9b13 or G7b5b9 for example. Or Bmaj7#5 etc.

Making functional changes less functional I guess


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Reg]

hey Jimmy get yourself a copy of Standardized Chord Symbol Notation. It's cheap and is standard starting point for notation concepts.

Standard Chord symbols and starting guidelines for notation and what the notation implies. gets into Compound and Polytonal as well as Quartal notation.

Is what most music programs, fakebooks etc... start with.

It's not complicated....

[JimmyDunlop]

hey Jimmy get yourself a copy of Standardized Chord Symbol Notation. It's cheap and is standard starting point for notation concepts.

Standard Chord symbols and starting guidelines for notation and what the notation implies. gets into Compound and Polytonal as well as Quartal notation.

Is what most music programs, fakebooks etc... start with.

It's not complicated....

Why should I? If you can name a chords in different ways. What would be the use of that book for me? I only have puntual doubts about some chords names and for that I can use online tools . I rarely would need that

[pamosmusic]

Why should I? If you can name a chords in different ways. What would be the use of that book for me? I only have puntual doubts about some chords names and for that I can use online tools . I rarely would need that

A significant portion of the work of composing/arranging is formatting your artistic vision in a way that makes it readable to other people.

The entire purpose of books like the one Reg recommends is to lay out the common practice so that a composer can communicate their ideas clearly

[JimmyDunlop]

A significant portion of the work of composing/arranging is formatting your artistic vision in a way that makes it readable to other people.

The entire purpose of books like the one Reg recommends is to lay out the common practice so that a composer can communicate their ideas clearly

And for that I would share a score written by me that displays exactly how do I want that the acompaniament IS played. Etc