The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    I'm new here and I've only been studying music theory for about 11 months.
    What I'm finding is that for most every rule in music there is an exception.

    The theory of relativity can't explain how a singularity at the center of a black hole
    can have infinite mass because the physics breaks down.
    And though the theory of relativity can explain the macro universe it cannot explain the micro universe. For that
    we need quantum mechanics which, by the way, does not play nice with the theory of relativity.
    And we lack a unified field theory currently. Something that can explain both the very large and very small.

    So, if every rule in music theory has an exception can it even be called a theory?
    What are the "real" rules?
    Maybe someone will write a unified music theory some day.

    Here's a video of Leonard Bernstein breaking down the opening of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn by Debussey.
    It seems most every music rule is broken an yet it's works perfectly. And sounds beautiful!
    Debussey was a musical genius.
    Maybe he had a unified music theory? He should have shared it with the rest of us.

    I'm only half serious here. I love music and jazz and theory and this is more of my introduction to the forum.



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  3. #2

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    Up next, 150 replies that devolve to

    “I only play licks, scales are bad“

    and

    ”some theory may help”

  4. #3

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    key word in music theory.."theory"

    fact (rules) and theory seem to be interwoven in many creative disciplines..terms: "proven fact" "just a theory" both can be used to describe functions and mechanics of all styles of art..including business..medical and legal practices

    the Gershwin line.."..it ain't necessarily so.."

    "truth is stranger than fiction"

    common retort to a successful broken rule.."that's impossible"

    the two rules..

    1-there are no rules

    2-forget rule one

    my fave.."..I know..but it sounds good to me.."

  5. #4

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    Maybe this is a rant.

    I think a theory should have predictive value.

    Jazz theory has some predictive value. For example, playing C Ionian against Cmaj7 will sound consonant. And, to get that lydian sound play C Lydian.

    But, that kind of analysis can start to break down when things get more complex. What I see happening is that a great player plays something and then analysts "explain" why it worked. They can do that -- post hoc -- for any note in any harmonic situation. It's a chord tone, a consonant extension, or it comes from the tritone or is borrowed via modal interchange, or something. But, if a theory can explain (sometimes you'll see the word "justify") anything, then what predictive value does it provide?

    OTOH, if you like the sound, it might help you remember how to find it again.

    I'm aware this is an oversimplification.

    This month's issue of GP has this kind of analysis of an Oz Noy solo on She's Not There. Harmonically simple tune, but not a simple solo. Goes into which scale he plays where in the tune, and there are a lot of them. Is it helpful? I haven't decided yet. I may make some time to go through it piece by piece and see.

  6. #5

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    But, if a theory can explain (sometimes you'll see the word "justify") anything, then what predictive value does it provide?
    You answered the question already

    playing C Ionian against Cmaj7 will sound consonant. And, to get that lydian sound play C Lydian.
    it’s still up to the player to pick the notes, but theory can get you the right ingredients.

  7. #6

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    I wouldn’t worry too much about theory having predictive value. It does, in limited circumstances, but as my composition teacher used to say “Composers compose, and theorists pick up the droppings.”

    Then there is the famous quote attributed to Yogi Berra:

    “What’s the difference between theory and practice? In theory, there is no difference. In practice, there is.”

  8. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by MrCoconut
    I'm new here and I've only been studying music theory for about 11 months.
    What I'm finding is that for most every rule in music there is an exception.

    The theory of relativity can't explain how a singularity at the center of a black hole
    can have infinite mass because the physics breaks down.
    And though the theory of relativity can explain the macro universe it cannot explain the micro universe. For that
    we need quantum mechanics which, by the way, does not play nice with the theory of relativity.
    And we lack a unified field theory currently. Something that can explain both the very large and very small.

    So, if every rule in music theory has an exception can it even be called a theory?
    What are the "real" rules?
    Maybe someone will write a unified music theory some day.

    Here's a video of Leonard Bernstein breaking down the opening of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn by Debussey.
    It seems most every music rule is broken an yet it's works perfectly. And sounds beautiful!
    Debussey was a musical genius.
    Maybe he had a unified music theory? He should have shared it with the rest of us.

    I'm only half serious here. I love music and jazz and theory and this is more of my introduction to the forum.


    Ok so there’s a lot of music theory out there which is designed to explain music in some way. Theory has a sort of parasitic relationship to music where it kind of grows off it.

    If you a musician, this stuff might make for an enjoyable Adam Neely video essay but it’s not that much use for a budding improvisor or composer.

    So less important are rules dictating this and that; and more important are mastering the language of what you are doing; licks for instance, common progressions. You learn a lot of this stuff. You might use theoretical terms to talk about this stuff - ‘Dorian lick’, ‘ii V line’, ‘contrapuntal embellishment of a 7-6 suspension’ and so on, but they are just commonplace phrases and ideas that get used a lot in whatever your tradition is.

    Learn enough of this and you will start to ‘sound good’ in that genre, which is to say fluent and idiomatic. It’s also how Debussy learned. Did he have to think of the ‘rules’ of counterpoint when he wrote his prize winning fugue as a student? No. That’s like expecting a chess master to be thinking about the way the horsey moves.

    Then, famously, he tore up the rule book and wrote music for the pleasure of his ears alone. This pissed off the theorists no end, until they invented more bullshit to justify it.

    Its really that simple. There’s a lot of money in making it seem more complicated. It’s work though.

  9. #8

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    Thanks Christian.
    And as wolfen said the key word is "theory".
    I've been giving the word powers it doesn't have.
    I think I've had the wrong idea about exactly what music theory is and what it should be used for.
    This has been truly enlightening.
    Thanks for everyone's comments!

  10. #9

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    Quote Originally Posted by AllanAllen
    You answered the question already



    it’s still up to the player to pick the notes, but theory can get you the right ingredients.
    This came up in a past thread which focused on Wes playing F# against G7. There were theoretical explanations offered. Borrowed from somewhere or something like that (EDIT: bVII sub on tritone was one). At that point, it occurred to me that there could be a similar explanation for any note. If every note of the chromatic scale works, for one reason or another, then jazz theory is "play notes from the chromatic scale and make them sound good".

    But, labeling and organizing things makes them easier to grasp. So, for example, it may be useful to know that you can play the notes of Gmelmin over a static C7 vamp. Or you can play the alt scale heading to the tonic.
    Last edited by rpjazzguitar; 03-14-2022 at 03:11 PM.

  11. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    This came up in a past thread which focused on Wes playing F# against G7. There were theoretical explanations offered.
    Yeah, I’m not into all that microscopic analysis. I’m trying to be a musician not a theory scientist.

    I think there are severely diminishing returns on theory after you get past the basics. I’m also biased because I don’t like music that’s more complex like Fusion and exotic heavy metal.

  12. #11

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    Here's the thread you speak of:

    How would you think about this Wes Montgomery lick?

    I read the first three pages and now I have a headache.

  13. #12

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    Quote Originally Posted by MrCoconut
    Here's the thread you speak of:

    How would you think about this Wes Montgomery lick?

    I read the first three pages and now I have a headache.
    To me that Wes lick is just a chromatic sidestep approach to G7. It would be perfectly normal to play a line there such as D#, F, D natural, i.e. the #5 and 7 of G7, landing on D (the 9 of C maj).

    All Wes did was play that line starting one semitone above then repeat it one step down, i.e. E, F#, D#, B, D natural (and to make it sound more interesting and break the expected pattern, he inserted a B instead of the F).

    You can chromatically sidestep any good melodic idea like this. I don’t think of this as needing much theory to explain or justify it. It just works.

  14. #13

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    Every idiom tends to have its own rules and idiosyncracies, so you can't really approach theory as a standalone entity.

    To me, theory starts making sense if it follows listening to, and playing, the music involved. You get the sound in your ears, and under your fingers, and then theory explains and fills up any gaps of understanding that may be.

    The opposite, just learning theory rules and descriptions, to me is both hard and kind of pointless. I did it when younger, both in jazz and classical, and it was knowledge that I mostly could never really translate into music, so soon forgotten.. Then, after listening to a lot of music, playing and practicing, hearing things, theory kind of started to make sense.

    Finally, you hear it, understand it, and.. kind of forget it (besides teaching it ). And then come other things of course, more music to grasp, more theory..

    To me, the perfect teachers of theory have been players that had a combination of high level playing, and lots of teaching experience. Some were more analytical, some more practical, but as long as these two ingredients were there, they were a joy to study with!

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by grahambop
    To me that Wes lick is just a chromatic sidestep approach to G7. It would be perfectly normal to play a line there such as D#, F, D natural, i.e. the #5 and 7 of G7, landing on D (the 9 of C maj).

    All Wes did was play that line starting one semitone above then repeat it one step down, i.e. E, F#, D#, B, D natural (and to make it sound more interesting and break the expected pattern, he inserted a B instead of the F).

    You can chromatically sidestep any good melodic idea like this. I don’t think of this as needing much theory to explain or justify it. It just works.
    At the risk of overdoing this, I ended up thinking he had a melodic shape going and eventually applied it Bmaj to Cmaj9. That is, approaching the tonic from a half step below. If the chord was something other than Cmaj9, it wouldn't make sense in this way, which is another reason that you can't think only about the chord-of-the-moment and the note. You have to think harmonic progression and melody.

  16. #15

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    It seems to me that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes what's been don successfully in the past. It gives you a set of rules and procedures to apply to a new situation, should you choose to use them, and if cleverly applied will help you come to a more-or-less satisfying musical result. Because it's derived from observation, there are bound to be exceptions unless and until someone comes up with a better description.

    It does not tell you what you **have** to do. You can do whatever you want, and the listeners will decide whether you were successful or not.

    Since the OP seems to like astrophysics, don't forget that it was only a couple of centuries ago that everything revolved around the earth, and therefore sometimes the other planets moved retrograde. Then somebody came up with a better description.

  17. #16

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    This came up in a past thread which focused on Wes playing F# against G7. There were theoretical explanations offered. Borrowed from somewhere or something like that. At that point, it occurred to me that there could be a similar explanation for any note. If every note of the chromatic scale works, for one reason or another, then jazz theory is "play notes from the chromatic scale and make them sound good".

    But, labeling and organizing things makes them easier to grasp. So, for example, it may be useful to know that you can play the notes of Gmelmin over a static C7 vamp.
    Yes good examples - it’s not particularly useful to your development as a musicians to spend an afternoon justifying Wes’s note choice (although it can be enjoyable if like me you are a total dweeb) on the other hand it’s extremely useful to know you can use G minor material on C7.

    As you point you can justify anything if you know enough theory; on the other hand theory is I think much more helpful when it acts as resources, stuff you can do, as opposed to trying to explain stuff.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 03-14-2022 at 06:46 AM.

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by dconeill
    It seems to me that music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes what's been don successfully in the past. It gives you a set of rules and procedures to apply to a new situation, should you choose to use them, and if cleverly applied will help you come to a more-or-less satisfying musical result. Because it's derived from observation, there are bound to be exceptions unless and until someone comes up with a better description.

    It does not tell you what you **have** to do. You can do whatever you want, and the listeners will decide whether you were successful or not.

    Since the OP seems to like astrophysics, don't forget that it was only a couple of centuries ago that everything revolved around the earth, and therefore sometimes the other planets moved retrograde. Then somebody came up with a better description.
    This comparison is not unusual - in his own day JP Rameau was called ‘the Newton of Music’ for his theory of fundamental bass - an idea that we now take for granted. At a stroke he was able, tbf, to unify many types of musical phenomena.

    Things don’t seem to me to progress in the same way in music as science. As Astronomy graduate many years ago I notice in particular there is really no mechanism where theoretical models get refuted and replaced in quite the same way as in science. I suppose it’s more like modern cosmology lol. (Tbf cosmology is this way because of lack of data.)

    Music theories do develop and change - but the main thing driving this as far as I can see is societal dynamics*. Many theories we use today emerged from the needs of liberal arts education as opposed to music education as a form of artisanal apprenticeship (as it was for Debussy at the Paris Conservatoire apparently); in jazz this is well understood as the driving factor behind the widespread adoption of Chord Scale Theory - even Rick Beato did a video about this.

    There is very little interest among musicians in any refutation or intellectual examination of the key assumptions of theory. Musicians in my experience don’t think this way - they tend to accept things from teachers at face value rather than assume a position of enlightened skepticism with seems more the case in more academic areas of both STEM and the humanities - and in any case it doesn’t actually matter if they can play. At the end of the day, however the colleges are organised, they remain artisans, not academics. And this is a Good Thing, because we want musicians to play music first and foremost!

    Scientism in the academy is another conversation but most musicians don’t seem too hung up on theory; they use what they find helpful and disregard the rest.

    *my view is very Popperite obviously. I’m not dismissing Kuhn when he points out that science is itself subject to various societal dynamics, but it seems to me that the self correcting system of science remains its defining feature.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 03-14-2022 at 06:49 AM.

  19. #18

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    2 mistakes in your op:

    1: assuming that they are all rules. They aren't. Many are guidelines.
    2: assuming all rules/guidelines can be broken. Some are facts. rhythm is rhythm. A quarter note is a quarter note. A 16th note is a 16 note. Tonality is based on how the major and minor scales function melodically and harmonically. You can expand on it or disregard it as you please but it's still a fact that can't be broken.

  20. #19

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    J
    Quote Originally Posted by Jimmy Smith
    2 mistakes in your op:

    1: assuming that they are all rules. They aren't. Many are guidelines.
    2: assuming all rules/guidelines can be broken. Some are facts. rhythm is rhythm. A quarter note is a quarter note. A 16th note is a 16 note. Tonality is based on how the major and minor scales function melodically and harmonically. You can expand on it or disregard it as you please but it's still a fact that can't be broken.
    recent scholarship is showing that the concept of tonaity itself was completely alien to the composers of the common practice era. How weird is that? Tonality was largely a 19th century idea popularised by German theorists.

    Even really basic stuff like ‘a major scale has seven independent degrees’ were not necessarily concepts back then. composers still trained in the medieval Guidonian hexachordal solfege at least in Italy, and 18C music was dominated by Italy even where we might tend to canonise German speaking composers today (I wonder why? ;-))

    what this means is that they didn’t use a seven note solfege pattern through a scale ‘do re mi fa sol La ti do’ or 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 they would swap in another solfege set halfway through on the fa or all degree (4 or 5) ‘do re mi fa sol re fa mi fa’ or 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4; this completely messes with my head but it does explain a lot about the way Mozart et al wrote melodies …. Modulation between near keys happened very frequently and smoothly as a by-product of this system; because they didn’t really think of them as separate keys at all.

    This is btw what the saying ‘mi against fa is the devil in music (the tritone)’ and Bach saying ‘fa and mi are all you need to know in music’ are referring to. Adam Neely covered this all fantastically in his tritone video btw. It’s really good if you haven’t seen it.

    Apparently they learned harmony all with rules of thumb - moti de basso, counterpoint exercises and melodic solfeggi exercises, mediated via mostly oral learning and lots and lots practice. More like a mid century jazz player with lots of listening to masters, substitution formulas and so on and loads of practical experience. ‘Harmony is a fairy tale told about counterpoint’ as the saying went at the Paris Conservatoire whose teaching including Nadia Boulanger’s continued this tradition.

    (Rules of thumb are underrated and I think schools have a tendency towards systematisation for all sorts of reasons. There are criteria for being accredited as an academic institution.)

    one of the first and most important treatises laying the groundwork for modern music theory, Rameau’s theory of fundamental bass was not accepted by Bach and its kind of questionable how much the later composers and teachers thought about it or taught it, though there appears to be some overlap (Mozart mentions it for example).

    In practice as Peter Bernstein said, echoing Bach and classical harmony as you’d learn it today, inversions are not interchangeable even though basic modern music theory suggests they are all the same chord. A second inversion triad has a different function to a root position one. Rameau (and to be fair Riemann, Schoenberg or any modern classical harmony teacher) knew this as much as anyone - the aim of his theory was not to replace the craft but instead to seek an understanding of the science of harmony, much like later theorists in Germany.

    But as an artist have to be alive to the specifics however you talk about music.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 03-14-2022 at 07:27 AM.

  21. #20

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    Quote Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
    At the risk of overdoing this, I ended up thinking he had a melodic shape going and eventually applied it Bmaj to Cmaj9. That is, approaching the tonic from a half step below. If the chord was something other than Cmaj9, it wouldn't make sense in this way, which is another reason that you can't think only about the chord-of-the-moment and the note. You have to think harmonic progression and melody.
    It seems a lot of the explanations in that thread were based on people looking at the transcription and detecting a B major triad within the notes played. But I don’t think that’s what Wes was thinking at all. It’s just a G7 line that he plays a semitone up, then repeats it a step down to resolve it (with the slight tweak that I mentioned). So simple really.

    I listened to the clip (the phrase is at 4:26 in the clips on youtube) and it seemed pretty clear to me. Bear in mind he is playing it pretty fast and there is a certain rhythmic feel to it as well, which makes the phrase work. Just looking at the dots wasn’t as helpful (for me) as hearing what it sounded like.

  22. #21

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    This is from Bert Ligon's Jazz theory book:
    "There is no substitute for the aural experience."

    I agree with this perspective. Especially after hours trying to learn a phrase from sheet music
    and then hearing the phrase played on a recording. Not all the articulation can be expressed
    in musical notation.

  23. #22

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    As a still relative newcomer to jazz guitar I'm interested in all these ideas on theory as an intellectual means to a musical end. However, after trying to wrap my head around the finer points of theory in this thread it seems like a good time to lighten up the discussion with the insights of a [fictional] Yogi Berra:

    Yogi Berra Explains Jazz

    Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?

    Yogi: I can't, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, its right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it's wrong.

    Interviewer: I don't understand.

    Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.

    Interviewer: Do you understand it?

    Yogi: No. That's why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn't know anything about it.

    Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?

    Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.

    Interviewer: What is syncopation?

    Yogi: That's when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don't hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they're the same as something different from those other kinds.

    Interviewer: Now I really don't understand.

    Yogi: I haven't taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    recent scholarship is showing ...
    You have quite a lot of historical knowledge. I had no idea about any of this. Thank you for telling us about it.

    Can you recommend books or papers on the history of music theory?

  25. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by MrCoconut
    I'm new here and I've only been studying music theory for about 11 months.
    What I'm finding is that for most every rule in music there is an exception.

    The theory of relativity can't explain how a singularity at the center of a black hole
    can have infinite mass because the physics breaks down.
    And though the theory of relativity can explain the macro universe it cannot explain the micro universe. For that
    we need quantum mechanics which, by the way, does not play nice with the theory of relativity.
    And we lack a unified field theory currently. Something that can explain both the very large and very small.

    So, if every rule in music theory has an exception can it even be called a theory?
    What are the "real" rules?
    Maybe someone will write a unified music theory some day.

    Here's a video of Leonard Bernstein breaking down the opening of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn by Debussey.
    It seems most every music rule is broken an yet it's works perfectly. And sounds beautiful!
    Debussey was a musical genius.
    Maybe he had a unified music theory? He should have shared it with the rest of us.
    "Prelude"
    I'm only half serious here. I love music and jazz and theory and this is more of my introduction to the forum.


    "Prelude" was one of my favorite pieces back in Jr Hi when I played french Horn. It is lovely.
    Bear in mind that music theory merely describes, after the fact, what musicians do in general terms, as well as providing a vocabulary for the discussion thereof. It cannot possibly describe every musical situation, though it does cover a lot. It is generally descriptive and not predictive. It is fun and sometimes edifying. Les Paul was asked if he knew theory. "Not enough to cramp my style," he said. He may have been jivin', but he did have the right perspective, IMHO.

  26. #25

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    Quote Originally Posted by dconeill
    You have quite a lot of historical knowledge. I had no idea about any of this. Thank you for telling us about it.

    Can you recommend books or papers on the history of music theory?
    sure! Most of my info comes from Gjerdingens books the Music in the Galllant Style and Child Composers in the Old Conservatoires, both of which are utterly brilliant (although he does have something of an axe to grind with modern music theory, not all scholars are quite so pointed haha.)

    Nick Baragwanaths book the Solfeggio Tradition is also a very interesting read.

    I would suggest checking out the Learn partimento podcast which features many interviews with scholars and classical musicians but also people like Tommy Emmanuel (!), Ritchie Hart and Charles MacPherson, even some film composers like Elliot Goldentahl. It’s pretty nuts.

    heres nick on the Solfeggio approach