Scott Nygaard,
Acoustic Guitar magazine's managing editor, is an
accomplished guitarist with more than 25 years' experience. He has
performed and recorded with Tim O'Brien and the O'Boys, Chris Thile,
David Grisman, and Jerry Douglas; released two solo albums, No
Hurry and Dreamer's Waltz (Rounder
Records); and been nominated for a number of Grammies for his
work on other artists’ CDs. He lives in San Francisco and performs in
the Improbables with violinist Darol Anger (www.darolanger.com).
In
traditional
Western triad-based harmony, chords are constructed by stacking thirds
on top of each other: a minor third (a step and a half) stacked on top
of a major third (two whole steps) gives you a major chord, and a major
third atop a minor third is a minor chord. Even the "fancy" chords used
in jazz and contemporary music, such as maj7, m11, 13, and even 7b9,
are constructed by stacking thirds on top of other thirds. Keep adding
thirds on top of the 1, 3, and 5, and you get the 7, 9, 11, and 13. In
the key of C, for example, you could add the B, D, F, and A notes to
the 1, 3, and 5 of a C-major chord (C, E, and G). Notice that if you
arrange all those notes (C, E, G, B, D, F, and A) in a slightly
different order, you get a C-major scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B.
In the
music of
many cultures around the world, the melody or rhythm is traditionally
more important than the harmony. And in many instances,
Western-influenced chord structures have been imposed upon what was
originally scale- or mode-based music. Irish traditional music is a
good example. This music originated with voice and bagpipes, and the
addition of chordal instruments like piano and guitar is a relatively
recent development. But the tunes didn't always take well to
triad-based chord accompaniment, and this is one reason that Irish
guitarists have often favored the droney sound of D A D G A D tuning,
which allows them to accompany the tunes without using obvious triadic
chord sounds. A similar thing happened in jazz in the '50s when Miles
Davis and John Coltrane conceived of basing their solos and the backing
harmonies of a tune on a scale, rather than on standard chords.
In this
lesson,
we'll explore the kinds of chords you can create by using the notes of
the scale that corresponds to a given key. Forming chords by combining
the notes of a scale in different ways is a great technique guitarists
can use to find interesting new colors. Once you're freed from having
to define a chord with specific notes–the root, the seventh, and the
third–the options become endless.
To keep
our
fingers from getting tied in knots, we'll start by using an open
string, D, as the root of the chord and play chords only on the three
strings above it. Of course, to construct chords using a scale, you'll
have to be familiar with the scale, not only across the fingerboard but
up and down it as well. Example 1 shows triads in the key of D, with a
D bass note, in which the voices in each chord move up the D scale step
by step.
For
example, the
notes on the third string move from A to B to C# to D to E to F# to G
and back to A. The notes on the second string are clearly a D-major
scale: D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D. If you're not seeing this as you play
the chords, play single notes on each string one at a time, as in
Example 2.
We'll
start our
exploration of modal chords by simply changing one note of the chord
forms in Example 1. Let's try raising the F# in the first voicing to a
G note. If we raise the highest note in all the voicings, we get
Example 3.
The notes
on the
second and third strings remain the same, but the notes on the first
string are one scale step higher than in the voicings in Example 1.
These particular voicings are often used in modal jazz and are
sometimes called fourth chords, because they consist of fourths stacked
on top of each other. Look at the first voicing: the interval from the
A to the D is a fourth and the interval from the D to the G is also a
fourth. The voicing on beat 4 of measure 1 sounds odd, doesn't it? As
we do these exercises, we'll come upon chord voicings that may not seem
to be very useful. But by going through every voicing of every
configuration, we can learn what sounds good and what doesn't.
Tune up