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Pursuant to Mark Lutton's excellent answer, I'd like to make the point that Chords don't give us feelings, we give chords feelings. The feeling you get after hearing a chord is not inherent in that chord--the only thing inherent in any chord is the physics of the harmonic series. (There is something to be said for consonance vs. dissonance within the ...

Context is important -- what else happens around the chord. Let's just take the C major chord for starters. Listen to these examples: The first two measures of Mozart's sonata "for beginners" in C major. A nice, pleasant chord. Happy music. The opening of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. This has a much more energetic and heroic sound. The opening of the ...

The 'sus' is short for 'suspended'. The term comes from traditional music theory, and it refers to that the chord has a note that was suspended, or 'delayed', or 'carried over', from the previous chord. Traditionally the suspended fourth note in the sus4-chord should also be resolved to the third before any further chord action. Example chord progression ...

Why? It sounds good. Music would sound boring after a while if all you played were the notes in the scale. I would be hard-pressed to find music that doesn't have notes outside of the scale--scales are just the basis for melodies, and the home base from which you can stray in creative ways. In this particular context (and your chords would be better ...

Unless you have a seven string guitar, this chord is impossible to play on guitar if you want all chord degrees represented. Since it is a G-minor chord over an Fm7, you can really think of the total composite chord as an Fm13, which is a pretty standard jazz chord for guitarists. . . or any jazz player for that matter. What notes you leave out in part ...

To answer your last question: Yes -- because it sounds cool. A common gospel piano thing is a IV chord with dominant function because it's over the dominant in the bass, i.e. F/G (in the key of C). Inversions were historically notated using a figured bass style. Slash chords are a relatively recent invention, and they can be used both for inversions and ...

The feelings and emotions associated with chords are completely subjective, influenced by a combination of nature and nurture. This is why I might go into raptures over a piece of music that leaves you cold, and vice versa. Absolute pitch In This is Spinal Tap, the character Nigel Tufnel says that for him D minor is "the saddest of all keys, I find". Most ...

Your question covers several different topics but I think what you're interested in is Harmony. This is a very vast subject. As for the importance of what you lack as a rhythm guitarist, it largely depends on the style you play. Lots of artists just don't know what they're doing when writing stuff and just happen to know empirically what goes well with ...

Interesting question! When you say "chord-leading," do you mean "voice-leading" or "chord progressions"? Voice-leading is controlled by the chord progression, so I suppose the rules of the one inform the rules of the other. But my answer, in short, is this: the chord progressions of the modes may differ from one another, but voice-leading rules will probably ...

It could be the case that the Andalusian cadence is attractive precisely because there is a certain amount of ambiguity to it (i.e., it can't be pinned down as either perfect or half cadence). If I may trust my own instincts on the matter, the cadence exhibits neither the "completeness" of a perfect cadence, nor the "incompleteness" of a half cadence; its ...

The function of a chord largely depends on the context in which it is presented. I am going to assume that your comments are with respect to the key of G as it was the example that you used. You are correct, in root position the chord would be: D F# A C E. Going to a "D7" on the guitar would be removing the 9th from the chord, thus you would have: D F# A ...

D9 is an extended tertian chord. Extended chords have only become quite popular in the last hundred years or so because they're somewhat vague functionally, as you've pointed out. Often, extended chords can be thought of as polychords in that different parts of the chord can function differently. For example, in the key of G, your D9 can come nicely come ...

Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound And Symbol Sound and Symbol is part of Princeton's "Bollingen series". Bollingen is the name of the estate of Carl Jung; hence the whole series represents the "Jungian side" of the sciences. Sound and Symbol is a "symbolist" approach to musical philosophy. It draws from the Spanish symbolists (who split from the Cubists who split ...

Your question is mostly about chords, but the term "relative minor" is about key signatures. I will answer from both perspectives: Key Signatures "Relative major" and "relative minor" are terms typically used to describe keys with identical key signatures and root notes a minor third apart. So, when we compare C minor and Eb major, the key signature is 3 ...

The note behind the slash is often meant as the note played by the bass guitar, and if you are playing this in a band where you do have a bass guitar, it can even be ignored on the guitar. In this particular example you see that the bass is actually a movement going down one note at a time (B A# G F#), where the movement itself is more important than if it ...

There's a couple of ways to name that chord (D-F-A#): Bb major in first inversion, as mentioned in terpsichore's answer. Dm(aug), Dm+5 or Dm#5. Although there's no such thing as a minor augmented chord in music theory, in rare cases it might be useful to write it like this, for instance in a chord progression that requires a specific voicing. Dm6. In ...

I think a good instinctive understanding of harmony is important, and one good way to get there is to work out chord progressions yourself. Start with simple three-chord rock'n'roll standards. Assume that you're working with the root, the fourth and the fifth, and it's just a matter of working out which order to play them. Start in A, so you're working with ...

Possibly the chord marked is not just for guitarists. To get a good voicing, the notes need to be spread over maybe 3 octaves - not easy on a guitar.With clashes like G and Ab and D and Eb,the notes won't sound good next to each other, on any instrument. When they're nearly an octave apart, they often sound great.As there are 7 notes anyway, at least one ...

I think there's some possibility for confusion of terms because lead and rhythm means different things depending on what precise area you're talking about. In a rock band, there's usually a division between the rhythm guitar whose job is primarily harmony and chords (the left hand of the piano) and the lead guitar whose job is to play little melodies and ...

I agree with the above, but sometimes the composer wants a basic chord eg. Cmaj, but with a bass note which is not contained in that chord ( C/G#) However this is a poor example as the G from the chord clashes with G#. In the example in the question, the bass line is moving down,so A# bass is good, and works against a Bmaj chord, which doesn't need to be ...