Triads as Building Blocks

14-04-09
Breaking down complex chords into more ‘manageable’ chunks.

This is a very simple concept which many musicians/guitarists will be familiar with, but some won’t be, or won't be used to thinking in this way. It seems pretty obvious, but then most things are once they’ve been explained to you. I use this for simplifying more complex or extended chords, but thinking-wise this concept assumes only that you know how to construct major and minor triads (if you’re not sure, there’s plenty of stuff on the internet).

This concept came about simply from exploring what would fit musically over one chord – in this case an Am7. What this turned into is a method I find really useful for breaking up more complex chords – seeing them as a stack of basic major or minor (or diminished) triads rather than a ‘big scary jazz chord’ with lots of extensions.

As daft as it seems, this approach didn’t occur to me until it was pointed out a couple of weeks back and I’ve been exploring it and having fun with it ever since – it’s an approach that really ‘clicks’ with me. I think it’s the way it helps the transition between a very simple idea and a more complex chord – I find it really gets ‘inside’ the ‘parent’ chord and gets me thinking in terms of scale tones, and also in terms of similarities between chords that might not seem to be closely related at all.

Edit 1 - the following are some points I drafted at the end of the above. For the sake of remaining concise, I've left them as bullets.

-If you’re working with just major and minor chords, you can now imply some new flavours or colours simply by adding the 7^th

-Clearly there are many voicings or inversions even for a triad, so there’s a lot of room for exploring this concept.

-You can bring out different flavours of complex chords without crazy hard-to-play shapes.

-You can now play major ideas over minor chords and vice-versa.

-If you’re getting into jazz, even sticking with 7^th chords you now have two ideas for each chord instead of one.

-Can be a useful way of achieving some ideas and separation if you have more than one guitarist to consider

-Setting out the notes of a key in this way is also useful because it effectively orders the notes in importance in relation to a chord – there’s more ‘space’ between notes now, and it looks less crowded than a scale à this sets out more of a useful order for the notes and how they relate to each other in the context of a chord.

Edit 2 - as yet I haven't figured out how to add diagrams to these blog posts. If anyone can help with this I'll gladly upload some scribblings to clarify my thoughts.