ShortScale.org

ok, firstly im trying to find a name for this chord. im not very good w/ chord notation beyond M's, m's, and 7's:

e- 1
B- 0
G- 2
D- 3
A- X
E- X

its probably pretty basic, i thought maybe it was an f with the 5th flatted, but i couldnt find it exactly on any charts. help?

so, okay heres the progression, its kind of played poppy strummy and open, with slight OD and spring verb. Lets call above chord, "X"
3 ah 4 ah (syncopated, like)
C 2 3 4, X 2 3 4, Am 2 3 4, Em 2 3 4, F 2 3 4, G 2 3 4,G (accented stoccato and rest 2 3 4 1 2, then *chi-ka-chi-ka*), C 2 3 4....


anyway thats experimental notation, haha. it might not make any sense, but i dont have a way of recording a demo right now. what i want to do is make this linger a bit longer, like maybe add some measures around the Em/ F part, but i cant figure out what comes next, besides the G part. what do you guys do in this situation?


thanks for any input!

www.chordbook.com says that it's a "F-5"

Mo Rocca wrote:www.chordbook.com says that it's a "F-5"

whoa! thanks for the link, thats just the utility i had in mind but didnt know if it existed, thanks!

You've chosen a particularly interesting chord and key here.

If I were you, I would ignore trying to name chords. There really isn't any definitive system of doing it. They all have their limitations, however some are more useful in certain spheres than others.

It's an F major chord, but not a straight, normal one, and it certainly can't be described as F 5 (more on that later). To make a chord, take the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale, so in F major, that'd be F (skip g) A (skip b flat) and C. In your chord, you have the F on the D string, the A on the G string, and the F again on the e string. Usually, you would have the C on the B string (first fret), but here you've left that open, so we don't have it, regardless, it's still going to sound more like an F chord than anything else.

Now for naming the chord.

The normal way of naming an unusual note in a chord is to assign it to a number according to where it appears in the scale of that chord.
The notes in the key of F major are F, G, A, B flat, C, D, and E.
The weird note in your chord is a B (the open string). Looking at the scale, we can see that there is no B in F major (there's a B flat, but that's one fret lower than B).

If (by some freak of tuning) the note in your chord was a B flat, we could just call the chord F4, or Fadd4, or Fsus4 (things like "add" and "sus" are terms that are so often misused by guitarists that they are more or less meaningless, so by and large you can ignore them, Personally, I think they only add to the confusion, even when they are used correctly, because so many people have wonky meanings for them, so I wouldn't use the terms "add" or "sus" at all). F4 is a bit of a dodgy name too, but we'll not get into that. If we were trying to name this made-up chord (not the one you're playing, but one with the nice, handy B flat), I think the best way to name it would be to say that it's an F chord with a fourth thrown in.

However, your chord doesn't have a nice neat fourth, instead, it has a B natural, instead of a B flat. There are a couple of ways we could name this. Immediately, we might think that this is the fourth, except a fret higher. In music, there are a couple of different words we can use to describe an interval (such as your fourth) that has been made slightly bigger than it ought to be. These terms include major, sharpened and a few other terms, but the one that suits best here is augmented. If you wanted, you could accurately describe this chord as an F aug4 chord.

There is a better way of describing it though, and this is where things might get a bit odd. If you look at the notes in F Major and also at the fret map below, you can see that between the fourth and fifth of F major (B flat and C) there is a note that has been described in the map as B: there is one note that is in between the fourth and fifth. When we are talking about this note, we can describe it in two different ways. We can either talk about it in terms of the fourth (as we already have) and describe it as and augmented fourth, or, alternatively, we can talk about it in terms of the fifth. Just as the word "augmented" describes an interval that is a bit larger than it might otherwise be, the word "diminished" describes an interval that is a bit smaller than it should be, so, we could describe this as a "Diminished fifth."

In terms of chords, it makes a lot more sense to describe this as a diminished fifth than it does an augmented fourth. For various reasons, dimished fifths are more common in minor chords than they are in major chords, so if you were to describe this chord as F dim5, chances are the person you are describing the chord to might assume you mean a minor chord instead of the major. For that reason, I think I would define this chord carefull and deliberately as an F major chord with a diminished fifth. It's a clumsy name, but it's probably the best and most comprehensive one.

I'll not go into why diminished fifth makes more sense than augmented fourth unless you want me to, because I suspect I've already written a lot more than anybody would care to read. If you have any more questions, post them up and I''ll do my best to answer them.


________ 0____1____2____3
e string: (E____F____F#___G)
B string: (B____C___C#___D)
G string: (G___G#___A___Bflat)
D string: (D___Eflat___E____F)
A string: (A___Bflat___B____C)
E string: (E___F____F#____G)

WHY ISN'T IT AN F-5???

At the start we talked about how to make a chord. You take the first, third and fifth of the scale. Putting a 5 after a chord usually means that you are leaving out the third, and having a chord that consists of just the first and the fifth. This can be useful, as whether or not a chord is major or minor is decided by its third, so leaving the third out means that we don't have to worry so much about major and minor clashes or disagreements or what have you. Guitarists know this, hence the popularity of power chords. Power chords are fifth chords.

BacchusPaul is a champ!

Here is another general chord naming, scale creating and such webpage:
http://www.jguitar.com/

wow! thats more info than i had bargained for. i appreciate it!

i dont really think chord notation is a great creative tool, but it could be a useful communication tool, and thats why id like to learn more. with your help, i have! thanks.

william wrote:wow! thats more info than i had bargained for. i appreciate it!

i dont really think chord notation is a great creative tool, but it could be a useful communication tool, and thats why id like to learn more. with your help, i have! thanks.

I think that with any sort of music notation, the important thing is that you don't try to stick rigidly to a certain system but try to communicate as best you can. That's why I don't like this practise of trying to boild a chord down to a letter and a number maybe with another symbol thrown in too. It doesn't communiacte well. You're better off saying "this is a such and such chord but I've put this note in here so that it sounds like this." At least everybody in the room is going to know what's going on then.

That was really interesting Paul. You clearly are up on your theory.

That was a proper interesting read. If you do this music theory book I'll be first in the queue, I've tried to learn it from a variety of different sources and usually I can't make head nor tail of it.

yeah, i guess i could have said "the top four strings of an f barre, but with the b string open" or something like that

there should be a standard, like E-e, X.X.3.2.0.1 or somthing like that. that way we could all talk about chords and everyone would get it and be able to replicate it period.


so this song would be

E.A.D.G.B.e

x.3.2.0.1.0
x.x.3.2.0.1
x.0.2.2.1.0
0.2.2.0.0.0
1.3.3.2.1.1
3.2.0.0.3.3 (sounds better this way, with the d on the b, rather than open)

the next chords are

x.3.2.0.1.0
x.x.3.2.1.0
x.x.5.4.5.3
x.x.3.2.3.1

in that order, but with a particular rhythm which admittedly my proposed system doesn't allow for.

BacchusPaul wrote:For that reason, I think I would define this chord carefull and deliberately as an F major chord with a diminished fifth. It's a clumsy name, but it's probably the best and most comprehensive one.

Why not just call it an FM♭5 as that's what it is?