Exploring Chords
Bristol-based RGT tutor Ben Watson shares his thoughts about teaching chordal playing...
The chordal side of the guitar can be a relatively uncharted area; students spend hours whizzing through solos at intergalactic speeds but some may have difficulty explaining what, for example, an A minor 6th is, or demonstrating more than one voicing of it. One reason for this is that chordal playing means holding down several notes at once, and placing the fingers in unfamiliar patterns; everyone remembers the pain and frustration of learning to play barre chords or even their first open G major! Mainstream electric guitar often focuses on being able to play chords well enough to play songs and builds up to taking solos with the scales learnt. Contrast this with Brazilian styles or jazz guitar where harmony is a flexible tool used for backing a singer or soloist and for solo sections in its own right; it is clear that an understanding of a harmonic approach to the guitar is a valuable asset for any student. Experimenting with cadences and unusual shapes can be helpful to anyone who enjoys writing their own music and wants to forge their own sound.
Excercises
As with many areas of education, there can be a tendency among guitar students to view what is written in a book or on a tutor's worksheet as gospel, a box they are not permitted to move out of. The purpose of these exercises is to illustrate that chord shapes and voicings are not set in stone; they are, especially in the arena of improvised music, simply a suggestion of what we could play, and a starting point for chord substitution.
To illustrate this, we could break a chord into bits and then reassemble
it, modifying it as we go along. Students expand on the basic shapes by
playing a little game based around one simple chord: I ask them to play
an open C major and 
then
get them to either add or remove one note to/from the chord - in other words
they are either lifting away or pressing down an extra finger. A common
response to this is to lift away the first finger, resulting in an open
C major 7th chord. We then continue from there through the scale (and outside
it!) by adding another note, or moving a note up or down by a semitone or
whole tone. If pursued, this will eventually take us through many types
of C chord. That is, unless we change the bass note to an A! Now all the
shapes we have just tried will have a completely different sound. This provides
the tutor with an opportunity to explain that a root note is the foundation
of the tonality, and that by changing it we can alter the sound of a chord
shape we already know, turning it into something new. The activity also
gives us the chance to explain scale tones - what a 6th, 7th or 9th actually
means. If we are teaching chords from an electric guitar exam syllabus,
we could use it to highlight the similarities between, for example, a C
major and an A minor, or how a D major becomes a D major 7th, then a D dominant
7th, with a demonstration of the different scales from which these chords
are drawn.
Another approach is to use pedal tones - by picking a drone note, say an open A, and, starting on A major, students can explore what happens when they move the shape up the neck one fret at a time, with the bass note left as open A. They can then repeat this with an A major 7th, A minor, A minor 7th, A minor 6th and so on. Once they've tried it with all the A chords you can think of, try it with the Es and Ds! Then introduce any of the three treble strings as pedal tones too - with just a few basic shapes they'll have quickly built up dozens of new voicings, any one of which might inspire a new chord sequence or song.
Inversions
Pianists are familiar with the concept of inversions - stacking the notes of a chord in a different order to obtain a different effect. We can get students to try this on guitar; take a simple E minor barre chord at the seventh fret. Find the minor 3rd. If we take this note down an octave, we free up the B string for other purposes; for example we could flatten the minor 3rd (G) by a semitone, turning it into a 9th; this gives us a nice minor 9th chord. A piano player might refer to this as 'inner movement' - the concept that we shuffle the heart of the harmony around to give us different textures.
In bossa nova guitar, the bass note mimics not only bass guitar or double bass but also the deep drum in samba. As such, players tend to stick to playing bass notes mainly on the sixth string as this gives the deepest sound; this type of voicing is also common in gypsy jazz guitar. It means that many of the chords played will have the 5th rather than the root as their bass note, which is why learning Brazilian songs by ear can be so confusing! For example the E minor 9th chord mentioned earlier might wellhave a B natural bass note, or a bass line that alternates between E and B, dancing across the bottom two strings. A more basic example would be the 'folk' voicing of open C major, which has a G on the bottom. It's worth trying all the chords rooted on the A string and switching the bass note over the E string to see what it sounds like.
Experiment
To me, this experimentation is the key. We can expand it to all chord playing - I tell my students: try anything, and if it sounds nice, do it again! If it doesn't, don't!
