Music theory lounge

Lounge
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Seems like there is a spark of interest in music theory at the community.

I think music theory on the internet is usually a trap for arguing fine points of theory. I would love to skip that entirely and just have fun discussions about fun stuff.

As a guitarist, I had built up a type of flavor of chords I really liked using. Some of these chords feature in my synth patching as well. My favorite guitar chords are major7b5, diminishedMajor7, minor7add11, dom7b5, major6/9, dom9sus4, dom7b9sus4.

They have kinda stupid names, but familiar sounds and can often be named other things because chord naming can be weird. Like the mouthful dom7b9sus4 is actually formed by playing a minor triad and adding a bass note a whole step above the root, like E7b9sus4 is also called Dm/E. Or say the C major 6/9 is really often spelled from low to high C E A D G C, and if we drop the lowest note, that is the major pentatonic scale stacked in 4ths.

would love to hear from patchers what they think about chords and scales and melodies and even rhythms as they work on music.

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Chord naming is weird indeed. My pet example is G D a c#. Very nice sounding chord, very awkward to name. Gadd9omit3#4 is the least weird of the options I can see. But no other chord symbols have “#4” in them so it’s a bit unfamiliar.

“minor7add11” at least has a nice shorthand, jazz folks tend to just write minor11. The 7 being implied then. You could take it to imply including a 9 also. But for some reason folks often avoid that one. Always the exceptions. :upside_down_face:

That chord is also a version of your EADGC stack of fourths btw! Octave-juggle it so A is at the root: A E G c d.

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Great thread! I’m into sus chords at the moment, but I also love a lot of the ones you mentioned there.

Here’s one for you. Play a major7b5 in an A shape, but move it up so the root note is G (ie. 10th fret on the A string). Then play the open E strings on the top and bottom. Now a completely different chord! How would you describe that? I think it’s an E minor6 add9. Minor 6/9? I’m not sure but the E Dorian scale fits nicely over the top of it.

Two points though: I find it really hard to translate guitar chords to the keyboard (guitar is my main instrument. Well, only instrument really, I can’t play anything else!).

Secondly, I’ve learnt quite a bit of music theory over the last 5 or 6 years, but can’t apply any of it to generative patches. It just sounds rubbish unless I leave everything diatonic!

Complex extended chords and interesting scales don’t seem to work for ambient music generally, although I did make a dark ambient drone in Lydian Augmented once.

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In my Meander module, chords all tie back to the circle of fifths and all chords are either major, minor or diminished triads. I then have an option to play 4 voice chords and a couple of options that add in a 7th, especially for a V chord. I then use inversions that more or less are based on minimum finger position changes between chords, leading to a loose voice leading effect, but not rigorously.

What is the music theory and common practice reason for having all chords on the circle of 5ths be major, minor or diminished?

Is it just the fact that it is for diatonic scales?

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I started a chat with Claude Pro Opus 4.8, high effort, thinking mode a week ago to talk about harmony and melody theory. Claude has been very useful in this context. I like Claude as it seems to handle the largest chat context history memory of all LLMs I have worked with. Even after a week of dense and deep music theory and practice conversation, Claude has not hallucinated once. By hallucinating, I mean getting confused about something in the current chat history that Claude has forgotten. Anyway, Claude does a decent job about talking about music theory. I think.

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It’s just convention I think, nothing to stop you using the circle of 5ths and chucking in extensions. You’ve still got the pull of the 5th back to the root with other chord types. For example in jazz it’s common to alter dominant chords and stick a #9 or b5 on the 5 in a 2-5-1.

The best thing to do is grab whatever you play and try it!

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Great example, GDAC#, is tricky to name on first glance.

I think if I saw those fifths with the third on top, I would lean towards Gadd9#11, yes the third is missing, but I am a jazzer ( lol not much of one) and that is implied in the voicing it would seem to me.

A fact is, that the most fun voicings can imply more than one chord. My favorite list is a good example of just that, yes minor7add11 is just another pentatonic stack C 6/9 and Am7add1 are basically the same stuff. And that is why chords can be elusive to name,or perhaps someone else sees it different, but the last judge should be the ears while things are in motion, what do you really hear happening.

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Meander is a “constrained” instrument that by design always sounds good (not discordant) for beginner musicians or patchers. I am a perpetual beginner, even though I have been working on Meander for 38 years now.

I’m carrying on a parallel conversation with Claude to identify what Meander is and what it is not and what it could be without too much change, as well as what it would be very difficult to get Meander to do without a large amount of re-writing.

These days VCV Rack and Meander are my instrument, even though my studio is full of guitars and keyboard instruments. I’m the perpetual amateur on all instruments :wink:

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And another resounding yes! My favorite list is generally made of what are often described as rootless voicings of other chords. Jazzers sometimes call these the magic chords, because one voicing can stand in for several chords and be used for different reasons even in the same composition.

Take my list, you already pointed out that Gmajor7b5 is a stand in for the Em6/9 -which can stand in for C#m7b5, so that one chord can stand in for a IV chord, II chord, or viiDim.

take BdimMajor7, its really a stand in for the G7#9 ( the Hendrix chord) or even the C#13b9

take Fm7add11, andrea already pointed out its connection to Ab6/9

or the A7b5 it has the exact same pitches as the tritone away Eb7b5, same chord diff name

or my sus chords I mentioned, are both what are often called slash chords

the A9sus4 is also G/A and Eb7b9sus4 is easier to call Dbminor/Eb

I love this sort of thing, not because they have knotty names, but because they have lush sounds and make me happy

And i was thinking how i do not integrate the guitar chords nearly enough in my patching, you are correct about the disconnect between synth patching and guitaring, not the same thing, but I wonder if a nice warmish FM synth could help me use this list better in synthing, I am going to make a patch about using these more deliberately. I will let you know how i make out.

generative has been too much about about scales, when i move the harmony by lowering the number of choices to 4 or less, i get better movement in general, but then i am just outlining chords, but generally that works better than outlining scales, however there is a place for both approaches

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Well the circle of fifths is really useful for both ways, diatonic it just moves very much like music we have heard before, very logical and useful. But as a jazzer we def get into sequencing with one chord and staying hard to the circle, just move the C7, F7, Bb7, Eb7, Ab7, Db7, Gb7, B7, E7, A7, D7, G7 and actually not use that whole row, but use it to get to a specific destination and jump out of the sequence then. Another common way to sequence that is to alternate the m7 and dom7, so Cm7, F7, Bbm7, Eb7, Abm7, Db7, Gbm7, B7 etc, or even take the ii/v as the unit and move it chromatically so then its Cm7-F7,Bm7-E7, Bbm7-Eb7, etc again making a bridge to some destination. I’m not saying these are great song starters or anything, just that we have heard these things before and they have a place sometimes.

And the circle of fifths is just one of the common cycles, there is whole tone cycle that covers half the chromatic pitches, a minor thirds cycle that covers 4 pitches, major thirds that cover 3 pitches. you can use these symmetrical systems like whole step, m3, M3 as the basis cover every note if you tranpose the cycles, like move a half step to get another whole tone cycle.

cyclical movement is a major feature of new music too , like the minimalists will transpose entire orchestral sections like gliding up or down on the guitar

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Lurking without understanding much :slight_smile: I’ll just throw this in here - The Alex Lifeson Chord:

Absolutely love it…

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Alex is a hero, love that chord!

If there is any barrier to understanding, it is the awful naming conventions of chords. Sorry to blast a bunch of chord names with little context. One problem is thinking of these chords as little separate entities, they all come from overlapping pools of notes or from simple motion from one chord to the next. The names may seem complex, but the notes are just the notes.

And theory does not stop with chords. I like thinking about scales, sequences, rhythms, modal composition, 12 tone composition, microtones, really anything in music is interesting to me. Maybe those with knowledge I don’t have can share their insights as well, just want to hang with the music nerds.

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The “system” of chord names itself isn’t that bad I think. The difficulty arises when naming chords that aren’t in the typical triads+extensions format, and also from the many exceptions and special cases. Not the first time a neat theory concept explodes when confronted with reality. :upside_down_face:

I don’t really mess with 12-tone rows/serialism and such, but the other concepts you named there I feel comfortable with. Ask me anything I guess!

Still on the topic of chords, here’s something you might like:

I have a pet peeve about the way the concept of “chord voicings” is usually explained. Many (otherwise very capable) music theory teachers will base their explanation on the idea that “chord voicings are variants of the same chord with the note in a different order”. The word “order” there always bothered me, as it’s not really a well-defined notion. What do you mean order? If I sing C4E4G4, and then sing G4E4C4, I sang the notes in a different order the second time, right? But those were the same voicing.

A better explanation (IMHO) begins by explicitly stating an idea that is pretty much always implicit: Modern/Western music theory always assumes something called “octave equivalence”. Notes that are one or more octaves apart are given the same name, even though they are actually different notes (of course). This is not a “truth” about music, just a helpful simplifying assumption.

On that assumption rests the concept of chord voicings. “C” as a chord name doesn’t tell you what octaves the notes should be in. So, many possible collections of notes share the same chord name, because they differ only by the octave(s) in which the notes are played. These are referred to as “voicings” of the same chord.

Example: E3 C4 G4 and C4 G4 E5 are different voicings of a “C” chord. “Spread voicings” specifically, since there is room between C and G for an E, which is not there, it’s been moved down or up an octave respectively. Spreading out the chord over a larger range.

Sometimes, there are names for different voicings. It’s often assumed for example that the letter name is also the lowest note you hear. If you want a different note as the bass you can put C/E for example, and that might refer to the first example above.

Another example is the one from the start of this thread. C6/9 and Am11 differ from each other in the exact same way that C and C/E does (which note is the root/bass). Chord extensions just happen to exist that describe the relationships of all the other notes both to C and to A. So you can write those instead of the slash notation.

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Oh, and the Alex lifeson chord is misspelled in that video by the way! :sweat_smile: It’s F#7add4. If you played it without the high E string ringing, it would be F#add4 as written.

I might also prefer to write F#7add11, personally. That’s not a correction per se, 11 and 4 are different octaves of the same scale degree, and often used interchangeably. But if you move the fretting hand down one step in that chord, you get F∆7add#11. Which you could also spell as “add#4” of course. But #11 is a much much more common (and thus easier to recognize for many people) spelling. Therefore I might like to use 11 over 4 in both these chords for consistency. As the open strings stay put but the other notes slide down a step, the add11 in one of them becomes the add#11 in the other, like the 7 in one becomes the ∆7 in the other.

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Much agreement here. I think theory often finds a general case and latches onto that simplification as the real description of all cases. But as you said reality bites, and the specific cases are much more nuanced almost every time.

Inversion is def left way too general in most instruction. Just change the lowest pitch and no more thought for the other voices. In my guitar jazz thinking I did learn the drop voicings like drop2 drop3 drop2/4. Those at least are meant to be very specific.

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Hehe, the word “inversion” is another potential source of trouble. I have heard it used for all these transformations:

C4E4G4 ->E4G4C5 (lowest note an octave up)

C4E4G4 - C4Eb4G4 (reverse order of the intervals, upwards from the same root)

C4E4G4 - F3Ab3C4 (Same order of intervals, downwards from the same root)

The first usage is much more common than the others. Which is ironic since it’s the one that feels least analogous to the word “inversion”, right?

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Yeah, you make a point, there is chord inversion and there is interval inversion. I guess I was sticking with chord inversion.

But a good point, reminds me that in post-tonal theory the major chord and minor chord are considered intervallic inversions of the same general interval stack. Maybe you have seen the modulo 12 numbering systems and the forte number chords? More generalizing but with a different slant.

PS, these spirited discussions are just a blast for me, no one in my physical space around me knows any of this stuff, even my favorite musical partner is not a theory buff of any kind, just getting to riff about notes and chords with other music nerds makes me giddy

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Add 11 for sure, add 4 is clumsy in that case. But you have to admit, a lot of fun is hearing the third rub against the fourth in that voicing.

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It seems like it might be good to have at least one reference linked near the top of this topic, such as @waldo posted in another topic:

Note, I had Claude Pro ingest the table of contents for this online textbook and we were able to have some deep conversations about music theory in our week long chat.

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The online textbook had the following to say about the two uses for the circle of 5ths. My Meander module attempts to visualize both uses but constrains the chord playablity to the diatonic harmonic progression circle of 5ths while still displaying the chromatic key signature circle of 5ths but grayed out.

“This circle (the circle of fifths for harmonic progression) is different than the circle of fifths for key signatures because this circle of fifths for harmonic progression contains diatonic notes only. The circle of fifths for key signatures (Figure 2.3.4) contained all 12 notes of the chromatic scale”