Further Chords

Dance music theory expert Oliver Curry demonstrates how to break away from basic chords and create more complex harmonic structures.

Way back in the very first instalment of Passing Notes we looked at some basic techniques for creating deep house chords and progressions, focusing on major and minor 7 chords.

This time, we’re going to expand on that idea and look at the construction of a number of other commonly used chords.

Intervals and the construction of chords

In a 7 chord, the number seven refers to the use of the seventh note of the scale. Hence, a minor 7 chord is a minor triad (root, minor 3^rd and 5^th) with the seventh note of the minor scale played above it. However, things get a little (but not much) more complicated when we’re looking at chords employing further notes above the 7^th, i.e. above the octave.

This is where chords such as 9, 11, 13 and so on get their name. The 9^th in a minor/major 9 chord actually refers to the second note of the scale, but played an octave above. There are a great number of options for voicing chords, but generally speaking, a chord becomes a ‘9’ rather than an ‘add2’, when the 2^nd interval is played above the octave.

If we use C major as a basic example, we can see in the keyboard diagram below that the terms 9^th, 11^th and 13^th  simply refer to the second, fourth and sixth notes of the major scale, played above the octave of the root note C.

Below, we can see how the major 9 chord is constructed. The 7^th and 9^th are added over the C major triad. The major 7^th (B) is shown in blue, while the 9^th (D) is shown in red.

As the second note of the scale is the same in both the minor and major scale, the addition of the same note, D, to the C minor 7, creates the C minor 9:

Below we can hear the construction of the major and minor 9 chords, starting with the triad, then the 7 and finally the 9.

Here’s how it sounds when we play the major triad, then add the major 7, then the 9:

And here’s how it sounds when we play the minor triad, then add the minor 7, then the 9:

In our recent Passing Notes article on sampled chords we looked at a great example of a sampled minor 9 chord in ‘Ebonics’ by Theo Parrish. The harmony of ‘Where Is Love?’ uses a very similar technique:

The extensive use of the 9 chord (in this case a minor 9) gives ‘Where Is Love?’ its unique harmonic structure. The chord pattern, created using a sampled minor 9, is shown in the piano roll below: