 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to tackle a very important theoretical set of questions all under the umbrella of naming chords. How would you go about naming a chord? Now I have done a detailed video on the Roman numeral analysis system which shows you how chords relate to the scale. So I suggest that you watch that, you don't have to watch that right now. You can watch that after watching this, but that's a very good supplementary video. This is a lesson or a two-part lesson series, there will be two videos in order to name any chord which is hurled at you. Either someone plays you a chord and tells you what is it, you know, but now I'm not, this is not a year training lesson for chords, we've done a lot of year training videos as well. We link up some of the harmonic year training lessons in our description. You can check that out also after this lesson. This is more of a theoretical lesson. How do you name a chord and how do you communicate that chord in a, I would say in an inspiring way to your fellow musicians. Now chord naming, I think the way things are done or the way things have evolved in our field has become almost as airtight as staff notation. The chord names are very, very defined, very logical and they have a proper amount of sense to them. To a point that any musician who's collaborating a violin, piano, guitar or any member can relate to these chords. It doesn't have to necessarily be piano chord names or guitar chord names. It could be multiple options. However, you do have a few voicing and inversion names. Because I might not cover in this series, inversions we've done earlier, we've done a lot of voicing techniques as well. This is just specifically how do you name the chords. So let's first look at how to broadly name our chords. After we get into understanding what should be the root, we look at some more fancy chords like slash chords, then we go into tensions, then we kind of have an argument between the names itself like adds, suspended, augmented, diminished and the extensions the 9s, 11s and 13s. Before we get cracking, it'll be awesome if you could consider hitting that subscribe button which is somewhere around our channel. I'm sure you're aware of that. It'll be great if you could hit it and there's a bell button too where you'll be notified of regular videos which our channel puts out almost daily. And also this is a very theory heavy lesson. So my handwritten notes will be available for you on our Patreon page. That would definitely help make this lesson a lot more easier to understand. You might want to pause the video, head over to Patreon, get yourself a PDF and watch along. Let's get cracking. So to name a major chord, first of all, let's start with the triad. So you have major, I'm going to do it with respect to C. So C major would end up being C, E, G. So if you look at this, it's basically a major third interval and a perfect fifth interval or a major third between the one and the three and a minor third between the three and the five. So any chord which shares has this sort of intervallic relationship is called as a major chord and a minor chord is not far behind. It's just this one. So what happens here? It's a minor third with respect to the root that's E flat and the same old perfect fifth. To make or to consider a chord as major, you don't necessarily need the fifth. Well, it's nice to have it, but even if you play C and E, you kind of imply, hey, the chord is kind of major or C major. Yes, there are no additional notes, there are no extensions, but if you took a bet playing C major would not cause anyone in your band to throw anything at you. If you were to play C major while you heard or you observed someone else just playing C and E, you can easily play that G unless of course they don't like that G, which is another problem altogether. Then that might be a diminished fifth or an augmented fifth, which we'll chat about later. So this is C major, this is C minor. What constitutes that is the minor third. Now the diminished triad needs two representative notes along with the root. All the chords, if you name them, they need a root. So the diminished would be that one. You need a flat three as well as a flat five, a quick trick to remember the flat five would be perfect five minus one. We also call that as a tritone interval, very important interval in music. There we go. It's your tritone. Then we have our augmented chord where you take the major third, but in addition to that you would need another major third with respect to the third. So the C to E major third, E to G sharp, another major third. We could also call this as an augmented fifth as the perfect fifth is raised to the augmented fifth. Okay. It gives you a very unclear sound. So the diminished is also unclear because of the tritone and the lack of the perfect fifth. The augmented fifth is again unclear because of the lack of the perfect fifth and the minor sixth or the augmented fifth interval is very, very mysterious, if you ask me. It's not very stable as the perfect fifth is. See, the perfect fifth feels like you're at home sitting on a sofa or something, but that doesn't feel like that. This is like a horror movie or some such thing here. So you're kind of stuck in a spiral like in that Alice in Wonderland movie. You feel like you're just in a random, in some kind of a trance. So these are all important to know. Okay. So suspensions now. I'm going to talk about suspended chords alongside the ad chords. So with suspended chords, what you're ending up doing is suspended means no three. Do not play the three. We don't want the three. So if you have this C major chord to suspend it, you can suspend it in two ways. You can either go sus two, where you play the major second along with the perfect fifth, but no three. That's not there. And now you have your sus four, no three, but perfect fourth root, perfect fourth, perfect fifth. So that's your sus four, this is your sus two. So suspended chords basically means no three. Okay. And this is not to be confused with ad chords. So ad chords basically will add to the triad. So if you take C major, you can have a C major ad two. You can have a C major ad four. You can have a C major ad sharp four, which is a very Lydian kind of sound. You can have a C major ad sharp five or ad flat six if you want to call it that. And then the same story with minor. You can do this is C sus two, but this will be C minor ad two. Some people also might say ad nine. I prefer to use it as ad two and not bother about the nines and unless and until there is a seventh in there that for my brain seems to work a bit easily. So there's nothing wrong in calling it an ad two I feel so C minor ad two. So C minor that's the D which is the ad two. So you can play that above the octave and play it within as a nice cluster of CD flat and then cheap. And you could even perhaps do a C minor ad flat two, the very Phrygian sound. It's more Phrygian, but you would call this as C minor ad two. So that's the ad cause you're adding to the triad. You're adding to the major or you're adding to the minor. Now when it comes to the adding of the sixth interval, we already have names for them. So if you take C major with the ad six ad major six, it would basically you don't call it C major ad six. You can just happily say C major sixth. No problem. Similarly, you do C minor with an ad major six. You don't want to call it C minor ad major six. That's annoying to say, isn't it? So you'd rather go C minor sixth. That's the official name. There we go. So all your sixth chords can be named pretty easily. Okay. However, if you do a flat six or a sharp five, you'd rather call this a C minor ad flat six. And a lot of these ad chords are felt and are observed and used sometimes not as a block of data, but in an arpeggiated form. For instance, that's a beautiful ad two or an ad nine set up. That's an ad flat six with the minor chord. That's an ad sharp five or flat six with a major chord. That's an ad flat two with respect to our major chord. So it's good to use them using arpeggio movements and not so good or not always to use them as a block. It may sound very dissonant as a block, I guess, right? When it comes to sevens, like the sixth, you don't have to write ad seven. You can just write seven. So there are different seventh chords as you may know, but they all are built with respect to the triads we have just learned recently. Now there are many seventh chords available, but all of them are based on the triads. So we've already learned the triads, major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended and so on. So if you build seventh chords, you don't have to say ad seven. Like you don't have to say ad six. Similarly, you don't have to write ad seven. So you do C major with a major seventh interval on top, we call that a C major seventh. So C major chord with a major seventh interval is a C major seventh chord. And I like to remember it that way because if you think about it, chords also are played as inversions, right? So if you're playing C major in this first inversion, you can tell yourself, okay, how do I C major seventh this? It's already a major chord. How do I make it a major seven? Just ask yourself, what is the major seventh B? And where is B with respect to this chord? It's right here. Okay. Similarly, you take a chord like E flat, this E flat major, what's its major seventh D? I could play it there or I could even play it down below. So it kind of isolates that and says major triad plus some other note or some other interval, which in this case is major seventh. So you have, let's go back to our C root. So C major with a flat seven would be a dominant seventh. And in simple words, we just like to say C seventh. Close. C seventh, with a B flat on the top, B flat. Now I say B flat on the top, but I'm also trying to think it could also be anywhere. It could be B flat at the bottom as well, B flat on the top or B flat in the middle. The quality of the chord still stays C seventh. So we don't say C major ad flat seven as some of my students ended up doing in a class. It's just C seventh. So seventh chords are very simple in that sense. And then the journey for naming seventh chords continues, right? So if you take a minor triad with a minor seventh, we call that a minor seventh chord. You take a minor triad with a major seventh. We don't have an easiest name for it. We have to call it C minor major seventh. C minor major seventh. You can write the major seventh in brackets if you wish. C minor major seventh. So C minor major seventh, or you can write it C minus sign for minor and then do a major seventh. Major seventh also has a triangle sign. So it makes the writing of the chords a lot more easier. So you could consider minus for minor, a triangle for major seventh and a degree for diminished, a plus for augmented, sus for suspended, and so on and so forth. So now if you take diminished variants, that's your C diminished bass. So you could start with a C diminished chord with a B up top. Now some people might argue this is a C minor major seventh flat five. You could also simplify it and say it's a C diminished major seventh. So C diminished major seventh. I don't use that chord a lot, but it kind of exists. Then you go. Now you may think this is a C diminished chord with a minor seventh. So should you say C diminished minor seventh? No, you say C minor seventh flat five. You can even say C half diminished. That's another way to call this chord. C half diminished. That's essentially take C minor minor seventh. That's your B flat flat five. You're flattening the G to become F sharp or G flat. So C minor seven flat five and it has a nice symbol, which is the Greek symbol phi or phi used a lot in some scary maths classes. So there we go. C minor seven flat five. Then the last diminished option we have would be C diminished with a diminished seventh interval. A diminished seventh interval is where you double flat a major interval, major seventh interval. So C to B is a major seventh. You double flatten it, which means go down a tone and you get yourself a C diminished seventh chord. Very interesting to note that this particular chord is just a bunch of minor thirds. Minor third, minor third, minor third. Here we go. That's your C diminished seventh. So then you have your augmented families, augmented major seventh. Now you could also re-spell this chord. You could call this as C augmented major seventh or else C major seventh sharp five. You could also call this as C major seventh because the G, which is the perfect fifth became G sharp, which is the augmented fifth, G, G sharp. So C, E, G sharp B, augmented major seventh or C major seventh sharp five. You can also do C, E, G sharp B flat, which could be called as C. A simple way to write it actually would be C plus seven. So you save some space in your book or paper, C plus seven. So that would be a dominant seventh up top. Whenever we don't precede a seven with major or minor, it is dominant seventh. It's a dominant seventh kind of chord. So a dominant seventh chord has a major third as well as a flat seven. Now what you do to the dominant seventh chord could be various things. It depends on the fifth, the ninth, the eleventh and the thirteenth interval, which we are going to talk about in detail in part two of this series. So C, E, G, B flat would be C seventh, that would be C augmented seventh, not C augmented minor seventh. No, C augmented seventh or C plus on top of top right of the C and under that seven. Okay. That's your augmented. And similarly you have suspended seventh chords that would be C sus four major seventh or C major seven sus four if you want to call it that. Then you could do a very common chord is called a C seven sus four because it's a C seven. It has that flat seven and a suspended chord inside it. Right now, I'd like to also mention that all of these chords, there's something remarkable and very beautiful about them. There's dissonance with less notes and consonance with more notes. So if I just come back to a major seventh interval from C, you see how dissonant this feels right. It's almost unusable, at least to me, a lot of chaos. But if I just add that E in the middle, well, I just can't explain this. This is just mother nature doing its thing. It sounds like you're just chilling out on a beach all of a sudden. But without that E, absolute chaos. Now we kind of know why because the number of intervals are adding up almost exponentially because if you think about it, it's just one interval. But if I add that E, there is C to E which is a major third, E to B which is a perfect fifth and you have a tension. So it's almost like there is more resolution because there are two resolved intervals major third and perfect fifth and there's only one tension. So it's sort of like the good defeats the evil, so to speak, because there's two goods, two peaceful sounds and one annoying sound. So it's using these tensions which can create some remarkable sounds in music. For example, this chord. There are a lot of tension in there, but this chord is very, very usable or maybe a chord like this. Now without some of the notes, it sounds absolute nonsense or sounds absolute chaos, but still a bit annoying, but wow, wow. Yes, it sounds unstable, but it's beautiful because you kind of know, you have a road map where that chord and where the notes of that chord would eventually land to. So dissonance happens strangely enough with less notes and consonance tends to happen with more notes and a few other points to note when it comes to naming chords. You can name chords with respect to higher extended or jazz tension intervals as we call them. That would be the 9s, the 11s and the 13. Now the 9, 11 and 13 are not new notes. They are basically played or named based on whether or not you have a 7 in the chord. So if you have played a 7th chord, let's say a C dominant 7th or a C major 7th or a C minor major 7th or a C minor 7th, then the possibility of calling things or using the 9th or the flavor of the 9, 11 and 13 and all of its variants like the 9 flat, the 9 sharp, the 11 sharp and the normal 11, the 13 flat as well as the normal 13, all of that will come into play. So 9, 11, 13, if you've heard of those words before, these are called as jazz tensions or extended intervals or beyond the octave intervals as I sometimes like to call them. Remember for those to be called 9, 11, 13, you need to have a 3rd as well as a 7th in the chord. More important 7th but 3rd is a given. However, when you call something as add, you don't necessarily need a 7th. If you call something as sus, you don't necessarily need a 7th. Usually when you say, which is why this chord, if you add the D, you can say C major add 2. If you play the D on top also, you can even continue to say C major add 2. But if you play C major 7th and then add the D, then you would start using the words 9 or 11, in this case, 11 sharp, 13, okay. Now 9 is same as 2 but played an octave higher, which is why 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 octave, 9 is the same as 2. So 9 is 2, 10 is 3, 11 is 4, 12 is 5 which we rarely call and 13 is 6, okay. So the things you need to remember are 9, 11 and 13. And in some cases even the 10th because we could voice a chord like this, 1, 5, 10. So even though this is a C major chord, I prefer to call it as a 10th chord or a 10th voicing or a spread chord, spread triad where the 10th is above the octave. So in cases where you want to deliberately play or stick out the 9, 10, 11 and 13 above the octave, you might want to use the words 9, 11, 10, 13 and also 9, 11, 13 specifically need a 7 for them to even be called that, okay. And last but not least in this broad categorization of chords, you would have modal chords or modal triads or just modal sounds if you will. So if you want to build a chord which speaks out or which gives you the flavor of a mode, you need to find the representing note. So if you take the Lydian scale, for example, Lydian is the same as major but has that unique sharp 4. So if you build this chord, C, E, F sharp, we call this a C major flat 5. You can call it that because it's a C major with a flat 5. It's that Simpson's chord or the Jetson's chord. They seem to like that interval or that chord. Anyway, so that's C major flat 5 but you could also call it a Lydian chord, you know. Now you could build a Lydian chord maybe even with a root sharp 4 and a major 7th. That also feels pretty Lydian. This is generally considered more Lydian. What about Phrygian? It's a minor scale with a flat in 2. A natural minor with a flat 2 is Phrygian. Now a nice Phrygian chord would be 1, 2 flat and perfect 4 because this gives you that it kind of motivates you to sing the Phrygian and so on and so forth. You could do an Aeolian chord, you can do an Ionian chord, you can do a Mixolydian chord. I suggest that at this stage there will be a lot of further study videos along with part 2 of this particular lesson which we are going to bring out as well right after part 1. So first watch part 1 then part 2 you will magically find it somewhere available on our YouTube channel but to have that magic there's a subscribe button. So go there and hit the subscribe then you will be notified whenever we release it. However, if you found that some of these concepts need to be dived further into for example a more deep dive into intervals, triads, only triads, seventh chords and more importantly things like tensions, modes. We have a lot of links which we'll put up in the description but to be honest, our channel does a lot of theory videos so it might be a lot to list in the description. I suggest you go to our Nathaniel school homepage in the main page and look at all the relevant videos in neat playlists which we've compiled together for you to learn easily at different skill levels, different subjects, chapters and so on and so forth. So you have a bunch of chords and that's how you name them. You have major, minor, diminished, augmented, suspended, ad versus suspended, the sixth chord, the seventh chord, then the jazz tensions, 9, 11, 13 and then of course modal harmony. So I'm going to cap off this lesson by actually whacking or playing a chord and we are going to try and figure out how we can name that chord. What are the common mistakes we might end up doing and in the next part we are going to get into some more advanced naming techniques. How do you handle the jazz tensions? How do you handle quartal chords which is a very interesting subject? How do you handle certain kinds of unique voicings which are known in the industry and have a unique flavor like six nines, poly chords, slash chords is also something we need to do. So I wanted to conclude the lesson by giving you an actual chord, rather weird chord and then let's work together to naming that particular chord. So if I, let me just find one and give you this sound. Okay. So the first strategy when you're naming a chord is the root which is going to end up being the capital letter by which you name that chord. So if you look down at this, it would be C because C is the lowest note and I'm even repeating C and you can see that C is right at the bottom. So a student might sometimes get confused between calling this some kind of a C chord or the other way you might want to name a chord is could this have been, now you're looking at C and this is a bit tricky. Now if you look at this structure I'm actually playing F major in the right hand with C as the base note. So now C is a slash, it serves as a slash function as part of a slash chord. In this case, F major is F, A, C jumbled here as A, C, F, but I'm presenting C as the lowest note and it's the lowest note which kind of pushes your ear to determine the sound of the chord or the vibe of the chord. Just to prove that you play F major with F in the bass, see it's automatically a very calm chord. You play F major with C in the bass, it's no longer stable, it's a tension. Similarly, if you played A flat major with a C in the bass, you may not want to get confused and say oh it's an A flat, it's a C something chord. No, look at the right hand, is the right hand or is the treble area an already known triad. If it is an already known triad or maybe an already known seventh chord, you can then infer and say okay it's an A flat triad over C or A flat slash C. This is very important. So coming back to the chord I played, you can't really dissect or decipher a triad in the right hand. I don't see any available triad there. So it's most likely not a slash chord. So this is C something. Now you might have a student who hears this and he may think that this is an A chord slash C. He may end up saying this is an A minor because A is minor third C. He may even call it an A minor add four, A minor add four. Yeah that kind of works if you think about it because A minor add four all those notes are there then he may say A minor add four flat nine slash C. Now who on earth would want to listen to the name or who on earth would even read that or bother to play it. We'll then go back to staff notation to help us. You want the chord name to not only enable you to know your whereabouts on the piano. You would also want it to inspire you to make music out of that maybe build a scale out of the chord. We should look at the chord scale relationship where this is going next. What type of chord is it now? So if you called this A again coming back to that weird name which may take me some time A minor or A minor add four which is theoretically right. A minor add four flat nine slash C. Oh wow too difficult for me. I'd rather just call this a C chord. So now assuming it is a C chord, C is in the bass isn't it? The first thing I'd encourage you to do is in a piece of paper you write down one, three, five, seven, nine if any, eleven if any, thirteen if any and that nine would either be flat nine, normal nine or sharp nine. The eleven would be normal eleven or sharp eleven. Let's first identify all those things and as I build it you'll know and you need to put a tick or you need to write down whether you found it. So I hope you've written that down. One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven, thirteen. Now is there a one? Obviously C write that down. Then is there a three? Now it may all be jumbled but you look here and say hey what is the three of C? The answer could either be a major third E which it is or it could have even been a minor third E flat which it is not. So it's a major third E not the minor third E flat in there. Now is there a G in this chord? Now if there is no G you don't have to be worried it's well you should then check is there a G flat or is there a G sharp because if there is a G flat then it would make it a flat five and it could have even been a diminished chord if the third was minor right and if there was a five sharp then it could be some kind of an augmented chord so there's no five. So the assumption is we can discard the five we don't need the five so you can just assume okay the five of this chord would be G. Now coming to the seventh what are the seventh possibilities you could have a major seventh B which there isn't you could have a minor seventh B flat which there is you could have a diminished seventh A which there also is but we don't have to call it a diminished seventh because this is not a diminished triad in the first place it's kind of a major triad with a flat seven so it's definitely a C seven something C seven something and now the other note so I've named the C I've named the B flat I've named the E I have not named the D and the A now what did I say when there is a seventh if I have some other additional note in this case I'm trying to consider D D would be called well you could argue add two but no there's a flat seven so when there is a seven we don't call it two we don't even need to say add we can just say C ninth C seven add nine not needed we can just say C ninth but now I have an additional note which is the A we call that what now with respect to the C and the fact that there is a seventh we call it a C 13 okay so you could call this as C 13 or you could even say just to make it more clear you can say C nine in brackets 13 to indicate that there is a nine and there is a 13 so usually with a 13th chord you don't necessarily need the 11 but if ever you push in the 11 you can call this maybe C 13 add 11 you could also call this as C 13 sus because there's no third in there but it depends really on how you voice it so if you tell someone C 13 you need the 13 in there the nine generally in there the 11th will be optional okay so a lot of these chord extensions and a lot of these fancy names end up happening over the dominant seventh chord or the dominant in seventh interval more of which the naming we are going to cover in the next part so do stay tuned for that so this particular chord was C 13 or C 9 13 you can call it a C 9 13 if you wish remember it has a flat seven so this is pretty much how you name any chord there are a few more bells and whistles with regards to chords so we'll cap that off in the next part hope you found the lesson useful and to get the next part don't forget to hit the subscribe you'll get access to a lot more videos on our youtube channel for free right so why not hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications catch you in the next video cheers