Chords with more than one name.
Polychords (Part Three)
Some chords just sound great as open-string shapes. But, what if you were to change or add different lower notes to those chords? These are called “Polychords”.
Continuing from Part Two
Adding low notes to the D chord on the fourth string.
One of the first chords you probably learned on the guitar is the common open-string “D” chord. It looks like this:
The root note (I) is D, the third (III) is F#, and the fifth (V) is A. You need these three notes to make the “D” chord.
What if we change the lowest note on the fourth string, and move it up one-helf step to “Eb”?
In the left image below, we now have the “D/Eb” polychord. The root note remains at “D”. The “Eb” is added as the altered lowest note of the chord.
If we change the root note to “Eb” in the right image, the chord now becomes an “EbmΔb5” (Eb minor-major 7 flat 5). Both chords occupy the same exact notes, but the intervals move to change the name of the chord.
In the key of Eb, A is the diminished (flat) 5th (v°) of Eb, D is the Major 7th (Δ), and F# is the minor third (iii). It’s just a matter of changing the perspective of the intervals in reference to the root note.
Let’s try another one.
If we move the Eb note on the fourth string up one half-step to “E”, we have the “D/E” polychord in the left image, and “E9sus” in the right image. Again, all that’s changing between both chords is the placements of the intervals. The notes are still the same, but the intervals are different, depending on the root note.
This next chord looks pretty strange.
If we move the root note on the fourth string up one half-step from E to F, we now have a “D/F” in the left image, and an “F6b9” (F 6 flat 9) in the right image. This is one of those chords that needs to be in context with a chord progression for it to make harmonic sense.
Last we have somethign more familiar.
Moving the F on the fourth string up one more half-step, we now have a very common chord in the left image, called the “D/F#”, and an “F#m#5” in the right image. You can see that everytime we change the root note to the fourth string, the intervals in the rest of the chord change as well - and none of them are the same. Every chord structure is different.
As I said in Part One and Two of this series, any chord can be seen as having more than one name. The more notes you add to a chord, the more names it can have.
In this lesson series, we will continue to look at many of the regular common open-string chords with various added lower bass notes.
Be sure to look for Part Four coming soon. We will take a look at a few more of the polychords we can make with the open-string “D” chord.
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