Ah, B7#5b9: yes indeed, that's what I thought.

Actually, I was using this thread as a checking service . That chord appeared in a magazine with a sequence of others, but they listed that one as "B7#5#9". I puzzled over it, because that seemed wrong - but I'm not confident enough of my own theory to be sure they were making a mistake rather than me...

I knew you would know!

As to the "famous" chord: I'll let that one run a bit. A lot of people here will know it, even if they don't realise. Folks'll be kicking themselves...

- C

If you're playing along, moving in A maj and you want to just throw in a jazzy sounding chord, try this.

4
3
4
3
x
x

Sliding it up a half tone and then various positions up and down the neck, gives you some interesting riffs, I use it a lot, it kicks me off into ideas when blended with other chords and nifty little runs.

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And to that, yes, I'll gladly take that consolation, thank you! As a careful follower of your posts, mondo, it is perfectly clear to me that you are miles ahead as a musician. So if there's one tiny thing I can do it's OK - though I suspect it's only because you are properly trained and know where your thumb is meant to be on the neck!

I like your flamenco sequence, partly because the major seventh is one of my too frequently used faves. So here's a nice sequence for that B7#5b9. Try a bar each of A13, C13, B7#5b9, Bb13 and back to A13. Obviously that group is just a building block to further things. And in that pattern the thumb fretting the root on the sixth string in each chord comes into its own...

Now. Who wants to show me some nice turn arounds?

Cheers - C

2
3
2
4
5
x

Ok Jimi, if you move that up the fretboard a bit and play it as ;

4
4
4
6
7
0

A steady rhythm, slow, say 3 beats and then move it down 2 frets. repeat the pattern for say 3 times and then finish on.

5
5
5
7
8
5

You have an intro into what could be a nice little composition.
Or maybe finish on the first chord I posted earlier , might be interesting.

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Ceri, you're too kind. Not long ago my parents turned up with boxes of my stuff that they had finally tired of having at their place (and wasn't Mrs mondo thrilled about that!); turned out most of it was my scribblings from my teenage years when I had the time and patience to learn. Well, it seems that not only have I forgotten most of what I once knew, I had no recollection of ever having known much of it in the first place!

Quartal harmony?! What the..? Articulated tenths? Ah, yeah, I remember those, and boy do I wish I'd remembered to practice them all these years. Exercises for practicing three against four (and four against five) for thumbpicked walking bass lines... gimme a break... heh.

Some kernels of knowledge did remain with me. I used to make fretboard charts and write down all the inversions of all the main chord families (Maj7, 7, Min7 and Min7b5, as those were the chords built from the major scale... I didn't worry so much about diminished chords as they're symmetrical and their shapes repeat every three frets). I'd do that with each group of four strings together, and then do all the ones for "broken" groupings of strings where a string was skipped.

Some of those voicings stayed with me... not all were readily playable, at least not by me. That Maj7 shape that you like a finish up on sometimes was a favourite, as was the Dom7 version... but the Min7? Not so much.

3
5
5
7
x
x

...too hard to squeeze two fingers in there at the fifth fret, and taking it with a tiny barre makes it next to impossible to get the highest note out.

The ones that have stuck have mostly been 7 chords, as about all I ever get to do these days is snatch a bit of blues at odd moments. This one's nice:

x
5
7
6
x
7 (E7, with the root note on the B string)

It's not hard to see how that might resolve itself into an A13... hmm. Anyway, moving along...

Jimi, that was everybody's least favourite major barre chord, D! Have you ever noticed how many people cheat and play Under the Bridge in C instead?

Rhumba, I'd call that Emaj7, Dmaj7 (or do you leave that 6th string ringing as a pedal tone? That'd make it a nice spacious E13 without a major third, I guess), and then Amin b6. I must give that a listen when I'm near a guitar.

Hi mondo: now I just want to cry. Three against four; OK. Four against five? Oh boy!

And articulated tenths...? Oh dear.

Meanwhile: surprised that nobody's sussed this one yet:

0
6
0
8
x
x

It wasn't a trick question: it really is very famous! Time for a clue. It helps a lot if you play it a certain way. Pick the fourth string, then second, then third, then first.

There. Suddenly very obvious, huh?

Cheers - C

Yeah right Ceri, as soon as you said pick it 4231 I knew ( Yes )
Before I even picked up my guitar. I had been strumming through it and to be honest I wondered where the hell you were coming from with that.
However, all becomes revealed.
I won't say and then others can have a pleasant surprise and feel silly for not seeing it at the start.
One further thing. I haven't got the recording anymore, so can you tell me the crash chord it builds up to. You know ? the crescendo with lots of whammy wiggling.
Thanks for this man, it's amazing what you come across in these forums.
Stay cool.

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Haha - though I wasn't out to make a monkey of anyone: I thought it was a nice easy one just for fun.

I think the band are simply playing Gm beneath that chord, aren't they? Leading up to C major - the crash chord. I believe Douglas Adams (of H2G2 fame) described it as the most lo-o-o-ong awaited C major in the history of rock!

But those four notes are a chord in themselves, and there's slightly more to it than mere Gm...

BTW:

I wrote that very tired at about three in the morning. It occured to me later that I was misunderstanding mondo. I was a drummer before I was a guitarist, and my brain somehow dumbly thought he was talking about three beats against four, etc. D'oh! (Four beats in one hand and five in the other can indeed be done - but it's fairly talented!)

But mondo was just talking about fourths and fifths and such - weren't you, mondo?

Earlier to bed, Ceri...

- C

No, no, it was three beats against four, and four against five (actually five against four, I think — that would make more sense), and the exercises were from one of George Van Eps' Harmonic Mechanisms For Guitar books. The idea was to play a standard 4/4 walking bass line, and then try to play the upper notes of the chords in 3 or 5 over that instead of just just playing them on the downbeat like an average human.

It was only recently that I realised I'd never heard or seen Van Eps playing; I'd forgotten that he was the architect of the brand new eighth circle of my teenage fingerstyle jazz hell. Of course, these days there's a YouTube clip for everything:

George Van Eps playing a Gretsch 7-string as if it were a piano

I don't think I've ever seen greater fretting economy.

Now... that extremely famous chord... still drawing a blank, I'm afraid! It sounds vaguely familiar. I didn't know we had to name these things by song title!

P.S. I seem to remember that the five against four exercise involved making two slips of paper with twenty subdivisions each, and marking one every fourth division and the other every fifth. Then you'd place them together and count s-l-o-w-l-y through, tapping the beats from one slip of paper with your left hand and the other with the right until it stopped sounding like random fat drops of rain before a storm and gathered a cartwheeling momentum. Then, the idea was to translate the resulting lollop somehow to the thumb and fingers of the right hand.

Ha - so it was beats after all!

Yep, in the percussion world you do an exercise just like that to learn two beats against three, or three against four. Couldn't be bothered to fire up the computer with musical notation on it, but here's a sketch:



As a kid on the bus to school I used to pass the time tapping those out one hand against the other, or hands against feet.

Never got as far as four against five. But ace drummer Steve Smith does a neat audience particiption piece where he plays a pattern of three with his feet and then with his hands plays rhythms over the top in two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve - which is then divided by four and so back to three against three. He gets the audience to try to clap out the beat at each stage - it's very funny!

That's a tasty George Van Eps clip, by the way. That belongs on Mike's YouTube thread...

Cheers - C

PS: this ain't turning out to be the thread JimiVanPage thought he was starting, is it...?