Day 25.

My mind runneth over. Another good mental exercise (but you can play it on your bass, too) is re-labeling chords with other names after you've shuffled the notes around. For example, the notes of a C add 9 chord are C, E, G and D. But they may also be notes of another chord, the G6th sus 4th (the G 6th is G, B, D, E - then sharp the 3rd or B note to become a C note (the suspended 4th) and the notes become G, C, D, E or G6th sus 4. The notes are the same (C, E, G, D and G, C, D, E) but their 'positions' have changed. Are there any other chords that can be formed from these four notes? Answer: yes. What? D, E, G, C could be a D9th sus 4 but there's no 5th (A) so it's not. Do we always need a 5th (or any single 'position') in a chord? Not always, so, loosely speaking, we could call it that if we had some other instrument play the A note. E, G, C, D is an Em7th augmented or Em augmented 7th.

If you think about it, you see that you can play the same bass notes along with two (or more) entirely different chords which are probably being used in different keys along with many other different chords in differing harmonic structures. Boggles the mind. (Who says that you always have to play the notes in a chord or the 'positions' in the same order all the time?) These ideas lead you to chord substitutions and deeper levels of musical theory - the next steps if you're interested. But you don't have to take any next steps if you don't want to right now. This game, which you can do on paper if it's too difficult to do entirely in your mind, will do it for you !

Another, even simpler example of shuffling the notes of a chord around and creating a new chord using the same notes but choosing a different root or tonic is, again, the C major chord and its notes C, E, G. These notes are the 1st, 3rd and 5th positions as defined way back when we were first talking about chords. Let's take the E note. What chord can be named if we use the E note as the root? Let's say we move the C note above the G - we do an inversion, an upwards inversion. Now we have the notes E, G and C. What chord does this form? Well, one way to approach this puzzle is to examine the number of half-steps between the notes. E to G is three half-steps so that implies a minor. E to C is eight half-steps. What's this? Well, we know that there are seven half-steps between the 1st position and the 5th position (from our half-steps chart) so the 5th position would be a B note. So what's a C note? It's the sharped 5th. What chord has a sharped 5th in it? Answer: the augmented ( + ) chord. So the chord made up of the notes E, G and C is an augmented minor chord. E is the root or tonic so the chord is named or labeled an E augmented minor or E minor augmented, Em+.

Another way to puzzle this out instead of using half-step counting and the 'positions' would be to think about the notes themselves, E, G and C. From your experience playing the E minor scale you know that the G note is the minor 3rd and the B note is the 5th. So the C note which is the sharped B note must be an augmented 5th. Therefore, the chord is an augmented minor chord.

Try to do this exercise as a game and pick any chord(s) of your own choice(s) that have three or four notes in them. Then see what other chord(s) you can come up with after you've shuffled the notes around.

Try to think of a few more musical games. Please let me know what you invent and if you'd like, I'll add it to future versions of this publication mentioning your name as its submitter if you want credit. Note, you must give me written permission to do this.

Did you ever notice that the letters in the words 'note' and 'tone' are the same?

End of day 25.