Extended Chords: Major (PT1)
Richard Barrett explains how adding notes to major triads can make for interesting harmonies – a skill to add to your improv toolkit
Taking the root, 3rd and 5th from a major scale and playing them together gives us a major triad, or chord. The other extreme might be to play every note in the scale at the same time, but that would not be harmonious! However, by adding to or extending chords with further notes from the scale, we can create complex and detailed harmony.
Understanding this doesn’t mean every chord has to be an unwieldy fistful of notes – it can also feed into melodic composition and note choice when improvising. As we’ll see, extending the chord leads to numbers being added to the name, but not 1, 3 or 5 generally, as these are presumed to be present already. An E chord with the 6th note of the scale (C#) added makes an E6 chord. However, our main focus in this article is what happens when we add notes from the 7th on up, making 9th or 13th chords. I’ll fill in a few of the gaps here such as ‘add’ and 11th chords next time!
Example 1
Theoretically speaking, this E6 chord is one of the simplest to understand. It really is just a standard E chord with a 6th (in this case, C#) added. Here, the 6th is on top, but you might find it works well nested inside the chord in other registers of the fretboard, so give this a try.
Example 2
b7
E7 is actually an E with a b (D), but calling it E 7 would obviously be misleading. The solution? Sometimes this is called E dominant 7th, but mostly the issue is avoided completely. If the 7th is taken directly from the scale and not flattened (D#), you would have E major 7th -’major’ referring to the 7th, not the chord…
Example 3
An alternative voicing of E7, this shape links nicely with the subsequent chords we’ll look at here. The use of mostly fretted notes gives this a warmer sound great for jazz. It also makes this shape movable to any key if you omit the open 6th string.
Example 4
E9 moves beyond the first octave of the major scale and begins to use notes from the octave above. Why do this? If b we have used 1, 3, 5 and ( )7, it makes sense to visualise this as extending higher. Count through a two-octave E major scale and the 9th note will be F#. 9th chords are based on the presumption that the 7th is also present somewhere, or you simply have an Add 9.
Example 5
E13 adds a C#, like the 6th but this is added to a 7th chord It is this that distinguishes it from a regular 6th chord, rather than the octave the 6th is taken from. However, the system of extending or stacking notes on top of an existing chord can make things easier to visualise.