Without going into the vagaries of chord construction and theory, it is useful to have a basic grasp of chord families and the chords within each of those families. The primary utility of this knowledge is being able to immediately substitute any chord for another within the same family. There are three areas where this becomes important relative to your guitar playing: 1) song simplification, 2) song texturing, and 3) song writing. So, if you are looking to take a complex song and make it easier to play or take a boring song and "spice it up" then read on!

Contrary to what you might think, this topic is actually not terribly complex. In it's most simplified form, there are really only three chord families. There are major sounding chords. There are minor sounding chords. There are dominant 7th sounding chords. That's it.

Most of you already know most of the basic open major chords (A, C, D, E, F, and G), open minor chords (Am, Dm, Em), and 7th chords (A7, B7, C7, D7, E7, and G7). If you've have added the basic moveable barre chords to you technique repertoire, then you can really can play any major, minor, or 7th chord in any key.

Before we discuss why this is true, let's introduce the chord families. In the following table, I'm going to list the most typical chord extensions that belong to each family.



So, for example, if you run across a Cmaj chord - you probably already know that it is a chord in the major family. Likewise, a C6 or a Cadd9 are also major family chords. Similarly, you can use this table to determine that a Am7 or Am7b5 are chords in the minor family and G13 and Gdim are chords in the dominant 7th family.

As I mentioned this is useful for a number of reasons:

Song Simplification:

Whether or not you know it, this means you can play pretty much any song even if you don't know all of the chords. This is because as long as you know what family the chord you don't know is in, then you can play another chord that you do know from that same family.

For example, in "Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss, there is a chord
progression in that song that uses the following progression:

E E6 E A

If you don't immediately remember what an E6 looks like or you want to make the song simpler to play if you are a beginner, then you can play:

E E E A

How's that for easy? (Even easier? How about E5 E5 E5 A5!)

Playing the song this way may not be "perfect", but it will be tonally correct and your audience probably won't notice too much of a difference.

There is one caveat to this. Many times you will run into slash type chords such as Am7/G. In this case, this means to play an A minor 7th chord with G in the bass. To simplify this chord you have to determine whether the progression is relying more on the "A minor" sound or the "G" sound as the underlying tone. This may require a bit of experimentation.

One more caveat. Try to look at the chord diagrams for the songs. Many times, all the chords listed only look harder to play, but if you examine the fingerings used - it may actually be easier to play the chords as listed rather than changing them. This is because chords are often selected because of their ease in moving from one to the next.

Song Texturing:

Suppose you are playing a twelve bar blues but you are a bit tired of the typical E progression:

E | E | E | E
A | A | E | E
B7 | A | E | E

You might use the table above to insert some "color" chords into the mix to "jazz" up an otherwise stale progression or to add your own twist to a cover song.

Song Writing:

Much like in the song texturing example above, you can use chord families to enhance your song writing. If you recall from our lesson on the "Circle of Fifths" from Song Writing Part 3, we spend some time looking at how to select chords that sound good together.

Here's the Circle of Fifths again:



Suppose we use the Circle of Fifths to develop a chord progression for a song that looks like this:

Cmajor | Aminor | Fmajor | Dminor

We could ten use chord families as a basis for coming up with a much more varied progression with more texture and life, such as:

Cmajor | C6 | Aminor | Am6/9 | Fmajor | F6 | Dminor | Dm6/9

I hope this lesson gives you some direction on how to simplify songs to fit within your abilities or to use chord families to create new textures for songs that you have written. As a final note, don't necessarily feel bound by any of these ideas. There aren't any real rules, use these ideas as a path, but let your ear be your true guide.

Written by Daniel Halberg

www.guitargearheads.com

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