[Supervox]

Originally Posted by arenalife

Chords

There are only four types, Major (the nice sounding ones), Minor (the sad sounding ones), Diminished (severe doom, not used in popular music) and Augmented (unsettled, instant film soundtrack music, not used in general music). I know there's all the extensions but don't think about that for now.

To make a Major chord play the first, third and fifth notes of the regular Major scale together (so for C major play C E and G.

To make C minor flatten the third one note (semitone), to make C Diminshed flatten the fifth note too. To make C Augmented start with the C major chord again and sharpen the fifth note. That's it! No tricks or complication, to get a different chord, just start with a different scale (G, F whatever - exactly the same principle).

That's the meat and potatoes of it, then there's all the added notes you add to make the flavour different like the seventh note of the scale (Maj7 chord - jazzy) the flattened 7th note (7th chord - a leading note chord like in a hymn to let you know it's changing). Each added or altered note gives a different flavour, there's about 35 in all. See link for them, there's instructions on the right for which notes of the cale to play to get each one.

http://jmdl.com/howard/music/quick_crd_ref.html

Good luck

Nice description - but . . .

. . . I'm guessing that your definitions of 'Popular music' & 'General music' are somewhat different to mine as Dims & Augs frequently crop up in a lot of stuff that I (attempt) to play !!