Imagine if a painter only had 12 colors to choose from. He wasn’t allowed to mix them together, he couldn’t dilute the colors, he could only use one type of brush and every painter had to use the color and type of canvas. Visual art would be boring, wouldn’t it? Artists would have a much tougher time developing their own style and even the person with no interest in art would begin to notice that everything she sees is based on the same 12 colors.

If musicians could only use triads (Three note chords based on 1-3-5 of the scale) the world would sound like it would look with only 12 colors. The various styles or genres of music would be much tougher to distinguish from each other and their unique sound that we’ve grown to love would be gone.

This is why composers developed extended chords. Extended chords “extend” the basic triad by adding notes to it. Extended chords, combined with creative voicings, are what give the different styles of music their unique sounds. Let’s look at how they work.

First, we will call a triad the building block of all chords. Remember that if we have a C Major triad, it is built by stacking the first, third, and fifth scale degrees on top of each other. This is referred to as a C Major chord. If we add another note on top of our triad, we would add the seventh scale degree (because for now, we always skip a note in between). Now we have a chord called a “C Major Seven” chord. The notes of this chord are C-E-G-B.

We can add another note on top of that. Do you know what it would be? It would be a D because we’re skipping a note. Now, although technically D is the second scale degree because we went in to a new octave, when we’re building chords, we call it the ninth scale degree. So now we have C-E-G-B-D. This is a “C Nine” chord.

Are you seeing the pattern? The next tone we add would be an F and we would have a “C Eleven” chord and the next would be an “A” and we would have a “C Thirteen” chord. Of course one cannot extend to a fifteenth chord because we’ve used all of the diatonic notes.

As we always say, very little in music is painfully simple and extended chords are no exception. First, these are the most basic of extended chords. There are many others. For example, there is another seventh chord called a dominant seventh chord that is spelled, C-E-G-Bb. There are hundreds of extended chords.

The other complication with these chords is that the more notes that we add, the worse they sound if we don’t do some creative voicing. When we write a seventh chord, for example, we often remove the fifth of the chord. This gets increasingly complicated as more tones are added.

Now, go to the piano and listen to these extended chords. You’ll find that your musician’s toolbox has just been expanded. And if you really want to get up to speed on extended chords, grab our course on “Super Chords Made Super Simple!”

Copyright June 16th, 2011 by Duane Shinn. Please do not copy without permission!