scott wrote:I know how to figure out any chord you spell out for me, and likewise I know how to spell out any chord you play for me. Can I do it in an instant? Hell no. Do I consciously implement it when playing? Barely, and not often. I much prefer to figure out, by ear, what *sounds* best, rather than trying to comply with any of the rules that I understand. One of the best songs I've ever written uses a host of chords that are bizarre if you spell them out and name them. Totally obscure. But I wrote it by ear, so that didn't mean shit.

Same here.

tipcat wrote:Same here.

Thirded. Additionally, most of the chords I regularly used are things I came up with on my own while fucking around.
I rarely end up using power chords, barre chords or jazzy shit.

I tried out a lot of shit from the Mel Bay chord book when I was a kid, and not much of it sounded usable to me.

A line from an interview with Duane Denison pretty much summarizes my approach:

"I try to make up new, cool-sounding chords without getting too ridiculous." [I paraphrase]

Seeings I open tune, this is my chord vocabulary:

Mazec wrote:

tipcat wrote:Same here.

Thirded.

Fourthed. Or Sus4 if you prefer.

burun wrote:Chords, like tuning, is a crutch.

i'd never think that someone with perfect pitch would talk that way about tuning.

iembalm wrote:Well I didn't start on guitar until after that fire at the gypsy caravan and then the accident at the sheet metal factory. Doctors said I should take it up as therapy. So my chord vocabulary is a bit limited.

Yet you still put out rawkin' albums like Master of Reality and IV. My heart bleeds for you, you fuckin' sad sack. Waaaaaaa.

I have a pretty decent chord vocabulary, but it’s pretty rusty since I don’t really use much of my jazz guitar training. Most altered dominant chords such as A7#9#11 are way too idiomatic in jazz, not to mention too chock-full of leading tones, to be used elsewhere without sounding utterly gratuitous.

Standard tuning lends itself fairly well to tertian, quartal and quintal harmony but not much else. Since I used to be too broke to own more than one decent guitar, I used to try to learn “tunings”-styled voicings in standard tuning, applying what I knew from jazz comping. I got fairly far with some Sonic Youth, Pavement and Idaho tunes, but a friend of mine broke me by playing some DADGAD stuff I simply couldn’t do in standard.

Since I love George Crumb and tone clusters in general, I came up with a few of my own secundal tunings to get those kinds of gloriously dense voicings you can’t possibly do in standard, even if you have Ted Greene’s hands that can effortlessly span 17 frets.

Since I know how these chords work theoretically, I can technically say they’re part of my chord vocabulary no matter how homebrewed the tuning is.

FuzzBob wrote:

iembalm wrote:Well I didn't start on guitar until after that fire at the gypsy caravan and then the accident at the sheet metal factory. Doctors said I should take it up as therapy. So my chord vocabulary is a bit limited.

Yet you still put out rawkin' albums like Master of Reality and IV. My heart bleeds for you, you fuckin' sad sack. Waaaaaaa.

I just saw a documentary a couple months ago where they had interviews with all the guys from Sabbath, and in that doc, they said that the accident happened on his last day of work there, that he had quit the job to play full-time with Sabbath. Funny that he would quit a job to play full-time in a band if he didn't even play guitar yet! I think he should pick a story and stick with it.

It's better if you make 'em up.

As David Fair says, the fat strings are low and the skinny strings are high. Close to the nut is low and close to the body is high.

That's most of playing guitar, and it can easily be 100% of playing guitar if you commit to it.

I remember this funny story Pat Metheny told, when he was going through a 'bored with the guitar' phase and wanted to 'rediscover the guitar.'

He spent, like, a couple hours just twisting pegs and trying to create some kind of *magicky magic* tuning that he could be all psyched about.

Then he got it! It was wonderful. Sounded just totally pure and wonderful. He was really excited. He set about figuring out exactly what discovery he had made during this process.

He had tuned his guitar to an open C.

When I was in high school I used to sit around and practice going between 3 or four nutty chords as fast as I could and learning all kinds of suspended and diminished and augmented and blah, blah, blah.

As soon as I started playing in bands I realized that I was never playing these chords ever. And when I did it sounded kinda dumb. Now I keep it simple and cannot even remember most of the chords I used to play.

When I listen to recordings of how I used to play guitar when I was a kid it makes me laugh a lot... it also sort of makes me jealous a little.