2-Note Chords
Jazz, extended and fusion chords, two notes at a time. The bass note does the rest.
A chord symbol names a stack. Nobody hears a stack
What a listener tracks, when harmony moves, is the two or three notes that changed. Play a Cmaj7 followed by a C7 and one note moved, and that one note is the entire event.
Most guitarists who want to play jazz stall on the chords. You look up a 13#11 and what comes back is a five-note grip with a stretch in it. Learn twenty of those and you still can’t comp, because comping isn’t playing grips in sequence — it’s moving between them, and a five-note grip has no moving parts.
So the usual advice arrives: learn shell voicings, drop the root, drop the fifth. Sound advice framed badly, because it’s framed as subtraction. This book takes the opposite position. Two notes chosen well aren’t a reduced chord. They’re a more precise one.
Which is where the extended and altered chords stop being difficult. A 13b9 is a nightmare as a grip and trivial as two notes, because the two notes that make it a 13b9 are the only two you need. Same for the lydian dominant, the minor-major seventh and the half-diminished.
Here’s the whole system
Not a sample chapter — the thing the book is built on. If this makes sense to you, the book is for you. If it doesn’t, it probably isn’t, and I’d rather you found that out now.
Two notes held still. Four chords. You don’t play the outlined notes — they name the chord, and someone else is playing them.
The lower note of your pair is
continued
Add the interval between your two notes and you have the second one. A third and a flat seventh is a dominant. A flat third and a flat seventh is a minor seventh. That’s the method.
One table and one addition. Every chord in the book comes out of that, in any key, from any string pair, and after a week you stop needing to look it up.
What’s in it
The argument
Why two notes is a more precise chord rather than a reduced one, and what the context is already supplying before you play. No diagrams.
How to use it
How the diagrams work, and the thing people get wrong: you don’t fret the bass note. It only names the chord.
The thirds
Major and minor from two notes, and why a major third and a minor third are the same two jobs with the assignments swapped.
The perfect fifth
maj7, m7 and 6 — the three families you actually read on a chart. Why a fifth means not-dominant and a tritone means dominant.
The tritone
Two dominants a tritone apart and the one diminished seventh they share. Tritone substitution and the sixth-diminished relationship, played rather than explained.
The major second
The colour chapter. m11, 7#11, 7#5 and add9 — none of which state a chord alone, all of which are useful once somebody else has.
Working it out yourself
The count in full, with the drill that makes it automatic. The chapter that lets you stop opening the book.
150 chords by symbol
Go from what the chart is asking for to the diagram that produces it. Thirty-five diagrams, none of which use an open string.
Before you buy
Two notes can’t do everything. They can’t state a plain diminished or augmented triad, because the identity of those chords lives in a fifth you aren’t playing. Altered dominants need a root somewhere to lean on. That’s on page one of the book as well, not buried at the back.
It assumes a bass player, or a chart, or a memory. The whole method works because context supplies the root. Solo guitar with nothing else going on needs more notes than this, and you should use them.
It’s a reference, not a course. Thirty-five diagrams and about three thousand words of argument around them. If you want two hundred pages of exercises, this isn’t that — and a system that takes two hundred pages to explain wouldn’t be much of a system.
A few things worth knowing
Who is this for?
Guitarists who read chord symbols and are moving into jazz, fusion and extended harmony. If you can play a barre chord and a blues but the charts in a real book stop you dead, this is aimed squarely at you. It isn’t a beginner book.
Do I need to read Chords from the Top first?
No. They’re companions rather than a sequence. Chords from the Top files voicings by the note on top; this one asks what you can leave out. Different question, same reader.
Is this a chord dictionary?
No, and deliberately not. There’s an index of 150 chords so you can look things up, but the point is the count in Part 8. After a week you shouldn’t need the pages.
Why isn’t it in twelve keys?
Because every shape is movable and none of them use an open string. Move the pair up two frets and every chord on the page moves up two frets with it. Printing that twelve times would be padding, and you’d be paying for it.
Is there a way to practise this?
The free Chord Builder builds a chord an interval at a time and maps it across the whole neck. Same thinking, approached from the other direction.
Is it available in print?
Yes — an 8.5″ × 11″ paperback on Amazon, or the PDF if you’d rather have it on a tablet at the music stand.
Play a chord you know. Take away everything except the third and the seventh. If it still sounds like the chord, you never needed the rest.