
Why 13th Chords - llambda
http://jtauber.com/blog/2008/09/23/why_13th_chords/
======
Jgrubb
...And this is what I love about Hacker News. As a 33 year old musician who
got the programming/entrepreneurial bug only more recently, it brings me great
hope to see things like this on this board. It brings me hope because a lot of
times I feel like such a late comer to the party, surrounded by folks younger
than me with many more years of experience in the programming realm having
conversations about others' technology articles that are, sometimes,
stratospherically over my head.

Yet occasionally another programmer/musician type, who maybe got into the game
the other way round, writes a post like this that expounds with mystery and
wonder upon a topic that I know inside and out. And it gives me hope that the
years that I spent in the musical woodshed learning those things inside and
out were not wasted in the context of the startup world, but giving me a
massive amount of (what I now know as) domain expertise.

So thank you HN, and happy new year. May this be your year, as I'm feeling
pretty good that it will be mine and my family's.

~~~
scrozier
Jgrubb, as a 53-year-old musician/programmer/entrepreneur (formally trained
[in parallel, mostly] in the first two), may I posit that you're not a late-
comer to anything yet!

~~~
davesims
A big ditto from me at 42 (programmer/musician)

~~~
drumdance
43 yo here. Recently I've been using Garageband to learn guitar. It's
fantastic. My first serious use of computers with music even though I've been
a programmer for almost 20 years.

------
kroger
That's one of the reasons that a 9th chord inverted, were the 9th is on the
bass, was frowned upon in 19th Century music theory. They argued that the 9th
in the bass is a 2nd, not a 9th.

To give you an idea of how conservative people were regarding music, even in
the beginning of the 20th Century, the Vienna Music Society rejected playing
Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht at first on the ground that it had inverted 9th
chords [1]. See [2] for an example, it's the first chord in the second bar.

[1] See "reception" in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verklärte_Nacht>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ic3ZLj5RPw#t=3m12s>

------
scrozier
Grew up playing classical and pop music, basically 3-4 chords (maj, min, 7th,
etc). Went to the best jazz school in the world (U of North Texas) and woke up
to jazz...an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. Will
spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz.

Why is this on HN? Because there is a giant overlap between hackers and
musicians.

For those of you interested, but confused, go to a music store and ask for a
"fake book," a big collection of tunes in "head chart" format (just melody and
the kind of chord symbols being discussed here. Study it like a new
programming language. Bang out the chords on a piano, if you can. (Most fake
books have a "glossary" of the chords in the front or back.)

Donald Knuth said that when a new CS grad student arrived at Stanford, they
didn't ask, "are you a musician?," they just asked, "what instrument do you
play?"

~~~
dextorious
"""an order of magnitude more harmonically complex than classical. """

Depends on the classical. There's classical stuff that's harmonically miles
beyond jazz music.

Contemporary classical, that is.

~~~
scrozier
Absolutely, dextorious. Something of a semantic issue. Maybe we should say,
"serious" music or "concert music" or some such. I really don't like any of
the terms.

In any case, your point is well taken. It would be interesting to trace the
parallel development of harmony in "serious" music and jazz. (Which, of
course, someone has done.)

~~~
chrisguitarguy
I always liked the term "art music" to refer to the entire classical music
genre. "Classical" implies a certain period to me.

~~~
harrylove
The problem with terms like these is the music at the boundaries. There's pop
and jazz music that sound more like art than some concert music. There's art
music that will never see the inside of a concert hall. What about interactive
computer music? Is it art? Is it a game? Is it theater? Is it improv? What
about music that arises out of dance movement? Is it dance music?

What's "serious"? What's a "composer"? What's "art"? What's "sound"? And just
like any jargon, it depends on the audience with which you're communicating.
The more you try to standardize a definition, the more star systems will slip
through your fingers.

~~~
gruseom
Yes. It's utterly pointless to set these distinctions. Iggy and the Stooges
and the Ramones were disciplined conceptual artists, yet they were part of a
movement that spelled stupid "stoopid". The beautiful thing about real art,
the kind that gets remembered as great art later, is that it is always ahead
of the theoretical game.

A famous example is Shakespeare, who was vulgar until the German Romantics
discovered him as classic.

------
owensmartin
I'd like to tack on another key feature to these 13th chords (no pun
intended)-- and that is of spreading out the voicing across the instrument's
(usually piano's) range.

There's a sort of rule of thumb in jazz that the only interval that sounds
genuinely BAD is the flat 9. Try it on your piano right now (say, C and C# an
octave up). Notice that a similar interval, the major 7 (C and B) sounds
pretty, even though the notes are kinda clashing because they're so close. But
on the other hand the flat 9 sounds GREAT if you voice it right. To see this,
hit a low C, then E, B-flat, and D-flat. Similarly this chord works with all
the other color tones: 9s, 11s, 13s.

I think ultimately what makes jazz piano truly musical is when the musician
has spent a lot of time trying out different voicings, spreading them out or
crunching them in, and listened to each one to see which sounds the best.

------
chrisguitarguy
> C9, C11 or C13 respectively instead of, say a Csus2, Csus4

That's actually not correct. sus, as in "suspended", implies that the third is
absent from the chord. Cadd2 or Cadd4 would be more correct. A major chord
with an added forth is kind of a weird sound, however -- too unstable, the
fourth wants to resolve. add2 chords are fairly common, though!

~~~
jtauber
yep, I'll tweak it to say Cadd2 / Cadd4

------
mirkules
"gives the chord a very different direction it wants to go"

I struggle with this every time I write songs. How exactly do you know which
direction you should go, and how to transition from verse to chorus (i.e. how
to pick good transition chords/notes). Currently, I do this by ear, whatever
sounds good, but I know there is a better way.

~~~
autarch
No, there really isn't a better way. All the rules behind music theory are
based on what sounds good, not the other way around.

What you can do, however, is push yourself to try out new harmonic structures.
You can make your chords more complex, you can delay resolution much longer,
you can shift keys.

There are also other musical idioms like polytonality, alternate scales, etc.
that you can use to expand you horizons.

But ultimately, you still should pick something that sounds right to you.

~~~
jtheory
Definitely agreed that theory follows practice, not the other way around.

BUT it's still good to work on a better grasp of the theory -- if you try
chord progressions at random until you hit something that sounds good... yes,
there's a better way.

The whole point of documenting lots of rules around "what sounds good" is that
you can refer to the rules and save a hell of a lot of time in your
experimentation.

~~~
mirkules
"if you try chord progressions at random until you hit something that sounds
good... yes, there's a better way."

This is definitely what I meant, and it's what I currently do. My grasp on
music theory is shaky at best, and I'm not exactly sure where to start to fill
in the gaps in my knowledge (this may be true of any self-taught skill).

~~~
jtheory
One day I may finish up my website that will guide you in an engaging way
through to a good grasp of the useful stuff, but at the moment it's just some
practice drills and no guidance at all. :(

Dunno if you'll even see this comment.. but my short-version recommendation is
to learn different types of chords, (major, minor, 7th, etc., inversions,
different spacings) and chord functions, then figure out what the progressions
that "sound good" are doing in those terms. That's a big step up right there,
I think.

------
guscost
That counter-intuitive, 1-based, Ionian-biased indexing still causes a lot of
problems...

People usually measure things with natural numbers when the things to be
measured share some of the properties of natural numbers, like _equidistance_.

------
tripzilch
A few people in this thread mentioned that the notation used in this article
is in fact quite simple and could be learned in 10 minutes or so.

Personally I find the article quite incomprehensible, and I _thought_ I knew a
littlebit about music theory :) Just a tiny bit, however, and I don't even
play an instrument--I always found it very hard to even just make a passable
tune on a tracker/software synthesizer. Even though I _love_ music and spent a
lot of times creating mixes and mash-ups in software such as Ableton Live and
Traktor (which were pretty good according to those who heard them both on and
off the dance floor), as well as coding software synthesizers, instruments and
sound effects (which were also pretty good according to my rankings in 4k
demo-competitions over 10 years ago).

I wonder, can anybody perhaps provide a couple of links to some good
introductory articles that would tell me about how to interpret the things
discussed in this article? (I'm willing to spend more than just 10 minutes on
them, btw ;-) )

------
robocop
Sorry to be pedantic, but a 9th chord actually has a 9th and a _flat_ 7th. For
example C9 has the notes C-E-G-Bb-D. 9th chords are part of the dominant
group, not the major group.

A chord with a 9th and a 7th is a _major_ 9th. For example, the chord C-E-G-
B-D is Cmaj9 (sometimes written C triangle 9).

~~~
jtauber
Well, I'm assuming by convention that the 7th is flattened, as the notation
"C7" does.

~~~
robocop
I think the convention for chord notation is different to the convention for
scale degrees. The 7th note in C major is B, but a C7 has a Bb.

~~~
_mayo
Major 7 chords are explicitly written as such. So in the case of a C chord
with a major 7, it would be noted as Cmaj7.

------
tibastral2
Excellent Will do more of that stuff as soon as I'm able to work less (soon)
Jazz is life Happy to see that kind of sruff on hn :

------
baddox
So, why is it called a 13th chord? Am I missing something obvious, or is it
just arbitrary convention that "13th" means "with the 6th and 7th added"?

~~~
gruseom
I was puzzling over the same question. Some of these words are semantically
overloaded, and as far as I can tell there's no single interpretation that
makes it all "work out" the way you would require if this were math. There are
two meanings to "adding 7":

1\. adding 7 arithmetically to obtain the same note an octave higher;

2\. adding in a 7th note to whatever chord you are playing.

But the way the chords are named isn't what you'd guess from those two
meanings. If it were, you'd add a 6th to C major to get C6 (that part is true)
and then a 7th to C6 to get C13 (that part is not true). Instead, there's yet
a third way the notes are "added", namely cumulatively in the following
sequence (I've cribbed most of this from the OP):

    
    
      C      C+E+G
      C7     C+E+G+B♭ 
      C9     C+E+G+B♭+D 
      C11    C+E+G+B♭+D+F 
      C13    C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A
    

(The author's argument is that while the chords are theoretically defined to
include all these notes equally, some notes - especially B♭ - are more
important than others. So even if you drop E,G,D,F and only play C+B♭+A,
that's still arguably C13. He's saying that's the essence of the chord.)

I suppose some arbitrariness is inevitable, because there are only so many
letters and numbers to go around, and more chords with a plausible claim to
the "best" names -- which, if you know regular expressions, would be something
like [A-G][1-9]+ -- than there are names available. One beautiful thing about
music is that it isn't math (we have math for that). It seems to overlap with
math and then mixes everything up in mind-blowing ways, at which point all you
can do is feel. Well, memorize and feel.

Does anyone know historically how C13 got to mean "C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A" rather than
"C+E+G+B♭+A", which if you consider things only symbolically, seems more
likely? Obviously, it must be because that's what people were playing - but
who? Presumably jazz musicians? When was this name settled upon?

~~~
jaylevitt
Been out of Berklee a few years, but a few nuggets that might shed light:

In Jazz theory, the 7th scale degree is part of the chord. C7 isn't C (C+E+G)
plus a B♭; C7 is its own flavor of C chord, C + E + G + B♭.

More generally, the ^3 and the ^7 are the two most important notes in the
chord. The ^3 tells you its quality (minor, major) and the ^7 tells you its,
uh, seventhness (dominant, diminished, maj7). It's common for players to leave
off the 1 and the 5; they're low-information notes, and those fingers are
better put to use playing the tensions, which are "chord ex _tensions_ ", the
9th, 11th and 13th. Critically, all three tensions are considered part of the
chord, unlike Csus4, which means substitute a 4 for the 3, and don't play the
3.

C9, C11 and C13 can exist, but you won't often find C13 in particular like
that. There's a whole set of memorizable rules to tell you which chord scales
go with which chords performing which functions; if that C is a I chord in the
measure, you're not likely to see a C11. You may see a C7(11), or C7(add11),
which is IIRC the C chord plus an 11th note - but not the 9th. Then there's
C7(#11), which you'll often find when C is the IV chord, 'cause the IV chord
gets a Lydian scale.. but now I forget how that explains anything.

C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A can also be looked at as D-/C7, and often is. That whole "Upper
Triad" polychord stuff is a whole semester to itself.

~~~
wazoox
_> Then there's C7(#11), which you'll often find when C is the IV chord,
'cause the IV chord gets a Lydian scale.. but now I forget how that explains
anything._

I'd say it's usually the other way around: if you want to improvise in a
Lydian mode, use a 7th(#11) chord on your IV, while improvising; if you're
composing, use this chord to hint the interpret to use this scale. And so on.

------
oxxx
For the record, F7 wants to resolve to Bb, not C.

~~~
jtauber
yep, corrected.

------
swiecki
Very much baby steps in jazz music theory, but this will probably be helpful
to some people!

~~~
jtauber
yeah, as I said in the post, it's Jazz Theory 101. But anyone coming from a
classical music theory background will hopefully find it a helpful insight.

------
josscrowcroft
Fantastic article, short and sweet. Reminds me why I did music at university!

------
mml
Well, that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" music
theory. Gibberish+Goobeltygooksus7

~~~
dextorious
Actually it's a perfectly succinct and easy notation. Not many musicians have
a "hard time" getting it, except for those that never cared to study it.

In fact, in the history of jazz piss poor black kids that never went to school
managed to master music theory just fine. And an enormous amount of people all
around the world.

The particular example you mention (chord naming) has something like 1/100 the
difficulty of something like regular expressions.

And it's several orders of magnitude easier than actually learning to play
your instrument. Which also millions of people manage to do.

~~~
mml
I'm afraid you miss my point.

I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents
perhaps? Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to
understand much of anything in it.

"I find not only the 13th chord a great substitute for a 7th now, especially
when it's the dominant resolving to the tonic, but I also love the
7th+3rd+13th/6th way of voicing it too."

~~~
dextorious
Actually, the part I found difficult about music theory, is that that there
are tons of stuff you're supposed to remember.

They are not difficult to understand, and they are even easy to derive from
some basic rules.

But you _do_ have to remember them, not derive them at will, to be able to
think musically and play fluently.

I think that's my problem with Chemistry too, as opposed to Physics. There was
always tons of stuff to remember when studying chemistry, while just
remembering a few basic rules and deriving everything else was possible in
Physics (I talk about High School grade material, of course).

~~~
alanfalcon
This is exactly why Math was Good for me in High School and History was
Terrible. And the thing is, with an understanding of history a lot can be
derived, or at least worked out, yet history class was all about memorizing
names and dates and the relationships and flow of history was often something
that felt coincidental to what was being taught.

------
jergosh
WTH is this doing on HN?

~~~
agumonkey
Einstein thought in musical ideas.

~~~
jergosh
Not sure what this proves.

~~~
MrTortoise
im not sure any comment could prove anything apart from something is posting
on HN?

