I know enough chords to busk around most jazz standard leadsheets etc, but I've got into the habit of making quite a small vocabulary of chord shapes go a long way - for example if I see an alt dominant I have my little collection of alt shapes.
Which is fine for most of what I play, but recently I've got involved with a project that's using big band charts and I'm seeing a lot of very complex chords crammed into tunes and defined very precisely - C13+11, Eb7+5+9, lots of slash chords etc. I don't have shapes for these at my fingertips and I'm not always sure whether my routine simplifications/subsitutes will work against the written horn parts etc.
My normal approach when I come across an unfamiliar chord has been to analyse it and work out my own shapes from first principles, trying to play enough notes to captures the flavour of the chord, but I'm finding that a laborious, time-consuming way to do it when there are lots of unfamiliar chords.
I'm thinking I could speed up the process if I could quickly access a few reasonably easy shapes for a particular chord. I have the likes of the Ted Greene Chord Chemistry books sitting in a cupboard somewhere but I always thought they were overkill. Any online resources people would recommend?
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Comments
Eb7#5#9 you could maybe just add the #5 or #9 as a triad ...?
You don't really need to play the root, or even the 3rd at times, especially when playing with others.
For instance- look at a G13 chord.
Root: G
3rd: B
5th: D
b7: F
9th: A
11th: C
13th: E
You can look at this chord in a number of ways.
For instance- it is a G triad and an F maj 7 chord played at once.
(You could also think about it as a G dominant and an A minor triad.)
So if you play an maj 7th chords off the b7 of a V chord you will imply a dominant 13 sound.
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F13b9 is just a normal D chord on top do when its played over a F root it will really sound something...or even the Eb without the root ..
F7#5#9 ..could be looked at as a Amaj7 triad without the 5th again over the F root will sound something