The FIRST Note You Should DROP From A Big Guitar Chord
Every guitarist runs into this eventually: a chord chart hands you six or seven notes to play, and you've got four fingers. Five, if you insist on using your thumb, you rebel.
So you start cutting notes. Obviously. But which ones?
A student asked me this exact question, and it turns out "just play fewer notes" isn't really an answer. Some notes in a big chord barely matter, you can lose them and nobody notices. Other notes are the entire reason the chord sounds like what it's called, cut those and you're playing a different chord entirely. And some notes are a judgment call: keep them and the chord picks up a little bite, cut them and it smooths right out.
None of this is random. There's an order of operations to it, and once you see it, you won't look at a six-note chord chart the same way again.
If you want to go deeper with how chords are built, connected, and voiced across the whole fretboard, my Complete Chord Mastery course walks through exactly that, from basic triads to the kind of extended voicings we're wrestling with here.
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet, so nice to see you. How do you play chords with six or seven notes on your guitar? In fact, even sometimes even chords with four or five notes are complex to play on the guitar because you cannot find all the notes you need in the same area on different strings.
So when you have too many notes into a chord, what do you do? The obvious answer is, well, you start playing only a few of them and omitting some of the other ones. Well, thank you, Sherlock.
But which one you play and which one you do not play? A student asked me that, and we did a deep dive into that. So let's see what notes you play and what notes you don't play when the chord you want to play has too many notes.
When you have chords that have five, six, seven notes in, you start omitting notes. Yes. And there's multiple different options.
It's more like what sort of the principles between, I know the fifth is very common to remove. Yes. I know there's more than one option.
The question is, what's the principles behind making the choice of which note to remove, which notes are the most common to remove as you get to those chords? And why? That's a good question.
So the most common note to omit, it's the fifth, because if it's just a perfect fifth, it doesn't add much to the chord. OK, yeah. So if you have a C major seven this way, but you can play it this way.
And pretty much sound the same. I mean, OK, the top note is different, but. Sounds the same.
You don't really need that, or you can just play that note here, it's quite neutral. You get all the sonority from the seventh and the third. Yeah.
So the fifth can go. It doesn't add anything. It's already in the harmonic series of the root.
Right, right, because root fifth, fifth root, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it's already in there. We don't need it.
OK, the first principle is you eliminate the least sonorous, no, OK. You know, the one that can contribute the least has to go. OK. Yeah. Fire the bottom 10 percent.
Anyway, for business people know what I mean. OK, makes sense. That would be the first thing.
Yeah. Then if you have more notes, you definitely have some dissonance somewhere. So then it depends on what kind of effect do you want. If you want that dissonance to be featured prominently, you eliminate other notes and keep the dissonant notes.
OK, so it's not if I put them in the same octave. You sound that way in a different time, but you like. So you keep that major third and sharp nine, which is like a minor third. Right. You keep. Yeah.
So if you want the dissonance, if you like the dissonance, if you like the conflict, you keep those notes. In other situation, you may decide that you don't want the dissonance. You want the feeling of the higher notes.
The sharp nine, the eleventh, whatever. But you don't want them to fight against the lower notes.
OK, you can totally have these, which is a dominant seven with an eleventh. But those notes are dissonant. If you don't like the dissonance, put a ninth instead of the third. And it's less dissonant.
So the idea is, do I want the dissonance? I keep those two notes because this chord will be written eleventh. Yeah.
In an eleventh chord, I have the root, the third, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth and the eleventh. I have six string, I have six notes, but still it's a bit of a problem. And I don't want to play all this stuff anyway, because I don't have six fingers.
OK, so I definitely eliminate the fifth. I have to keep the root. Otherwise, I don't know what chord it is.
OK, the third, I can keep or not. OK, the ninth, I can keep or not. The eleventh, I have to keep because the chord is called an eleventh. If I put them in the eleventh, I would just call it a ninth. Yeah. OK.
The seventh, I typically keep. There's a flavor. OK. Yeah.
So at this point, the choice is to eliminate the ninth or to eliminate the third. If I want the dissonance between the third and the eleventh, which are one fret apart, essentially one half step apart or one minor seventh or whatever it is apart. I mean, not a major seventh or minor ninth apart. OK, whatever it is, then I keep those two notes.
OK, if I don't want a dissonance, then I eliminate the third and I put the ninth instead. Who doesn't conflict with the eleventh. OK, that's the idea. Yeah. OK.
So it's kind of a creative thing. It's not just automatically, hey, I have this chord, so I know I don't have to play this. OK, you kind of make a choice of out of this box of notes that I'm given. OK, which one do I keep and which one do I omit to make a sound that I like?
Sure. OK. Now, if you had any distortion, I would usually eliminate most dissonances unless I really wanted to go for that. Again, in music, what do you do? You do this unless you want to do that.
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's not I can't dictate what you want to do. So it's a choice. Yeah. OK.
Clean with you can do pretty much whatever you want. OK, so typically those conflicts are between the eleventh and the third. OK, that's the most typical major third, typically, and the eleventh. OK, you can keep it or you can eliminate it. OK. OK.
Or the conflict are between the flat nine or the sharp nine and either the root or the or the third. But again, if you have a flat nine, you really want that sound. You don't eliminate the roots. And so you keep the dissonance.
Does the root sometimes get removed if you're playing with a bass player? Yeah, but then sometimes. OK, then. Then, yes, that's another consideration. What other instruments are there?
If somebody else is playing the root, you don't have to play it. So you can start playing from the third, as we say. Right. So C major seven, C, E, G, B. The bass player plays the root. You play E minor, E, G, B. Yeah.
Much easier. They play the root and you get to play only a triad. OK, or for ninth, you're going to get to play only a seventh chord. And so you just go down a degree and you start from the third. That's an option. Yes.
You have another instrument playing all the basic triad. You can get away playing a note or two, which are just the extensions. So, OK, so somebody plays one, three and five and you play seven and eleven.
OK, you may have to study this before. Sure. OK, and make sure you play them high so you don't conflict with the other instrument. That's the idea. As long as the sonic space is fine.
OK, you can just decide, OK, I'm going to play only these. I'm going to carve out for myself this little niche in the chord. OK. OK. That's the idea.
Make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. Good then. Thank you. Thank you very much.