Forum Activity for @john-astor

Harmony notes/chords

General mountain dulcimer or music discussions

What a minute! your playing a G and D chord when your instrument is tuned to D A D, that's in the key of D. D is you're lead key

So the chords are D Em F# G A Bm

We need to do that stuff in perspective to the D chord and not the G. See if you can do it by yourself from my comment earlier about the key of G

The notes in the key of D are

D E F# G A B C# D

G was this

G A B C D E F# G

Mandy said:

Hey John, yes that makes perfect sense. I mostly play in DAD so I'd be G on 3rd fret. Thanks. So for the G chord since G B and D make up the chord those make sense. But what I don't get is how the A and the E work. How do I find out these notes using other chords without knowing theory? Hope that made sense to you?

Harmony notes/chords

General mountain dulcimer or music discussions

It would help if we had a video room where we could share, but here goes.

All the notes in a scale work well with chords that are made up from that scale. Some notes work better than others. for example with a G chord, the notes of that chord are a solid and strong fit. With the A and the D notes, if you can imagine the black keys on a piano and when you play them randomly it all sounds kind of nice. Those notes make up what's called a pentatonic scale (5 note scale) that used in blues, rock, folk, country and many times without the artist even realizing it, they just sound kind of nice.

the reason, technically that they work well is a little more complex but it comes from the way youu can make a major chord with them. A G, when you add an E to it is called a G6 chord, A G when you add a A to it (preferably note right next to the G but higher up) is called a G major 9 chord.

When Skip mentioned that the F# is nice, he was really right. When you add a F# to a G chord you get G major 7. So those notes give our G chord a different name by adding them to each of them. From a 3 note chord, we now have 4 note chords, a little thicker and a little more harmonically involved.

Let's see, the A is one up from the G so that's there and the E is 2 down or 6 up from the G.

Harmony notes/chords

General mountain dulcimer or music discussions

Hi Mandy,

If I understand your inquiry about the chords that naturally work well (meaning the harmony chords first) with G and D. I think you're looking for this. If we go up one at a time from G, the chords would be

G Am Bm C D Em and a funny chord that I would leave out for now

So if you have a G, the notes in that G chord are G, B and D

The notes in the D chord are D, F# and A

Now if your playing the G chord or the D chord you could use any note in that G scale (depending if your G is an open string or on the 3rd fret of your dulcimer). But some work better than others. With the G chord, for example G, A, B, D, E notes work really well and the others C and F (if your G is an open string) ,or F# (if your G is on the 3rd fret)work good but mostly in passing.If your G is open, you may want to be careful with that F, it may not work.

For the D chord, we're still in thekey of G so for D, the notes that work really well are D, E, F#, A and B.

You're right to ask about the harmony and harmonic relation so I'm sure that you'll find your way by........playing!!

Maybe this is a bit convoluted but I hope this helps you out.