The Mighty "Alt" Chord?

[DrApostropheX]

Alt chord = play a major triad with the root of that triad being on the note which is a whole note below the root note (key) of the alt chord. So if you have a B-flat alt chord, play an A-flat major triad over a B-flat pedal.

[Ogg Vorbis]

Alt chord = play a major triad with the root of that triad being on the note which is a whole note below the root note (key) of the alt chord. So if you have a B-flat alt chord, play an A-flat major triad over a B-flat pedal.

Wouldn't that be simply a Bb9sus? (or just Ab/Bb).

[bernhardtjeff]

others who know more have already replied, but i don't think anyone's said this yet (or if they did, i read over it): alt chords often serve as the V when resolving to a minor i next. your mention of the alt chord at the end of the bridge in "all the things you are" is an example of that, as the first chord of the next bar is a -7. also, in the most common minor blues progression used in jazz, the 4th bar is switched to a 7#9 (which i suppose can be treated like an alt chord) to make the transition to the next -7 a 5th below. the 4th bar of sonny rollins' "airegin" also has the same idea. most people play some sort of altered scale-based idea over this sort of thing and it sounds goddamn awesome. a lot of people even take the 4th bar chord as altered in a major blues, too. i used to wonder how players got that kick-ass sound all the time until i just boned up and learned my altered scales and it all made sense. of course, like someone else said, just running scales during a solo sounds like ass, but it sure is a decent place to start and helps you understand and see the patterns in what others are doing when you hear THAT sound. you can also use ideas built on the whole tone scale over an alt chord for starters. it has the "avoid" note of a M2, but sometimes avoid notes are fun! plus, the strength of the scale makes it sound cool no matter what. whole tone scales rule! for some whole-tone scale practice, listen to wayne shorter's "ju ju.

also, as has already been mentioned, the alt scale is the 7th mode of the melodic minor scale and can be thought of as the same as a lydian dominant scale a tritone away. for good practice with this idea, listen to "a flower is a lovesome thing" by billy strayhorn, which hangs out on a 7#11 chord for the first 4 bars. it's a ballad, so you can use it to practice alt scales/lydian dominant scales and get a feel for how each note sounds.

transcribing how other people handle not only alt chords but ANY dominant chords will help, since a lot of people alter 7th chords all the time even when they're not written that way. then after you get some of those ideas down and work them out in all keys, they'll just pop up in your head naturally when you come across an alt chord. everyone has their own people who they transcribed a lot and got a lot of ideas from, and i learned a LOT of stuff from tom harrell solos. simple, clear ideas all over the place. i was sick for a week once and just sat around listening to him and transcribing ideas here and there, and i swear that was the best week for my jazz development ever.

so yeah, others probably have better ways of dealing with alt chords, but that's what i've been able to make of them.

[rp314]

As jmeier notes, the more you lean on the unaltered notes the less altered it'll sound.

So we should avoid the unaltered notes and heed jmeier notes, huh? Sorry, I just had to, kids...

As to the question regarding what the composers of show and jazz tunes intended, well I usually start out with their sheet music and in places where the chords symbols don't make that much sense to me I just look at what the piano is actually playing there. If you're just comping to a jazz version, then of course you probably don't care as much as long as, once again, you avoid playing what "shouldn't be there". But I sometimes get tired of jazz chord notation when the underlying music theory is often simpler and ultimately allows for aesthetic preference without all the complex verbiage. Just my 2 cents, of course, I know that others prefer different approaches.

[jancivil]

...the alt scale is the 7th mode of the melodic minor scale and can be thought of as the same as a lydian dominant scale a tritone away.

I assume you mean, for instance, B C D Eb F G A.

vs: "a dominant seventh chord with all possible alterations, i.e. of the 9th, 11th and 13th extensions."*

eg., F A Eb Gb G# B Db

scale: Eb F Gb Ab A Cb Db ?


So, what's the definitive 'alt chord' here? what's the relationship with alt scale?

(*: what quality fifth? b5 = #11. you're not going to see natch 5 along with flat AND sharp 9, AND #11, too frequently.)

Is there any consensus on this??

[bernhardtjeff]

...the alt scale is the 7th mode of the melodic minor scale and can be thought of as the same as a lydian dominant scale a tritone away.

I assume you mean, for instance, B C D Eb F G A.

vs: "a dominant seventh chord with all possible alterations, i.e. of the 9th, 11th and 13th extensions."*

eg., F A Eb Gb G# B Db

scale: Eb F Gb Ab A Cb Db ?


So, what's the definitive 'alt chord' here? what's the relationship with alt scale?

(*: what quality fifth? b5 = #11. you're not going to see natch 5 along with flat AND sharp 9, AND #11, too frequently.)

Is there any consensus on this??

i don't think there is a consensus. the op seemed to be asking for some ideas how to deal with alt chords, and i suggested learning the diminished whole tone scale (alt scale) as a starting point. how the notes in that scale line up with however the other musicians decide to alter the alt chord is up to the spur of the moment and makes things more interesting, right?

[jancivil]

Sure! I would decide on *whatever* from a lead sheet anyways, if I ever for some reason arranged some thing.
(I am not a jazz player in any normally understood sense, on any pitched instrument. But, I done some cute charts back in the day)

I did wonder what the songwriter's, or whoever put out the lead sheet's intent, on that Kern and the other guy tune. Or whatever it was. A standard, like.

Let me get you straight, you'd do a B C D Eb F G A on what, basically an F7 or B7, right?

[bernhardtjeff]

Sure! I would decide on *whatever* from a lead sheet anyways, if I ever for some reason arranged some thing.
(I am not a jazz player in any normally understood sense, on any pitched instrument. But, I done some cute charts back in the day)

I did wonder what the songwriter's, or whoever put out the lead sheet's intent, on that Kern and the other guy tune. Or whatever it was. A standard, like.

Let me get you straight, you'd do a B C D Eb F G A on what, basically an F7 or B7, right?

yeah, i guess you could look at it like that. for an F7, those notes specifically work in an F7#11 (though the #11 sounds cool over a regular F7, too), and over a B7, they'd produce more tension than a regular mixolydian, which is why i think they're usually used over a B7alt instead, being that the B7alt is meant to produce more tension itself than a regular B7 (this is what i've gathered from mostly self-study, so feel free to correct me if any of this isn't quite on the mark).

i guess the idea is once you learn the scales, you start to hear some of the altered tones in your head and naturally get away from the scale approach (which is boring, but a good place to start) and find other patterns and hip stuff as you develop. also, like i mentioned, i got a lot of great stuff from tom harrell's solos.

[jancivil]

I rarely use root third AND P fifth in a major/minor 7th, btw. in a 'jazz' context, F7 and B7 often amount to the same thing to me.
eg., C E G Bb, not a chord I have so much use for for some reason, I'm weird that way. it sounds German or something.
I rebelled against a lot of 19th c vocab,, classical training, still am in that frame I guess.


If I have to think of what I'm doing, I'm paralyzed, I HAVE to have it internalized to function.
I can't keep up with a lot of changes anyway, it's alien to my limited brain

[Sascha Franck]

subtlearts said almost everything spot on already, so here's just some add ons.

The purpose of the altered chord is of course adding color as well, but I think traditionally it longs back to the "wish" of adding more "force" to a V-I chord movement by utilizing chromatic movements (which have a strong "leading tone" tendency), especially in a context when more and more chords with option notes got common (it started more or less in the swing era, but there might be some classical composers which utilized sort of altered chords quite some time before - I wouldn't happen to know or name them, though).

To illustrate this a bit, here's some examples (for ease of typing I'm using a C tonic chord).

In a plain major V-I movement, we don't have plenty of possible chromatic movements from our G7 to the Cj7. There's the two traditional leading tones, the 7th (F) moving chromatically to the 3rd of the Cj7 (E) and the 3rd (B) moving up to the root (C). The latter movement sometimes can't even be used as the C may clash with the B in a Cj7 chord, at least when played in higher registers.
All the other notes you may add to your G7 chord (basically 5th, 9th and 13th - the suspended 4th is another thing...) could, at least in a "least movement" voice leading scenario, stay the same on the transition to our C chord. 5th of G (D) becomes 9th of Cj7, 9 of G becomes 6th of Cj7 (or C6), 13th of G (E) becomes 3rd of Cj7.
Not exactly a lot of chromatic movement.

Being "allowed" to alter all those optional notes (and even the 5th) results in plenty further chromatic movements.
The b5 of our G (Db) could move down to the C or up to the D. The b9 (Ab) could move down to the G or up to the A. The #9 (A#) could move down to the A or up to the B. The b13 (or #5, depending on how one looks at the altered scale) (Eb) could move down to the D or up to the E.
Especially in a typical II-V-I progression, this will lead to several double chromatic movements (always assuming we make full use of our optional notes).
Two examples:
The 9th of a Dmin7 chord (E) could move down to the b13 of a G7 chord (Eb) and then down to the 9th of our Cj7 (D).
The 5th of a Dmin7 chord (A) could move up to the #9 of a G7 (A#) and then up to the j7 of our C (B).

Obviously, all these can be combined, sometimes even in contrary movements (one voice going up chromatically, another going down).

As far as playing these chord goes, I'm not exactly a piano player (I'm a guitarist), the best I can actually play is some typical 4 part voicings (which piano players often use in their left for backing up their right), but you can construct those close voicings rather easily if you know a little bit about what note might replace whatever other note in the voicing. Especially in jazz, as has been mentioned, you typically only need the 3rd and the 7th to "describe" a chord (the root is either played by a bass player or by your left hand, in case you play the chords with your right). The other two voices can be used more or less at will (of course following your scale and possibly avoiding clashing intervals, etc.).
Let's take our II-V-I chord progression from above as an example.
A straight Dmin7 chord would look like D-F-A-C. Now, knowing that we only need the F and the C (3rd and 7th), we can move around the D and A. The D could become an E (the 9th) and the A could become a G (the 11th). In this particular case, using both of these options probably doesn't sound too great.
Assuming we're dealing with the closest possible movements, for the G7 we would use D-F-G-B (second inversion). Treating the chord as we did with the D, we may now add option notes. The D could become an E (the 13th) and the G could become an A (the 9th). Note: With this particular inversion, especially the A might not sound too great (in other inversions it will).
And as we're dealing with altered chords, you may now add your alterations, too. So, for that G7, the E could become an Eb, the A could become an Ab. Another note: Most of the times these alterations are applied, you usually always use altered 9ths and 13ths together, using b9/13 or 9/b13 leads into halftone-wholetone or wholetone territory - not necessarily a bad thing but something different from altered, so let's skip that for now.
Finally, we'd be moving to our Cj7, which, without option notes, would be C-E-G-B. We may use a D instead of the C (for the 9th) and perhaps an A instead of the G (the 13th), in this particular scenario and inversion I don't like the latter.
In the end, one option for our entire progression would move around like this:
E-F-A-C (Dmin7/9)
Eb-F-Ab-B (G7/b9/#5 (or b13))
D-E-G-B (Cj7/9)

This very procedure works on all inversions. As said already, some option notes sound weird (sometimes even wrong) on certain inversions and you'll have to be aware of them (one possibly worth mentioning: minor second intervals between the upper two voices, exactly the reason why, when a root on top is needed, most people usually play a 6th chord instead of j7).
I don't know of much further chord creation options for keyboard based instruments, I'm sure some piano players may help you out. However, the way to deal with the option notes (including the altered ones of course) is vaild for other chord approaches, too.
And the very same 4 part voicing technique can as well be applied to guitars, assuming you know of a little trick called "drop 2 voicing". Doesn't mean anything else but dropping the second voice from the top by an octave. Our Dmin7 D-F-A-C (already kinda tough to play on a guitar) would become A-D-F-C (very easy to play). Drop 2 voicings also are used often in 4 part horn sections, to give them a little wider sound.

A last word about the altered scale, often refered to as the 7th degree of a melodic minor scale: Following the traditional way of building up chors on scales, by stacking thirds, this is plain nonsense. In case we stacked thirds, the resulting chord on the 7th degree of mel.min would be a minor chord with a flattened 4th. It's just that for our ears the flatted 4th sound so much like a major third to trick our brains out, even so much that we accept a "strange" interval as the sharpened 9th.
In some cases, the approach makes sense, though, but only in an eqal tempered system and from a physical POV. I may have learned my melodic minor fingerings already, no need to relearn them for the altered scale. That's all there is about the connection of the mel.min and altered scale.

Ok, so much about that for now.

Cheers
Sascha

[jancivil]

chords with a diminished sort of basis, like the B C D Eb (F G A) given herein as alt scale...

in this (chromatic treatment of cycling 5ths movement) style, one might learn an automatic list of reactions, for instance that B7 = F7, pretty much a viable known quantity here...

An octatonic symmetrical, 'diminished' run, B C D Eb F Gb Ab A, starting with a semitone, same deal.
One might simply memorize (and accordingly internalize to the ear) that, when you start the run with a tone (whole step), the 'dominant' root would be different, eg., C D Eb etc, you go for, say a D7.