Frank Gambale 'Magic Chords' 1

Some years ago, guitarist Frank Gambale had a regular monthly column in Guitar Player magazine. Some of his monthly columns looked at what he described as Magic Chords. These are advanced guitar chords that are constructed differently to regular triads and are therefore a little ambiguous. The good thing about this is that we can use this chords in several different contexts.

The first Magic Chord is constructed from intervals 1, 2 and 5 or C, D and G if we're in C. We might think of this as being a Csus2 chord:  

Here's the fingering for this guitar chord:

It's not necessary or sometimes even possible to play all of the notes in a chord, so we can also think of this same chord in the same position in several different ways. Here are some examples of how we could use this same chord - the intervals we're using from the chord are after the chord symbol:

C, D, G
Csus2 (1, 2, 5)
D11(b7, 1, 11)
Ebmajor 13 (13, 7, 3)
F69 (5, 6, 9)
Gsus4 (4, 5, 1)
Abmaj7#11 (3, #11, 7)
Am11 (b3, 11, b7)
Bb69 (9, 3, 6)

We can use our one Magic Chord in place of 8 different chords all with the same fingering in the same position.

The chord can function as:
C, D, F, Bb and G dominant 7th chords
C, Eb, F, Bb, Ab, G major7th chords
C, A, D, G, F minor 7th chords

That's a lot of possible uses for one chord. Try using this magic chord in some of the songs you usually play and tune in tomorrow for another Guitar Chord of the Day.   

G sus2

Hendrix Chords

The next chord in our Jimi Hendrix chords mini series at Guitar Chord of the Day is a sus2 chord. Jimi used this chord lots, you can here it being slide up and down the fretboard at the beginning and end of Castles Made of Sand from his second album Axis: Bold As Love released in 1967, it's also used in Little Wing and many other Jimi songs.

This chord demonstrates another common technique that Jimi used: fretting notes with his thumb, as you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

Sus2 chords have no 3rd in them (the sus stands for suspended), they're neither major nor minor though Jimi usually used them in place of major chords. Because they're neither major or minor they can often be played instead of either.

Sus2 chords use these degrees of the major scale: 1, 2, 5

G sus2 uses the notes: G, A, D

Our inversion uses the notes in this order: G, G, D, A

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