Looking through some of Justin’s videos, one goes through variations of chords - A, C,D and F mainly.
In part of the video it shows a variation of the D chord, and one of those is the Dsus4, whichis easy enough to understand - suspend the third and chuck in the fourth - Justin refers to this as a Dsus4 chord.
However, in the same video, the same chord is played with an F# bass note. This has the same fingering as the Dsus4, but Justin refers to it as a Dadd11/F#.
Looking through various sites, including Justin’s chord finder, it lists it as a Dadd11/F#, but looking through the list also shows it as a Dsus4/F#.
They are obviously identical, but what gives with the naming? Is it because the 11th note is is relative to the Bass F# instead of the original D note? When would the names change?
I’m about to sign up to the music theory course, but am already creating my chord charts with extra information - where the notes come from etc. and would like to add info on why and where the name changes.
…incidentally, would they be referred to as notes, intervals or something else?
So when do you decide to count into the next octave or not? Is there a logic/rule to this or just conventions, so Dsus4 rather than Dsus11 and Dadd11/F# rather than Dadd4/F#
A bit of both.
In general, if the note that is being added to the general triad notes sit higher than the first octave repeat of the root then it will be counted as a scale degree above 8.
For example.
C major and Cadd9.
For the Cadd9 the note D is played on the B string, one whole tone above the octave repeat root note at fret 1 of the B string. That octave root would be counted as 8 so the D is counted as 9.
There are exceptions and this is not a hard and fast - especially in inversions / complex chords / less common chord shapes.
Cheers
| Richard_close2u | JustinGuitar Official Guide & Moderator
