Barry HarrisThe method

Chris Parks · Stage 9: Sixth chords and the scales of chords

Don’t Think C9

Episode 81 · 9:13 · On YouTube · In the lesson player

Chris shows that the common five-note C9 guitar chord, which is hard to invert, is really G minor 6 over a C bass. Thinking of it that way opens up the whole G minor 6 diminished scale, so on a C blues he moves through minor 6 chords, borrowed notes and the tritone instead of repeating one shape.

Step by step

  1. 0:00Look at the usual C9 voicing (C, E, B flat, D, G) and notice it is hard to invert.
  2. 0:41See its top four notes as Barry does: G minor 6 with C in the bass.
  3. 1:25Play the G minor 6 diminished scale in drop-2 voicings over the C.
  4. 2:04On a C blues, replace the static C9 with moving G minor 6 chords.
  5. 2:39Treat F9 the same way: C minor 6 over F, with the same moves.
  6. 3:54Hear the ‘C13’ as G minor 6 borrowing one diminished note, then borrow more than one.
  7. 4:32Add the tritone F sharp 7, played as D flat minor 6 on top.
  8. 5:48Test how well you know minor 6 voicings with parallel, oblique and contrary motion.
  9. 7:06Practise G minor 6 in thirds, triads, broken drop 2, octaves, drop 2, drop 3 and drop 2 and 4.

Chords and notes in this video

Tap a time to jump to it in the video.

C90:00
𝄞𝄢♭
CEC4DGB♭
  1. C
  2. E
  3. B♭
  4. D
  5. G

Barry’s own words on this

9.5 The minor 6th diminished scale and its diminished partner10.4 Borrowing10.5 Drop voicings13.1 The blues the Barry way

In the course

The tritoneEvery chord belongs to a scale of chordsThe minor 6 on the fifth: don’t think C9The elevator: Thomas Eccles’ floorsParallel, oblique and contrary motionBorrowingThe blues the Barry way

Transcript

  1. 0:00Hello and welcome to episode 81 of Things I’ve Learned from Barry Harris. And today I thought we would discuss a very common chord for guitar players and probably piano players also. It’s this chord. It’s this we would call C9. So it’s got a C in it, an E in it, a B flat in it. So there’s your root third flat seven. but then it also has a D natural in it. So there’s your ninth and then it’s got a G in it. So there’s your fifth. So that’s a beautiful chord. Play it all the time. But what I found for myself was I
  2. 0:41would only play that chord. And then if I try to invert that chord, because it’s a five note chord, so it’s hard to invert, which means if you just move each note up to the next degree of those five notes, you get some interesting shapes, but they’re not really shapes that I was able to get in my hands so well that I want to play them all the time and from other chords. But studying Barry’s method, then I started to see what he talks about, which is this C9. He doesn’t think of this as C9. He thinks of this as the highest four notes. He thinks of as G minor six with a C in the bass. So really that C9 chord, this one specific chord, now if you think about it as G minor six,
  3. 1:25As a Barry person, you say, okay, so now we know Barry doesn’t look at a chord like, oh, here’s this one group of notes. That’s good. Okay, here’s his next group of notes. He sees those group of notes as being part of a scale, which means it’s all movable. So if you take this chord and you see it as G minor 6, that means if you know your G minor 6 diminished scale, let’s say we just play the drop twos. It’s really beautiful. So now it gives you some options of sounds that you may have never done before. So for example, instead of just playing C9, let’s say if we were doing a blues in C.
  4. 2:04So you got C for a measure, F for a measure, then back to C for two measures, C7 for two measures, or C9 for two measures. So here’s what it would sound like. Now every guitar player has played that in one way, shape, or form. But now if you think of it as, well, wait a second, that C9 is actually G minor 6, so I can go crazy on all my G minor 6 things that I know how to do. So let’s just say if I just did a couple...
  5. 2:39I did that for C9 instead of just playing this. So let’s see what that sounds like. One, two, three, four. Sounds nice. Pretty sound. Totally different than what most people play. Totally different. Then, if you look at C9 is G minor 6, that means using the same idea. F9, instead of being F9, would actually be C minor 6, but with the F in the bass. So you can do exactly the same thing that you just did for G minor 6.
  6. 3:16Let’s say if we do it for C minor 6, which is really pretty. So let’s see what that sounds like. One, two, three, four. It’s really pretty. And then maybe again the G. So it’s pretty. So let’s play the first couple bars. One, two, three, four. Really pretty. Now that’s thinking of, instead of that C9 to F9, you’re thinking G minor 6
  7. 3:54diminished to C minor 6 diminished back to G minor 6 diminished. Now, that was just playing drop twos. But also, what is a chord that people always play? The C9, and then sometimes they’ll add this, they’ll call it 13, right? But as Barry people, if we think of this as, we don’t think of this as 13, we just think of, here’s G minor 6, here’s a diminished, so there’s our note. So we think of it as one borrowed note in G minor 6. So if we could play one borrowed note, we could play several borrowed notes.
  8. 4:32Instead of just playing this one, let’s also play this one, which would be F sharp. So then I’ll say... So let’s do that. One, two, three... Maybe. So that time, when I went back, I played F, I played, I’m sorry, C, and instead I played G minor 6. F9, I played C minor 6. Then back to C. Then I did two things. I played G minor 6, but then I played C’s tritone, which is F sharp 7. And F sharp 7, also I used the
  9. 5:14same principle where I used, instead of playing F sharp 9, I used D flat minor 6. But I’m trying to just use the same kind of things for each one so you can hear it. But do you see now it gives us a huge variety of things that we can play. Whereas if you just look at a chord and just say, well, I can play inversions of that chord. True, definitely true. But when you see a chord as being part of a scale of chords, it frees you up in such an unbelievable way.
  10. 5:48And then the only limitations you have are how quickly you can see those scales of chords on your instrument. So it does a few things. it changes the way you think about things. It changes how you hear things because now all of a sudden you’re playing different chords over a C. A G minor six over a C has a different sound, has a beautiful sound. But it also then says, makes you say, oh, okay, so I don’t see my drop twos that well in minor sixes. Or I don’t see my, let’s say if I just wanted to do, now we’re just doing parallel motion, but you could also do oblique motion where one note
  11. 6:25stays and other note moves but that one note stays or we could do a contrary motion where a note moves in one direction and another note moves in another direction and you can test yourself and see if you know it that well. So these are all things that blossom out of just the one idea of saying instead of C9 I’m gonna think of this as G-minor 6 which means I think of it as G-minor 6 diminished. So now you have all of these things now that you can do over every time you were going to play that one chord. I mean, I think it’s limitless. So this is another thing that I feel like Barry’s
  12. 7:06thing does, or Barry’s scale systems do, which is it takes something that is a lot of times limiting, and it branches it out and it makes it almost limitless. I mean, I can’t think of any limitations on it from that point of view when you start to really think of it that way. Because if you think about all the different ways we need to practice G minor 6, let’s just say, oh, that’s, you know, you have even if you just do, if you do G minor 6 in thirds, if you do G minor 6 in triads, if you do G minor 6 in
  13. 7:45let’s see, broken drop 2 chords if you do G minor 6 in octave chords if you do G minor 6 in drop 2s like we were doing if you do G minor 6 in drop 3s If you do G minor 6 in drop 2, drop 4. I mean, so you see all the different things that you have to know with just G minor 6.
  14. 8:27Now, you multiply that by all the different options you have when you’re playing a C9 in a blues, and you have a certain tempo that you have to be able to play it at. that’s going to make you practice things and do things in a way that you never thought you would do before. It’s really, it’s, the more I’m discovering more about this myself, the more I want to share because it’s, it’s so freeing. And in the end, that’s probably what we want to be when we’re playing music is we want to be free. So, all right, this is just a little short lesson in discussing,
  15. 9:03not to think of it as c9 anymore, but maybe to think of it as g-6. Anyway, until next time. Thanks.