Extended triads???

[dabass]

Can someone explain and give some examples of extended triads? Oteil mentioned that he learned extended triads from Carol Kaye in a Bass Day 97 video. Please clarify???

[petermynett]

There are a few things you might be talking about, but they all involve adding more notes to chords.
Quickly: from a scale your get a chord. You do this by taking the first, third and fifth note (1 3 5) of the scale and you get a triad. When you add a fourth note, you get a seventh chord (1 3 5 7). This is the most common type of chord in lots of kinds of music. But you can keep going. Its common to have a ninth in the chord. So it'd be 1 3 5 7 9. Thus you have "extended" the number of notes in a chord.

Now say this is Am9: A C E G B. Instead of writing Am9 you could write Em/A (said E minor over A). This would mean to play an E minor triad over an A bass note. It would be describing a specific voicing for an Am9 chord that leaves out the b3.
Another example could be a voicing for a Gsus7 (G C D F, 1 4 5 b7) chord. This is a G7 chord (G B D F) with the 3rd suspended to a 4th. If you were to extend this chord you'd add the 9 and get G C D F A (1 4 5 b7 9). If you take the F A and C out of that, you can play Gsus7 as F/G.

[steveb98]

You hear people talk about using Traids in their soloing and it is taking what PeterMyNett spoke of to another level. Sometime you hear what Peter was talking about called Polychords. Written like C Maj/D Maj (pronouced C triad over D triad). Polychords are away to play imply a extended chord with fewer notes. So a C Maj/D Maj gives you the sound of C 6/9 #11 chord. That is still a lot of notes to play on a guitar so one make the C just a bass note of the chords. Then players soloing look at these triad as a way to control what colors they are playing in their solos. So if interest you can make a chart of all twelve triads and the colors they create against a major chord. Then can do the same for the triads against a minor chord and then dominant. After that same thing again for minor triad against all those chords. By time your done and have experimented with working the triads into solos and learning the sound of the colors they bring, you will probably find a handful you like and can use in the future.

[ogyen]

He could be talking about playing triads across two or more octaves? That's something a teacher got me doing years ago, it's a great way to learn the fingerboard, it's a good way to avoid becoming too dependent on scale/chord box shapes. It's really simple, if you start by playing across the strings in position (with a shift for the second octave). Once that's comfortable try and play the same triads up the fingerboard, you'll find that there are many ways to play a triad in two or three octaves by moving up the fingerboard and across strings. I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it's good practice anyway