Suggested shapes for D flat to E flat?

marxski · June 2023

I’m playing a song that has a part Fm to D flat maj then E flat major. Struggling to find a decent shape for D flat and E flat apart from A shape barre or E shape barre. Tried D shape on first and 3rd fret but have doesn’t sound great with the D string muted and I can’t get into the shape to play the D string fretted with my little finger. Any ideas?

sev112 · June 2023

Put a capo on 1st fret and they become Em, C and D

or play the Db and Eb as the C shape with a barre

marxski · June 2023

sev112 said:

Put a capo on 1st fret and they become Em, C and D

or play the Db and Eb as the C shape with a barre

Yes I can’t capo it because the of the other chords in the song have open strings Bm then G then Am then down to Fm to Dflat maj to E-flat major… it’s quite a cool dramatic shift - I will try the c shape barre. Thanks for your suggestions.

Danny1969 · June 2023

The obvious move from Fm to Dbmaj is to just sharpen the C to Db, both on the bass and octave, then whole thing up a tone

marxski · June 2023

Danny1969 said:

The obvious move from Fm to Dbmaj is to just sharpen the C to Db, both on the bass and octave, then whole thing up a tone

I give it a go!

Tannin · June 2023

For the Db, play it in first inversion. Take a D shape, slide it down a fret, and use your little finger to fret the F on the D string. Please yourself whether you barre the 1st and 3rd strings or use your first and second fingers.

Roland · June 2023

Two ideas: Embrace the challenge, and learn those difficult chord shapes which involve your little finger. They will come over time. Fm 133111, Db x43121, Eb x65343. When playing the Fm barre with your index finger, and play the 3rd fret notes with fingers 3 and 4. Then keep the barre in place, and use fingers 2, 3 and 4 to form the C shape for the Db. Move it all up two frets for the Eb. There’s also an Eb at x1134x, again using index, 3rd and 4th fingers, which offers a different sound and keeps the first finger barre in the same place.

Alternatively, learn to play the song in the middle of the neck, between 5th and 9th frets, using partial chords. Fm xx6564, Db xx6664, Eb xx8886. This works very well in a band setting where you can let the bassist play the lower notes. There’s also an Fm7 at x64646, and again at x 8 10 10 9 8, if you want some variation.

Tannin · June 2023

@markski is going to wind up with muscles like Charles Atlas doing those shapes on an acoustic!

Oh, but something I forgot to mention earlier - it is a piece of cake to play those chords as 7ths, maj 7ths, and 9ths anywhere on the neck if you don't mind sounding like a jazz player. For example, x 4 3 4 4 x for Db9, x 4 3 5 4 x for Dbmaj9.

marxski · June 2023

Hey everyone thanks so much for the suggestions! I’ll be woodshedding away this weekend. The sequence I’ve ‘borrowed’ is Living in Another World by Talk Talk. I suspect it was originally written on keys.

guitarjack66 · June 2023

Roland said:

Two ideas: Embrace the challenge, and learn those difficult chord shapes which involve your little finger. They will come over time. Fm 133111, Db x43121, Eb x65343. When playing the Fm barre with your index finger, and play the 3rd fret notes with fingers 3 and 4. Then keep the barre in place, and use fingers 2, 3 and 4 to form the C shape for the Db. Move it all up two frets for the Eb. There’s also an Eb at x1134x, again using index, 3rd and 4th fingers, which offers a different sound and keeps the first finger barre in the same place.

Alternatively, learn to play the song in the middle of the neck, between 5th and 9th frets, using partial chords. Fm xx6564, Db xx6664, Eb xx8886. This works very well in a band setting where you can let the bassist play the lower notes. There’s also an Fm7 at x64646, and again at x 8 10 10 9 8, if you want some variation.

I saw a youtuber teacher speaking about playing 7 chords recently and he spoke about ignoring the root note as the bassist in a band would generally play those notes. As somebody who has never played with other musicians I found that a very interesting comment. Is that usually how it works?

Tannin · June 2023

Well, more-or-less.

But you can very happily leave out the root in all sorts of ways (never mind just leaving it to the bass player).

Start with a standard 4-note 7th chord, which consists of the 1, 3, 5, and 7. Now, suppose you want to leave one of those 4 notes out for some reason. (Maybe you want a simpler, less muddled sound, or maybe it's just too hard to finger.) Which note can you leave out and make the least change to the overall sound? Ans: the 5th. The 5th contributes least to the overall flavour of the chord. You can pretty much always leave the 5th out if you feel like it. Play 1 3 7.

And the note which contributes the second-least flavour is, surprisingly enough, the root. You could just play 3, 5, 7 and it will sound fine. And you can even leave out both the 5th and the root. Just play 3 and 7. It really does work.

Here is a simple example tutorial which skips the theory and just provides a useful example to demonstrate the notion.

Tannin · June 2023

PS to the above. But conversely, there are whole genres of music where you very seldom play anything else except the 1 and the 5. (Think AC-DC, or even the Sex Pistols.) That stuff is virtually all powerchords.

But these styles are played with a lot of harmonic distortion, usually with valve amps cranked up to 11. The 3rd of the chord there alright even though no-one is playing it. The amplifier is adding all sorts of strange harmonics which, in a jazz band at sane volumes, you'd have to fret yourself. Head-banging powerchord stuff still has harmonic richness, it just gets there a different way.

(PS you do NOT play the 3rd in that sort of band at those sorts of volumes. Through a valve amp at 11 it sounds awful. Just play the powerchords. Malcom Young isn't stupid.)

Roland · June 2023

guitarjack66 said:

I saw a youtuber teacher speaking about playing 7 chords recently and he spoke about ignoring the root note as the bassist in a band would generally play those notes. As somebody who has never played with other musicians I found that a very interesting comment. Is that usually how it works?

Sting said that the guitarist can play whatever chord shape he likes, it’s the bass player who determines what chord it is.

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Suggested shapes for D flat to E flat?

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