9th Chords Guitar

About 9th Chords on Guitar

A 9th chord — written as a bare 9 after the root letter, as in C9 or E9 — is a dominant 7th chord with one more note on top: the 9th, which is the 2nd degree of the scale raised an octave. The formula is 1 – 3 – 5 – ♭7 – 9, so a C9 is C, E, G, B♭ and D. Because nothing is removed, the chord does exactly the same job as a plain 7th: it is the V chord of a key and it pulls toward the tonic a fourth above, with the same tritone between the major 3rd and the minor 7th driving the tension. The 9th only widens the sound. That is five notes and a guitar has four fingers, so the perfect 5th is the tone that gets dropped — the root already implies it, and every four-string voicing on these pages leaves it out on purpose. Three spellings that look similar are worth keeping apart. An add9 chord adds the same 9th to a plain major triad and has no 7th at all, so it is bright rather than bluesy. A maj9 chord uses the natural 7th instead of the flat one. A sus2 chord replaces the 3rd with the 2nd rather than stacking it an octave up. Only the plain 9 is a dominant chord. In practice this is the chord of funk, blues, R&B and soul: the open E9 grip is one of the most recognisable sounds in rhythm guitar, and the moveable A-string form — index on the D string, ring finger flat across the top three — turns up in every blues turnaround. Each root here gets three voicings: the A-string root grip, the six-string E-string barre, and a compact four-string form rooted on the D string.