I Don't Believe In Chords...

[0:03]Barry Harris used to say, I don't believe in chords. In Barry's world of harmony, he thought of everything as belonging to an eight-note scale. The way he came up with them was he said, he started with a chromatic scale. Now the chromatic scale breaks up into two whole tone scales. If you take two notes from one whole tone scale and two notes from another, you come up with a diminished. Actually, you can do that three times, so you get a C diminished, a C# diminished, a D diminished. Now this is the interesting part. This is how he comes up with his scales or chords. If you take the C diminished and the C# diminished, you can come up with four possibilities of chords. The first one is going to be a major six. The second one's going to be a minor six. The third one is going to be a dominant seven. And the fourth one is going to be a dominant seven (b5). The only diminished we didn't touch is the D diminished. And that is how he creates his scale of chords. So the first one is C6 diminished. Minor six diminished. Dominant seven diminished. And dominant seven (b5). Now that's good not only for C, but it's good for Eb, it's good for G flat, and it's good for A. After you finish practicing those, you have eight more keys and you're good to go.