name this chord

[SteveB]

from high E to Low E string... E C A D C F#

it's most natural name is D9, but what would you call this as a variation on Am? Its not really suspended because it still has the third. Am+4/F#?

[veatch]

Ted's style made a lot of this stuff accessible to a dumbarse like myself.

Huge +1 on this one. About the book, not about you being a dumbarse...

P.S. I can assure you that owning all of these books won't do squat for you. You have to actually open and read and apply them, or so I've been told.

...and i'm now screwed...

[JohnnyB]

Yeah, that's Music Theory 101. When you use the 3rd as the bass note, you omit it from the chord voicing to avoid a clash. You can double the root or the dominant in the bass but when you do it with the third it doesn't sound right, so you leave it out of the chord.

huh? i musta missed that day.

i think you're confusing the practice in jazz to omit the 3rd in a 13th chord to avoid the minor 2nd clash between the 3rd & 11th.

No, I'm not confusing anything. I'm not referring to anything as complex as a 13th chord. I'm talking about basic 3- or 4-part harmony such as in a choral group. If the bass takes the major third of a chord, the upper voices only play/sing the tonic and dominant (root and fifth). When I say theory 101, I really mean high school theory where I learned that, and it's served me well ever since, especially in bass lines. My point is that spelling out an E major chord with the 3rd voiced in the bass is pretty fundamental, but evidently was enough to stump the Rush forum.

In more modern music, I'm sure the 3rd is often doubled between the bass and the chord or melody, but if you let the bass sound the 3rd alone (and not too often) it's cleaner sounding. When I said "clash" I didn't mean a clash like a 2nd and a 3rd, but just the clash in overtones of a low 3rd plus a high 3rd. Leaving one of them out is more harmonious.

[specialk]

Ehhh. What's in a name anyhow?