Hey Friend,

Have you seen any of the movies? Every once in a while in the Vance household we're down for a campy slasher film for the sheer ridiculousness of the plot. Who doesn't love a good suspense flick now and then. Jason rising out of the lake...

The inevitable, "Turn around, he's right there!" scene...

And you've got to love the stereo-typical jock/cheerleader type characters - always good for a laugh.

Of course, sometimes there is a good scare, especially if you aren't anticipating what comes next in a scene. 

Even if you're not really into the whole horror genre, you have to admit, sometimes it's fun to have a good fright.

It's sort of like slash chords in guitar tabs. You've seen these in my lessons before, but I haven't really explained them in detail.

Before we get into it, these AREN'T chords named after (or by) Slash, nor were the made famous by him. They also don't have anything to do with you being slashed by a machete when playing them!

I used to think the slash was an indication that the note following it was an additional note to the chord shown before the slash. Back then I didn't give much thought to chord construction and the notes in a chord, so it was more ignorance on my part.

But there's nothing mysterious about the slash - it merely indicates the bass note of the chord. Pretty simple, actually.

Here's the thing - for most chords you play, you aren't going to see slash notation. This is because in most cases, you will end up playing the same bass note as the chord name.

For example, the D major chord is played over the first four strings in open position. It's a second inversion chord, meaning the note order from the D major scale is 5 - 1 - 3. Looking at the fingering on the strings, your index finger is on the third string, second fret for the A note. Ring finger is on the third fret, second string for the D note and we have F#  on the first string second fret (middle finger does the job).

If that's how we normally played a D major chord, the notation would be D/A, because A would be the first note we strummed of the chord. But that's NOT how we play it.

We play the open D string (fourth string) as the first note. So you DO have a D note as the bass of the chord.

For the most part, the chords you play will have that note as the bass. Even when you play barre chords, you will end up having the same bass note as the chord name. 

It's when you start stepping off the path a little looking for some interesting, contrasting notes that you start seeing slash chords in your songs. Don't worry, Jason isn't going to jump out of the shadows!

Now you probably know me well enough by now to know I love these things. They become extremely fun when you start doing arpeggios with your chords, and ideas really start to flow when you jump out of line a bit, so to speak.

For example, what if you took a little progression from a D chord to a G chord? Take a look at the exercise here and see what I did to the D chord by adding the F# note first in the riff (F# is the three note in the D chord). From there we change to a G6 chord. 

Try your hand at it and let me know any questions you might have about the use of slash chords. 

Peace~

Dave

P.S. you can use the same slash notation for power chords. For example, If you're playing a D5 chord, but the five note is in the bass of the chord, you'd notate it like this: D5/A. the A note would be the first strummed in the power chord. Check out all the fun in Easy Power chords.