What is a flat six chord?

BoogieMan

Blues Junior
I ran into this while doing a TF course called Blues Soloing Strategies (great course by the way!). The instructor made the comment "Any time a flatted 6 chord comes your way, target the blue note, the flatted 5th."

I can't seem to find a simple answer that I can understand...

"The flat-six, which we’ll discuss now, is a major chord from a parallel scale. So if you’re playing in C major, it will be an Ab major. If you’re playing in A major, the sixth-chord will be an F major".

Can anyone help me understand this?
 

Paleo

Student Of The Blues
This used to confuse me when I first heard it.

It's a bVI chord, even though it sounds like they are saying b6 chord, as if you were adding a b6 to a triad.


C Major has a vi chord, Am.

C minor has a bVI chord, Ab Major. It's built on a root a half-step lower and is Major, thus bVI.


Ab isn't a chord in C Major. It could be considered "borrowed" from C minor, it's parallel minor.

Hitting the b5 in C (Gb) over the Ab Major (bVI) chord would create an Ab7 (Ab C Eb Gb), so target it.

That's my best guess as to what he's saying.


Likewise, the vi in A is F#m. A bVI would be F Major.

Eb would would be the b5 in A and would create an F7 chord when played over an F Major chord.
 
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Paleo

Student Of The Blues
Come to think of it, isn't there a bVI in "The Thrill Is Gone" and in BGU Solo #2?

Note to self:

In BGU Lesson 11 "Minor Blues", Griff briefly discusses the bVI in the first 2 minutes.

In Lesson 20 (Solo #2) he refers back to it, but he doesn't go into detail about his note choices for the solo.

However, I see in LIck 12 he "targets" the F#, which is the 7 of the Gmaj7 (bVI) and the root of the following F#7#9 chord.
 

Randy S

Blues Junior
My take on it for what it's worth.

You can look at/number chords in one of two ways. The first would be that the chord that goes with with the key signature is always the 1 chord and all the other chords follow. The other way to number them would be to name the tonic chord as 1 and number the other chords from there. Same chords but looking at them it from a different perspective. This is a minor key (Aeolian) so if you look at it the 2nd way then the flat six chord would be the chord built off the flat sixth of the minor scale- which would be a Major or Major 7 chord.

I made myself a cheat sheet on this that I have attached. Please note that the Harmonic Minor on this sheet is not really a Harmonic Minor progression- it is for when the composer uses a Major or Dom7 V chord in a minor key rather than a minor v. On that chord and that chord only you would use a harmonic minor scale- Griff covers this in his some of his courses but I can't remember where.

As far as soloing- it is an Aeolian/minor progression so you could use the Aeolian/minor scale or minor pentatonic over the entire progression and try to target chord tones as you would normally.
 

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Paleo

Student Of The Blues
This got me thinking that there's no way in speech to differentiate between 6, vi or VI.

Just for fun (or to add to the confusion):

If I was discussing the chords in a Major key, like I ii iii, etc. and said to someone, "You have a major one, a minor two, a minor 3...." they may be hearing "Major1, min2, min3". What the heck are those?

And if I was thinking vi and said "that's a minor six chord" they may say "Did you say Am6 chord?".

One more example: We're told we'll most likely never see a vii chord (meaning dim triad) and then in a Blues all the chords are 7 chords.


Point being that instructors and students alike need to be on top of whether they are talking about scale degrees (arabic) or chord function (roman).
 
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