Slash chords

When you first hear the term ‘slash chord’, you could be forgiven for conjuring up images of heavy metal guitarists with poodle hair and stovepipe hats, but it actually has nothing to do with your favorite former member of Guns N’ Roses.

Instead, in what turns out to be something of a punctuation-based anti-climax, the ‘slash’ merely refers to the way a chord is written when played over a bass note other than the root.

So what does this actually mean? Well, a chord can be thought of as a vertical stack of notes, which is actually the central concept around which modern music notation is based. Pop music generally uses a system known as ‘tertian harmony’, in which chords are