Revoicing major chords

Major chords – we all love them, and even now they're still the cornerstone of most modern pop records. However, the fact can't be denied that they do have a certain nursery rhyme quality to them; a kind of childish feel that sometimes proves quite hard to get away from when you're trying to come up with a credible tune.

So what can we do to make major chords a bit more relevant? One approach is to totally revoice them – take the normal ‘root-third-fifth’ formula that makes up your common or garden major triad and explode it,