Why Burl Ives Didn't Give Chords for All Keys

What are Open String Chords? · Arpeggi Jumping One String · Summing Up the Use · Why Burl Ives Didn't Give Chords for All Keys

The obvious answer is, the Cowboys whose music he wrote down didn't use all keys.

But there is a more profound answer.

A guitar can be tuned in even temperament. Third fret will be the square root of the square root of 1/2 the string lenth, and first fret will be the cube root of that.

But it can also be tuned in some kind of pure temperament, Pythagorean or Just - the first has pure fifths "all along", the other has pure thirds.

This means, they will not work equally well for all of the keys. There is an enharmonic "fifth" which is not a pure fifth in either case - and you don't want that one into your tonic!

So, I think the keys he explores are eight keys - one flat to two sharps in the signature, major or minor.

F - C - G - D and Dm - Am - Em - Bm.

I have only given four common chords for the key of G major. There is in fact a chord progression, called the "Anatole" in France, which you can't do with only these, to the "Anatole" in G major, you need ...

/: G Em Am D7 :/

And as you can see, I left Em out. And I am leaving it out. I am not giving, unlike Burl Ives, chords for all they keys, and I only provided these as a service for beginners.

If you learn the strings and frets for the notes, and if you learn the notes of chords, you will be able to make similar "open string chords" for the chords I did not provide.

Rock bands (at least those closer to metal) typically instead have guitars played with touching frets fairly far down, perhaps around 12th fret or so, and not arranged in chords always, and chords made by arranging notes of them between different guitarists ... another thing I am not showing.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Octave of St. Lawrence
17.VIII.2022