The C is the lowest note and the G is the highest note. We’ll take a C major triad to help explain this.Ĭ major in root position is made of C E and G all within the same octave. But that’s not really a satisfactory answer since voicing is very important in music and music has way more than one octave. Or if we look at building chords only within one octave. To our number and have 4083 unique chords.
So now that we’ve defined the equation, let’s crunch some numbers!Īdding all these numbers up, we arrive at 4017 unique chords that can be made.Īnd if you’re one of those people who think that two notes can make a chord, then we add Which is what we want! Since, for example, 7 D notes do not make up a chord. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.Īnother note for the above equation is that the subset will not account for duplicate notes. Therefore, all the different voicings of a set of notes are considered to be one chord. Note that in the above equation, the order of the notes does not matter. Since we’ve defined a chord as being 3 or more notes played together, we will run with above equation from k=3 all the way to k=12. K is the subset (or the number of notes in the chord). If it was a pentatonic scale, n would be 5. If we were looking for the possible combinations of chords in a heptatonic scale, n would be 7. N will always be 12 in the case of musical notes because we’ll always be drawing from the chromatic scale. And it means to multiply an integer by each whole number that is less than the integer (that’s a strange way of writing it out, so let’s look at an example). The ! in the formula is called a factorial. K = the subset (number of notes in a chord) If we’re not at all concerned with voicing (or only concerned with notes within a single octave), we can use the following combination formula to find how many chords are possible: Therefore, we have 3-note chords, 4-note chords, 5,6,7… all the way up to 12-note chord(s).
There are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, and a chord is made of 3 or more notes. However, any three unique notes will build a three-note chord! Usually, these 3-note chords are built by stacking thirds and are called triads. Unique in the sense that they are not the same pitch or an octave of a pitch already present in the chord (Three C notes spread across three octaves do not create a chord). This article will run through the calculations to answer our question: How many possible chords are there in music?Ī chord is defined by three or more unique notes sounded together.
Warning: This is some pseudo-intellectual shizz! But still, it might be fun to do some math and discuss the chords of music. How many possible chords are there in music? This is a question I remember thinking about when I started learning music theory but have never answered.
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