Confused about altered and extended guitar chords? Here’s the theory behind them – and how they can supercharge your songwriting

Terms such as ‘altered’ and ‘extended’ chords are relatively simple to explain. Extended chords add other notes from the scale to the existing root-3rd-5th triad (for example, C-E-G), so if we add a 7th, we’d call this a major 7th chord (C-E-G-B).

We can extend up to a 13th in this way by progressively adding in the non-chord tones of a scale – in theory, at least.

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