I went to my musical library shelves and pulled down my one and only Steely Dan songbook, "Double Deluxe-The Royal Scam/Aja"

After a few pages of pictures, there's a page or 2 on their chordings...

"The Mu Major (moo majer)(MM)chord is the most frequently used stylistic device in the arsenal of music effects responsible for defining and maintaining the distinctive Steely Dan sound. Without the Mu major chord it would be impossible to achieve the airy, modern, almost jazzy quality that the sensitive listener can detect in just about every Steely Dan recording."

Further...

"Note the substitution of a major 2nd in place of a conventional tonic in the chord structure, (in the case of MM, B natural for an A natural in the right hand of an A chord.) Of course, this chord can be built on each side of the twelve root pitches found in most western music. Some of our more harmonically sophisticated readers may know this chord by one of several other names such as "deud de musica (1st expansion"), "major triad avec neoplastic distension" of "M'Lords Consonance." Used only sporadically in most contemporary music, we have found this little honey to be a sine qua non in almost every song we have written to date. All SD members, past & present have come to believe as we do, that the luminous, mystic quality of the MM is capable of greatly enriching the musical vocabulary of our otherwise discordant era. Virtually any piano owner can experience this sonority, when confronted with a major triad, to come down on the keyboard with their thumb just slightly to the right of where it normally would lead. Once you become accustomed to this wholesome harmonic mindbath, you'll soon find yourself sneaking 2nds into minor 7th chords and stacking 4th like a Hindemith gone haywire in Harlem. Inversions of the MM may be formed in the usual manner with one caveat: The voicing of the 2nd and 3rd scale tones, which is the essence of the chord's appeal, should always occur as a whole tone dissonance."

It goes on with examples and chords charts...

Cool stuff...


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Bill in Dayton

[This message has been edited by Bill in Dayton (edited 09-18-2009).]