do chromatic chords exist???

No, it's rubbish ;) No matter where you got it from, an A and C are still a minor third interval. Chords are made of thirds stacked on top of this all. It either is a chord and already well described or it's just a bunch of notes together that might sound nice but isn't a chord.

[x 2 1 2 2 X] = B D# A C#, or B D# (F#) A C# = B9, you just let the fifth away. It's a very commong chord voicing.
[0 0 2 1 2 0] = E A E G# A E = Amaj7/E, another very common chord voicing. Normally you'd leave the sixth string alone as it's an Amaj7 but since the E is part of the chord you can leave it in. Big chances the bass-guitar would take care of the roots anyway.

If you happened to just stumble into these sounds without knowing what it was and you accidently liked them you should take a listen to some jazz, the home town of chords like these. :D

And welcome to GN!

As Arjen said, the fingerings you're coming up with are common.

As far as the logic goes, 'regular' chords are built in thirds: A-C#-E has the first, third, and fifth of the major scale. Your first example is actually a secundal chord, which is built on diatonic seconds... A-B-C# uses the diatonic seconds from the A major scale. (Some folks call secundal chords 'diatonic clusters')

The logic of building from the chromatic scale isn't new either. Alan Forte (among others) uses 'pitch class sets' in analyzing chords. These basically identify one tone (either the root or C, depending on your applicatino) and then the number of half steps to other tones... so C major becomes 047.

Like almost all advances in music theory, pitch class sets solve some problems and create others :)

Our profs referred to those as 'tone (or tonal) clusters;' either half or whole steps.

In another part of the original post, chords based on the wholetone scale would come out to be augmented chords and chords based on the diminished scale would wind up being diminished chords - *if* you stick with the idea of a chord being two or more stacked 3rds.

I love clusters though; they're easy on the piano but can make you do some stretches on the guitar. I guess it would also be fun to tune a guitar in half-steps or whole steps.

Oh, just another thought: there are such things as 'quartal chords' (all 4ths) and 'quintal chords' (stacked 5ths).

Best regards.

Sheesh, now the idea of tone rows is stuck in my head!

Okay, just went through the beginning to "Yesterday" mentally and I'm okay :)

Yeah, they did start out as 'tone clusters', a term I think was coined by Henry Cowell about 90 years ago. Then some theory writers decided there should be a distinction between clusters (chromatic notes) and diatonic clusters (whole & half steps in key).

The quartal harmony stuff is old - harmonizing by fourths appears pretty early on, even before chordal music, really. But the idea of building chords using only fourths throughout a piece is only about 50 years old - it was cutting edge music theory when I was in school in the 70s.

Since quartal harmony (and quintal) is building chords the same way tertian harmony does, theorists took another look at the diatonic tone clusters and decided it was really a new method of harmonizing: secundal chords. That's become the preferred term in theory books these days, but the shift is so recent you'll still see a lot of works calling anything smaller than thirds 'clusters'.

cheers guys thats really helped. thanks for the welcome to! :) i have never had any lessons so reading all the articles and forums has really helped.

Yes, and thanks to NoteBoat too; it's been about 30 years for me since my last music class. I remember there always 'was' that confusion about whether the clusters were whole or half step clusters. I'm glad to hear it's been codified somewhat. By the way, is there a naming convention too? Like what would you call a half-step cluster starting on a C for example? Or do they just not bother applying names to them since they probably wouldn't be showing up in fake books?

Secundal chords - I like that term!

Thanks again for the update!

(Oh I know, maybe a cluster of half-steps starting on C could be a CmSec, and whole-steps could be CMSec)

Take care

Well, they do bother naming them... but since nobody agrees on what to call them, there's no standard yet :)

There are really two main methods... one is to use Forte's pitch classes, so a cluster of half steps on C would be 0,1,2 and a cluster of whole tones would be 0,2,4. Another way that works well if all the tones are diatonic is to use a modified interval notation - like C4x2. The letter is the root, the first number is the number of tones in the chord, and the second number is the diatonic steps - so that would be C-D-E-F.

I've only seen them in a few scores, and the notation is kinda screwy - a hollow boxy shape for diatonic ones, a solid boxy shape for chromatic ones. I'm guessing that comes from the white key/black key piano arrangement. Of course, if they're short - four notes or less - they just write out all the notes, using both sides of the stem if need be.

Both chords you "came up with" are in Fake Plastic Trees.

:D

So someone definitely beat you to it!