Mu Major: The chord that Steely Dan invented
The amount of time and dedication that Steely Dan put into their music is truly astonishing. It takes a great deal of courage to step away from live music and focus solely on the production of great music, and that’s exactly what Steely Dan did. They were tired of being constantly restrained by the need to translate songs to the stage and decided to step away from the stage and just focus on the studio.
The result was incredibly experimental music that straddled the line between pop, rock, and jazz. They also explored a range of different themes within their songwriting and used different effects to explore all of the different aspects of sound. No stone was left unturned.
Sometimes, their experimentation paid off. For instance, the bold lyricism they used in their John Lennon critique, ‘Only A Fool Would Say That’, is more than what many artists dared to write at the time. Equally, the different avenues they explored on the Aja are still respected and studied by music lovers to this day.
Equally, some of their other periods of experimentation didn’t quite go to plan. Songs such as ‘Throw Back the Little Ones’ and ‘Cousin Dupree’, while there was clear ambition behind the two of them, amounted to nothing. However, the one thing that remained clear throughout Steely Dan’s discography isn’t just their ambition when it came to the music they made, but the means by which they made it.
This is best reflected in the fact that the duo invented their own chord, which they could use to give their songs a jazz feel without being overly jazzy. It was called the Mu Major, and it was similar to a suspended second chord; however, it contained a major or minor third, which you don’t tend to see when dealing with suspended chords. This meant that they could play standard minor and major chords, but give them more texture without making the track sound too jazzy.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen expand upon the use of the Mu Major in the Steely Dan Songbook. “Inversions of the Mu Major may be formed in the usual manner with one caveat,” they write, “The voicing of the second and third scale tones, which is the essence of the chord’s appeal, should always occur as a whole tone dissonance.”
Steely Dan weren’t the only musical masters who created (or at least popularised) their own chord. Jimi Hendrix famously championed what is now known as “the Hendrix chord” and put it into almost every song he ever wrote. People now adopt the track in a bid to sound like Jimi Hendrix.
Of course, the chord itself was the 7/9, which he used a great deal in the ‘60s. It was adopted by a number of bands, including Steely Dan, who used it in their 1976 song ‘Kid Charlemagne’. The chord has also been used by The Beatles, Pixies and Muse. While Steely Dan’s Mu Major might not have been as widely adopted, the mere fact that it exists is a sign of just how innovative a band they were. They were constantly looking to push themselves creatively, and if problems arose, they would steer clear of them in unique and exciting ways.
