Money Notes
The inside and the outside
A while back I struck up a conversation with another musician and he asked me what I play.
I said Brazilian guitar — bossa nova, that kind of thing.
He immediately name dropped Yamandu Costa.
If you don’t know Yamandu, he’s a Brazilian guitarist with extraordinary technique. Blazing single-note runs, incredible speed, total command of the instrument.
I said yeah, he’s impressive — but I didn’t sound enthusiastic.
And this confused the guy. Why wouldn’t I be excited about someone who can play that well?
I responded that Yamandu plays a lot of fast notes, but his playing is very inside.
“Inside” is a jazz term.
It means you’re playing the notes that belong to the chord — the root, the third, the fifth, the seventh.
The notes that outline the harmony.
There’s nothing wrong with those notes. You need them. They’re the foundation.
But if that’s all you’re playing, you’re narrating the chord progression back to the listener.
And after a while, that sounds like elevator music.
It sounds vanilla.
It sounds safe.
Speed doesn’t fix this.
You can play inside notes at 200 beats per minute and it can still sound predictable.
The listener’s ear isn’t impressed by how many notes you fit into a bar.
It’s that sort of traditional palette that sounds rather generic to a sophisticated jazz listener.
I’ve had this conversation more than once, by the way.
There’s a common thread among traditional folk and classical guitarists — choro players, tango players, the whole Latin tradition — and it goes like this.
You mention jazz harmony and they say something like: “Music is not mathematics.”
I’ve heard it enough times to recognise it as a (somewhat defensive) philosophical position, not just a throwaway comment.
For these players, music is about the song. The melody. The vocal quality of the line. The virtuosity of the performance.
The underlying chords are there to support the melody, and that’s where the thinking stops.
Anything beyond the basic seventh chord — the extensions, the alterations, the voice leading choices — that’s “mathematics.” And mathematics isn’t music.
I thought about this for a while, and I realised my attitude is exactly the opposite.
If you want a modern jazz sound you have to become comfortable with the idea that music is mathematics.
Not in the sense that it’s cold or mechanical.
In the sense that the interesting stuff happens when you count past seven.
The seventh chord gives you the foundation. But the 9th, the 11th, the 13th, the ♭9, the ♭13 — those are where the colour lives.
And yes, you have to count to get there. You have to know which degree of the scale you’re on, what’s diatonic and what’s altered, where the tensions sit relative to the chord tones.
That’s mathematics. And that’s where the money is.
So there’s this cultural gulf.
On one side: Yamandu Costa, the choro tradition, the classical guitarists. Music is the song, the melody, the virtuosity. Don’t overthink it.
On the other side: Baden Powell, Jobim, Piazzolla, Ted Greene, John Stowell. Music is interpretation. It’s impressionistic. It’s abstract. And the abstraction comes from extended harmony — from the notes beyond the seventh.
Both sides are making real music. But they sound completely different.
And the difference comes down to a handful of notes.
The altered tones. The tensions.
These are the money notes.
In the vocal world, a “money note” is the big high note the audience is waiting for — Whitney Houston belting the key change, that kind of thing.
For a guitarist, the money notes are something different.
They’re the colour tones — the extended and altered notes that create tension and resolution within the harmony.
They’re the notes that make a chord sound like something, rather than just sounding correct.
Ted Greene — one of the most respected harmonic thinkers in the history of the guitar — put it bluntly: if you’re just playing chord tones, you’re not playing jazz.
He didn’t mean ignore the chord tones.
He meant the chord tones are the scaffolding.
The jazz lives in what you put on top of that.
Here’s an example.
Take a standard ii–V–i in A minor.
The textbook version gives you Bø7 – E7 – Am.
Those are inside chords. Perfectly correct, perfectly functional.
If you voice them with their basic chord tones — roots, thirds, fifths, sevenths — you’ll get something that sounds fine.
A theory teacher would give you full marks.
A listener will have forgotten it before the next bar.
Now extend them.
The Bø7 — add the 11th (E). That’s a strong colour note that changes the character of the chord immediately. It’s no longer just a pre-dominant placeholder. It has its own voice.
The E7 — play it with a ♭9 (F) and a ♭13 (C). Now the dominant chord has weight, darkness, urgency. Put that ♭9 in the bass — E7♭9/F — and you’ve got a voicing that shows up all through tango and bossa nova arranging.
The Am at the resolution — voice it as Am6, or Am9, or Am(♭6) if you want that Piazzolla colour.
Each chord now has something to say.
That’s the difference between outlining the harmony and embellishing it.
This is why players like Ted Greene, John Stowell, and Baden Powell can play at a completely relaxed tempo and nobody notices — or cares — that they’re not playing fast.
Every note is doing something.
There are no filler notes.
There is no padding.
Consider the opening of Jobim’s How Insensitive.
The tune begins on a minor seventh chord, and the melody immediately moves between the 5th and the ♭6th.
That ♭6th — the same note as a ♯5 — is a money note.
It’s not a chord tone.
It’s a tension note, sitting a half-step above the 5th.
And it creates an ache that defines the entire character of the piece.
From the very first bar, you know this isn’t going to sound generic.
That one note does more work than an entire scale run.
Now here’s the part that’s counterintuitive, and it’s where most guitarists get stuck.
Understanding harmony means you need to play fewer notes, not more.
This goes against everything the guitar internet tells you.
Speed exercises. Scale patterns. Picking drills.
The implicit promise is always: if you can play faster, you’ll sound better.
And there’s a whole industry built around that anxiety.
You watch someone shred on Instagram and you think: I need to be able to do that, or I’m not good enough.
So you practice scales. You build speed. You learn patterns.
And then you play over a tune and it sounds... fine.
Competent. Fast, even.
But not particularly interesting.
Not the way Baden Powell sounds interesting.
Not the way a Piazzolla arrangement grabs you by the throat with three notes.
The problem isn’t your technique.
The problem is you’re playing all the notes equally, without knowing which ones are the ones that matter.
If you know where the money notes are, you don’t need to fill every beat.
You can play a simple voicing with one well-chosen tension and it will be more interesting than a fast run built from chord tones.
The listener doesn’t process speed.
The listener processes colour.
A ♭9 in the bass of a dominant chord. A major 7th against a minor triad. A ♯11 on a major chord.
These are the sounds that create the emotional response.
And they require zero virtuosity to execute.
They require knowledge.
This is why Bill Evans at the piano, or John Stowell on guitar, or Baden Powell playing a slow bossa nova, sound endlessly interesting at tempos that any intermediate player could technically handle.
The complexity is in the note choices, not the note count.
So what does this mean for studying harmony?
Most jazz theory resources focus on teaching you the chord tones and the common progressions.
That’s necessary. It’s the alphabet.
But the alphabet isn’t the poem.
The reason to study harmony for the modern guitarist isn’t to know what the inside notes are.
It’s to know what the outside notes are.
So that when you play, you know exactly which note is the one that matters.
Without the harmonic understanding, you’re just gripping shapes and hoping they sound interesting.
The same principle applies whether you’re playing chord melody, comping, or improvising single-note lines.
In a line, the money notes are the ones you want to foreground.
The chord tones provide the voice leading that connects notes that do the expressive work (earn you the money).
This is a complete inversion of what Youtube jazz guitar tutorials teach, where the chord tones are the ‘targets’.
For a modern jazz sound, it’s the other way around.
None of this requires you to play faster.
In fact, it argues for playing slower — or at least, for not worrying about speed.
The focus shifts from physical execution to harmonic awareness.
Knowing which note creates the colour or the tension.
And that’s why I build harmonic analysis into every arrangement I publish.
The Roman numerals and chord symbols aren’t academic decoration.
They’re a map that shows you where the money notes are.
When you see a II7 chord in a tango, or an E7sus resolving to E7♭9 in a bossa nova, you’re seeing the moments where the arranger chose tension over safety.
Those are the moments that make the piece interesting.
And they’re the moments that will make your playing worth hearing — at any tempo.
I publish solo guitar arrangements of Argentine tango, Brazilian guitar and modern jazz music with full harmonic analysis — standard notation, TAB, chord symbols, and Roman numeral analysis. Browse the catalogue on Payhip, or subscribe here on Substack for more on tango and bossa nova harmony.