: Can a chord be both major and minor? So I was messing up with chords the other day and I came with a case where the chord could be both minor and major. I'm wondering if it can be true or if a chord is either, but cannot

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It depends on how you arrange the notes in a chord. The answer is yes, but not on all chords.

If you play a C major chord with a major 6th, you have: C,E,G,A. This is a major chord.

You can rearrange it to create an Am7 chord, if you put the A as the lowest note: A,C,E,G which is a minor 7th chord.

So, in your case, you can read your chord as Gm add b13 or Eb maj7/G (G as the bass); whichever works for you. Usually, you would see this kind of chord as Eb maj7/G rather than Gm add b13.

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Yes. Some said it depends on how you arrange the notes. Wrong. It depends on which note you have in the bass. Play a low C with your left hand and you will hear C6. Play a A and you will hear Amin7, no matter how you arrange notes in your right hand

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The 13th in a minor chord becomes a 5th when it's flattened. So it reverts in sound to a component of the normal triad.; Thus the chord doesn't really exist. It is Ebmaj7, as you state.

Taking D6th notes and swapping them around produces Bm7, so the answer can be 'yes'.

At a tangent, the Hendrix chord, say, E7#9 could be construed as both a major and minor chord at the same time, certainly sound-wise, if not technically.

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Shevliaskovic and Tim are both right I just want to point something very important about how chords work in general. Because we build chords in thirds and we consider triads (3 note chords) to be the basic unit of a chord, the more notes you have the more triads you can break them into.

For example the E?Maj7 is spelled:

E? G B? D

We can make two different basic triads out of this which are:

E? major (E?, G, B?)
G minor (G, B?, D)

These both are the basic building block of the you noted the chords (Gm(add?13) and E?Maj7) can be considered when naming a chord. Depending on what key you are in, where you are going, and where you are coming from one name will make more sense then the other.

As a result of the added tone you can see that both a major and minor triad can be derived and the resulting chord will reflect that whether you call it a major chord or a minor chord. As your chord get bigger in general you add "color" to the sound and the resulting sound is a combination of the sounds not just one or the other.

Another good example of this is the dominant 7th which build off C is:

C E G B?

We can make two different basic triads out of this which are:

C major (C, E, G)
E diminished (E, G, B?)

In this chord we don't just want the typical major chord, we want the dissonance that diminished chord brings, but at the same time we want to be more stable which is found in the major chord. So the chord quality blend in a way we take advantage of.