Understanding Chords ( part 1 - the triad )

To understand chords and how they function within songs and music lets look at a simple C major scale and get to know some of the process of why it works and sounds good to our ears..

Key of C 

( a key is just simply notes that sound good together )

1     2     3    4     5     6    7     8

C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C

Basic major and minor chords are made up of 3 notes that are each,  in musical terms, a 'third' apart from each other - meaning if your first note is C then your next note of the chord would be an E and the next note would be a G. These 3 notes would make up a simple C major chord. 

Here are some examples with the notes of each chord highlighted in red.

        C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C        a C major chord

        C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C        a D minor chord

        C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C        an E minor chord

        C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C        a F major chord

        C    D    E    F    G    A    B    C        a G major chord 

Notice that each chord only contains notes from the C scale and that they are all the same distance apart alphabetically. What actually makes them Major or Minor is the difference in the amount of semi-tones (or guitar frets) between the 1st note of the chord and the 2nd note of the chord. 

A three note chord like this is called a TRIAD and can really set the foundation of harmony in rock, pop, blues, and jazz guitar styles. 

The confusion on the guitar sometimes stems from the fact that we play these 3 note triads on 6 strings and that chords can have many different shapes and a variety of combinations of these 3 notes.

Let's look at one of these puzzles and check out whats going on.

If we look at the G major chord to the right and number the

strings from left to right as 6 5 4 3 2 1,  the notes of the chord

would be G on the 6th, B on the 5th, D on the 4th, G on the 3rd,

B on the 2nd, and G on the 1st.

You can see that for this G major chord on the guitar we use 

3 G notes, 2 B notes and one D. If we exhausted this method

of combining G-B-D note combinations over the whole fretboard

we could come up with dozens of different looking G chords. 

Next time we will look at putting together these major and minor chords into progressions we can use in songs and begin to see and hear there basic functions.