Guitar chords are combinations of notes played across multiple strings strummed together to form musical accompaniments for songs. Chord charts provide a quick way of learning the shapes quickly.
Hammer on notes are played by pressing down with the fretting hand’s finger against a string and raising its pitch higher than it was originally set at. This technique can be found in most chord charts as an arc symbolizing this trend.
Major Triad
Triads, three note chords, are an ideal starting point to learning music as they can be found in every major scale regardless of whether it contains flats or sharps. Their construction is also simple, making triads an essential building block of more complicated chord types like major open voiced, diminished and augmented chords. To best learn triad shapes isolate each CAGED shape individually on every string using the root note as an anchor point and practice them one string at a time until your understanding grows.
Once you’ve memorised all three triad shapes, you can move them to form any major chord you wish. However, be careful as moving up or down the fretboard can alter their position, altering both their shape and root note position! Knowing your notes well allows for quicker arpeggio creation as well as rapid riff creation.
Minor Triad
Once you know the major chord shapes, creating minor ones should be relatively straightforward. Simply move one of the notes down an octave (the third). A minor triad contains two third intervals on either end while major ones feature one major third in between them.
Triads can be formed using any note in any scale and come in four types – major, minor, augmented and diminished – which make up their four families of triads. Chords composed of multiple triads are known as tertian chords.
Triads are named by taking their root from its major scale and adding any accidentals necessary for that piece of music as the root. When creating minor, diminished, or augmented triads you add a suffix indicating their quality (i.e. double sharp or double flat). Suffixes may also be used to indicate inversion without altering spelling of root note.
Major Seventh
The major seventh is an extremely versatile chord used frequently in jazz and other musical genres that rely heavily on stacked thirds, often creating an appealing sounding melody. It is more melodic sounding than its dominant counterpart.
The notes of a major seventh are identical to a major triad, except the seventh is raised one half step to form an interval known as major seventh interval. Although it might sound complicated at first glance, playing it can still be accomplished quite effortlessly.
In guitar notation, major sevenths are usually written with an uppercase M to indicate its significance; however, some instructors use an alternative symbol such as Cmaj7 or Dmaj7 which could easily become confused with lowercase m – therefore avoiding such symbols altogether would be best practice.
The major seventh is commonly used to form dominant seventh chords, yet differs from it by having an interval that contains a minor third; this makes the chord sound slightly tense and unstable compared to that of a major seventh.
Minor Seventh
Minor Seventh, or Amin7 chord, is one of the easiest guitar chords to learn and play. Fang just one note – open E string – before moving four and a half whole-steps (9 half-steps) up the neck until reaching seventh note of natural minor scale (symbol vii).
This seventh chord features a flattened third, giving it more of the characteristics of a diminished triad than a major chord. Its formula is 1-3-5.
To create a minor seventh, begin with the root note of a chord – this will form the basis of your minor seventh. Draw this root on your staff, followed by an extra-long snowperson representing notes a third, fifth and seventh above it.