As your piano skills advance, you will discover new chords to add depth and variety to your music. For example, The Beatles song “Let It Be” begins with a C major chord and later transitions to a G major chord – two examples of chord progression that add a great deal of variety in one tune!
All major triad chords contain the first, third and fifth notes from their respective major scale. They produce an intense yet joyful sound.
Scales
When we refer to a chord as major, this indicates it contains no sharps or flats – the type most frequently seen in pop songs.
Every major scale follows a uniform pattern of whole steps and half steps (semi-notes). On a piano keyboard there are two semitone steps between every white key, making identifying these intervals much simpler.
To transform a major to a minor chord, all it takes is shifting down one half step on the third note – something as small as this can have a huge effect on its sound! Once you learn this simple formula, any major chord can be converted to its minor equivalent in any key! Knowing how to build major chords is therefore one of the most essential piano skills; it will lead you toward learning other types of chords.
Triads
A triad is an assemblage of three notes consisting of a root, third and fifth that form a chord. Its quality as major, minor or diminished depends on how close its intervals to those at its center are – between its root and fifth note respectively.
As with scales, triads come in various flavors: major, minor, diminished or augmented.
Triads can use any major scale note as their basis or root to form their chord, with only its third note determining its major or minor nature.
Example of C-major Triad with G Root and D# Third Above it. However, changing its root to B or F# produces A Major or D Minor Triad respectively – thus listening carefully is the key to recognizing these triads.
Intervals
Intervals, or pitch differences between notes, determine how a chord sounds and how its parts fit together into scales and chords. Musical intervals can either be perfect or non-perfect and major or minor in character.
Perfect intervals, also known as perfect fourths, fifths and octaves, create consonant tones in any major scale tonic and form the basic triads that form the backbone of most songs.
Non-perfect intervals include thirds, sixths and sevenths that are either major or minor in scale degree. They may be either major or minor and either augmented or diminished – making them either one half step larger than perfect or one half step smaller – respectively. An augmented sixth (A5) sounds different than when written as D5, as its critical band (the range of notes where an interval can be heard) differs with register.
Adding Tones
Once you understand how chords function within scales, adding different tones to create different sounding chords (Chord Tones).
A basic major chord consists of three notes from a scale: its root, major third and fifth. The root note serves as the bottom note in this chord while two half steps up from it is its major third note with three half steps above that being its fifth note.
For changing the tone of a chord, simply add any note above its root in a scale. This will lend it a different quality – adding variety that allows us to choose songs with many distinct voices!
These additional tones are indicated by numbers written after the chord symbol. For instance, in C major chord a note E is added to its basic pattern of 1,3,5. This creates what’s commonly known as a major seventh chord or more precisely 6add9. Understanding these subtle distinctions is vitally important as they change how a chord sounds.