Learn the most common major chords to give yourself a good foundation when playing songs. Major chords add brightness and positivity to songs with bright and sunny melodies.
An essential major chord comprises a triad, composed of its root note, major third note and perfect fifth.
Triads
Triads form the core of most chords. There are four kinds of triads; Major, Minor, Diminished and Augmented. All four contain the first, third and fifth notes from any scale arranged as 1st, 3rd 3rd 5th positions; their intervals differ only in duration between notes. They can all be played across every key on piano with equal ease as well as using similar hand shapes which will help build muscle memory over time.
As you become familiar with these four triads, it will become much simpler for you to add 7ths, 9ths, and 11ths. Furthermore, it will become much easier to distinguish major and minor chords as well as other types of chords – which is useful when performing creative improvisation and creative compositions. Playing broken up, inverted and shifted chords gives more musical soundscape and can open up creative improvisation opportunities; also note that moving it to another key can alter its quality (though this occurs less frequently), which will be covered further in another lesson.
Intervals
Intervals, or distance between notes, can either be major or minor and can either be considered perfect (major intervals) or diminished (minor). Major intervals are also known as perfect while minor ones are referred to as diminished.
Reduce a major interval by half steps and it becomes diminished; for instance, C-G becomes C flat if reduced by this amount. On the other hand, when made larger by half steps it becomes an augmented interval; an example would be when raising F-C by one half step to G sharp.
Most chords are composed from triads and are either major or minor in nature. Major chords consist of a root note, major third and perfect fifth note arranged in succession from bottom note up. Root note being the lowest note while major third being four semitone steps above it and seven half steps higher than it respectively.
Scales
Piano contains 12 distinct notes and once you memorize the major scale pattern, chord building becomes much simpler! Just bear in mind that beginning on a flat note may result in different sound as minor scale contains sharp (or sharp-flat) notes as well.
A chord’s quality depends on the intervals between its consecutive notes; for instance, major second G is one tone above the root note G and major third B one half step higher than both G and H respectively.
There are various other kinds of chords as well, such as the less frequent sixth chord (6th), with its added major seventh. Also less frequently seen is a major ninth (maj9) chord, which adds the ninth note to an already existing major seventh chord in order to reduce dissonance between seventh and eighth notes. Learning these basic chords will make music playing more fun and creative while opening up more opportunities for improvisation and exploration of additional types of chords such as diminished and augmented ones.
Inversions
Chord inversions are a vital element of piano playing and are an excellent way to make transitions between chords more fluid/smooth and easier for pianists to navigate. Additionally, these inversions change the sound slightly and add emotion and tone to a piece of music.
Chord Inversions simply switch the order of notes within a triad, creating different fingerings for the same chord. In this lesson we’ll learn all major triads in their first inversion so that they are accessible with one finger only 3-5 fingers.
chord inversions alter the sound and quality of a chord subtly, without changing its function or quality. For instance, when we compare C major with A minor we are only altering their ordering of notes and their respective intervals (i.e. distance between root, middle and fifth notes) which allows us to continue calling both chords major second even though they now exist four major fourths apart!