Composers have long used dominant triads from major scales and expanding them to four notes to craft great sounding chord progressions in minor keys, providing strong cadence resolution.
One key distinction between major and minor scales and chords lies in their respective thirds – major chords always have a major third while minor ones contain one that has been flattened or lowered by half steps.
Root Note
A chord is constructed around its root note and can consist of up to seven notes. This note serves as its lowest note and determines its tonal quality – for instance, G7 chord has G as its root note, making it major chord in its own key.
Root notes provide the tonal center of any key and all chords and scales associated with that key revolve around them. Chords may then be classified by their tonal qualities depending on which intervals they use.
Identification of the root note of a chord is an integral first step to mastering its sound, providing a direct link between its scale position and its chord root note. Take your time searching each string for its root note – then double-check with any chord diagrams that might exist – trying to locate which letter matches up with it!
Major Third
Minor scales differ significantly from major ones when it comes to ascending and descending patterns of whole and half steps, most noticeably in terms of their third note; music created using minor scales typically contains a major third between its second and third notes while major ones typically have a minor third between these notes.
This interval is an integral component of chords, defining whether they have major or minor qualities. A major third consists of one large and one small whole step and can be found in many popular songs like Greensleeves and For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.
A perfect fourth is composed of five half steps while a major sixth has seven half steps. However, diminished intervals exist which feature one less half step than perfect fourths; these may be used in blues music that features minor tonics or in jazz styles that use this pitch range as part of the melody line.
Major Triad
Triads are simple three-note chords used as building blocks of tonal music. Most commonly heard in bass instruments and supporting higher notes. Triads provide the ideal balance of tension and release within melodies.
Major triads are by far the most frequently occurring chord structure; these consist of stacking the root note atop of a major third and perfect fifth. Minor triads, on the other hand, involve subtracting out one major third to create an inverted tonic tone and then adding back in another major third and perfect fifth note to complete it.
Both major and minor triads can be found across all 12 keys, so practice them across your strings as you’ll likely encounter them in various contexts. Also make sure that you transpose these shapes into other minor keys to deepen your knowledge of minor scale theory. Triad qualities –major, minor, diminished and augmented–depend upon the quality of intervals between root, third and fifth to determine its quality.
Minor Triad
Minor scale chords differ from their major scale counterparts in that their third note is flattened by half-step, meaning its value becomes one semitone lower and creates a darker sound and sense of tension in the chord. Music theory often refers to this technique with an abbreviation such as C Minor = Cm for this technique.
Major and minor chords differ primarily by one note each; however, there are various ways of creating minor chords!
Building a minor chord can be as straightforward as building any major triad with one minor third tacked onto it, although inversions offer another option for creating unique sounds; they use similar techniques but with one note up or down shifting to match its root note instead of matching up exactly. These inversions offer great opportunities to explore different sounds! You could even experiment with inverting major triads – this allows for unique chord shapes!