Mastering both major and minor chords is key to becoming a versatile guitar player, enabling you to express emotions, tell stories, and form meaningful connections with audiences on a deeper level.
A major and minor chord differ in one critical way – their third interval. Music with major chords tends to feel upbeat and optimistic while songs featuring minor chords have more melancholic or sad-sounding tones.
Major Triad
A major chord, commonly referred to as a major triad, consists of the first, third, and fifth notes from any major scale. Knowing this simple formula allows you to create many different chords in any key.
Major chords produce an inherently cheerful sound. This is due to their composition; major chords contain two consonant intervals: four half steps higher than their root note and a perfect fifth which create a harmonic coherence that gives a major chord its distinct sound and feel.
Moving the second note down by one semitone changes a major chord into a minor one, creating a minor chord. It’s important to keep this in mind because playing major 3rds over minor chords may not always sound great and may even sound harsh – although there may be exceptions to this rule.
Minor Triad
Minor chords have long been used as an expressive means for emotional expression; however, their use can also add tension and create suspense. When used creatively through various tempo variations and chord progressions, musicians can use minor chords to convey various moods and emote a range of feelings.
Minor chords consist of the first, flattened 3rd and fifth notes from any scale, connected by intervals (gaps between individual notes). Understanding these intervals (the gaps between them) is critical in order to properly appreciate how each sound translates onto paper.
Triads, or chords composed of three consecutive third intervals, are known as triads. For a minor chord, its minor third serves as the bottom note and major third as the middle and top note.
Unknown degrees (such as 6, 9, or 13 ) in a chord (such as 6, 9 or 13 ) are typically assumed to be major unless otherwise specified, so we might see Cm6 or Cm7 instead of simply Cm. However, 9 in minor 6 chords is often played as major 9 to create more complex tones such as #9 or b9. This makes the chord sound richer.
Major Scale
The major scale is one of the foundations of western music and should be studied closely in order to create chords and harmony. Knowing your major scale well is essential for any musician.
A major scale is an ascending sequence of seven distinct notes that span an octave, with intervals that alternate between whole tones and half tones in an order of: tone, semitone, tone.
The tonic (also called keynote ) is the note at the center of any song that provides its key and overall feel. Other notes in the scale may change, but its anchor remains.
Simply shifting three notes can alter the key of a song and turn a major scale that contains a flattened third into a minor scale, producing darker and melancholy tones. This formula is easy to remember and can be applied to any major or minor scale.
Minor Scale
Minor scale music can create melancholic tone. Furthermore, its modulations between major and minor keys is powerful enough to elicit feelings of relief for listeners – for instance verses may begin in one key while its chorus transitions smoothly into its complementary major key for added effect.
Minor scales differ significantly from major ones in that they feature more variation between whole steps and half steps, often changing more frequently than its major equivalent. There are two commonly-used minor scales – natural minor and harmonic minor; natural minor is similar but with one major distinction; its seventh scale degree raised a half step to give major chords their dominant power.
As they will likely feature prominently in your songs, familiarize yourself with scales and their tonic chords. Listen to some popular tracks and attempt to identify their tonality by listening closely to their chord progressions.