Understanding the relationship between notes and chords is a fundamental skill for any guitarist, as knowing which notes comprise particular chords opens up an entirely new area on the fretboard.
Example: When playing a major chord, it will sound bright and energetic; similarly, playing a minor chord will produce sad and melancholic sounds.
Scales
Triad chords are the simplest form of chord. Triads consist of three notes separated by an interval of a third – known as an “instance”.
Intervals between three notes form the backbone of any musical scale. Once you understand them, a world of chords and progressions is revealed before your very eyes!
Chords for any given key are constructed by drawing inspiration from its associated scale, so in order to produce chord progressions that accompany your melody you must first determine its scale.
This also makes transposing chord progressions into other keys very simple; simply switch out the root note of your scale so that it matches up to the chord, and all other notes will fall in their proper places – just make sure that you remember how intervals work! (Check out Intervals page for more info.).
Triads
Triad chords consist of three elements – root, fifth and octave – and are likely one of the first chords you learned on guitar. They may sound familiar since you likely started taking lessons. A basic power chord consists of either C major (C, E and G) or D minor chords (C, E and D).
Triad quality is determined by the interval between its root and third notes; this determines if it’s major, minor, diminished or augmented and therefore an integral component in creating harmony.
Doublings and open spacing may obscure identification of a triad, but its identification can still be made using octave equivalence principles. For instance, C major (C-E-G) and E minor (C-E-G) chords will both sound identical – with only minor differing in that major contain a perfect fifth while major don’t; each sounding unique due to quality differences.
Relative Chords
To master creating harmonically compelling chord progressions on guitar, understanding relative chords is paramount. These are chords which share a common root note while differing by only one note from each other – an illustration that scales and chords are integrally interlinked; just pieces of a greater whole.
If you’ve heard guitarists refer to the common “one, four and five” chord progression found in popular music; this refers to relative chords. To determine your relative chords simply take their respective major scales and build them onto your fretboard.
Recall that relative chords are always two scale tones down from the major scale and upward, making them easy to recognize. Ditto for relative minor chords – these handy tools will enable you to match chords with melodies for beautiful and harmonic melodies!
Intervals
Intervals refer to the distance between two notes measured in terms of their distance in steps on either a major or minor scale, and serve as an essential building block in chords and melodies. There are various kinds of intervals including thirds (both minor and major), fifths and perfect sevenths.
To determine the distance between two notes, two methods exist for measuring their interval: counting staff positions or scale steps. Scale steps is generally simpler as it only looks at what notes span one scale – for instance, B and D is spaced apart by three notes in any diatonic scale sequence that run from B to D.
Intervals may possess various qualities, including being augmented, perfect or diminished based on how many steps the top note exceeds or falls below its lower note. An interval whose top note exceeds or falls below that of its bottom note by one semitone would be considered an augmented interval; one half step smaller would qualify as minor; and any whole tone or more difference is considered diminished.