How Guitar Chords are Made – Part 2
This is part 2 of a 6 Part series on Chord Construction for guitar.
In my previous article on How Guitar Chords Are Made I covered three basic C chords. In this Article I shall cover three basic G chords.
As before in the last article, if you look at the music stave above, you’ll notice that I have numbered each note and also given it an alphabetical name, no big deal, no rocket science here.
Chords are grouped into three basic categories:
Major, Minor and Sevenths. However I did have a very long discussion once with the great guitar player Ike Isaacs and he was leaving the question open ended about whether there was a fourth type. But I’ll keep it simple here and agree with most of the planets musicians and say there are three.
I’ll also reiterate that the way chords are made is generally by taking the 1st, 3rd and 5th of a scale.
If you look at the top line of music above, you’ll see it is G, B and D, this is called a major triad. You could play a couple of G’s B’s or D’s in it instead of just one, it’s still a G major chord.
If you look at the second line of music above, you’ll see it is G, B flat ( the little b = flat) and D, this is called a G minor triad. Also, just like the major chord, you could play a couple of G’s B flat’s or D’s in it instead of just one, it’s still a G minor chord.
The seventh chord consists of the 1st, the 3rd, the 5th and also the 7th note, but this is IMPORTANT. Look closely at the note though, in truth what is known as a 7th is really a flattened 7th, it is one note lower than the seventh note of the normal major scale. Because of the construction of the guitar fretboard, guitar players often leave out notes of a chord, in the case of the G7, I have omitted the D note, but listen and you’ll notice that it still sounds right.
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