This is part 1 of a 6 Part series on Chord Construction for guitar.
How chords are made is not that difficult to understand. You will require a tiny bit of patience and the ability to count up to 13 and also know the alphabet from A to G.
Having a good understanding of how chords are made will help you with your guitar soloing and accompaniment, many guitar players bypass this type of information. I would encourage you to get on top of the basics of this info and a whole lot of newe areas of your playing will open up.
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.
Major chords have a strength about them, they are reasonably bright sounding, I could say ‘happy’ sounding but it’s not quite correct. Examples would be C, D, G, A, E with no numbers written after them.
Minor chords are very sad sounding, the saddest of all being the D minor chord. Many composers for films will write in the key of D minor T evoke sadness in a a film, think tissues and hankies. Examples would be: Dm, Em, Gm, sometimes written with a minus sign D-, E- or Dmin or Emin etc
Seventh chords imply movement. They are just major chords with an extra note, their sound creates a feeling of wanting to go to another chord. The way that a seventh chord is generally written is: G7, E7, A7 etc. They are commonly used in Blues music and variations of 7ths are common in Jazz, they’ll often look like G7b5#9 etc but let’s keep it simple.
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 C, E and G, this is called a major triad. You could play a couple of C’s E’s or G’s in it instead of just one, it’s still a C major chord.
If you look at the second line of music above, you’ll see it is C, E flat ( the little b = flat) and G, this is called a minor triad. Also, just like the major chord, you could play a couple of C’s Eb’s or G’s in it instead of just one, it’s still a C 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 C7, I have omitted the G note, but listen and you’ll notice that it still sounds right.
In these examples I have used only three note chords, for some situations, using a thrree note chord can be better than a full chord. Regardless what you use, it’s still valid, three, four, five or six.
To download the Free High QualityPrintable version Click the following Link:
How Guitar Chords Are Made TAB
NOTE: Part 2 will be available within four days.
For Blues Scales go to the following link at my other blog/site:
http://acousticguitarist.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/blues-scales-learn-guitar-tab-and-dots/