Ok, who is ready for some modes?
Only kidding, but what we learn today will be instrumental in our building blocks for getting to the big, scary modes. Ready to build some chords? Let's jump in.
This lesson isn't really a pick up and play the guitar kind of lesson, but I believe it is something that every guitarist, and musician really, should know. We are going to be focusing on how chords are built and why they are built like they are.
If you remember when we built our scales, we gave each 'note' in the sequence a number. It was a pretty easy system, the first note is referred to as the first note, second as the second, so on and so forth. In keeping with that, I want to introduce (or re-introduce, honestly can't remember if I mentioned them or not) intervals. Intervals are simply the distance between notes in a scale. Let's refer to the C Major Scale for a visual.
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
So by looking at this, we could say that an A is the 6th note, or tone, in the scale. This shows that there are six steps (notes) distance from the first note (C) to the sixth note (A). Be sure to remember when counting intervals that the first note is counted, or in this case; the distance from C to C is 1, as C to D is 2, etc. This rule applies to all scales.
A few things of note about major intervals:
1. The intervals in the major scale are referred to as Major Intervals (I know, right?), except
2. The 1, 4, 5 and 8 notes are referred to as Perfect Intervals..
What this means is that if I were to say "Key of C, play the Major Scale starting on the Major 2nd", you would play the scale just starting on the 2nd note, which in this example would be a D. We will discuss perfect intervals at a later time when we explore other scales, I just wanted to clarify.
Ok, so we've got a basis of intervals down and now we want to start building some chords for our song, where do we start? Well you go back to the scale/interval chart. If we wanted to start off with a root/tonic/Major 1st chord we would start off with the first note in our scale. In our example, this note is a C. So we grab our friend Mr. C and sit him in the forefront. He sounds pretty good, but he also sounds a little monotonous so we would go grab the 3rd note, E. Alright, sounds better...let's finish him off. Throw in a 5th on top, a G. Now we're talking. We've got ourselves a good solid sounding chord to get this tune started with. The highlighted notes are the ones that build our chord, and the easiest way to explain it is simply, every other note.
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
This is what it looks on the guitar:
---0--- --E--- --3----
---1--- --C--- --1---
---0--- the notes in the chord ---G-- the interval in the scale ---5---
---2--- ---E-- ---3---
---3--- ---C-- ---1---
-------- -------- --------
This chord is called a Major Triad (1-3-5), meaning it is a Major chord with 3 notes in it. You'll notice that we only do "the every other note" for three notes and then stop. I want you to grab your guitar, if you already haven't and find and play this tab:
--------
---1----
---4----
--------
--------
--------
Sounds pretty horrible doesn't it? But then again, William Hung made a career out of it. What this is called is dissonance, and we don't want that. If you were to go past the three notes that make up the triad and add in the next "every other note", you would get these two notes that fall by each other and that would create this dissonance.
Now, let's try to build a Perfect Fourth chord in the key of C, using the same formula for a major triad but starting on the fourth note of the scale.
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Same deal, every other note with the only difference being we started at the 4th note of the scale instead of the first.
Things are about to get a little confusing, so I'm gonna cut off this lesson here and let this sink in before moving on. As always, thanks for reading.
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