Harmony – two or more notes played simultaneously (intervals and chords)

Dynamics, tone, intonation, timbre etc. are vital as well but for this opening discussion, let’s narrow it down to the three basics of rhythm, melody and harmony.

Think of a specific recording of one of your favorite songs. Now think of a favorite section of that song and play it back in your memory or even better actually put it on and listen carefully to it.

Obviously, there are specific rhythmic things happening around a steady pulse (time signature, tempo, straight feel or swing feel, pushing or laid back).

And likely there is a melody out in front being sung or played (vocal phrases or an instrumental solo).

Beyond that, there is likely someone playing chords or harmonies underneath or alongside the melody (guitar strumming, piano chords, bassline, vocal harmonies, keyboards, horn sections, orchestral arrangements etc…)

Take some time and really think about what is happening in the music you’re listening to rhythmically, melodically and harmonically.

Obviously, we don’t need to think about all of this stuff to appreciate or react to music. Especially since you’re listening to one of your favorite pieces of music, there is an urge to turn your mind off and just get into it.

That’s the coolest thing of all and it’s a good idea most of the time. There is something transcendant in the merging of these things with the human element that a book won’t explain.

But for the purposes of studying and understanding music theory it’s

important that you take some time for this type of “active listening” to real music and specifically the music that is important to you. It’s much more fun and way more productive than trying to learn all of this stuff dry off a page with just your guitar.

In the last chapter, we exhausted the harmony of two-note combinations called intervals. For the purposes of this chapter, we’re going to be taking the next logical step into three note combinations and specifically the simplest types of chords known as “triads”.

We need to first realize that there are many types of chords from simple major and minor triads to chords with much more complexity which we’ll get to later.

The simple chords we’ll be dealing with in this chapter are called triads because they are each defined by three and only three notes.

The first chords most of us learn on the guitar are the open position chords of C, G, D, A, E, Em, Am and Dm. If you aren’t already aware, all of these chords are actually triads because they are each built from only three notes.

When you learned these open chords as a beginner, chances are you

memorized them by shape as most of us do. You also probably noticed that these chords involved 4, 5 or even 6 strings played simultaneously.

Your first assumption of these chords could understandably be that they actually contained 4, 5 or 6 different notes when in fact, as triads, they were built from only three notes which were in some cases duplicated on other strings in different octaves.

It’s important to start with the basic understanding that any chord is by definition, a combination of three or more specific notes. Anything you might look at as a memorized shape on the fretboard (from a basic C, G or D chord to the most advanced and convoluted chord imaginable) exists ONLY because it happens to be a good way to combine some very specific notes on the fretboard. It’s certainly not as if somebody just came up with a good sounding shape on the guitar fretboard a long time ago and named it a “C chord”.

And all of this is not to minimize the importance of “shapes” which are an integral part of guitar and fretboard theory. Simply to explain that there is much more to it.

By learning this stuff, not only do your creative ideas become more clear but you gain a deeper respect for the subject of music and harmony in general.

Just as advanced mathemeticians or scientists aren’t just looking at numbers or test tubes. When they see the elegant order of their systems clearly, they see something profound and they are far closer to mastery.

Going back to the last chapter. Intervals, as you’d suspect play a fundamental role in chords.

In the case of building the simple “triads” we’re going to discuss in this chapter, the intervals of 3^rds and 5^ths are critical because:

Any major chord is merely the 1^st, 3^rd and 5^th notes of it’s major scale combined.

In this example, for simplicity, we’ll use a C major scale but everything that we learn is directly true for all the other major scales using their respective notes as well.

We have a starting note called a “root” (C), a note which is an interval a third above the root (E) and a note which is a fifth above the root (G).

C

E

G

It’s easy enough to see based on that information, that in all

circumstances, a “C major” chord is nothing more than the notes C, E and G combined together.

Again, if we took the first note of the C major scale and stacked a third and a fifth above it, that would mean we were adding the notes E and G to the original note C.

G (the 5^th of the chord) E (the 3^rd of the chord) C (the Root of the chord)

One of the most important things to understand is that for purposes of defining the notes of a chord, this simplistic stacking method is crucial but it will give you only the most simplistic and possibly the least interesting

“voicing” or arrangement of the notes of the chord.

Below are just a few ways (there are dozens more) to combine the notes C, E and G together (a C major chord) on the fretboard in some common and not so common ways.

C Major:

The term “voicing” refers to how many and in what order these defining notes of a chord occur.

Regardless of the fact that each of these voicings sound different in terms of arrangement of the notes and range. They are ALL C major chords

because they all contain only the notes C, E and G. The 1^st, 3^rd and 5^th notes of the C major scale and nothing else.

All of these chords are also triads because regardless of how many strings are being played, it’s still just those three notes.

We also see that we can setup these three notes to sound high or low, thick or thin, but again, it’s still just a C major chord if the only notes involved are C, E and G.

In fact, you could have an entire stadium full of guitar players (or any other instrument) and if everyone is playing either a single C, E or G note at the same time, and no other notes beyond that, together they would create an enormous sounding yet very simple C major triad.

Conversely, if you just played three little notes (C, E, G) on three guitar strings or a piano, you would have an equally complete but much thinner sounding C major chord.

Now that you know the notes of the all of the major scales (or are working with a plan to get them all memorized in the near future), the revelation

that any major chord is merely the 1^st (root), 3^rd and 5^th notes of its

Take some time to verify that on your fretboard. Look at those basic open major chord shapes you know and think about the individual notes on each string.

Since we’ve built a C major chord from the first note of the C major scale by stacking a third and a fifth on top of it, the next step in the process of finding the basic chords in a scale is to do the same thing with each of the remaining notes of the scale.

Next up is the second note of the C major scale which is D. If we add an interval of a 3^rd and a 5^th on top of D (staying within the C major scale) we’ll be adding the notes F and A.

Remember, we’re using only the notes of the C major scale for now and in this case, we’re building a chord from it’s second note so the result is D, F and A.

C

D

F

A

Be sure to understand all of the above information clearly before continuing further in this chapter.

If you happened to notice a few pages back, we learned (among some other stuff) that a D major chord is made up of the notes D, F# and A (the Root, 3^rd and 5^th of the D major scale).

So the point is, this chord that we just built from the second note of the C major scale, does not match up and is NOT a D major chord. If you just played this chord, you might have already recognized the fact that this chord lacks the “happy” major chord sound and instead sounds “sad”.

This is a D minor chord and it’s the second chord built from the C major scale. We use the roman numeral notation “ii-“ to indicate that it’s the second chord in the key (ii) and that it’s minor (-).

The C major chord would be referred to in roman numeral notation as a capital “I” to indicate that it’s the first chord and that it’s major.

Why is this chord minor ?

Play the basic open position D major and minor chords back to back. Notice all that’s really happening is you’re moving the only 3^rd (F#) that happens to be in this particular voicing (located on the 1^st string) to an F natural. For this reason, we’re going to call the F natural a “flatted 3^rd” or “b3” as it relates to a D root.

A (5^th of the chord)

Here’s a very important point. Like a lot of concepts in music theory, it’s important to be able to look at this D minor chord (or any chord for that matter) from two different angles.