Guitar Lessons 3


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		3

	Chords Chords are groups of 3 or more notes. We’ll focus on chords that have only 3 notes, and you could play years of professional guitar with just these 3 note chords. By the way, ‘E’ means the E Major chord (sounds happy and content). ‘Em’ means the E Minor chord (sounds dark and serious). Here is the E chord formation.

I want you to understand the difference between the phrase ‘chord formation’ and the word ‘chord’. This picture is of 3 dots, 2 of them closer together than the 3^rd one, right? (for now, ignore the other 3 strings, which would be played ‘open’, or ‘not pushed down’).

This physical placement of those 3 dots is called a formation. In fact, this exact placement is called the E formation. When this E formation is played as pictured, in other words, when it is played with that single dot on the first fret, and those two ‘together’ dots on the second fret, it is the chord E.

If you were to move that formation up one fret, it would no longer be the chord E, but it would be the chord F. –but it would still be the E formation, get it?
--by the way, why would it now be the chord F? Look above at your chromatic scale. What is one fret above E? Yes, F.

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Keys

A ‘key’ is made up of the notes of any major scale, and the chords that can be built using the notes of this same scale.
How would you build these chords? You’d take one of the notes of the scale, and then skip the next note, take the next note, skip the next note, and take the next note. That would give you a 3 note chord.

Example, the C Major scale:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Let’s start with the note C for simplicity, and then skip the next note, take the next note, skip the next note, and take the next note and you get C, E, G, right? The chord C is made up of the notes C, E and G.

If you build chords on every note this way, you get:

C, E, G – called the C chord. – it’s built on the 1 of the scale and called the I chord.
D, F, A – called the Dm chord. – it’s built on the 2 of the scale and called the II chord.
E, G, B – called the Em chord. – it’s built on the 3 of the scale and called the III chord.
F, A, C – called the F chord. – it’s built on the 4 of the scale and called the IV chord.
G, B, D – called the G chord. – it’s built on the 5 of the scale and called the V chord.
A, C, E – called the Am chord. – it’s built on the 6 of the scale and called the VI chord.
B, D, F –called Bmb5 –you can pretty much ignore this chord. It has a weak, unstable sound and is almost never used in rock, country or pop. It’s the VII chord.

So, we say that the ‘Key of C’ contains the notes C,D,E,F,G,A,B and contains the chords C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bmb5.

Notice the Roman Numeral numberings of the chords.

Any song that is truly in the key of C contains nothing but these notes and chords. Sometimes one part of a song will be in one key like C, and another part of the song, maybe even for just a couple beats, will be in another key because that part of the song had a note or chord that’s NOT in the key of C.

What would the chords of the key of E be?------ E, F#m, G#m, A, B, C#m and D#mb5. You should be able to figure this out for yourself.


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