Building Chords

It's a beautiful evening, so lets relax and take a look at music theory.

We will look into building basic chords. Chords are built with intervals. First we will begin with triads (3 note chords). Once again we will use the C major scale to demonstrate chord building:

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C (or scale degrees: 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8 )

To build the C major triad you will use 3 notes - C, E, G (scale degrees 1, 3, 5). Notice that these notes are just two intervals - a 3rd with a 3rd on top. Let's look at this chord vertically to see the intervals:

G (5)
E (3)
C (1)

Go to a keyboard and see that the distance from C to E is a 3rd, as is the distance from E to G. Therefore, a triad is two intervals of 3rds. If this seems a little confusing, refer back to the post on intervals. In music theory, it is always good to have notes (posts) to refer back to.

The three major chords of the key of C are C, F, and G. Let's build these chords, just as we did the previous chord, except without the scale degrees:

G        C        D
E        A         B
C        F         G

The notes that are in bold are the root of the chord and identify which note it is: C is C major triad, F is F major triad, G is G major triad.


You can build triad chords this way using any scale.


In the next post we will talk about using roman numerals and how they relate to scales and chords.