Chords defined
You've no doubt heard, with trepidation, about the thousands of
chords you must learn in order to play music. I myself remember
a book called "1001 Chords" and my feeling of total inadequacy
because I still only knew half a dozen or so. Well, you can relax.
Chords are no big deal.
Keep in mind that you don't need to know any of the theory behind
chords in order to play. You can simply skip the next section and
go straight to the chord diagrams page and start to experiment.
HOWEVER, if you want to become a musician, not just someone who
can hack out a couple of tunes, you'll get there much quicker by
finding out the why's and wherefore's right at the beginning. I
will explain in my own plain English way the basic structure of
music, and hopefully you'll be able to understand.
First of all, let's define what a chord is: A simple chord consists
of three scale notes. Which notes? Any three alternate notes. If
you imagine the seven scale notes as the days of the week, reading
horizontally, we're talking:
1 |
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2 |
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3 |
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4 |
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5 |
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6 |
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7 |
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Combining alternate notes
from the C scale, we get CEG - DFA - EGB - FAC - GBD - ACE - BDF
Each of these three note clusters is a chord. |
Notice
that there must be differences in the intervals of each of
these combinations because of the uneven scale. These variations
are the reason that in every key 3 chords are major, 3 are
minor and one is diminished. The main thing to remember is
that chords come from the scale and that all keys are identical
in layout.
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So the major scale, using this simple recipe, yields seven chords.
These three-note chords are known as triads. These chords, and
the scale they come from, this family of notes and
chords, is called THE KEY.
There are 12 major keys, one for each note
of the chromatic scale.
Let's see what some of these chords look
like on a guitar fretboard 
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