[Stephen]

This will cover some of the same ground as other posts here. It is designed for people who don't really want to learn much theory.

Some basics about chords

Too much theory makes my head spin, so I’ll keep this short and as sweet as I can. We’ll assume you know nothing about music, and we’ll also assume you only want to know as much theory as will help you play the guitar better. There is much to music theory, and especially harmony theory, that we just can’t cover here, and we’re not going to try and teach you to read music. We won’t show you a single music staff, not one crotchet and no time signatures. Just a little about how chords work and how you can use that knowledge to make playing easier and to sound
better. We’re going to start right at the beginning.

1 What’s a chord?

It’s a set of at least two, and more correctly at least three, different notes played together. Let’s take a C chord — I’m using the C scale for illustration because on a piano it uses only the white keys and so it’s the simplest scale. I’m in trouble already because you may not know what a scale is, right? Okay. But you know this sequence: doh, re, mi, far, so, la, ti, doh. You can probably sing it, or you have at least heard the song—Doh, a deer, a female deer, and so on. The sequence from doh up to the next doh is a scale, made up of eight notes, or an octave (“oct” means eight).

All right. Now if we start with doh as the note C, then we get the same sequence of notes with different names—the names of the white notes on the keyboard—

C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C

equivalent in the C scale to doh, re, mi, far, so, la, ti and doh again. This is the C scale, also called the C major scale.

A chord is made up of three or more notes that harmonise, or sound good together. If we start with C and take every second note until we have three notes together, we get a C major chord. That’s C, E, G. It’s C major, but it’s more often just called C. When the Beatles sing Twist and Shout they go “ah, ah, ah, ah,” with every “ah” higher in pitch than the one before. What you’re hearing is the notes of a major chord, just like C major. The C major chord has only three notes, but you can add
the next highest C, an octave above, and it’s still a C chord. You can also add a higher E or G if you want, but the essential elements of the C chord are C, E and G.

C E G (C major, also written C)


2 The basic chords in the C scale

You can start with any note in the C scale, take every second note until you have three together, and you get one of the basic chords in that scale. (There is one exception, and that is the chord starting on the B note).

Let’s start with D, the second note in the C scale. If we take every second note we get

D F A (D minor, also written Dm)

All right. Here are the other basic chords in the key of C:

E G B (E minor, also written Em)
F A C (F major, also written F)
G B D (G major, also written G)

Did you notice what happened here? Starting on G, we skipped a note to B, then had to start the scale again, skipping over the C to get to the next note, D, which is the start of a new sequence, or new octave, whose notes simply repeat the scale — C, D, E, F, etc.

A C E (A minor, also written Am)

Now we come to the exception (below). There is a chord based on the B note. If we follow the same procedure, taking every second note, and starting on B, we get

B D F (B diminished, also written Bdim and B°)

This chord is unusual. In formal harmony theory it is called a B diminished triad, and it is one of a series of chords — the diminished chords — with unusual properties compared to other chords. Diminished chords actually consist of four notes, and the fourth note in the B° chord is an Ab. So the full chord is:

B D F Ab (B° or B°7 (B diminished, called B diminished seventh in formal harmony).)

This chord is an exception because it is not considered to be one of the main chords in the key of C, for reasons rather too complex to elaborate on here. What we can say is that the full B° chord has a note that is not in the C scale (the Ab), and when we are harmonising simple songs in the key of C we want chords that contain only the notes in that scale. Secondly, for the vast majority of ordinary songs the chord containing the B note that sounds better than B° is the following:

G B D F (G seventh, also written G7)

You will notice that this is actually quite similar to a B° chord, the
only difference being that we have rearranged the order of notes and
replaced the Ab with a note that /is/ in the C scale, that is, G.

3 Harmonising the C scale

Let’s suppose you want to sing a C scale with a guitar accompaniment. Even as a beginning guitarist, you should know all the chords in the C scale. If you sing the notes in the scale, you can accompany them on the guitar using one chord for each note. Play a C chord, then dampen the strings and sing doh, re, mi, far, so, la, ti, doh.


Okay. Now play the C chords in order (see above), like this:

C Dm Em F G Am G7 C
Doh re mi fa so la ti doh

If you don’t know these chords yet, learn them as quickly as possible. They are essential. If your guitar is in tune, you will hear that each note fits perfectly with the chord being played.

If you can’t hear where to start, play the second string—the B string, which should have your index finger on the first fret if you’re playing the most basic C chord. That’s C, the note for doh

C doh second string, first fret

You can play the next notes in the scale like this:

D re second string, third fret
E mi first string, open (not fretted with the finger)
F far first string, first fret
G so first string, third fret
A la first string, fifth fret
B ti first string, seventh fret
C doh first string, eighth fret

If you play the harmonised scale, you have a clue to how the chords of a song are formulated. The chords relate to the different notes in the song.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply using a different chord for each new note of the song. There are many ways to harmonise a song, and often the simplest is the best, especially for simple tunes that don’t stray far from the scale they are in. For example, a simple song in C will use only the notes in the C scale, and very often can be harmonised with just the three basic C chords—C (C major), F (Fmajor) and G (G major). You can also harmonise the notes in the C scale very simply
using these three chords instead of the seven chords we used to do this before.


Sing the scale again, and this time play the chords shown above each note:
Chord: C G C F G F G(7) C
Note: C D E F G A B C
Doh re mi fa so la ti doh

A great number of songs can be played using only these three chords (or four if you count G7).