Major and Minor Triads on the Guitar
How the pros make simple chords sound great
Triads are the simplest guitar chords that we hear every day in any music style. They are the basic building blocks of the western music, and one of the best-kept secrets of the pros. You know when some famous songs sounds wonderful, and then you discover that it just uses the same old chords? But then, when you are playing the same chords on your guitar, they do not quite have the same magic? Here I will explain you the missing link and by the end of this guitar chords lesson I am going to show you some interesting applications.
The Basics
There are four types of triads: Major Triads, Minor Triads, Augmented Triads and Diminished Triads; today we are going to look only at Major and Minor Triads . A triad is composed by three notes (hence the name). To find the three notes that make up a Major triad, you proceed this way:
- Choose a note to be the root note of the triad. Let’s choose C.
- Take the note 4 frets above the root. In our example this is E.
- Take the note 3 frets above the last note you found (E). In our case this is G.
These three notes, C, E, and G, taken together are the C Major triad.
A Minor triad is constructed the same way as a Major triad, but the middle note is lowered one fret. As an example, the C minor triad is composed by C, Eb, G.
On the Fretboard
Now that we know the notes that compose the triad, how do we play them? Well, a choice is to play them in order (from the lowest note to the highest) C, E, G; this is what we call root position. You will find the fingering of this and all other alternatives below. This is not the only possibility, though: we can play the C one octave higher, so that we have E, G, C. This is still a C Major triad, but it is in what we call first inversion. Now we can play E too one octave higher than it is, thus obtaining G, C, E. This is what we call the second inversion of the C Major triad. The important thing of this is not to remember the names, rather it is that you can play the notes in any order you want and the triad is still a C Major triad. Different ways of playing the same chords are called the “voicings” of that chord.
This is all good and well, but how can we apply these notions practically to our guitar playing? Well, for a start we can map out the voicings we have just seen on any 3 adjacent strings on the guitar. On strings 1,2,3 we find that the C Major triad can be played these ways:
On strings 2,3,4 we find some slightly different shapes. To give you an idea of the power of this approach, the verse of “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne is composed using only these shapes. It is incredible how good the old simple major chord can sound if used properly.
I will let you work out the positions for strings 3,4,5 and for strings 4,5,6: it is not difficult to do and it is a good exercise to gain some more familiarity with triads.
Open and Closed Voicings
The three ways of playing the triad we have just seen are called “closed voicings” since all the notes are inside a single octave. These are opposed to the “open voicings” where the notes span more than one octave. The open voicings are C, G, E (root position); E, C, G (first inversion); G, E, C (second inversion). Let’s see some examples of these open voicings on the fretboard. To find shapes that can be played without overstretching your hand we need to work on non-adjacent strings. For instance on strings 2,3,5 we can find:
and on strings 3,5,6:
Applications
You can use these chords to arrange your favorite chord progressions. Here are a couple of examples using the chord progression Am Dm C G. Using the standard chord shapes this progression sounds quite boring, but try to play the example below and see how good and more “professional” you can make it sound.
Another possible applications is to arrange a melody into something more interesting. This works very good with songs such as Christmas carols or simple pop songs (where only triads are involved). As an example, I transcribed here my arrangement of “O Come All Ye Faithful”. All the shapes involved are just triads (I wrote the names of the triads above the score to help you study it). While writing an arrangement like this seems very complicated, it is in fact quite easy even if you do not know the chords that go with the melody. You just try all the different shapes whose top note is the melody note you are trying to harmonize, until you find something that sounds good. It’s fun and easy! You can hear a recording of this arrangement by clicking HERE.
As you can see, there is way more to triads than meets the eye! One thing that we have not covered here, and that is very important to know, is how to CONNECT these triads together when you play them in a Chord Progression on Guitar so that the chords sound 'together' and not disjointed. You can learn this by clicking the button below and reading the page that will appear. Have fun!
