Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright (Howard@jmdl.com)
Chapter 1 : Introduction
1.0 : Introduction
The idea of this
FAQ is to give you the information you need to be
able to work out and understand which notes make up a certain chord.
Using this FAQ you will be able to:
- Work out the notes you need for any chord.
- Work out what chord name should be given to a particular bunch of
notes.
A lot of people are
put off from delving into a little
chord theory
because there seems so much to learn, it often seems confusing, and
it's hard to give hard and fast
rules. When someone posts a
chord
shape and asks '
What is the name of this chord?' there are usually at
least four different replies given. It is true that in a lot of cases
there is more than one way to look at things, and often a chord
could be given two names, but it's still surprisingly easy to get
to grips with the
basics of
chord names.
What do you need to know to be able to work out chord names for
yourself?
Well it is hard to give '
Golden Rules' of harmony or music theory
which can be followed to the letter always giving the right answer.
However there are a small number of
basic guidelines which you can
follow that should take 95% of the mystery away from
music theory
as applied to chords.
First things first. To work out chord names the first and most
important skill is to be able to
count. Hopefully everybody
mastered this skill some years ago, so we're off to a good
start.
The second most important skill is to know the
major scale.
Most people will be pretty familiar with this too, but in any
case it is very easy to learn.
The scale is characterised by the distances between successive notes.
If we choose
G as our starting point, it goes like this:
Note of the scale Distance up from root note Actual note
------------------------------------------------------------------
1 (root note) 0 G
2 2 semitones A
3 4 semitones B
4 5 semitones C
5 7 semitones D
6 9 semitones E
7 11 semitones F#
8 12 semitones G
*** Important note for all you folks in America ***
Over in
Britain we have things called
tones and
semitones.
From what I know, you have things called
whole steps and
half steps.
The conversion is:
One tone = one whole step
One semitone = one half step
As I'm used to writing about tones/semitones, those are the words you'll see.
I think you can translate easily enough to steps/half steps.
*** Another note for people in Germany and Scandinavia ***
I will use the British conventions for note names - so there will be Bs and
Bbs. To 'translate':
German/Scandinavian British/Others
H = B
B = Bb
Likewise, if any of you that are used to
Bs and
Bbs see chord names like
H7, use the above to
translate back.
Anyway...
The
pattern of tones and semitones is what characterises the scale.
Obviously you can choose whatever
note you like to start on, but if
you simply count up in semitones, using the middle column above,
you will get the major
scale of that note.
It makes things easier if we refer to the notes of the scale as
'the
7th' or 'the
3rd'. If we know we are talking about a major scale and we know what the starting
note is, then we can work out what the '7
th' or '
3rd' of that scale is. We use this idea to "
spell out" chords - this is where you say something like:
The major chord is made up of
1st 3rd 5th
This means choose your starting note (the 1
st) find the
3rd and
5th of its major scale and you have the right notes for the chord. The advantage of this method is that it can be used to find
any major chord - you just change the
starting note.
If you want to put in a little
effort, you can quite easily learn
the major scales of every
key. That way you don't have to actually
count up in semitones every time you want to find the 5
th of a certain key. (See
Appendix C)
But - if you want to keep things really simple, counting will work
just as well. So, a little
example.
-
You want to find out what notes are in a D major chord.
Your starting note or root note is D (the 1st)
To get the 3rd of the major scale count up 4 semitones - F#
To get the 5th count up 7 semitones - A
So the notes are: D F# and A.
So all this chord stuff comes down to these 3
rds, 5
ths and so on. These are called
intervals.
Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright
Reformatted and noded (with permission) by Space Butler
Index |
Intervals >