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Easy Beginner Guitar Lessons- My first steps to learning major chords on the guitar

By Mike Hayes | August 17, 2009

You can tell a really great guitar player by the way their mind
controls their fingers, not the other way around … there’s no
wasted notes or chords.

Learning the guitar presents all sorts of problems when trying to
apply theoretical information to the fretboard; even the most
basic harmonic concepts such as how to construct major triads
seem to mystify all but the very best guitarists.

Essentially there’s four types of chord families; the major,
minor, augmented and diminished chords.

Today we will look at the major chord or major triad as it often
referred to by musicians.

In our first example we will learn how to spell a ‘C’ major chord.

Step 1. Using notes from the C major scale:

C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C

Step 2. Apply the major chord formula 1-3-5 to identify the
correct chord tones.

In this instance we would use the first, third and fifth notes of
the C major scale to build our C major chord.

Hence the spelling of a C major chord would be C-E-G

It’s as easy as that, once you understand that there is a precise
way to make up a chord you free yourself of chord books, which
simply contain generic chord shapes that have nothing to do with the sound on a particular recording you are wanting to emulate.

Moving on, let’s build the other most popular ‘guitar friendly’ major triads.

G major:

Using the notes from the G major scale G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G then
extracting the first, third and fifth notes we would arrive at
the spelling of G-B-D for a G major chord.

Now, here’s how we would construct a D major chord.

D major scale:

D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D therefore we would spell D major D-F#-A

How about a A major chord?

A major scale:

A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#-A so we would therefore spell A major A-C#-E

Here’s how we would spell an E major chord.

E major scale:

E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-E and the notes in the E major chord are E-G#-B

Applying this concept to the flat keys we would arrive at the
following major chords.

F major

F major scale

F-G-A-Bb-C-D-E-F

F major chord = F-A-C

Bb Major

Bb Major scale:

Bb-C-D-Eb-F-G-A-Bb

Bb major chord = Bb-D-F

Eb Major

Eb Major scale:

Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C-D-Eb

Eb major chord = Eb-G-Bb

Try using this simple formula with all the other keys and you
will be well on your way to mastering chords on your guitar.

And now I’d like to invite you to get free access to my “How To
Remember 1,000 Songs” eCourse. You can download the course for
free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com

From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar
System

http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
http://AdvancingGuitaristProgram.com

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