by Charlie Garratt

Created on: November 16, 2008

I'm occasionally asked by people who read music, usually singers and musicians whose instruments don't lend themselves to chords, how the chord works. Basically, it's fairly simple - but explaining it isn't. One has to have a little musical knowledge in order to understand it, but if you didn't you probably wouldn't be interested anyway.

Basically, each musical scale in the western music system is made up of eight notes, an 'octave'. though, more accurately it's really 13 half notes (or semitones) and it's important to know that in order to grasp the more subtle chords such as minors and sevenths etc. Each scale progresses from the root note, which is the name of the scale, such as 'C', 'G' etc, as three full notes, a half note, three full notes and a final half note. In the key of 'C' this will be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, in 'G' it will be G, A, B, C, D, E, F#, G and so on.

Now to the chords themselves. The main chords in any scale will be based on the first, fourth and fifth notes of that scale so, when accompanying someone in the key of 'C', for example, the main chords used will be C, F and G. If there's a minor chord being used it would often be based around the sixth note in the scale, so for 'C' the minor chord would often be Am (Aminor), for 'G' it would be Em (Eminor). There will be others but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

To construct any 'major' chord, that is, one of the straightforward ones, take the root note and build the scale, as above, from there. Then the chord will be made up of the first, third and fifth notes in that scale. So, a 'C' chord will contain three notes, C, E and G, a 'G' chord will contain the notes G, B and D. Getting a bit more complicated, an 'A' chord will have the three notes, A, C# and E - same principle but the underlying scale has some sharps in it.

In order to add a slightly different feel to music we also have a number of variations on the basic 'major' chords and there are lots of these, far too many to explain here. It is worth mentioning the two most often encountered variations though, the 'minor' chord and the 'seventh' chord.

In the minor chord we still take the first, third and fifth notes in the scale but we flatten the third note by taking it down a semitone (i.e. to the half note below). So, for Am we would take the C# down to C, giving us a chord made up of three notes: A, C and E.

The seventh chord is slightly more complicated, in that it includes four notes. The first three are the same as the major chord but then we take the seventh note in the scale, flatten it and the add it to the other three. Confusing? Not really. Take the example of the 'C' chord we used earlier. It has three notes, C, E and G. To turn this into a C7 (Cseventh) chord we take the seventh note in the scale of 'C', which is the note B, we then flatten it, making it Bb (Bflat) and add it to the other three so that the C7 chord is made up of C, E, G, B.

Any good chord book will show you all the possible variations but at least this is a start.

Learn more about this author, Charlie Garratt.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.