This lesson is a follow up to the lesson on figuring out the seven chords in any key. In that lesson, we took the major scale and stacked 3rds on each degree of the scale, to produce seven chords that could be transposed in any key.
Here is a brief summary of the lesson.
The Major scale has seven notes. If we build triads on each note of the major scale, by stacking them in 3rds, we get the following seven chords:
Maj – min – min – Maj – Maj – min – dim
Here is an example in the key of C:
How many chords do you need to know? That’s sort of a ‘how long is a piece of string?’ question, but in this case there is an answer, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
There are 15 chords that when mastered, will allow you to play thousands upon thousands of songs. These 15 chords are ‘open chords’, which means they’re played in the first position, and use at least some open strings. There are 15 open chords that just happen to get used more than the others. It’s basically the 80/20 rule – most of the time, we use a small percentage of available chords.
Because these 15 chords are relatively easy to play, and because the open strings give them a beautiful, resonating character, they get used most often, which makes them more popular. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Why is a chord a chord? It’s a question philosophers have grappled with since the beginning of time. Ok, not really, but it is the subject of this lesson. Guitarists have a great dependance on chords. Many guitarists put themselves into the ‘rhythm-guitarist’ category and decide that that’s all they’ll ever learn. But for all the time we devote to learning chords and using them in music, we often overlook what they actually are, at a fundamental level. There are a few reasons why this happens. The main one is that we tend to learn shapes, which means that we can play a D minor chord without knowing what it’s made up of. We can also learn thousands of songs, using chords, without understanding how the chords work together, so we easy develop a philosophy early on of ‘Who cares why this chord works? It just does’.
Most guitarists play chords by learning shapes. By learning commonly used shapes, you have the tools to play thousands of songs. This is a great way to enter the world of chords and start playing music.
One of the downfalls of this is that it is very easy to learn how to play chords, without knowing exactly what chords are. In this lesson, we are going to break down exactly what chords are, by exploring triads.
What would you do if you had to improvise a guitar solo and had never done it before? Let’s say you were in a band situation and you only had a few minutes to figure out what you were going to do.
Analysing a chord progression and figuring out which scales should be used at different points can be tricky. It can also be hard to execute scales on the fly, while being musical and sounding confident. The hardest thing for guitarists who are just starting out with improvising, is just that – getting started. I often teach students who simply want to know what to do, when jamming in a certain key with friends, or who are asked to take a solo in an ensemble.
For these reasons, I think it’s good to have a basic battle plan. A kind of simple rule of thumb that can work as a starting point, but can also be your go-to tool when improvising.
If you’ve been reading up on the many lessons relating to scales on this site, you will most likely know the importance of learning scales in five positions (known as the CAGED system).
By learning scales in five positions, we cover the entire fretboard, which allows us to play any given scale no matter what position we are in.
But what about arpeggios? Do they work in the same way?