Chords: Who, What, When, Where, and Why

Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here): 

THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!

It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.

DON’T BE LIKE THEM! 

Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks. 

Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.

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So far you’ve learned every chord imaginable. You are literally a chord master. 

You just learned scales. And you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just tell you what a chord is and how it works. Because I felt you needed one more step before we went into making chords. You’ll see why momentarily. Let’s check it out. 

Here’s your normal A minor scale again:

Here’s an A minor chord:

What notes are in the A minor chord? 

Let’s start with low E string and work our way up:

• 6th string- N/A (because we don’t play it)

• 5th string- A

• 4th string- E

• 3rd string- A

• 2nd string- C

• 1st string- E

To dwindle that down, we only have three notes there: A-C-E (the other notes are just repeats of those). 

So how do these three notes connect to the scale? 

Here’s the numbering of the A minor scale again:

The notes from the A minor chord are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th scale degree: 

Every single minor and major chord is made up of these three scale degrees (1st, 3rd, and 5th). The big difference being the minor and major chords are the result of the minor and major scales. 

The A major chord is based on the A major scale.

The notes for the A major chord are A-C#-E. It’s still the 1st, 3rd, and 5th scale degree for the A major scale. 

You can figure out every single minor and major chord using this system:

1. Pick a chord 

2. Make the appropriate scale (depends on the chord you picked whether it’s minor or major). 

3. Notice the 1st, 3rd, and 5th scale degrees in that scale. 

4. Check the notes that are actually in the chord going string by string. Are the scale degrees different from these notes? If they are the same, you did it right. If they’re different, start over and make sure the half and whole step relationships are correct for the chord/scale you’re working with. If you need a reminder, go back to our post on scales.

If this all makes sense to you, you’re probably wondering what a 7th chord is. Look at the A minor scale again and the Am7 chord.

Am7 is exactly what it says it is. It’s the A minor chord with the additional 7th scale degree. This means the notes for this chord are A-C-E-G. This is easy. 

Now what’s not easy, is the A7 chord. It’s a little more challenging because the notes for this chord are
A-C#-E-G. 

Wait, what happened? Shouldn’t that 7th degree be G#? 

Yes, but it's a little more complicated. 

A normal 7th chord (regardless of it meaning a minor or major chord) should have a whole step between the 7th and 1st scale degree. That’s easy to do in minor because that’s how the minor scale works, but difficult in major since it’s only a half step between those two notes in that scale. 

Minor Scale:

Major Scale:

A normal 7th chord is a minor-7th chord. In music theory, an Am7 chord is called a minor-minor chord due to the minor chord and the minor-7th chord.  An A7 chord is called a major-minor chord since it’s a major chord with a minor-7th. 

So if we want a major-7th chord, we’d have to indicate it in the name like this: 

Now both of those chords use the G# as the 7th instead of the normal G in the regular 7th chords. 

Is this confusing? 

Yes it is. It’s even more confusing because we indicate minor chords with a “m” (Am), while major chords we don’t (A). But minor-7th’s we don’t indicate the minor-7th (Am7 or A7), while major-7th chords we do indicate the major-7th (AmM7 and AM7). 

Hey, I didn't make the rules. 

So here’s the different A chord’s we’ve gone over: 

See how they change from chord to chord? 

If you think you have it all figured out, try out the D and the E chords. Go through every step listed above and play every single version of the chord you can. That means, Dm, D, Dm7, D7, DmM7, DM7, and all the same versions of E. 

You got this. Get it done and become a master of da chords.