Chords

An integral part of music is creating chords. Chords are simply a combination of 2 or more notes. 2 single notes would make up a diad, while 3 notes would make up a triad. From here you could build
bigger chords by stacking additional notes together. Things can get complicated pretty quickly but to keep things simple lets focus on triads since these are one of the most fundamental chord types. Think about the
Scales page and remember how a C scale was made up of the notes C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. Using a major scale you are able to create 7 triads using the same notes that appear in the scale. Each note in the scale can be assigned a
value of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1. A Major chord triad consists of a root (1), third(3) and fifth(5) or 1-3-5. So to make a C Major chord you would reference the C major scale and use the notes C-E-G.

C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1
C Major Chord:
C-x-E-x-G-x-x-x

We are able to build the other 6 chords from the C scale but things get a little more confusing when you aren't starting from position 1 or the root of the scale. If you remember, there are 12 notes which means there are
12 Major scales. Each Major scale has 3 major chords, 3 minor chords and a diminished chord which is unique from the other two. In all major scales, the 1, 4 and 5 are major while the 2, 4 and 6 are minor. This leaves the 7th
as the diminished chord which we will ignore for now. With this in mind you can now quickly derive which chords in a scale will be major or minor. The major chords in the key of C are C major, F major, and G major while the
minor chords are D minor, E minor, and A minor. To build a triad from a scale you can simply start from any note and then just skip 1 note using the pattern above. Below is an Emin triad

We start from the E in the scale, skipping one note to follow the pattern 1-3-5
(the chord is automatically made minor because E is the third degree in the C major scale)
C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1
E Minor Chord:
x-x-E-x-G-x-B-x

Below is an example of a few Major chords. To get the notes of each chord, you should use the respective Key the chord belongs to. If you are building a C Major reference the C scale but if you are using a
D Major reference the D Major scale. One last tip is that if you take any major chord and flatten the third by one half step you can automatically make the chord minor. C Major (C-E-G) becomes C Minor (C-Eb-G)
when flattening the third.