Major Scale and Primary Chords

This is the where I explain the primary chords we’ll use during for all the exercises during this section. I’m going to make this as painless as possible, so we don’t get caught up in theory and things of that nature. First I’ll show what a scale looks like, a very simple explanation of chords, and then we’ll focus on the main chords we’re going to use.

Everyone has heard the major scale at some point or another in their lives. To hear the C major scale click here. To shut off the example, hit escape or the close button.

What you notice at first is that the scale is just the 7 white notes of the keyboard being played in succession, one after another with no skips.

So, how do we get chords from the C major scale? Well, for a very simplistic definition of a chord, we’re going to say if you take 3 notes and skip a note in between each of the notes, you have a chord. You can play these 3 notes at the same time or you can sound out each note individually. If you play all 3 at the same time, you get the kind of chords you play on the keyboard to accompany yourself, or on the guitar. If you play the notes individually, you are playing them melody style. All the exercises in this course with deal with playing the notes individually.

Now, because the major scale has 7 notes, there are 7 chords you can build from it. However, for this study, we’re only interested in 3 of these chords. The chords we’re interested in are the chords built upon the C, F and G notes. Click here to see these chords.

If we put numbers underneath the 7 keys, like below, you see that the C chord is built on the 1st scale note, the F is built on the 4th and the G is built on the 5th. As a result of this they are called the one, four and five chords. Most of the time, Roman numerals are used for this, and it looks like I, IV, V chords.

However, each note of each individual chord is always referred to as 1-3-5, where 1 is the first note, 3 is the second note and 5 is the third note. The reason these notes have these names is because 1 is the root note, 3 is the third of the chord and 5 is the fifth of the chord. These are intervals, and intervals will be explained in the words within words lesson. Click here to see numbered chords.

Of these 3 chords, the one, C and five, G are the strongest, with the one, C acting as a “home” chord, and the four, F acting as a supporting or as a transitional chord between the other 2. There are strong theoretical reasons why this is so, which would bore you to tears, so I’ll skip such explanations. However, if you know some music, you can click here for an explanation. If you can't understand it now, you'll understand it better after the section on intervals.

Just take my word for it that for hundreds of years people have found that the one chord is home, the five chord creates tension and goes back to the one chord, and the four chord will also go to the one chord or to the five chord. These are the chords that have built rock and roll, blues and folk music, so we know that they work. Click here to see the 3 main chords. Also notice that they are different colors. The C chord is always going to be red, the F chord yellow and the G chord blue. The reason for this is that as these exercises evolve and you view the examples, you know when the chord changes. More on this in the next section.

So, that’s it for this section. We have the C major scale, you can get 7 chords from the scale, were interested in 3 of those chords, and those 3 chords are the C, F, G or one, four and five respectively. The notes of the chord are labeled as 1-3-5. Those 3 chords, with various changes applied to them, are what were going to focus on for the remainder of all our topics.