Triad Foundations – Unlocking Chords and Understanding Triads

Triads are a huge point of conversation when it comes to guitar learners. They are a major buzz word (hopefully that’s not your strings buzzing!).

Today we’ll look at how open chords and triads are related. My aim is to demystify them for you.

It’s easy enough to learn triad shapes and remember where they go on the fretboard but what really unlocks this topic is understanding certain elements of Theory (and the guitar fretboard). That will help you to work them out for yourself.

Questions answered today:

1. WHAT IS A TRIAD?
2. WHY ARE TRIADS IMPORTANT?

 

I’m going to start by answering Question 2 first,

WHY ARE TRIADS IMPORTANT?

1. They’re the foundation of all chords. 
2. They give us different voicings and registers to play the same chord in (we can take all the open chords we know and play them all over the neck)
3. We can use them to vary our rhythm, riff & lead playing. They really open up our options of where to go for sounds on the guitar
4. For some it makes playing guitar accessible when you have options of playing chords with just 3 strings

 

WHAT IS A TRIAD?

UNDERSTANDING OPEN CHORDS (GUITAR THEORY INJECTION):

To help understand a triad I’m firstly going to look at some of our old favourite common open chords (major and minor ones only, in this lesson). A little chord analysis…

Most people come to guitar memorising certain shapes for chords. eg C Am G F etc…This works for a time but has its limits. I will help you unlock your guitar a little bit today.  Once we know what makes up the chord, as well as how to work out the notes on the guitar neck (for now using a fretboard map is allowed) we can find those chords in different places…

We’ll start with the C Major Chord:

We play 5 strings for the C Major open chord. But let’s look at what notes are in the chord.

In order, from the A string to the high e string the notes played are – C E G C E

Yes, we play 5 strings but we’re only actually playing 3 separate notes C E G.  The doubling up of certain notes gives the chord a fuller sound but at its core we only need 3 notes to create a C chord. 

Deeper diving, lets look at the C Major Scale. 

The notes are numbered 1-8. We take notes from this scale to create chords. If we look at the 3 notes we need to make our C chord (C E G) and call them by their number positions in the C Major Scale

We have C = 1   E = 3   G = 5

Another example…

A Minor Chord

We have 5 strings in this chord too. The notes in order from A string to high e are: A E A C E

Again, just 3 notes – A C E

The related scale – A Natural Minor consists of:

The notes from the Am Chord A = 1   C = 3   E = 5

 

 I’m SURE you’re seeing the pattern by now but, just one more example….

 

G Major Chord

We play 6 strings.

In the 4-fingered one, the notes are – G B D G D G if we take the ring finger off and play the 3-fingered G = G B D G B G

The 3 notes at the core of G are?  G B D

The G Major Scale is 

This again, means for our G chord that G = 1   B = 3   D = 5

 

This is the same principle for ALL Major & Minor chords. 

 

RECAP

What you now know is 

• Major or minor chords only actually have 3 notes at their core

• These are specific notes – The 1st, 3rd & 5th from the related scale

THIS = THE TRIAD

Together with a fretboard map of the guitar (or your memory of the fretboard) you can now go and find the Triads of each open chord on your guitar fretboard to spice up your playing and to get to know this awesome instrument further!

➡️ Premium PDF Lesson Download (This is 6 pages of printable detailed content that include extended information,  details of how to work these out on the guitar fretboard and fretboard diagrams with 6 shapes for Major Triads and 6 shapes for Minor Triads.

Full Video Lesson

 

If you thrive on all this information as much as I do it will bed worth its weight in getting to know your guitar. Take you time and soak it up!

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