What is a Chord made of?

Chord Construction: Unveiling the Building Blocks

In this post, I am writing exclusively about Triads, so there will be no 7th chords.

The “recipe” that is needed for a chord always consists of the same ingredients: namely a root, a third, and a fifth.

The root indicates whether it starts with a C, an F, a G, or any other letter. The third makes the chord a major or a minor, and the fifth is just there. 😛

A chord consists of three or more notes played simultaneously. A note is — as the name suggests — simply a note. Two notes are an interval, and from three notes, we speak of a chord.

Since most popular pop songs consist only of major and minor chords anyway, we will only deal with these two chords here.

To understand this well, we should be familiar with the major and minor scales.

The Major Chord

Based on this C-major scale, a C major chord can now be easily found and played. So we look for a root (R), a major third (3), and a perfect fifth (5) and play them together.

So that we don’t just play three notes and have to make sure that we don’t hit any other string, we can double or even triple the notes.

As you can see here, we are now playing a normal C major chord.

The Minor Chord

The exact same thing can now be done with the minor scale. The only difference between a major and a minor chord is the third. It is played a half step lower, which makes it a minor chord.

If we try to take either the root, the minor third, or the fifth from each string here, we automatically end up with an A minor chord.

Please note

…that the lowest note is always the root. It would theoretically not be wrong and would not necessarily sound wrong if you took either the third or the fifth as the lowest note (this can be read about under Triads and Inversions), but there would then be other names for it, such as Am/E or D/F#, etc.