Have you ever looked at guitar chord charts, and wondered how those chords were constructed? Or were looking for a chart for a particular named chord, but couldn’t find one?

In this series of posts, I’m going to look at some aspects of guitar chord theory, namely how guitar chords are constructed using the notes of various scales. This will hopefully give you an insight into where guitar chords come from, and some idea of how to create chord shapes on the guitar fretboard.

In this post, I’ll talk about how basic chord construction works for guitar chords. Later posts will cover how more complex guitar chords are created, using the same principles.

When you first start learning the guitar, pretty much one of the first things you learn to play are the basic major guitar chords, such as C-major, G-major, etc, and you learn to read guitar chord diagrams like this one:

which shows an open C-major chord. That’s all well and good, and if you learn a few of these different chord shapes, you’ll be able to play a range of songs. Where though, do these shapes come from?

As you progress on the guitar, it becomes very useful to know something about how chords are constructed. This will let you find chord shapes anywhere on the fretboard. Also, if you want to play lead guitar, then having some understanding of how chords are built from scales will let you create much better sounding solos.

Guitar chords, or more generally any chords in music are created by choosing certain notes from a particular scale. Here, we’re going to look at chords created from the major scale.

Here are the notes & guitar tab for the C-major guitar scale:

The top section shows the regular musical notation, with the names of the notes next to each one. The lower section shows the guitar tab for these notes.

The colored numbers in the middle are important. These are known the scale degrees, which is a fancy way of saying “the note’s number within the scale”. The notes marked in blue are the root notes of the scale, since this is the C-major scale, the root note is the note ‘C’ (3rd fret, 5th string on the fretboard). The notes marked in yellow are the other (non-root) notes of the scale.

To build a basic major chord, we just take the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes from the major scale, and play them together at the same time. Here is the same diagram as above, but now the notes that will form the C-major chord are highlighted:

So the basic major chord consists only of these scale notes 1, 3, 5, and none of the others. If we play these 3 notes together, we get the basic C-major chord, also known as the C-major triad:

Play all the scale notes on your guitar, then only the 1, 3, 5 notes shown, to get an idea of the sound of the basic major chord.

These 3 notes form the bottom part of the C-major chord in the chord chart shown above. To get the other 2 notes, we just repeat the scale notes 1 & 3 (notes C and E), and stack these on top, to get the full C-major chord:

All basic major chords consist only of these 3 scale degrees, 1 (root), 3 and 5 taken from the major scale. The above example used the scale of C-major to create the C-major chord.

To apply this for a different chord, you would start off with the major scale (e.g. the G-major scale), and take notes 1, 3 & 5 from it.

How can this help when playing lead guitar? Say the rhythm chords are C-major followed by F-major, and you’re playing a solo over these. As we’ve seen from above, the notes in the C-major chord are C, E, G. While the rhythm is playing the C-major chord, then lead licks and phrases that start or end on one of these notes, will overall, tend to sound a better ‘fit’ with this chord than other notes from the C-major scale.

When the rhythm changes to the F-major chord, the notes in this chord are the 1, 3 & 5 scale degrees of the F-major scale, which are the notes F, A & C. You would change your licks & phrases to start or end on these notes while the rhythm is playing this chord.

That’s not to say that you have to play licks/phrases that start or end on those 1, 3, 5 notes. Doing so though, is a way to learn how to make your licks & lead lines match the underlying chords, and will seem to blend in better with them than playing just any notes from the scale.

With lead guitar, one aspect is understanding the chord construction from scales, which we’ve introduced above. The other aspect though, is knowing where these particular notes are on the fretboard, which is a different thing to learn & practise. These two aspects together though, can really improve your guitar soloing ability.

Next time, we’ll look at extensions of the basic major chord, and use this same approach to see how these chord variations work.

Chris

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