Playing With Major Chords

For reasons I do not fully understand, many guitarists, myself included at first, have created a disconnect between chords and scales.  My theory is that most of us learned guitar through chord memorization and not chord building. I mean, who wants to do that when the goal is to play the guitar.  Getting bogged down with a bunch of knowledge about the guitar is crazy at first, that is why I say wait until you have a good year under your belt before looking at scales.  Play the guitar and have fun then add the other stuff, learn the chords, and explore the guitar.  In the words of one of the greatest songwriters of all time in the song Into the Great Wide Open Tom Petty put it best, "She had a guitar and she taught him some chords, the sky was the limit."  I know that some of this stuff stifles the fun very quickly, but hang in there--it gets better, the sky is truly the limit when we learn the answers to the ultimate question:  Where do my fingers go on the neck?

Chords do not make scales, scales make chords.  Simple right?  (Just nod and agree for the moment.)  In a book that my mom gave me, there is a chart printed on the back inside cover called The Magic Chord Accompaniment Guide.  It may not be magic, but it is awesome! The book is called Alfred's Basic Guitar Method, by Alfred d'Auberge and Morton Manus.

At first I thought the magic was what was revealed on the chart, things like in the key of C you have C, F, G as the major chords, then D minor and A minor and G7 and so on, it was eye opening.  Two years into my guitar playing, I knew only about the major chords and sevenths but not about minors.  Today I owe a lot to that chart for showing me E minor, which by the way, is my favorite chord, and I do not mean that it is one of my favorite chords, it is hands down my favorite.

What the chart does not show is how the writer put all of that information together.  Today I realize that the true magic is what is done in forming the chart, but sadly after learning this, guitar playing becomes less magical and more mathematical.  This should not be unbelievable or even catch you by surprise, because music is based in scales, and scales equal notes, and notes equal beats, and beats equal time, and time equals numbers and numbers have time signatures.  For example like this; one and two and one and two and . . . equals 2/4 time. 

Now back to the part where you nodded along, or nodded off; scales make chords.  All you need is the scale then add a formula and voila, you can build the chords you painstakingly memorized.   Take the C scale for example, CDEFGABC and the Formula 135 and you will get this:

That is it.  You have successfully built a chord.  The thing to remember is to use the scale of the chord you wish to build, for A use A scale, for B use B scale and so on.  This is only how you build major chords though, the others have their own formulas.  The notes can be arranged in any order and in any way on the neck, and repeated as well.  Next take your notes C E G and put them on the guitar in an easy to use way, the most popular is this one:

When I teach I ask my students how many notes they are playing, most count their fingers and say three and in this case they are right.  Notice that all six strings can be played because in this form CEG low E and high E are played open, along with G. 

For me I found that not having the knowledge of how this chord exists was clouding my ability to see that this chord can be played anywhere on the neck where the notes are found.  I first noticed this phenomenon when I was playing a song with my Grandpa.  When he played C, he pressed the Low E on the 3rd fret and made it G, turning the C chord into a four-fingered chord; needless to say, I was confused.  This happened many years ago, before I knew of the formula, so I wondered who was playing it right. I ran through many ideas and landed on a generational gap theory: older guitar players played C like Grandpa, and the young played like me, until one day I say another guy who played a C in a way I did not know.  Later I asked him what the chord was and he said that it was C2.  Then I had it figured out, or at least I thought I did.  Grandpa's way was C1, this guy's was C2 and mine was C3.  Not!  Later I noticed my way was used more often, so naturally I changed the order to mine being number one and Grandpa's being number three.

Here are the other two forms:

Who was right?  Everyone, but my theory of 1,2,3 was way off and the guy who classified his chord as a C2 was wrong in his classification of his form of C and this is why. 

The 135 formula helps us build chords is in the same octave. On any scale the notes 1-7 are in the same octave and the 8th is the end of the scale, but the start of the next scale in the octave above. Making the formula for his C2 written 135+9, that is all 8 notes of the scale plus 1 in the next octave, equaling 9. A true C2 would omit the E on the D string and play D open making a formula 1235.  As you can see there would have been no way for me to make sense of the C situation without the help of chord building, because I didn't have the formula to reclassify the guy's C2 as C+9.

Grandpa played the notes GCEGCE, mine was ECEGCE, and the other guy's was ECEGDE.  Notice that Grandpa's way has a more even spread then mine; 2G's, 2C's, 2E's.  Mine 3E's, 2C's, 1G. What might be a good and long debate over coffee sometime is answering which form is the best way of playing C.  I will tell you what I think, though I never play it in this way.  I choose the four fingered C as the best way.  Like I said before it gives a very even spread of the notes, but for all intents and purposes, my three-fingered C style is effective.  In the end, it may just be up to personal preference.  

So what came first the Scale or the Chord? After you build your first major chord using the 135 formula you will have your answer, and go on and add a 2 or a 9 if you want to.