Welcome to guitarlessons.com I’m Nate Savage. In this lesson, we’re going to be learning how major guitar chords are made. So what we’re going to do is start out by just making a regular Triad, I’ll show you this shape and then I’ll explain to you what we just did. So take your third finger on the fifth fret of your G-string, middle finger on fourth fret of your G-string, and your index finger is going to grab the third fret of the B-string. Just give those three strings a strum.
[Demonstration]
Okay, what we just did was we built a G-major chord, a G, B, and D. Now the way you want to think about this is as far as major chords are concerned, let’s take the G-major scale, write it out, G-A-B-C-D-E-F# and G, start on the G note; circle that G-note, skip one note, so skip A, circle B, skip another note and circle, go the next one and circle D. So you have the G’s, B’s and D’s.
So we start on your G, a third, what we call a third away from that B, that’s why we skipped one note in the scale. And then if you start in your B, a third away from that is going to be a D. And that’s the way you build chords. Now when you’re talking about a major chord and get out what we call a major 3rd on the bottom or from the root note to the 3rd of the chord from your G, to your B, it’s going to be a major 3rd, what we call a major 3rd. And if it was a Minor 3rd, it’d be from a G to a B flat. But we don’t want that since we’re building major chords. We want G to a B. And then from the 3rd to the 5th what we all the 5th of the chord, the 3rd note that’s from a B to a D. And from a B to a D is a Minor 3rd.
So that’s the formula for any major chord that we’re talking about. You’re going to have a Major 3rd from the 1st to the 3rd and a Minor 3rd on top from the 3rd to the 5th. And that gives us the characteristic sound of a regular Major chord. So if you’re to take your regular G-major shape, all that shape that you just learned was G’s, B’s and D’s. It’s just in a way, put together in a way where we can use all six strings to make the chord.
So now that you know how to make a G-major chord, what I want you to do is go find all the G’s, B’s and D’s on the fret board if you can and then try to come up with your own G-major chords.
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