How to Tell What Guitar Chords Are In A Key

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Hey I’m Nate Savage and in this lesson I’m going to teach you how to find out what chords are in a given key.

To do this you're going to need to know the key signature of whatever key your in. So let’s pick a key and let’s do D major and in the D major there’s 2 sharps C sharp and F sharp. So when we spell the key of D, spell that, scale out, we have D, E F sharp, G, A, B and C sharp and back around to D.

So how can you tell what chords are in that key? There's a really simple formula that’s easy for you to remember and hopefully this will be really simple for you where can really pick out any major or minor chord in the given key. The formula is that 1, 4, and 5 on the given key are always major chords. If we’re talking about major key, so if in the key of D major. It’s going to be D,G, and A are going to be our major chords, our 3 major chords for the key of D.

[Demonstration]

So those are the major chords in the key of D. Now, if you want to find out our minor chords in the key of D. All we have to do is remember this formula here 2, 3, and 6 are always going to be minors. So if we count 2 away form D, that’s E, that’ll be a minor chord, if we count 3 away from D, D, E F sharp that’s going to be a minor chord as well. And if you count 6 away from D, G, E, F sharp, G, A and B, 6 that’s going to be a minor chord as well.

So we have all that taken care of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ones going to be major, 2 is going to be minor, 3 is going to be minor, 4 is going to be major, 5 is going to be major, 6 will be minor and finally, the 7th chord of the key in this case is going to be a C sharp, it's going to be called a half diminished chord.

So if you had a minor chord, a typical minor chord will have a root, a flat3rd, and a 5th . A diminished chord or half diminished chord, depending what context you're talking about it in, will have a lower 3rd and you’re going to lower the 5th one step as well. So you're going to have a root, a 3rd, a flat 3rd and a flat 5th as well.

So that is how you tell what chords or what quality major minor or diminished in a given key. Take a key write it out, put your key signature on there and then label the 1st, 4th and 5th major and then label the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th minor and finally, the 7th will be a diminished chord.






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