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Triads

Lesson 6 from: Music Theory Essentials: Chords, Scales and Modes

Tomas George

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Lesson Info

6. Triads

<b>In this lesson, you will learn about triads.</b>
Next Lesson: Inversions

Lesson Info

Triads

Hi and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be talking about triads and chords. So a chord is basically more than one note played at the same time. And a triad is a free note chord which consists of the root or the first, the third and the fifth note. So let's have a look at the scale here. You'll notice I've written out ac major scale. So we have CD EFGAB and C and then we're going to build on here the third and the fifth of each of these notes. So all you need to do the simplest way to do this is to just count up from the note you start on and add on the third and the fifth. So this one here c the third. So if 123 is this E, so if you just draw on the E here and 45, is this one here a G? So I just add on a G here to this is ac cord actually ac major chord. Later on, we'll talk more about chord progressions. So how to work out major chords and minor chords and also a chord called a diminished chord. But for now, we're just going to have a look at triads. So the easiest way to ...

build a triad is to just count up from the note we started on. So this one here ad so this is the root when we talk about this D cord, it's actually ad minor chord in the scale of C major. So the third will be this one here, which is an F and then the fifth. So it's 12345, be this one here, which is an A. So it's the same for all the records here as well. So we have the root here. E then the third will be a G and then the fifth will be this one here, which is A B I've just built the other cords as well. You notice there's no sharps or flats because we're in the key of C major. So there's no sharps or flats. And let's just hear this back. I'm sure you'll notice some of these chord sounds. We have major chords, minor chords and also the seventh one here is a diminished chord and we'll talk about these different types of cords a bit later on. So that's a simple triad and that's how you can quickly write them in. So all you need to do is just right at your major scale and then build from there, third and the fifth. If we go to the piano roll editor, we can see here these calls have been written in it as well. So we can write them in with the piano role editor. So we have here CD EFG ABC. So remember tone tone semitone, tone, tone, tone semitone to work them out. Then we just add on the 1 to 3. This note here. 45, this note here, see it matches up. So the 2nd 1123. So it's this note here 45 and it's this note here. So you can write these in in the score editor or the piano roll editor. And in the next lecture, we're going to have a look at something called inversions where we basically change around some of the octaves of these notes in the chord to make it sound a bit nicer and a bit less jumpy. So thank you for watching this lecture just about quickly building triads.

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