Building Chords

Building chords is rather simple once you understand what a chord is and how it fits in with the corresponding scale (refer to other posts). To build a chord you take the root note of the scale, then for each new note you use take the next third (Carter 91). For example, the C scale: the root is C, the third is E, then G, then B. Make sure that when building a chord, not all the notes of the scale is used. This is necessary because some notes in the scale do not fit with the rest when played together. For example, A, B, and C do not sound pleasant together even though they are all part of the C scale. “note that in practice, not all chords are played, or voices, with all of these notes being included – so that it is possible to play a seventh chord by playing only a root, a third and a seventh” (Carter 91). When playing a C scale, you can skip the third note (which is the fifth step) and it would still sound like the scale.

https://youtu.be/2cSu0TTtTUI

In this video, I played a typical C scale. As mentioned above, you can play a chord without the fifth step in it (so the notes for a C scale would be C, E, and B and the chord still sounds clean). You could also do this with other steps of the chord such as playing C, E, G, and D. When you delete the seventh step in a scale, it is labelled as an add9 (so the C chord would be called Cadd9).

If A, B, and C are all notes in the C scale, why are they not able to be played together?

Carter, Nicolas. How Chords are Built. Music Theory From Absolute Beginner to Expert. N.p.: Nicolas Carter, 2016. 91-92. Print.