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- Hey, everybody, and welcome back
to Music Theory for the Dropouts.
My name's Cassi Falk and today we are talking about chords.
Chords are made up of three to four notes
and we want to think of them kind of as a full word.
When we see the word "cat,"
we don't see the separate letters as c-a-t,
we see it as a whole system,
and that's sort of what we want to see our chords as.
So, let's take a nice, easy chord; the C chord.
When we say a C chord, C is going to be the base note
and we're going to skip up a letter name,
and another letter name.
You can see on the staff how they all go from a line,
to a line, it kinda looks like a snowman.
And if they're all in the space,
they look like that.
So, the first way that we figured it out,
was we just went from C, we skipped up a letter name,
and another letter name.
Now, this is called C major.
So, let's see how it's all made up.
From C, we go up what is called a Major Third,
which is composed of four half steps.
So from C we go up one, two,
three, four half steps and end on E.
And then again we go from C and add a Perfect Fifth up,
which is seven half steps.
So one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven.
So here we have our Major Third on the bottom,
and a Perfect Fifth from C to G.
So notice how it sounds.
It has a nice, happy sound to it,
and the symbol for this one is written
just with a capital C.
So we have our major chord,
but now let's change that to a minor chord.
The minor chord has a sadder sound to it
and the only thing that we're changing is the middle note.
We're changing the middle note from an E down to an E flat.
So let's see how this one is composed.
We wanna have now a Minor Third for the bottom two notes,
which is made up of only three half steps.
So from C we go up one, two, three.
Now remember we have to call this an E flat,
and not a D sharp,
because we always have to skip a letter name.
So we have our C going up our three semitones to E flat.
And we keep that Perfect Fifth from C to G
for the outside notes.
The chord symbol for C minor is written with a capital C
and a lowercase m.
So let's take this and now apply it
with our starting point being D.
So with our letter names, we have to have a D,
and an F, and an A.
Already with our ears we can kind of tell that
that's going to be a minor chord.
But let's double check.
We have D, and we even want to go up a Minor Third
for a minor chord.
So we're gonna do our three semitones from D.
One, two, three.
There's our Minor Third and our Perfect Fifth
on the outside notes.
So we go from D, remember this is seven semitones.
One, two, three,
four, five, six, seven.
So D minor is written with a capital D
and a lowercase m.
Now remember, minor chord, Minor Third on the bottom,
so to make it a Major Third,
we just have to now make this middle note a Major Third
from the bottom.
So from D, we're gonna go up our four semitones.
One, two, three, four.
We can already hear that from the D minor starting point,
and D major, has a definite sound to it.
And we keep that A that was on the outside
and make our D major chord.
So whether we use our ear to determine
whether it's a major chord or a minor chord,
or we use that semitone pattern of our Minor Third
or Major Third to find our notes,
either way we can apply this anywhere on the piano
and find out a whole bunch of chords.
Explore the piano, find your own chords, comment below.
I'd love to know what your favorite chord is,
and we'll see you at the next lesson.
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