- Hey I'm Nate Savage with Guitareo
and I'm here with David Becker today.
We've been recording, well Dave's been recording,
some series on triads and I remember when
I first learned about triads, from a book.
I had no idea why I was learning them.
It was confusing to me and it took me forever to learn them
and I had no reason for doing it so it took me forever.
It was terrible, but David mentioned something today
that was like, "I wish someone would have told me"
It was a really cool application for triads.
And I just wanted him to share that with you
so you could have some kind of perspective on
how you use triads and then he's going to show you
a really cool exercise for getting to know
and move triad shapes up and down the fret board.
- So, basically Nate, what's interesting about triads
is we think of them as just being these little chords.
Little nice, little sounds and using them when
you're comping and maybe once in a while
you try to find a melody but really
our musical system is based on triads.
We have major, minor, diminished, and augmented.
Those are our colors of the rainbow.
All the combinations of those triads
make up all these, you know, complicated chords
like major sevens and dominant sevens
and these sharp nines and flat fives.
So, what I did was I took a chord scale.
Just the C major chord scale
which is C major seven, D minor seven, E minor seven,
F major seven, G seven, A minor seven,and B half diminished.
And within those four note chords,
they are made up of two triads.
So the C major seven is made up of a C major.
In this case, the third is up an octave.
And an e minor.
The D minor seven is made up of a D minor and a F major.
E minor seven is made up of E minor and G major.
The next chord, F major seven, is made up of a F major
and an A minor.
And the G seven, the blues chord, is made up of a G major
and a B diminished.
You can hear that blues sound.
A minor seven is made up of A minor and C major.
And then the half diminished,
so I'll play it down here as well so it's a little easier,
is made up of a diminished triad and a minor. D minor.
So that's how we spell those.
It's kind of like when you spell words, you know.
If you spell the word cafe, how do you spell that?
Okay, most people, C-A-F-E, but it could be K-A-F-F-E-E.
- Yeah
- Or it could be C-A-F-F-E.
I've seen it all different ways.
The idea of the word is not the spelling,
it's the sound, the pronunciation.
It's cafe. It's the two sounds.
So C major seven is C major and that E minor is important
because when you hear that major seven, you're really.
The C itself is very little to do with the sound
of the major seven.
Same thing with the G seven, that G seven sound
that diminished really gives you the sound of the chord.
In fact, a lot of guys will play this shape,
the diminished shape, as a G seven and not play the root
which is perfect, you know.
(riffs on guitar)
So anyway, what I did was I put together a way to see
the neck with these triads in a key
because if you don't have a way to put them together
it's like going to the buffet and you order steak
and you go pasta, wow fish, salad,
boy that crab leg looks great,
but your plate is so full and you go,
"Great I've got all the food on my plate,
what do I do with it?"
- [Nate] Right?
- You have to put it into context,
otherwise you get indigestion and you don't want that.
So, here's what you do.
In the key of C major, the triads move with each other.
Not diatonically like C to D minor but what happens is
I can move this triad, this C major,
I can do one of two things.
I can raise the fifth and still be in the key of C
which makes me go to A minor.
Or I can lower the root, which would go to E minor
and those two triads are in the key of C
but I want to move up because
I want to see how the neck moves upwards.
So I'm gonna raise the fifth
and the fifth happens to be,
in this case, on the top string.
Now, there's a pattern that's going to form
and this pattern will always work,
regardless of the inversion.
So in this case, I raise the fifth of C major
and now I have A minor.
Now, the fifth of this chords is now not on the top string
but it's in the middle string.
So A minor I'm gonna raise the fifth
which is this E note here, to F.
Now I get F major so I have C, A minor, F major.
Now the bottom string is going to be the next one up.
That's going to be from here the F major,
the fifth is now the base of the chord,
move that up to D minor, so I have this C major,
A minor, F major, D minor
and you can hear that's all the key of C.
It sounds like a nice cadence.
Top note gets moved again cause we're starting over
with our pattern so now it goes up here to B diminished.
Middle string moves up and we've got G major.
Bottom string moves up and got E minor.
Top string moves up and we're back to C.
Whole octave of a scale, but the scale is
not going diatonically; one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven.
What's happening, diatonically, is
(plays notes on guitar)
Sounds very musical.
- That's pretty, yeah.
- And if you play 'em, you can play them as chords.
(plays chords)
Which is fine, this is like snow on a mountain top or ice.
Also make them flow like a river.
So they're going to melt.
And that's how you use them.
You'll actually do them on all sets of strings
so I did them on the top strings.
You can do them on the bottom strings, the middle strings.
Your C major, A minor, F major,
D minor, B diminished, G major, E minor, C
and I keep going up.
Next octave, here's A minor.
Then we got F, D minor, B diminished,
G major, E minor, and so forth.
So what's happening is when you start to do this,
you're seeing the diatonic movement
but you're seeing them in shapes.
So whenever I'm on a note and I want to play something in C,
I know that there's a G here.
I know that there is a B diminished here.
I know that there is a D minor here.
I can see there's a G.
(plays riffs on guitar)
So I'm not limited to just
(plays scales on guitar)
There's a lot of black holes when I do that.
- Yeah.
- But here, there are no black holes.
I can do the whole neck, like I'll start down here on C.
There's the first possible C on the first fret.
Right? E is the open strings.
There's the A minor. There's F.
There's D minor. There's B diminished.
There's G. There's E minor.
There's C, where we started before.
So you see, there's all options are there for me to play.
(plays riffs on guitar)
- And I'm going up.
Two octaves, no black holes.
- This is a great example and a point for me,
where I am in my playing, cause typically when
I practiced triads, I either practice a chord scale
- Right.
- Or a progression throughout.
- Right.
- Like G, C, D for example.
- Right.
- Or C, G, F
- Right.
- In the key of C, up the neck and I'm like,
"Okay I can do that, that's fine"
But this covers, it's a different way to cover
every diatonic chord in the key
- It is.
- While working with the fret board like you said
- Right
- With no black holes.
- And what you want to do with this is
to really apply it logically is take a chord out
of the key of C.
Let's take G seven.
- Sure.
- Okay, so I'll just put a G seven in my loop here.
Here's my loop.
And I'll play, I said that G seven is
G major and B diminished so I'll play those.
But I can also add the D minor, E minor.
So that whole movement, going from this
to this, to this, to this, which we did in that cadence,
they all work over G seven.
Here's C, F.
Another thing too that would be good to do is just take
the root triad of that dominant seven, G major,
and play a whole step down the F
because that contains six of the seven diatonic notes
that are in that chord so you can isolate it like that
but you also have the other options
of getting the chord tones.
And never forget too that what's important is the intervals
that are inside those inversions.
Take a look at that B diminished up here.
There's a tritone.
There's a fourth in that G.
So, get to know those intervals really well
so that when you're targeting notes
you're gonna be able to play them.
And you're not going to get lost in a key
where you're suddenly like "I don't know where I'm at".
- Well that's for sharing that with us David.
I know this is going to help my playing a lot
and for you guys out there who have been playing
a long time but maybe never understood how triads worked
or what they can do for your playing,
this is going to be something that is going to be really
beneficial for you to dig into.
- Absolutely.
- And if you want to check out the entire course
that David did today actually,
it will be up on Guitareo very soon.
We'll see you there.