Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright (Howard@jmdl.com)
1.0 : Introduction
Chapter 1 : Introduction
The idea of this FAQ
is to give you the information you need to be
able to work out and understand which notes make up a certain chord.
Using this FAQ you will be able to:
- Work out the notes you need for any chord.
- Work out what chord name should be given to a particular bunch of
A lot of people are put off
from delving into a little chord theory
because there seems so much to learn, it often seems confusing, and
it's hard to give hard and fast rules
. When someone posts a chord
and asks 'What is the name of this chord?
' there are usually at
least four different replies given. It is true that in a lot of cases
there is more than one way to look at things
, and often a chord
could be given two names, but it's still surprisingly easy to get
to grips with the basics
of chord names
What do you need to know to be able to work out chord names for
Well it is hard to give 'Golden Rule
s' of harmony or music theory
which can be followed to the letter always giving the right answer.
However there are a small number of basic guidelines
which you can
follow that should take 95% of the mystery away from music theory
as applied to chords.
First things first. To work out chord names the first and most
important skill is to be able to count
. Hopefully everybody
mastered this skill some years ago, so we're off to a good
The second most important skill is to know the major scale
Most people will be pretty familiar with this too, but in any
case it is very easy to learn.
The scale is characterised by the distances between successive notes.
If we choose G
as our starting point, it goes like this:
Note of the scale Distance up from root note Actual note
1 (root note) 0 G
2 2 semitones A
3 4 semitones B
4 5 semitones C
5 7 semitones D
6 9 semitones E
7 11 semitones F#
8 12 semitones G
*** Important note for all you folks in America ***
Over in Britain
we have things called tone
s and semitone
From what I know, you have things called whole step
s and half step
The conversion is:
One tone = one whole step
One semitone = one half step
As I'm used to writing about tones/semitones, those are the words you'll see.
I think you can translate easily enough to steps/half steps.
*** Another note for people in Germany and Scandinavia ***
I will use the British conventions for note names - so there will be Bs and
Bbs. To 'translate':
H = B
B = Bb
Likewise, if any of you that are used to B
s and Bb
s see chord names like H7
, use the above to translate
of tones and semitones is what characterises the scale.
Obviously you can choose whatever note
you like to start on, but if
you simply count up in semitones, using the middle column above,
you will get the major scale
of that note.
It makes things easier if we refer to the notes of the scale as
' or 'the 3rd
'. If we know we are talking about a major scale and we know what the starting note
is, then we can work out what the '7th
' or '3rd
' of that scale is. We use this idea to "spell out
" chords - this is where you say something like:
The major chord is made up of
1st 3rd 5th
This means choose your starting note (the 1st
) find the
of its major scale and you have the right notes for the chord. The advantage of this method is that it can be used to find any
major chord - you just change the starting note
If you want to put in a little effort
, you can quite easily learn
the major scales of every key
. That way you don't have to actually
count up in semitones every time you want to find the 5th
of a certain key. (See Appendix C
- if you want to keep things really simple, counting will work
just as well. So, a little example
You want to find out what notes are in a D major chord.
Your starting note or root note is D (the 1st)
To get the 3rd of the major scale count up 4 semitones - F#
To get the 5th count up 7 semitones - A
So the notes are: D F# and A.
So all this chord stuff comes down to these 3rd
s and so on. These are called intervals
Guide to Chord Formation by Howard Wright
Reformatted and noded (with permission) by Space Butler