How triads are build

Triads are chords which contain 3 different notes of a scale, which have to be arranged in intervals of thirds. If you are not familiar with intervals, they simply describe how far one note of a scale is away from a specific other note. If you want to have an interval of a third, you count beginning from your starting note, to the finishing third note. If you start for example on the “C” note, the third will be “E”, because you count “1,2,3” or “C, D, E”, from the first to the third note.

The order of the triads in major keys is as following:

major triad
minor triad
minor triad
major triad
major triad
minor triad
diminished triad

To give you an example, in the key of C major you would build a triad on every note of the scale; it would look as following:

C major
D minor
E minor
F major
G major
A minor
B diminished

You can use this formula for every major key. We are going to take a look now on how the different triads are build:

Major triads:
Major triads are build by a major third and a minor third, in the order of the major third coming first, followed by a minor third. A major third contains two whole steps, while a minor third contains a whole step and a semitone note. To give you a visual aid, here is how a C major chord would look like on the fretboard:

Minor triads:
Minor triads are build by a major third and a minor third, in the order of the minor third coming first, followed by a major third. To give you a visual aid, here is how a A minor chord would look like on the fretboard:

Diminished triads:
Diminished triads are build by two minor thirds following each other. There is only one diminished chord in a major key. In the example below you can see the notes of the diminished chord in the C major scale, which is B diminished:

Now that you know how the triads are build and how they are derived from the major scale, I give you a short assignment to practice and memorize these chord shapes. We covered the A minor and C major triad in this article. Now it is your turn to find out the notes of the remaining major and minor triads of the C major scale. Use your fretboard as visual aid to figure them out, as I've shown you above.

If you find this task as being too easy, try to figure out the same triads as we just discussed for other major keys. If you've done this, you can begin to figure out where you can place the notes of each chord on different strings, so that you can actually hit them with your pick as chords all at once.

Thanks for reading this article, I am Marco von Baumbach, guitar teacher in Wuppertal, Germany. If you want to check out my website about Gitarrenunterricht in Wuppertal you are welcome!