Posted in: Music Theory by Cadoink on March 19th, 2009 | 0 Comments
This discusses how musical chords are made and why they are made the way they are as well as how they relate to each other.
This is an article explaining how to make musical chords. This will be theoretical. If you wish to play any of these chords on an instrument all you will have to do is play the necessary notes in the chord. In this article I will tell you how to make a major chord, a minor chord, some of the 7th chords, a diminished chord, and some of the other chords such as a 9th chord.
Image via Wikipedia
To understand how to make a chord, you must first understand how to make a scale. I have an article discussing in detail on how scales are made.
If you wish to view this article you can go to: http://www.musicouch.com/Music-Theory/Music-Theory-for-Beginners.71940
If you understand how scales are created, or how to create scales, then you can skip this part.
Here is the basic idea. There are 12 tones, or notes total. These are A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp. Also, you can refer the sharps as flats as well. So a step from A is A sharp, but a step backwards from B would be a B flat. So A sharp, and B flat, are the same tone, or in other words they sound exactly the same. The movement from one tone to another is known as a half step. So from C to C sharp is a half step. From C to D is a whole step.
Now will all this knowledge you can create a scale. The formula for a major scale is:
Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step, Whole Step, Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step
If we look at the C scale, we see it is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. The C scale has no sharps or flats. If we look deeper at the scale we see that from C to D it is a whole step. From D to E it is a whole step. From E to F it is a half step. From F to G it is a whole step. From G to A it is a whole step. From A to B it is a whole step. And from B to C it is a half step. This fits our formula of Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, Whole, Whole, Half.
