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Enough groundwork! You know the Major Scale, the Intervals, and the Triads. Let's unravel the formulas for chord construction.
First off, we're largely going to be thinking about the Major Scale here. With that in mind, you should already know the intervals that make up a Major chord. A root note, the Major 3rd, and the Perfect 5th.
Put another way, the "recipe" for a Major chord is:
1 + 3 + 5
The Sus2 and Sus4 chords are, respectively:
1 + 2 + 5, and 1 + 4 + 5
What about a Minor chord? Easy, we just make that a Minor 3rd and we get:
1 + b3 + 5
So far, this shouldn't be anything new to you. But let's take it a step further. Many chords contain more than 3 distinct notes, and this is where things get interesting.
You've probably heard of 7th chords by now. As you might expect, these chords have a 7th interval added into them.
Let's look at the 3 most common 7th chords.
Following the pattern we've laid out, we can construct a Major 7th like this:
1 + 3 + 5 + 7
For the Minor 7th, we use a Minor Triad with the Minor 7th on top. A simpler way to think of this is that we simply used the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes used in the Minor Scale!
Just remember, if you want to make a Minor Chord, follow the Minor Scale:
1 + b3 + 5 + b7
Lastly, the Dominant 7th chord. This one doesn't fit cleanly into either the Major or Minor Scales. No wonder it sounds strange!
It's a Major Triad with a flat 7th on top:
1 + 3 + 5 + b7
Okay, so we've gone all the way up to the 7th now, is the Major Scale out of notes? Not quite. If we keep following the pattern a while longer, we'd get:
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 11 + 13
Of course, we don't really have a 9th interval. A 9th is just a 2nd, one octave up!
Similarly, an 11th is a 4th an octave up, and a 13th is a 6th.
Now we've used all 7 notes of the Major Scale, but in a different order than we typically play it.
This is the traditional method of chord construction. We would call this a 13th chord.
Of course, we can't really play a chord like that on the guitar, no matter how we arrange the notes. It's very common, then, to omit some notes of the chord.
The first to go is usually the 5th. It's such a stable sound that it doesn't really add much colour to a chord. This means playing a 7th chord with only the root, 3rd, and 7th is very common. You might hear these kinds of chord shapes called a "shell voicing".
Another common occurrence, often with 9th chords is to drop the 7th. A traditional 9th chord is played as:
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9
If we drop out the 7th, it becomes simply a basic triad with a 9th on top:
1 + 3 + 5 + 9
This is typically referred to as an "Add9" chord. That tells you it's not a typical 9th chord with all the notes included. For example, a "Cadd9" would be a C Major triad with the 9th added on top.
This is far from an exhaustive list of all possible chord combinations, but I hope it's given you a basic understanding of how to build chords for yourself, and how to read some chord notations.
For a more in-depth examination of chord notations, click HERE for a discussion of Chord Naming Convention.
If you'd like to start applying some of this theory, click HERE to check out some Common Tetrad Shapes.
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