Expanding your chord vocabulary

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A lot of people seem afraid from chord theory, they think it's too confusing and complicated to learn, that's why they don't expand their chord vocabulary. You know that you have to use a variety of chords in your songs, that's why i'm going to reveal some great songwriting techniques that you can use to expand your chord vocabulary.

As you know it's very hard to give exact rules to music theory, that's why every songwriter works with his own techniques, but fortunately, that leads always to the same thing. Let me give you a cool thing: don't bother yourself with a lot of techniques and rules that you'll be ending up confused with, the 2 main things that i need you to learn are "The major scale: the absolute of songwriting techniques", which is the golden technique and "What are Intervals?" where we've talked about a very important thing which is: intervals and their names, in this lesson we're going to see how we can use them to name and modify triads "chords".

In the lesson "First of songwriting techniques you should learn: song key", we've seen how to harmonize the major scale so we can extract chords from it, we take the 1st, 3rd and 5th note of the scale to form a major chord, this means that you can choose your root note let's say C, pick the 3rd and the 5th of the C major scale and you got it "C major chord"= "C - E - G".

Major and minor triads have 1 difference which is that major chords have a major 3rd, and minor chords have minor 3rds which is a semitone or half step less than a major 3rd. If we take the example of C major chord, the 3rd which is E becomes Eb=D# (the same). The C minor chord has these notes "C - Eb - G".

These are the most used chords in music "major and minor chords", we will learn more chords in the next lessons.