Chord Spelling - Major and Minor Triads

Know Your Chord Tones

Knowing the individual notes or chord tones of a chord helps with remembering melodies, enhancing existing chords and improvising.

From the 15 major scales below we can come up with the possible chords one will encounter in most music.

From the major triads we can derive and remember the notes of other chord types.

Major Chord (Triads - 3 notes)

A major triad is made up of the chord tomes build from the major scale degrees 1, 3, and 5.

Here are the 15 major triads for the 15 major scales:

Observations, Tips and Tricks

Over the many years of teaching, playing and publishing I have come up with a few ways for a student or player to learn the notes of a chord. Here are a few observations.

For chords with the same letter name root, whether contains a sharp, flat or natural note the three letters are always the same. For C, Cb or C# major triads they all contain the letters "C E G". This will be true whether the chord is major, minor, diminished or augmented. Each individual letter might be a flat, double flat, sharp or double sharp - but the letter name of the chord tone will not change.

Most common chord triads are build from of major and minor thirds. These chord tones are three letters away from each other. An interval of a third. C D E F G

A third is the distance between one line and the next of the music staff or from one space and the next space of the music staff. In the treble or "G" clef the names of the lines are E G B D F and F A C E for the spaces. These are the order of the letters in the chords without any sharps or flats.

The E G B D F is the Every Good Boy Does Fine nemonic the is taught in elementary school music class.

In any major and its relative minor key that are three major triads. Here are the two triads that did not show up in the original 15 keys list above.

• Fb Ab Cb
• G# B# D#

Note the letters are the same as one of the previous chords but 1/2 step lower or higher

Here is the complete list of possible major triads that are in the 15 keys sorted alphabetically:

Memorize this list

More Observations, Tips and Tricks

Every Amaj, Amin, Adim, Aaug whether it's A, A# or Ab will be some form of the word ACE. This might help in organizing the memorization process for the seven letters used in the musical alphabet A, B, C, D, E, F and G. This can be viewed as seven words to memorize. Sort of a spelling list to memorize.