Scales And Chords

I told you before, to form chords out of a scale, we simply take all the chords which have notes belonging to the scale, and play these chords. Now we look at forming chords from a scale, which will make life easier for us.

First of all, we'll form major/minor chords out of the major scale. To do so, we list the notes of the major scale, C major, each note numbered:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
C D E F G A B

First, we will form the chord based on C. We will select the notes 1, 3, and 5. These would be C, E and G. These are the notes of the C chord, so the first chord would be C major.

To form the next chord, we will list the C major scale starting at D.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
D E F G A B C

Note that this is not the D major scale, we simply wrote the C major scale in a different way. Now, we will select the notes numbered 1, 3 and 5 from the new listing. These would be D, F and A. Based on the notes, the second chord will be D minor.

To figure out the third chord, we will repeat the above process; listing the C major starting from the E note, and selecting 1, 3 and 5. We will continue this process to figure out the rest of the chords. Try to figure out chords for the remaining notes.