Reply To: Music Theory Corner/Practice

[Brian]

So had a little revelation today!!!

First off things are going really slow but its really fine because I am having to study the material alot then I have to take quizzes and stuff. so far have been focused on intervals and I am finding out they are part of everything which makes sense because they are how we label different sounds.

I moved on to Triads today after doing my interval ear training where I hear an interval and find it on guitar then map out the steps and half steps between notes to see what type of interval it is and my ears seem way better than when I was 18 years old as far as being able to find the notes.

Anyway back to Triads! I was not that excited about Triads I knew in the past what a Triad basically was it was a chord with the core notes. for a major chord: root, 3rd & 5th.

However oh boy was I wrong!!! you see while it was said in the past I never paid attention that much that for major chord it was a major 3rd and for the minor chord it was a minor third! Now in the past I knew the word major third, minor third I knew the distance between notes was intervals and those where some of the names of them etc… BUT DID I REALLY KNOW WHAT THEY MEANT??? No I don’t think so. In fact I know I didn’t I was pretty ignorant to the importance of them and how far this all goes.

See once you learn intervals then you start learning triads and then you learn each triad is actually two intervals for major its a [root, major 3rd & minor 3rd] and for a minor its a [root, minor third & major 3rd]. why is this important??? well I will get to that in a moment but look at those two chords real fast first. They are transposed and its all about the interval tone/distance between them. You reverse the minor and you have major and if you reverse the major you have minor.

Next there is two other chords not used often but they have importance and also relate to the intervals. there is Augmented and Diminished Triads and they are very easy to remember. augmented triad is [major triad with raised 5th: [root, 3rd, #5] and the minor triad is just a minor triad with a diminished 5th [ root, -3rd, -5th]. ( minus – = flat) for this reason there can only exist four possible e combinations. major triad: (major, minor), minor triad: (minor, major) and aug triad: (major, major) and diminished triad (minor, minor). so not much to remember here just 4!! oh but it gets better!!!

in past when I made triads it was like what key is this triad in I was trying to look at keys and it could be difficult when building all over the neck and especially when your learning every note on the neck and you cannot build a chord because not sure what you will get all the time; that can kind of suck!

intervals come to the rescue!!! now if you know intervals and all those beautiful half steps and whole steps and you remember the small amount of triad chords you can create them anywhere and quickly know what they are even when they get weird!!!

simply use intervals ok your first interval is 1.5 steps well that’s a minor third so guess what you have your first keyboard and you know if you want a minor key just find next note that is two steps for example you started with E and you added G so you know B will be your next note. Maybe however you want to make it diminished then you know you need another minor for a minor 3rd/minor3rd interval! not to mention you can tell with your ears as well. Anyway I found it really cool.

I am studying inversions now where the root is not always in the base. sometimes the 3rd is in the base its called a “first inversion” and when the 5th is in the base its called a “second inversion”. Still studying these last topics if I have a revelation and get it all figured out I will share.