How using triads can change the way you play guitar - both rhythm and lead - Lesson EP399

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] all right so in this lesson we're going to be talking about triads and why they're so valuable to you as a guitar player especially those of you that are learning to improvise and you're trying to play all over the neck you watch guitar players do that they make it look effortless and i don't care if they're playing rhythm or lead they're using triads and triads are used for rhythm lead they're also used for harmonized leads where you're playing a harmonized third or harmonized six so we're going to break all of that down major triads minor triads how to see them very easily all over the neck and how you can use them and i've got this lesson split into two parts in this video we're going to go through all of the theory part of it so this is really the value in this little mini course if that's how you want to think about it in the premium video which will be the part 2 video there's a song that takes all of the things we're going to learn here and you put it into practice and i've got that song available in multiple tempos and also multiple keys so you can practice it in the key we're going to learn it in but then also a different key just so you can try transposing it on your own and learn how to do that all right so before i jump into the lesson i want to talk about this guitar this was made for me by a guy down in new orleans named patrick and he and i have gone back and forth on email for a couple of years now actually he's the one that built the the shell pink telecaster style guitar that you've seen me use in other videos i love that guitar there was a few things i didn't like about the neck i mean i'm just getting picky i guess in my old age but it's a little thin for for my hand anyway you know we're all kind of we've got our our neck profiles that we like and so anyway it was that and then there was the seven and a quarter inch radius which just makes it you know which is a traditional vintage radius but i wanted something that was a little more modern i guess that make it a little easier to bend and so anyway we went back and forth on building a second guitar and this finally showed up in the mail just about a week ago and i love this guitar so that's what this is and i actually want to put his uh information up on the screen uh he's a very nice guy very reasonable price too if you're looking to buy a guitar have one custom built for you patrick's your guy so you can contact him by uh you know emailing him by the email that you see on the screen right now but anyway that's what this is that's what this guitar is rosewood neck uh 10 inch radius jumbo frets to make it a little easier and then i got the p90 pickup that i wanted in there which i just think sounds so cool but that's what this is great little guitar all right so thank you patrick i'm i'm really enjoying this thing it's it's awesome all right so the first thing i want to say is i did a lesson on triads uh that was similar to this about six months ago which is ep 362. that might be a really good uh lesson to go through and watch you can watch the part one video for free you don't have to be a premium member for that where i go through all of the theory uh but that would be a good one to maybe start with i'm going to be covering some of those same topics but there's probably some that i went through in that one that i'm not going to go through in this one so anyway ep362 you can go on activemelody.com and do a search for that if you're interested to learn more about this okay but the first thing is what is a triad a triad is just a chord with three notes in it and and a major chord is made up of the root the third and the fifth those are the intervals of the major scale so that's the major scale doremi fasola tito if we put a number to those one two three there's the root the third and the and the fifth so one three five those are the notes that make up in this case that would be a g chord and the notes in a g chord are g b and d now the one thing i didn't know and i didn't mention this in the previous video but it took me years to realize this i don't know why but i assumed there were more notes in a chord just because if i played a g chord i'm playing six notes you know i'm not just playing three that's what i'm thinking right because i just brushed six strings there well if you break it down though and look at what's going on the first string and the sixth string are the same note they're just an octave apart and then you have the third string which is the same note as well so you actually have three g notes within that g chord so then you've got your you your second string which is a b and then your fourth string which is a d and actually that fifth string is also a b so you've got two b's you've got three g's and you've got one d so really this chord is still those same three notes and that's true of all your chords you can go through any one any of them and and check that out and just and see it for yourself we're talking about major chords here not like getting into you know a major seven or dominant seven if there's a number after it it's you actually end up with more than three notes but just a straight up major chord three notes a straight up minor chord three notes uh but you flat the third interval for a minor chord so anyway we'll get to minors in just a minute but let's talk about the major chords so we're going to be playing off of three chord shapes out of the cage system now all of the triads we're going to be learning are played on the top three strings and i did that in ep 362 and that confused some people they said well what are you going to follow up and show us how to play the you know the rest of the strings well the truth is all of the theory and everything you need to know are played on these top three strings and actually when you're playing rhythms using triads most of what you're going to be doing is on the top three strings anyway and same is true for lead most your lead stuff happens on those top three strings the bottom three strings just muddies the water and you if you want to get into those you can do that on your own i'm going to give you everything you need to do that but anyway top three strings is what we're going to be focusing on you'd be surprised what you can do with that okay so the three shapes we're going to be using in this we're going to be looking at the the triad the major and the minor triad in three positions the first one is right here off of the e shape right this is we're gonna be thinking cage so if you looked at your e bar chord i'm sorry your g bar chord using the e shape and played the top three strings it would look like that barring the first two strings on the third fret and then fourth fret third string and then we're going to play our d shape up here that's where i've got my middle finger and my index finger on the seventh fret strings one and three and that's the same as your d shape down here but we're just playing it here so we have our e shape our d shape and then we're going to come all the way up here and play the a shape so the a shape looks like that if you're playing a g chord using the a shape but we're just going to play the top three strings so that's what that triad looks like so we have a g chord a g chord and a g chord now you can hear what's going on there they sound different and what the reason for that is we're playing different inversions of that chord it's still the same three notes as i'm going up the neck i'm still playing a g a b and a d note but they're just switching order as i go through that so when i play it this way using the e shape the g note is on the first string when i play this shape the d shape the g note is on the second string and when i play this the g note is on the third string so that i'm just pointing that out so that those of you that have your note names memorized all over the neck if you know where your g note is for example on the second string you can then build your d chord shape off of that and you can see it makes the triangle and that's the tip of the triangle that's how i think of that so same is true with the third string if you know where your g note is on the third string within that is that triad there so that's your major triad in three positions all right so what can i do with that g chord all over the neck well one obvious thing would be you could use it if you're playing rhythm so if you had a song that had a g in it instead of playing a g now you could play a g up here just on those top three strings use your pinky to do embellishments right so anyway you've got these spots that you can play the g the other thing you might think about this is like a sidebar but if you're playing a lead break you know a lead has a has is made up of phrases so you have a beginning and an ending of that phrase so one thing you can do is you can use those triads those three notes to land on those will be your period at the end of a sentence so if i'm making a statement right i was playing the minor pentatonic scale pattern two and i ended on this note which is my g note right i can land on that note i could also land so that would be the one i could also land on the three [Music] that's another really good place to wrap up a phrase is to land on the one or the three now the five you can land on but it makes the most sense to do that when you're playing over the v chord so in a blues if we were playing a blues in the key of g our v chord would be a d so when he came to the d right i'm hitting that d note which works nicely over the five chord otherwise you would pretty much not all all the time but it makes a lot of sense to land on the one or the three if we're just talking about triads so that's another little sidebar used for them let's take those triads now those major triads and convert them into minor triads we can do that the same three positions super easy to do for the e chord we're just gonna bar the first three strings now on the third fret but look at what's going on don't just do that and take it at face value think about what's going on here for a minute so if we look at the e chord because remember this is made out of the e chord shape right so if we look at the e chord itself in first position if i told you play an e chord most of you would do that and if i said now play an e minor you do that right now look at what's going on there when you play the top three strings the nut is doing what your finger would do here right your finger is doing what the nut was doing i should say that maybe that's the better way to say it so it's like a little capo so you're replacing what the nut was doing here so that makes sense major minor same is true here there's our d major chord right well how do you play a d minor chord think of it in first position there's a d major chord there's a d minor so let's do that same thing here there's the g major there's the g minor so now you're starting to see okay so you got your major minor you got your major minor the same thing is true up here using the a shape that would be the a chord and then to play the a minor you flatten the third which is this note so you just go down one fret that's how you flatten it and now i've got this shape and you can see there it's like a stair step you've got the 12th fret third string 11th fret 2nd string 10th fret first string so now i've got a g and a g minor a g and a g minor a g and a g minor with that information you've got just about everything you need if you can understand that you are so far down the road in terms of learning how to improvise and use this stuff if you've got that basic concept of the major chord in the minor chord because from the minor chord you can play a six chord and a nine chord remember a six chord uh i don't want to get too far off the the reservation here but when you're playing a six chord like a you know the classic jazzy sound in six chord it's really just the relative minor chord of the major chord that you're playing so if i was playing a g6 i would be playing the e minor uh triad now that sounds like an e minor right but not if there's a g in the bass right it has that sound totally different vibe it gives it more of a kind of a jazzy feel so some light bulbs went off for some of you and you realize oh i can just use the triad to play the six chord and i'm just using that minor triad that i just learned there and i can do it in three positions now you start to see the value of this and that's the sixth chord and remember to get to the nine chord you just go down two frets this direction and you're playing the nine chord using that same shape so we've got our major chords we've got our minor chords in three positions so let's put everything into practice now this is where it's going to all start to come together we're going to take a simple chord progression a g chord an e minor a c and a d right very basic simple chord progression but i want you to play it in three positions so we're gonna start off playing our g chord like this then our e minor like this do you see what's going on there do you see why the e minor is working right there's our e major chord using the d shape there's our e minor chord right all right so back from the beginning we have g e minor where's our nearest c chord in the same area here right using that same a shape that we were using when we the top part of the a chord when we were playing up here we're doing it here now right because there on the third string is our c note so that's why that chord works now for the d chord we can just take that up two frets now why did i choose chords in the area that i did why did i choose an e minor here i could have played it up here but you don't want to be jumping around so much that you're going to make mistakes when you do that so it's always best whether you're playing lead or rhythm to find the nearest neighbor so when you're playing a g chord real quickly go through your rolodex in your brain of these chord shapes and think where's my nearest e minor oh yeah there's one right there same thing for the c chord look at that i'm just changing a few fingers and then my d chord is there or my d chord is there right but okay so those are your first chords now once we're up to here we're going to do the same chord progression but we're going to start our g chord here e minor c d all right let me do that again all right now let's move it up here and play the g chord up here in this position e minor c d all right and then we just reset and come all the way back to the beginning and start the whole thing over again so that would be a really good exercise you don't even need a jam track or anything for that you can set a metronome actually it would be really good to set a metronome it keeps you honest and it keeps you on the beat but use that as a really good practice to become familiar with these chord shapes in different positions so i was doing all that in the key of g now challenge yourself and transpose everything and play it in the key of a do the same little practice thing so you your chords then be an a an f sharp minor a d and an e so find those chords using that same strategy all right so now that you've got that let's talk about harmonize six and how we can find those out of these chord shapes so let's start back with this first one here out of the e shape if i look at that and i play just strings three and one i don't have to play all three strings just these two now i'm picking the third string with my pick and then i'm using my ring finger to pluck the first string but if i play that that's a harmonized six and the way that you can tell the difference between a harmonized six and a harmonized third on the guitar is a harmonized six would be uh have a gap between they would have a string in between them so i'm playing strings one and three i'm skipping the second string so all of that stuff has that extra string in between now a harmonized third on the other hand sounds like this also pretty also harmonized but it has two adjacent strings so in this case it would be the the second in the third string or it would be the first and the second string so that's what a harmonized third is a harmonized third is two adjacent strings a harmonized six is when there's you're skipping a string now there's obviously there's more theory to it than that the theory is a harmonized six is six intervals apart so when i'm playing these two notes there you can see there's six so if i count them out it's one two three four five six when i play those two there's six intervals apart as opposed to these two it's one two three and i'm counting up the major scale so that's how that works you find that note in the major scale and you keep going on the major scale until you get to your other note and however many intervals there are between are what give you that sound and most harmonies you hear are either a harmonized sixth or harmonized third that's where most of it comes from so when i'm playing a lead break and i want to work in a harmony there's a few little ideas that i work from so i think of the e shape and i see this [Music] just memorize this what i'm doing there is i'm playing two shapes i'm playing the shape that i started with and then i'm going into this where i've got two fingers on the same fret that would be the second shape that's the same as that second shape this is your major shape because it's a major chord right this is your minor shape because you'd be using that for a minor chord you can see if i were to play the all the chords in the major scale and so in other words if i played the major scale let's say i'm using the first string [Music] but if i were to play all the chords using that scale there's a formula for that it's major minor minor major major minor i'm going to stop there i'm not going to deal with the diminished one but those are the main ones anyway so it's major minor minor major major minor and so that is what allows you to walk up the major scale then by using harmonies is i would you you do the same thing but i would only play strings one and three [Music] right and so that's one way to look at it the the easier way i think is to just where whatever your e shape is look at this and then know that you've got the one major and you've got the two minors on the side of it on this side of it and so it sounds like this and if i look at just the first string it's like three blind mice right that's how i see it and you're just skipping a fret each time so so all whole steps there [Music] so that's also brown eyed girl you know van morrison that kind of thing but anyway that's off of the e shape so just remember if you're playing a major chord and you're using your e shape you've got you've got this little thing that you can do with the harmonized six now if you're playing a minor chord so if it's playing a g minor chord then the formula looks like this so then it's minor minor major so you're changing changing it up a little bit remember the first time it was major minor minor now it's minor minor major so it's like the the mirror opposite of that and so i use that as just a simple guideline for getting into these harmonized six so i know if there's a minor chord i've got this little embellishment [Music] if it's a major chord i've got right i can come down to this part of it if i want to as well there's another little extra thing now i could keep going up the major scale like i demonstrated before but honestly i get more mileage out of just that little piece right there so if the song is a one four five actually if it's the song is the same chords we were doing a minute ago we've got the g the e minor so you can play all of that's the g and then when it comes to the e minor i could go [Music] right because there's my e e minor using the e shape and then it comes to the c well c is there and then it goes to the d you can see what i'm doing i'm using that same little formula that i showed you over this major chord so now you've got one that works over the major chord and the minor chord for your harmonized six that's a really easy way to jump into harmonize six the only other thing i'll add to that is harmonized thirds are the same thing you're just playing strings uh either two and three or one and two but you're still playing the notes of those triads so if i'm looking at this g uh triad using the e shape i'd be playing strings one and two like this and then if i were to walk it up so using that same formula that's my major shape that's my minor shape just like before so this there are two two different frets and then in this case they're both in the same fret right [Music] right you can come up here [Music] this would be your g chord using the a shape i'm just playing strings two and three another really useful harmonized third that i find myself using a lot is coming up to this d shape playing strings one and three so you have [Music] right or coming all the way up to the a shape [Music] or check this out going from the a shape and walking down to the d shape right classic blues move you can go the other way too right all of that's harmonized thirds and look at that i'm just using those same three shapes but i'm playing strings one and two you could do the same thing on strings two and three [Music] now i went to the c chord back to the g chord right you can hear the chords just by playing those harmonies so hopefully that's giving you some ideas for how you can start to pull all of this stuff together these triads you can use them in rhythm you can use them in your harmonized leads and you can also use them as as target notes when you're playing a lead break they're those are your chord tones that you can target now i'm going to take those same four chords the g e minor c and d and i'm going to play through a really simple little progression that's using all of this stuff that we've done the harmonized thirds harmonized sixes uh chord shapes everything all over the neck and and go through all three positions if you're a premium member you'll have access to the slow walkthrough and the tablature for that and the jam tracks that you can practice playing it but that's how i'm gonna wrap up this video i'm just gonna leave you with that and then hopefully you'll come join us for the follow-up to that which will be in the slow walk-through video all right i hope you've enjoyed this video and make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven't done so yet click subscribe click that alert bell and then also give this video a like if you liked it and you found it useful alright we'll see in the next one [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 1,138,968

Keywords: guitar triads, guitar triad shapes, what are triads, what is a guitar triad, triad rhythm guitar, triad lead guitar, triad for harmonized lead, triad harmonized 3rd, triad harmonized 6, online guitar lesson, online guitar teacher, blues guitar online, blues guitar lesson, guitar tutorial, guitar instructor, guitar instructions, guitar education, music education

Id: Bnztu5DFaQY

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021