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Three Part Major Key Harmony

By now you should be able to play any major and minor chord. But which chords fit with which key? This lesson uses harmonisation of the major scale to discover which chords work with each major key and, as an added bonus, introduces you to the diminished chord.

To start off with, let's assume that we want to find which chords work for the scale of C Major. To construct the major and minor chords which we have examined in previous lessons we require three distinct notes. The major chord uses the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the major scale whilst the minor chord needs a flattened 3rd instead of the natural third. Let's therefore see how we could combine the notes of C Major (our key) to construct chords which consist of three notes.

The Three Part Harmony

One method of combining the notes of the scale gives us the 'three part harmony' - a certain sequence of chords related to a particular scale that work well together.

Fortunately, this method is nice and simple. To construct each chord in the three part harmony of a particular scale start on each note of the scale. Now, moving up the scale, miss out one note. The note subseqent to this excluded note is in the chord. Then moving up the scale, miss out the following note. The note after this in the scale is the final note in the chord. As the major scale contains seven notes, the three part harmony yields seven independent chords for each scale.

Let's do this for the C Major scale. The notes of this scale are:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

To form the first chord, we start on C, then miss out one note so we get E and then miss out one note again so we get G. The notes of the first chord are therefore C, E and G:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

To form the next chord we start on the next note in the scale - D. Using the same method of skipping a note until we have three notes we get D, F and A:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

Continuing up the scale to start on E we get E, G and B:

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

If we apply this method to every note in the scale we get the results summarised below.


Root

Notes

Chord

C

C E G

C Major

D

D F A

D Minor

E

E G B

E Minor

F

F A C

F Major

G

G B D

G Major

A

A C E

A Minor

B

B D F

B Diminished


As you can see, the notes C, E and G are the notes which form the C Major chord - clearly these are the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the C Major scale because of the 'skipping a note' method we have used starting on the 1st note of the scale. The D Major scale is formed by the notes:

D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#

The second chord which our harmonising of the C Major scale gave consisted of the notes D, F and A. D is the 1st note of the D Major scale, F is the flattened 3rd note and A is the 5th note. This is the formula for a minor chord - so the second chord is a D minor.

Click here to continue page 2 of this lesson >>


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