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Uncle Bob's Guitar Lessons
Lesson 3 - Elementary Chords And Theory
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Guitar and Music Theory

Building a C Major Chord From Scratch

Now that we've looked at all this from the piano and music theory points of view, let's apply all of it to the guitar. If you'll recall from earlier, these are the notes in the C Major scale on the guitar...

But that's really a lot more notes than we need, because we're beginning on an E, then going to F, then G, etc. Taking away some notes, a simple, one-octave C Major scale would look like the following...

This is important because it helps us build some simple chords. Remember that the C Major chord is made up of C-E-G, so reducing our diagram even further those notes are...

But we still have a couple of strings left, so we add few notes from the higher octave back into our diagram and we get the following illustration...

That's really all there is to it. An appendix at the end of these lessons has a bunch of chords, and this is how they're all basically formed.