Hey, what’s happening, guys? This is
John McClennan and I’m here with guitarcontrol.com,
excited to bring you some great lessons
here on basic triad voicings.
What a triad is, is a three-note chord.
We’re going to start with just an A on the
high string. It’s going to go 2nd fret,
2nd fret and then open string, just these three notes.
What’s so wonderful about knowing triads is
if you play in a band they’re so great for
being able to come up with secondary parts within the band.
Here’s your A chord. What we’re going to do is
we’re going to invert that, meaning going up to
the next voicing. Instead of A, C sharp, E,
now we’re going to go C sharp, E, A and the
frets are 6, 5, 5. Then we’re going to move
it up again to 9, 10, 9. This just looks like
a D chord, but shifted all the way up to the 9th fret.
If I invert this again, then I’ve got 14, 14, 12,
which is an octave above where we started.
There are our three positions, just as markers.
Now, what I want you to do is go from the I chord
to the IV chord to the I, to the V, to the I,
just a little cadence like classical music,
as an exercise. Here we’re going to go A to a D,
back to that A, to an E, which is just going
to be my first finger here on the 1st fret of
the 3rd string, back to A.
What this is is all the voicings, all
the chords are just using three notes
and they’re moving from one with really
smooth voice leading. If a note doesn’t
have to move, I’m going to keep it there.
For instance, this A note here is in D
chord as well. So I’m not shifting and
the chords sound very related.
So let’s go up to the next voicing and do
the same thing. We’ve got 6, 5, 5; here’s
that chord. And then go to 7, 7, 5, back to…
And then what looks like, again, a D shape,
but in this case it’s an E because we’re on
the 4th fret and then resolving home. So we’ve got…
Inverted again to that — our third position here.
We’re going to play this chord and then our
next chord is 11, 10, 10, back to this A.
Here’s your E, 9, 9, 7, and back to A.
So a real great chord here.
So just filling-out your triad chord vocabulary
and be sure to click the link below for all of
these shapes and we’ll see you in the next lesson.
Thanks for watching.
