I feel as though, when I was talking about the definition of an interval in Guitar Lesson: Chords (part 1), I did not give enough detail about how to use the notes of a scale to construct a chord with the given intervals. So, rather than drag my first lesson out even longer, I decided to write this brief lesson to help you better understand the intervals.

"Intervals define the distance between two notes..."

Every time we move up or down a half step (1 fret), from our first note, on the fret board of a guitar we are changing the distance between those two notes. Knowing the intervals of a chord; we know what notes are needed based on the distance asked for.

Let's take a look at the G Major scale:

The first note is the 1st interval, or root note.

And so on. As we already know, a basic chord triad consist of: the 1st interval, the 3rd interval, and the 5th interval, and since this is a G Major scale, we know that the 3rd interval will be major, making the chord major. Let's start constructing.

So we need the 1st, 3rd, and 5th interval?

I'll try some notes and then we can decide whether it is right or not.

In-case you have never seen a chord diagram, this what it looks like.

The whole diagram is sideways and goes in order of: the low E string on the farthest left, and then going right you have the A string, D string, G string, B string, and the high e string.

The numbers at the bottom are which fingers you use. 1 is index finger, 2 is middle finger, 3 is ring finger, and 4 is your pinky.

The frets start at the top and go down. So you have the first fret at the very top, followed by the second, third, etc. The dots represent which frets are being held down, and the circles at the very top mean that those strings are open, meaning they are played but no fret is being held down.

Now let's take a look at the notes we have. The very first one is a G so that takes care of our 1st interval. The second one is a B; that takes care of our 3rd interval. The 3rd note is a D and takes care of our last required interval, which is the 5th. The fourth note is another G, which is a repetition. The 5th note is a B so that is another repetition. And finally our last note is another G and is a repetition. So in total we have notes: G, B, D. To make a G Major chord we needed three notes: G, B, D. Each one of those notes is from the G Major scale and matches the intervals and notes needed so make up a G Major chord. So now we know that this is a perfect G Major, and are ready to play.

Hopefully this made things a little more clear.

-Dylan