Hi,

"Well, chords are just tones that sound well together. The tones that sound best together are the octaves. On your guitar, play a tone on the lowest sounding string, without pressing it down on the frets: That's an E. Now count 12 frets from the top down towards the body, and press your finger behind it (closer to the top), and play the string again. (Try both a few times.) They sound so well together that they're like the same tone.

In fact, they sound so similar that they can be a bit boring. So, start with E again, but then for the other tone count 7 frets and play that one. Sounds nice too, even a bit more exiting. If you've ever heard of a "quint" ... this is it.

Now, there would be one additional tone that would be nice to play, but most of our instruments can't play it. Bother. The problem is, starting from E again, you'd have to count three and a half fret. That doesn't work, so we play it either by counting 4 frets, or by counting 3 frets. Dangerous names coming up: If we count 4, which is too much, we call it a "major third"; if we count 3, which is not really enough, we call it "minor third". ("Major" because it's the bigger one, and "minor" because at 3 frets it's still under-age.)

Now, if you play the E together with the quint and the major third, you play a chord. And if you play the E together with the quint and the minor third, you play a chord as well. (Just don't play the major and minor third at the same time.) But, playing a chord wouldn't work if you'd have to play it all on the same string. Fortunately, you have more strings, but! They are all tuned differently: Every time you go to a string that sounds higher, you have to count 5 frets back to get the same tone. So, to find the quint, you'd count 7 frets, like before, but then go to the next string and you count 5 frets back. Of course, it may sometimes be easier to do this in your mind, and think "2 frets" immediately, but no matter what, you can always count it out. Try this out for all four of them: Octave, Quint, Major Third, and Minor Third.

Right. Time for a five-minute break, and get something to drink while you're at it. Seriously, after the break you'll need all your energy to make a leap - sort of.

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OK - Leap of faith time: Because an octave sounds so much like the tone you begin with, for every tone you want in your chord, you can also take one that is an octave higher, counted 12 frets towards the body of the guitar. (And you can even count yet another octave if necessary.) And then, of course, you can go to a higher-sounding string and count 5 frets back again. And so over all strings, except that the designers of the guitar thought it funny to have an exception: If you go from the 4th string, counting from the lowest-sounding, and go to the next higher-sounding, you count back only 4 frets. (Then on the 5th, to get to the higher one it's 5 again.) Now count out all four of the tones on higher strings: Count back 5 frets (or 4 when you're at the exception) to get to a higher-sounding string, and when there aren't enough frets for that, count up 12 frets to reach the same tone in a higher octave.
(If you're ever on the first fret and all you have to do is count back just one more, then don't press down the string at all. That's just like how you play the first tone, the E, without pressing down its string, only strumming it.)

Now you've found the same tones all over the place. To play a chord, you play as many strings as you like, but: on every string you play you have to play one of three tones: The tone you began with (called the "prime"), the quint, and either the major third or the minor third. And, all three have to be present: The prime, the quint and one of the thirds! (And remember, you can go up an octave = 12 frets, whenever you need it.)

All of those would be the same chord. Except ... since thirds don't play nicely in the same sandbox, either you have the major third in it - then it's called a major chord and with that tone being a bit higher the chord gives us a higher mood - or you have the minor third in it - then it's a minor chord, a lower tone, and a lower mood. Of course, if you use different strings, there are small differences in how the chord will sound, even if you would play the major chord each time: Imagine playing the prime on each of four strings, and the other two tones on one string each; that's going to sound different from having found four strings where you can play the quint and use the last two strings for the other two. But they are all the same chords; they match with the same chords and tones on other instruments and in your singing. Pick whichever you feel you can or would play. (To start with, you usually try for combinations where you have only a few strings to push down, and where you don't have to spread your fingers too much.)

OK, time to play around: So far you started with E, so the chords were called E major and E minor. Now try to start with F (begin by counting 1 fret on the lowest-sounding string, and from there again count 12 frets for the octave, 7 for the quint and 3 and a half for the third(s). And then on to G ...

If you know how a scale works, then you'll know that you'll always have to count two more frets for every higher tone you want to start with, except that it's only 1 for F (as you've already seen), and also only 1 for C. With that, for every major and minor chord you see printed, you should be able to count out whether the indicated tones really all are prime, quint, and third. And if you have a blister on your little finger, you can figure out which string you can skip because the tone would be double anyway."


Well, something like that. Pacing could probably be done better, and it might help to establish first that guitar strings go down when they go up, which causes the numbers to go the wrong way. Further hands-on stuff could explain the stuff I ignored here but, of course, this is all on a strict No Need To Know basis: By just keeping to the version the first book shows (or the last), they can play the chord without knowing how it works. It's only when you play the guitar on the MTv that you apparently run into problems.

Bye,
                                                                Mysha