Building the C Major Chord on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're going to take a look at our C major chord and we're going to see how the notes of this chord relate to the scale degrees and afterward we're going to go in and see how we can manipulate them to make other notes. But for this one, we're just going to start with the C major. So, if we go back and review our major scale and we see what notes make this chord, we find that we have the notes C, E, and the G that make up the C major chord. And if we take a look at the shape of the C chord which is presented both here and here, we find that we have those notes. Here's our C, and usually we're going to have our root note or our 1st scale degree as the lowest note on our chord. The next one up is E, which is our 3rd; G is on this open 3rd string, that's our 5th of the scale degree; another C here and another E. And if you look over here, the same thing is written in the scale degrees. So, you could also relate to this as being 1, 3, 5, 1, and 3 up on the high E string. This is going to be really handy to know especially once we start making other types of chords, so you want to practice thinking of these both in terms of the note names. This is C, E, G, C, E, also, 1, 3, 5, 1, 3. We'll be able to take it from there and manipulate it how we want, but we really need to get those down first. This is the C major chord."