Tag Archives: triads

Spread triads, or open voice triads, are a variation of the more commonly used standard triads, or closed voice triads. The intervalic relationship between the notes of open voiced triads creates a more melodic structure that’s a bit less linear.

Arpeggios are great tools to be used in music, but they can take a little time to get under your fingers. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at a few approaches to practicing arpeggios that not only build technique, but also improve musicality and overall knowledge of the fretboard.

As guitarists, once we learn the pentatonic boxes we seem to immediately strive to get “out of the box” and extend our playing up and down the fretboard. However, what if instead of trying to get out of the box, we seek to maximize what each box position has to offer?

In previous lessons we’ve learned about major, minor and diminished triads. In this lesson we’ll round out the triads with augmented triads. We’ll take a look at the interval structure that creates the augmented triad and map them to the guitar fretboard.

In a previous lesson, we looked at how to build chords from the major scale, which is an important concept when it comes to understanding diatonic harmony. In this lesson we’re going to go through the process of building minor scale chords, which follows the same process as the major scale.

In previous lessons we’ve explored both major triads and minor triads, which are two of the most commonly used triads. In this lesson we round out the triads of the major scale with a look at diminished triads.

Seventh chords are chords that include the root plus the 3rd, 5th, and 7th intervals above the root. Another way to think about it is a seventh chord is a triad plus a 7th interval.

When it comes to the guitar fretboard, there are many different ways to view its structure and layout. The more we explore it the more complete picture we can get of how these structures are interconnected.

In this lesson, we’re going to break down the main riff from Snow (Hey Oh) by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. While it’s known for its level of difficulty what I like so much about it is the cool use of triads to create an uptempo, groovy riff.