Basic Chords: What Chords Are and How They're Built

The short answer: a chord is multiple notes sounding together — and the two chords that run western music, major and minor, are built by one simple recipe: stack a 3rd and a 5th on a root. Gitori's Basic Chords course teaches that recipe from first principles, so every chord you ever meet afterwards is a variation, not a mystery.

The recipe

Take any note as the root. Add the note a 3rd above, and the note a 5th above. That's a chord — specifically a triad, the three-note core that even huge guitar voicings reduce to.

The fork in the road is the 3rd:

• Major 3rd (4 half steps up) → major chord: bright, resolved, happy.
• Minor 3rd (3 half steps up) → minor chord: dark, heavy, sad.

One half step of difference carries almost all of the emotional information — Major third vs minor third digs into why. And the recipe isn't arbitrary: build a chord on each note of a major scale and majors and minors fall out in a fixed pattern (How chords are built from scales).

What the course covers

Notes → intervals → stacking intervals into triads → major vs minor → naming conventions (why "Cm" and "C" mean different worlds). Each concept comes with interactive checks, and by the end a chord symbol reads as a construction diagram rather than a label to memorize.

Where it leads

This course is the gateway to Gitori's whole harmony track: 7th Chords adds the fourth note, Diatonic 7th Chords organizes them into keys, Making Music with Chords puts them into progressions, and Advanced Chords generalizes the recipe to every chord in existence.

Before you start

Basic note names and the major scale — covered by Air to the Major if you need it. Degrees & Intervals is the ideal companion, since chord recipes are written in exactly that language.