Minor Triads: What Are They & What Do They Do?
Minor Triads – Root, Lowered 3rd, 5th
| Good morning. This is Duane again. Duane again, sounds like a word all it’s own, doesn’t it? This is Duane, and I’d like today to cover minor triads. Yesterday we covered major triads, and we discovered that a major triad is made out of a root third and fifth. A triad, of course, is a word like tricycle or trio that means three, right? A triad is a three-note chord. Now, we can play (music) multi-note chords too, can’t we, but a triad is a basic building block of those complex chords. Yesterday we covered major chords, which is made out of the root third and fifth of a major scale.
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| A minor triad is a root flat third and fifth of a major scale. In other words, you just find a major chord and you lower the third a half step. This is the third because it’s the third note of the scale, right? Okay, so I just lower the third a half step. The only difference between major and minor triads is that lower third, but that changes the flavor, doesn’t it. What if “Summertime” went like this?
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| (Music – “Summertime”).
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| It would sound stupid, wouldn’t it, but of course, it goes like this.
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| (Music – “Summertime”).
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| A big difference between major and minor, but that difference is only the minor third, the lower third. Let’s go through all twelve chords and make each major chord a minor.
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| That’s the C chord, the C triad, and we’ll make it minor by lowering the third. That’s the F major triad. We’ll make it minor by lowering the third. That’s the G major triad, lower the third. That’s the D major triad. Why? Because the D scale goes like that, and if I take the root third and fifth of the D scale, that’s the triad for that particular key, so I lower the third. This time, I have to go from a black note to a white key, right, so that’s the D minor triad. E major, E minor. A major, A minor.
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| I hope you notice something there. There’s three minor chords that are all white. D minor, E minor, and A minor are all white. There were three major chords, wasn’t there, three major triads were all white, C, F, and G, where there’s three minor triads that are all white too, D minor, E minor, and A minor.
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| Then D flat major is like that. To lower the third there, what do we do? There’s no black key to the left, so we go to the white key, and we can’t call it E though. If we lower that F, it’s got to be called F flat, so that would be called F flat, D flat minor triad. E flat major, E flat minor. A flat major, A flat minor. G flat major, here we have B flat as the third of the G flat chord. How do you flat a flat? You lower it a half step, don’t you, but you couldn’t call that A. You’d had to call it B double flat. You put two flats in front of that A. There’s the B major chord, B minor, and B flat major and B flat minor.
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| If you haven’t already mastered that, be sure and master that. Turn all major chords into minor, all major triads into minor triads, just play that. I would go through those every day if I were you if you’re not familiar with them, and practice turning major triads into minor triads. That will be the building block of more complex chords in the days to come.
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| That’s it for today, so we’ll see you tomorrow with another little tip like this on a different chord. See you then. Bye bye.
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