Learn The 3 Chord Trick

3 CHORD TRICK (OR THE 1.4 AND 5 CHORD)

Back in the 60’s it was said that all you had to do was learn 3 chords and you could get a record deal. Well it was not quite as easy as that, but a lot of songs in the charts in those days only had 3 chords in them. But if you do really only learn 3 chords all of your music will be in the same key.

Francis Rossi from Status Quo admits that they are the worlds most famous band for the 3 chord trick, but just listen to some of their music and you will know just what great musicians they are. They have even called there new album in search of the 4th chord.

Even today most music doesn’t use all of the chords in any given key, and of course each key uses different chords  so to make life easy we refer to them as the 1,4 and 5 chords.

Learn Guitar Chords

If we take a quick look at major scales and keys you will find that the notes always  follow the same pattern, ie:

TONE, TONE, SEMI TONE,TONE,TONE,TONE,SEMI TONE. SIMPLY knowing this will enable us to learn 7 of the 12 notes  that can make up a major scale.

The notes of the E string are...

E,F,F#,G,G#,A,A# B,C,C#,D,D#.

( you will see that the notes e and b do not have a sharp). On the guitar neck each fret is one step usually a semi tone, so the scale of E major will have the notes...

E,F#,G#,A,B,C#,D#E

So the 1,4,and 5 chord will have routes in E,A AND B.

In the same way keys all follow a pattern of chords that are used and the pattern for a major scale is :

MAJOR,MINOR,MINOR,MAJOR,MAJOR,MINOR,DIMINISHED.

So if we look  at the Emajor scale the chords will be:

E MAJOR,F#MINOR,G#MINOR,A MAJOR,B MAJOR,C# MINOR,D# DIMINISHED.

Therefore your Three chord trick, or 1,4 and 5 chord in E major will be

E MAJOR A MAJOR  B MAJOR.

To make things easy for you here are the others:

If you want to put this to good use take a look at Mike Hayes Express Guitar course  featured on www.riffmagic.com

Teejay O'Neill