What’s the Difference Between a “Triad” and a “Chord”
The concepts in this blog post refer to Lessons 15 and 17 of the “Easy Music Theory with Gary Ewer” Course.
CLICK to read more.
____________
In music, a chord is three or more notes that are played simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously. By “nearly”, we mean that if you arpeggiate a chord by playing one note after another (like the opening piano part on Adele’s “Someone Like You”), it’s still thought of as being a chord.
A triad is a particular kind of chord: the kind where one note is considered to be the root, with a note a 3rd higher and another one a 5th higher. A C major triad, for example, consists of the notes C-E-G.
By definition, a chord doesn’t need to be identifiable by a letter name or Roman numeral, but a triad is always able to be labeled in that way. If you walk up to a piano, and lay your arms down on the keys so that you’re playing 57 notes at the same time, you’ve just played a chord. Not identifiable as such, but a chord nonetheless.
All triads are chords, but not all chords are triads.
It is possible to think of a chord as being two notes, if you consider the term implied chord. An implied chord is one that has enough tones present to suggest what the full chord would be. For example, if you play a C and an E together, you don’t need the G to make it sound like a full C major triad. If you listen to the first verse of Rihanna’s “Disturbia”, you’ll notice that the first verse is accompanied by these kind of incomplete “implied chords”.
-Written by Gary Ewer
Identifying the Key of a Piece of Music
The concepts in this blog post refer to Lessons 15 and 23 of the “Easy Music Theory with Gary Ewer” Course.
CLICK to read more.
____________
If you’re looking at a piece of music that has no sharps and no flats, how do you know if it’s in C major, A minor, or perhaps some mode?
Let’s deal with the question of mode first. We know that a scale that starts and ends on D, but uses the key signature of C major, gives us the dorian mode. From E to E is phrygian, F to F is lydian, G to G is mixolydian, A to A is aeolian, and B to B is locrian. (These are all transposable to different key signatures, of course). For a piece of music to be in any of those modes, you’ll see the letter name of the mode playing a significant role, perhaps as the starting note, and most certainly the end note.
It’s more likely that the key will be either major or minor. So in the example of an excerpt of music that uses no sharps or flats, follow these steps to identify the key:
- Consider first the possibility of A minor. In order for the music to be in A minor, there needs to be a leading tone (G#) present. If you don’t see it, A minor is very unlikely.
- Confirm by looking for G-naturals. If you see G-naturals instead of G#s in the music, you are confirming that A minor is not possible.
- Look for a final note of C, especially approached by B below or D above.
There can sometimes be complications with this method, especially if the music includes sharps and flats that are operating as so-called “non-chord-tones.” But this 3-step method can at least get you close.
Written by Gary Ewer
Easy Music Theory 