It’s time for another installment in the triad guitar lessons I’ve been posting. While after this lesson I may move on to other topics and return to triads a little later, I wanted to post a lesson dealing the major triads on strings 1-3. If you’re just tuning in, here is where you can find part 1 of the triad guitar lessons, which covers major triads on strings 2-4, as well as the basic idea and construction of triads. And, here you can find part 2 of the triad guitar lesson, which covers using the triads on strings 2-4 to be able to play a standard I-IV-V chord progression.

Triad Voicings on Strings 1-3
Now, we’re going to look at the voicings for a C major triad on strings 1-3. If you need a little background on triads, including how they are constructed and the meaning of root position, 1st inversion, and 2nd inversion, that’s all covered in part 1 of the lesson that I linked to above. Other than the fact that we’re using a C chord rather than a G chord for this example, these chord shapes are exactly the same as the ones we learned on strings 2-4 in lesson 1. We’re just voicing the chords on a different set of strings. Let’s take a look at them.

C major triad and it's inversions on strings 1-3

Like I mentioned in the first lesson on triads, it’s important to know which note is which in terms of number for these triad voicings. Just to review, the notes in the 3 chord shapes go in this order:

Root Position – 1, 3, 5
1st Inversion – 3, 5, 1
2nd Inversion – 5, 1, 3

To start using these chords, the first thing you will want to do is learn the C triad voicings above and play them up and down the neck until they’re very comfortable and familiar. Then, try playing other chords while using the same chord shapes.

Mixing Everything Up
In order to get these triads to be part of your chord vocabulary, you could go through the same process with them that we talked about for the triads on strings 2-4. That would be: learning the C triads, playing all of the inversions for the chords in a chord progression as an exercise, and finally mixing up the triad voicings to play a chord progression.

One thing I wanted to point out is that now that we have major triads on two different sets of strings, you can change string sets in a position. So, rather than just moving up and down the neck, you’re now able to move vertically as well. Below is an example of the the C major triads on both strings sets in different positions.

C major triads - mixing string sets 1-3 and 2-4 in various positions

I hope you’ve been enjoying the triad lessons so far! There’s still some other things to cover, such as: minor triads, spread voicing triads, songs that use triads, etc., etc. I’ll get to them eventually!

If you happen to be in the area and are interested in guitar lessons in Chicago, feel free to get in touch!

Thanks for checking out the blog!