Building the D Major Chord on the Guitar

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're going to go and we're going to take a look at our D major shape, reviewing first the notes of the D major chord, how those apply to the scale degrees in our shape, and then remembering how to play that shape on the guitar. Reviewing from our scale degrees, the notes that build up our major chord are the 1, 3, and 5 of our major scale. That gives us the notes. In this case D, that's our 1, F sharp, that's our 3, and A is our 5. And looking at our D shape, we can see how those apply. We've got our D, again that's our 1, A is our 5, we've got another D up here, and our F sharp, that's our 3 down here on the high E string. Really, the most important thing is to be able to think of it both in terms of the number--or I'm sorry, the letters themselves, D, A, D, F sharp but also being able to think of it in the scale degrees 1, 5, 1 and 3 knowing where each of those scale degrees are. That allows us to easier--more easily manipulate that chord into what we want it to be; in this case, a major chord. Here's our D shape.

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