Chords

Clicking a chord letter link above will take you to a page for that chord.
You will see a table of the notes for the scale starting on that note (the Tonic).
After each table are the chord shapes for the basic chords - 5th, Major, Seventh and Minor.
The 1st, 3rd and 5th notes will be bold.
These three notes are the most important for chord formation.
Click 'How to' to see how other chords are formed or 'Intervals' to see a gentle
explanation of chord formation.

e.g. the table for C chords shows all the notes in the scale of C, starting with
the root (1) and going up to octave (8)

C	D	E	F	G	A	B	C
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8

In some cases, the 5th (or power) chord sounds better than, or is
a lot easier to play than the major.
Certainly that's the case with the bouzouki where the long reach makes
real major chords difficult.

The bouzouki is often tuned differently to take advantage of the 5th chords,
which are sometimes called 'modal' chords.
A mandola can also be retuned to a similar effect.

The commonest (easiest) tuning is ADAD which is an open D5th.