Watch the Triad Applications online guitar lesson by Kenny Wessel from Shades of Jazz

Here is a tool that we can use to expand our palette and we already are probably pretty familiar with this. I'm talking about triads. 3 note chords, in particular major and minor triads. As guitarists, we all play triads in some form or another, probably from our first moments on the instrument. A major triad is the root, third and fifth of a major scale (or root, major third and perfect fifth, intervalically speaking). A minor triad is the root, flat third and fifth of a major scale (or root, minor third and perfect fifth, in intervals). We first need to be very conversant with these triads throughout the fretboard. Learn them in position, up and down the fingerboard, on one string, etc. - like anything else that we want to use in our playing, we have to know it everywhere with no holes on the neck, or dark places where we don't know how to play it! Learn them on different string sets, fingerings, in different inversions (135, 351, 513), keys, etc. In this section, we'll be investigating some ways to use these simple musical building blocks in all sorts of interesting ways - finding some different contexts for triads to ramp up our linear playing. Included in the course material are some approaches to fingering triads on the neck.

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