How to Find Every Chord in Any Key, Major and Minor

Did you know you can find every chord in every key using scales you already probably know?

No chord charts. No memorizing. Just one scale shape you have likely been playing for years, broken open the right way.

I am going to use one example so this does not get crazy long, but this works for any key, any scale, anything. That is what is really remarkable about it. It is about as utilitarian as guitar theory gets.

First, you need your major scale

We will use C major. It is a perfect scale, no sharps, no flats, so it is easy to follow along with.

If you do not already know your major scale shapes, go learn them. It will only help you from here.

The major scale is called the major scale for a reason. It is the most important scale you could ever learn. Everything else is based on it. Anytime you see a formula, or some permutation of a chord or a scale, it is all in reference to your major scale.

C major is C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. Then it repeats into the next octave.

The pattern

We love patterns as guitar players. Sometimes we love them a little too much and we forget the notes underneath that are actually doing the work. It is good to know both. But this one is a nice easy pattern.

Here it is. Play a note, skip the next note in the scale, and instead play the one after that. Then do it again.

So for C, we play C. Skip the D, play the E. Skip the F, play the G.

That gives us C, E, G. A one, a three and a five. A C major triad.

Now walk it through the whole scale

Start on the next note of the scale, in this case D. Skip the E, play the F. Skip the G, play the A.

D, F, A. That is a D minor triad.

Keep going and you get all seven:

• C, E, G is C major
• D, F, A is D minor
• E, G, B is E minor
• F, A, C is F major
• G, B, D is G major
• A, C, E is A minor
• B, D, F is B diminished

And then we are back to C.

What is happening each time is that we shift up to the next note in the scale and take the root, the third and the fifth out of it. Those three notes are what decide whether that chord is major or minor.

That is every chord in the key of C major, pulled straight out of a scale shape you already know.

So what do you do with that?

This is where it gets useful.

I have always been a big fan of the Nashville number system. When somebody says they want to play a 1, 4, 5, and I am in C, I can work it out instantly. One is C. Count up, four is F. Five is G.

So C, F, G. That also happens to be La Bamba by Ritchie Valens.

Another super common one is a 1, 5, 6, 4. The one is C, the five is G, the six is A minor, the four is F.

So C, G, A minor, F. There are about twenty Green Day songs built on that, and a ton of other pop songs.

Once you know the relationships between those notes, you do not even need to play them as bar chords. You just know where they are.

Now the same thing in a minor key

There is a formula you can use with your natural minor scale that tells you every chord in that minor key, and it is the exact same skip-a-note move.

We will use A minor, since it is the relative of C major. No sharps, no flats, so it is a little easier to navigate.

A natural minor is A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A.

Start on the root, A, on the 5th fret of the low E string. Skip the B, land on C, which is the flat third. Skip the D, land on E.

So we have A, C, E. A minor triad. One, flat three, five. And of course it is minor, because that is the key we are in.

Then move to the next note of the scale and run the same pattern:

• A, C, E is A minor
• B, D, F is B diminished
• C, E, G is C major
• D, F, A is D minor
• E, G, B is E minor
• F, A, C is F major
• G, B, D is G major

And back to A minor.

Put those in a sequence and you have the diatonic chords of A minor. A minor, B diminished, C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major.

Building progressions in minor

Now that I know all my chords in A minor, I just start plugging them in.

Say I want a 1, 5, 6, 7. A is my one. Count up, five is E. Six is F. Seven is G.

So A minor, E minor, F, G.

Maybe I want to swap out the G and play the third instead, which is C. Now I have A minor, E minor, F, C.

And because I already know the key is A natural minor, while that progression is playing, all I have to do to solo over it is play A natural minor.

That is the part that makes this worth learning. The chords and the scale stop being two separate things you memorized.

Practice it this way

Pick a key. Run through your major scale in that key and find the little triads.

First note, skip the second, get the next one, skip the next one, grab the next one.

Eventually you will get good enough at that pattern that you will not have to think about which note to skip. You will just see the shape all the way through. At that point it only becomes a question of whether it is a major triad or a minor triad.

This hearkens back to the triads lesson, and a bit of the arpeggios one too, because in some cases you are playing a little arpeggio there as well.

Why every major key has the same pattern

Here’s a thing that saves you a lot of work once you notice it.

Run the exercise in C and you get major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished.

Run it in G. Same pattern. Run it in D, in A, in F. Same pattern every single time.

That’s not a coincidence, it’s just what the major scale is. The distance between the notes is identical in every key, so the chords built on them come out identical too.

Which means you never have to work out whether the six chord is major or minor again. It’s minor. It’s always minor. The two and the three are minor, the four and the five are major, the seven is diminished.

Do the exercise in a couple of keys until you trust that, and then you’ve got the chords of all twelve keys available to you from one pattern you already know.

What this actually gets you

At that point it becomes a decision making process instead of a guessing game.

You can mix and match them. Some combinations are going to sound better than others, but all of the chords will be correct.

No more guessing. No more fumbling around trying to figure out, is that right? Does that sound good?

Later down the road you can start messing with modal interchange, where instead of staying in one key, you swap a chord in from another and get some more unique sounds out of it.

The pattern on the fretboard

Here’s what the skip-a-note move actually looks like under your fingers, using a three-note-per-string C major shape.

e|-------------------------------
B|-------------------------------
G|-------------------------------
D|-------------------------------
A|--3-----5-----7-----8----------
E|-----------------------8--10---
      C     D     E     F

Play a note, skip one, play the next. Then from that note, skip one, play the next. Three notes, and you’ve got a triad.

Then slide the whole idea up one step in the scale and do it again. Same move, new chord.

Once your hand knows the physical shape of “skip, skip,” you stop counting entirely. You just see it.

Common mistakes

• Counting notes instead of scale degrees. Skip the note in the scale, not the next fret
• Forgetting the diminished one. Every major key has exactly one, on the seventh, and it sounds wrong on its own. It’s supposed to
• Assuming it only works in C. C is just the easy one to teach with. The pattern is identical in every key
• Stopping at the triads. Keep stacking by the same rule and you get sevenths, then ninths. It’s the same move, further up
• Learning it as a list. If you memorize “C, D minor, E minor, F, G, A minor, B diminished” you’ve learned one key. If you learn the move, you’ve learned all twelve

It works on everything

I am not going to do this for every single scale and every mode here. That video would be a couple of hours long and would be the equivalent of the first few weeks of a college music theory course.

I would much rather you put the work in and figure it out for yourself. You will find it is really handy.

It works for all majors and all minors. If you are already into your modes, it works there too, because each mode has its own diatonic chord system behind it. If you want to write modally, that is a really handy tool to have without memorizing some atrocious number of chords.

So take your scale, break it open, and find your triads.

It is that simple.