You know how to play a G chord, right? Probably learned it in your first week of guitar.

But do you know why a G chord is made up of those specific notes? Or why it sounds the way it does?

Most players don't. And honestly, for a long time, you don't need to. You can play hundreds of songs just memorizing chord shapes and moving your fingers where you're told.

But here's what happens when you don't understand where chords come from: you hit a wall. You can't figure out new voicings. You don't know which notes you can change and which ones you can't. You're stuck playing the exact same chord shapes everyone else plays - because you don't understand what makes a chord a chord.

I've seen this with countless students. They'll play a G chord perfectly, but when I ask "what notes are you playing?" they have no idea. They're just making a shape.

And that's fine... until you want to get creative. Until you want to write your own progressions, or add color to your rhythm playing, or understand why certain chords work together and others don't.

That's when understanding chord construction changes everything.

Once you know that a G major chord is built from G-B-D (the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the G major scale), suddenly the fretboard opens up. You can find those notes anywhere. You can create different voicings of the same chord. You can make substitutions that sound interesting but still make musical sense.

You stop being limited by shapes and start playing with actual notes.

In the video above, I walk through exactly how chords are built from scales and how those notes show up in the chord shapes you already know. It's one of those "oh THAT'S why it works" moments that makes everything else make more sense.

And in Guitar Theory Unlocked, we go even deeper - you'll learn how to build any chord from any scale, how to find those notes all over the fretboard, and how to use that knowledge to get genuinely creative with your playing.

Because when you understand how things fit together, you stop memorizing and start creating.

Checkout the other lessons in this series: