Chord tones

Every chord you’ve strummed is secretly tiny: underneath the six-string noise, a major chord is just three notes — degrees 1, 3, and 5 of its scale. Those three are the chord tones, and an arpeggio is simply those notes played one at a time. In this exercise you’ll find them hiding inside two chords you already know.

The 1-3-5 recipe

Take the C major scale: C(1) D(2) E(3) F(4) G(5) A(6) B(7). Keep every other note starting from the root — 1, 3, 5 — and discard the rest:

degree   1   2   3   4   5
note     C   D   E   F   G
keep     C       E       G

C, E, G. That’s the complete contents of a C major chord. Any major chord, same recipe from its own scale: 1 is the root (the name), 3 is the third (major or minor lives here), 5 is the fifth (stability).

Finding them in the open C shape

So what are your five strumming strings actually doing? Duplicating. Here’s the open C chord with each string’s note and job:

Open C chord, note by note (low string to high)
string   A(fret 3)  D(fret 2)  G(open)  B(fret 1)  e(open)
note     C          E          G        C          E
degree   1          3          5        1          3

Play the chord one string at a time, slowly, and say the degree of each: “root, third, fifth, root, third.” Five strings, three notes.

Finding them in the open E shape

Open E chord, note by note (low string to high)
string   E(open)  A(fret 2)  D(fret 2)  G(fret 1)  B(open)  e(open)
note     E        B          E          G#         B        E
degree   1        5          1          3          5        1

Same trio — E(1), G#(3), B(5) — spread across six strings. Notice the E shape hoards roots (three of them) while the C shape doubles up differently. Every chord shape is some arrangement of 1s, 3s, and 5s; that’s all a chord shape is.

Your first arpeggios

Hold the full C shape and, with a metronome at 60 BPM, pick its strings one at a time, low to high and back — letting the notes ring into each other. That’s an arpeggio played the easy way. Do the same with E.

Then the distilled version: just one octave of the C arpeggio, one note per finger —

C arpeggio, one octave:  A string fret 3 (C) → D string fret 2 (E) → G string open (G)

— up and down. Three notes. That tiny figure is C major’s entire identity.

Sing them

Last step, and the one that matters most: pluck each note of the one-octave arpeggio and hum it back. Then try to hum the next note before you pluck it. Accuracy is not the point (your species varies widely here, and it’s fine); the point is that chord tones you can pre-hear become notes you can aim for. The final exercise of this course is entirely about that aiming.