Adam Phillips

Following on from looking at the major triads in open D, a next logical step is to look at minor triads.

Getting from minor triad to a major triad is fairly simple. We just need to move the major 3rds down a fret. From looking at an open D equivalent of CAGED, we would expect there to be 3 basic shapes for our minor triads, the same as major triads.

One little wrinkle however is that our first shape is all the open strings. This means that we cannot just move the major third down to a minor third. To get…

Understanding triads is a fundamental concept in music. A good understanding of triads is useful in soloing, comping, composing and pretty much any other musical situation you might find yourself in.

I’m not planning on going into the details of how to use triads in your playing as there are many resources available online. Most things written about using triads in standard tuning, on indeed music generally, apply the same in open D.

However there are some interesting things to note that are specific to the…

I’m a big fan of Open D tuning. In fact it’s pretty much all I play in these days. But getting started was a bit of a slog. I spent a lot of time going back to basics, figuring out chord shapes, scale patterns etc and there was a period in the middle where I almost felt like I was starting from scratch with the guitar.

So I’m trying to write out some of the things I’ve learned along the way in the hope it will help others trying to do the same thing.

Here is the first of these. It’s a look at what the…