Triads in Open D

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 Open D tuning.

Let’s start by looking at our open chord with triads in mind.

Below is the open chord with the note names for the open strings. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings are A, F# and D respectively. These form a root inversion D major triad. Root inversion means that the lowest note of the triad is the root note of the chord. Therefore if we want to play a root inversion D major triad, we just need to play the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings open.

Now we can see that the note on the 1st string is the same as the note on the 4th string. They are both root notes, in this case D.

So if instead we play the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings we now get a D major 1st inversion. This is where the lowest note of the triad is the major 3rd.

Similarly the notes on the 2nd and 5th string are also the same. So if we want to play a D major 2nd inversion - where the 5th is the lowest note of the chord - we can instead play the 3rd, 4th and 5th strings.

This is actually pretty cool. We can shift the inversion of our chord by just moving the shape across the strings of the fretboard.

If you have read my previous writing about CAGED in Open D, you will remember that there are 3 chord shapes along the fretboard for each chord - The D shape, B shape and A shape. So let’s move onto the next shape. This will be the “B” shape played up 3 frets to give a D major. We will start by playing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings again

First we get a D major 1st inversion.

If we take our shape and move it “up” a string set - ie play the F# at 4th fret on the 1st string, not 4th fret on the 4th string - we get a D major 2nd inversion.

And if we move it “down” a string set - i.e. play the D at 5th fret on the 5th string instead of 5th fret on the 2nd string - we get a D major root inversion.

Let’s repeat this one more time for our “A” shape.

First we get a D major 2nd inversion.

Then if we move “up” a string set we get D major root inversion.

And finally if we move “down” a string set we get D major 1st inversion.

So this means we have a system that allows us to move easily between different inversions of major triads both along and across the fretboard. Even better it is cyclical so whichever chord we choose we can easily switch to a different inversion or a different position on the fretboard.

Here is the table of inversions for D

Another way of looking at it is if you want to move up an inversion you can either move up a string set or up a position.

One type of playing where this is particularly useful is for chord melody playing. When playing chord melodies, typically the ear will hear the top note as the melody note. So instead of thinking in terms of chord inversions, we can think about the melody note that we want to play.

Below is the same table again but stating the melody (ie highest) note and interval for each triad.

Therefore whatever chord we require we can easily adjust it to have the desired melody note on the top. This also works the other way - whatever melody note we have, we can easily fill out the rest of the triad below.

Here is a similar table showing the highest melody note for the C major triad across the 9 combinations of shape and string set. However this time we will start with the “B” shape as this allows us to fit all 3 shapes within the first 12 frets

So hopefully this illustrates how triads and Open D tuning are a great fit. The tuning makes it simple to move between different inversions as required. Although we have only looked at major triads, the exact same principle applies to any other triad including minor and diminished triads.