COLOURS:

SECONDARY COLOURS

Secondary colours = major and minor triads

Learning outcome: major and minor chords are orange, green or purple

How does this work?

The 3 notes of a C major triad (C, E, G) are yellow, red and red respectivly

We think of this entire chord as orange, because its notes are a mixture of yellow and red

C minor is also orange

At the heart of secondary colours is the perfect 5th interval

the foundation of tonal harmony and harmonic stability

Ok,

All major and minor chords built on yellow root notes are orange

Heres a Gb minor triad with the 5th in the bass, it's orange.

This results In a family of major and minor chords related by minor 3rds

Seeing this on guitar really helps, play a barre chord and move it 3 frets at a time to traverse the respective colour family

So, if we ascend major or minor triads in semitones we get orange, purple, green, orange, purple, green etc:

OK,

Do you feel comfortable that major and minor chords related by minor 3rds have the same colour?

That's what we're to think when we look at the colour wheel

Each of the 6 colours represents either notes or chords related by minor 3rds

Before we move onto the why of these colours, we need to introduce this chart,

It holds all 12 major and all 12 minor chords showing certain relationships and groupings

The chart is a flattened out hypercube:

Which we'll unpack in the Geometry section

Here are the main chord relatinships inside the chart:

We have major chords related by minor 3rds:

We have minor chords related by minor 3rds:

We have perfect 5ths going up and down:

We have relative minors next door within the lines:

And we have parallel minors next door across the lines:

We'll start to explore what this chart does in the next page: Harmonic Functions

But right now,

I think it's time for a break...