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Which Triad

Knowing your triads is the easy part. Knowing which one to play over the chord in front of you is the question — and it has a numerical answer.

Count how many of a triad’s three notes are chord tones. That single number tells you where it sits, from fully inside to fully outside. In every seven-note collection the seven triads rank the same way: 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0. Exactly one has no chord tones at all — and that one is always the three extensions.

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Four pages. The full ladder worked out over two different chords, the two shortcuts, and how to stop it sounding like an exercise.

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Seven triads, ranked

Over Fm7 (F A♭ C E♭), using F Dorian. Every triad below is built from that collection, so none of them is a wrong note. They differ only in how much of the chord they contain.

TriadNotesInOver Fm7

A♭ majorA♭ C E♭♭3 5 ♭7

F minorF A♭ C1 ♭3 5

C minorC E♭ G5 ♭7 9

D diminishedD F A♭13 1 ♭3

B♭ majorB♭ D F11 13 1

E♭ majorE♭ G B♭♭7 9 11

G minorG B♭ D9 11 13

The top

A♭ major and F minor are both three for three. Everything they contain is already in the chord.

The bottom

G minor shares nothing with the chord. Read it as degrees and you get 9, 11, 13 — the three extensions, and nothing else.

It is always the same ranking

252 collection-and-chord pairs tested across Dorian, melodic minor and major, in all twelve keys. Every one produced 3–3–2–2–1–1–0.

Each chord tone is the root of one diatonic triad, the third of another, and the fifth of a third — so it gets counted exactly three times. Four chord tones, counted three times each, is twelve. Twelve spread over seven triads, none holding more than three, only fits one way.

What’s in the guide

The full ladder worked out over two different chords in two different collections, so you can see the pattern transfer.
The build-on-the-fifth shortcut, which lands on 5, ♭7 and 9 every time — identically over a minor seventh chord and a dominant.
The upper structure triad: the one with no chord tones, and why it is always three extensions.
Why the classic triad pair — two major triads a whole step apart — is really just the top and bottom rungs, and covers six of the seven notes with two shapes.
Inversions, and the one triad whose inversions are all the same shape.
Breaking the note order, adding rhythm, and the three-bar cross-rhythm you get from accenting every third note.
A practice order that starts with two rungs instead of seven.

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Every musical example in the guide is original. The triads, chord-tone counts, degrees and the ranking itself were computed and checked rather than recalled. No melody or transcription of any copyrighted composition is reproduced. More lessons, play-alongs and practice tools at fretprints.com.