Chord Patterns on the Guitalele - Requinto

The Guitalele and Requinto are musical instruments that share the same tuning, and are commonly used to create the melodies and riffs for a song.

Sometimes musicians play full chords, or arpeggios on them, as well as they move along the notes of a scale.

The DG Guitalele-Requinto Chord Patterns Android application facilitates the learning of chord patterns on these instruments, by displaying all the notes and intervals in a chord, on any position along the fretboard.

To produce notes of a chord, you must play only notes from the chord.

For example, say you want to produce notes for the Adim7 chord.

The Adim7 chord is based on the following notes: A, C, Eb/D#, F#.

Suppose you want to play this chord starting from the 1st fret of the instrument, and onwards.

• 1st string is A, part of the chord, and also is C on the 3rd fret;
• 2nd string is E, not on the chord, but also F# on the 2nd fret is;
• 3rd string is C (on the chord), and also Eb/D# on the 3rd fret;
• 4th string is G, not on the chord, but A on the 2nd fret is;
• 5th string is D, not on the chord, but D# on the 1st is, and also F# on the 4th;
• 6th string is A, on the chord, and also C on the 3rd fret.

The following image shows this chord pattern from the 1st fret onwards:

Next, you need to know the intervals, to be able to tell which is the root, and its relationship to the other notes in the chord.

By tapping on the fretboard of the DG Guitalele-Requinto Chord Patterns Android application, it reveals the note intervals, as shown below:

This way you know the root (R) appears in 3 places, the third (m3) appears in 3 places, the diminished fifth (d5) in 2 places, and the diminished seventh (M6) in 2 places.

So there are several potential ways you can build this chord.

Next, you have to decide how to combine the dots such that you form a chord with the R, m3, d5, and M6 intervals.

Because there are six strings, there is scope for some redundancy (repeated notes).

Here are some possibilities (we leave some others for the reader to discover):

Which one you choose, depends on the proximity to the melody you are playing, on the sound, on the proximity to the previous and the next chords, and on how comfortable your fingers feel on those positions.

And remember that you can explore more by using the ">>" arrow, to display intervals in higher frets.

As you have seen, by understanding the intervals behind the chord formulas, this application will help you build many chords on your Guitalele or Requinto.

A key point to remember: it does not teach you how to do chords by memory, it teaches you how to deduce them.