If you look at the start of the words tricycle, bicycle and unicycle you will notice these prefixes "tri" means three, "bi" means two and "uni" means one.
In music when we play three notes at once we call it a TRIAD. We can build a triad on every note of the scale.

If you play two notes right next to each other on the piano you will notice that it sounds really bad. When we miss out every second note we notice that it sounds a lot better. This is because every note has it's own special wave that travels through the air to your ear. You can think of these sound waves like waves in the ocean. If they get too close together they can run into each other. This is what happens when we play notes directly next to each other on the piano, the sound wave made by one note bumps into the wave made by the next note and it sounds like waves crashing into each other.

When we leave out every second note the waves are far enough apart that they do not crash into each other but make nice patterns. This is where we get harmony from - the nice sound patterns that we can make when we use triads. Can you draw a lovely picture of some sound waves? You can use lots of colours. Do you want to draw the "crash" of the close notes or the patterns of the triad notes? Find some colours and a blank page and get drawing.

So how do we make those nice patterns in music? We begin on the first note of the scale and choose every second note till we have three notes on the piano pressed down. Try this on the piano. What are the notes?___________

The notes of the triad built on C are C, E, G.

If we move up one note to begin a triad on D, what are the other two notes? ______________

Can you find the notes for the triads built on the other notes of the C major scale?

E ___ ___
F ___ ___
G ___ ___
A ___ ___
B ___ ___
C ___ ___
Now we know all the triads of the C major scale we are going to make the triads for the F major scale. See if you can fill in the blanks. Do this at the piano if you like.

F ___ ___
G ___ ___
A ___ ___
Bb ___ ___
C ___ ___
D ___ ___
E ___ ___
F ___ ___
All we now have to do is build the triads for the G major scale. Here we go.

G ___ ___
A ___ ___
B ___ ___
C ___ ___
D ___ ___
E ___ ___
F# ___ ___
G ___ ___
In harmony some triads are more important than others. We call them the primary triads. These are the triads that are built on the first, fourth and fifth notes of each scale. We call the others secondary triads. These are the triads which begin on the second, third, sixth and seventh notes of each scale.

To end your lesson on triads, put a circle around the primary triads in the scales C, F and G.