I (31m) am new to music and trying to understand how the human ear hears a chord as a combination of strings.
To avoid ambiguity I’ll focus on the C chord of a 5 string banjo tuned to G.
The individual strings for a C chord are played with E,C,G,E,G(high)
How do G and E combine to sound like C? My initial thought is constructive wave interference but that seems like it would make an F note, not C.
Please help a newbie 🙂
In: 1
The E and G don’t “combine” to sound like a C note. Rather, the three notes together make up a C chord (specifically C major). Chords are made by starting at the first note, called the root, and adding different notes at specific intervals. So, if C is number one, then adding the third and fifth notes (C-d-E-f-G-a-b) makes a C major chord. If you start at D, the third and fifth notes are F# and A, which makes a D major chord (whether a sharp or flat is involved has to do with the key, but that’s a another can of worms)
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