ELI5: Why there are 7 musical chords?

Imagine music is like a yummy cake. To make a cake, you need ingredients, right? In music, the ingredients are notes – like Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti.

Now, a chord is like a special mix of ingredients that makes a unique flavor. We only use 7 main notes to make these flavors. Think of it like having 7 basic colors of paint.

So, why only 7 main chords? It all comes down to how these notes sound together.

• We start with a scale. A scale is like the order of your colors. The most common one is called the 'major scale'. Think of it like your basic cake recipe.

• From that scale, we build our chords. A chord is usually made of three notes that sound good together.

• Because we only have 7 notes in our scale, we can only make 7 main chords using those notes. Each chord has a different mood - happy, sad, exciting.

These 7 chords are the most common because they sound the most pleasing to our ears when they follow the rules of the major scale. They also create a good foundation for building more complex songs.

Musicians can change these chords or add extra notes to create even more exciting flavors (like adding sprinkles to your cake!), but those initial 7 are the building blocks.