You already know a major triad. Three notes, best friends, huddled together on three neighbouring strings like they're afraid of the dark. Now imagine yanking the middle one up an octave and making the poor thing skip a string to get there. Congratulations: you've just invented the spread triad, and your ear suddenly thinks you got a lot more sophisticated over lunch.
This one-minute clip is exactly that, and nothing more: open-voiced major triads living on the B, G and A strings, marched politely through the circle of fourths. The trick isn't the shapes — it's the voice leading, keeping every chord connected to the next so the whole thing glides instead of jumping around like a caffeinated squirrel.
How spread triads and voice leading actually work
A close-voiced triad stacks root, third and fifth right next to each other. A spread (open) triad takes the middle voice and lifts it an octave, so the three notes fan out across skipped strings — here, the B, G and A. That gap is the whole magic: the same triad and its inversions now sound wide, orchestral and grown-up, because your ear reads the air between the notes as depth.
The genuinely useful part is the voice leading. As you move around the circle of fourths, don't leap to a random new shape — find the closest inversion so the top note (and the inner notes) move by the smallest possible step, often just a fret or two. That's the takeaway: pick the next triad by where your fingers already are, not by which shape you memorised first. Smooth top-voice motion is what turns a dry exercise into something you'd actually put in a song.
Warning: once these worm their way into your playing you will never voice a plain major chord again, and your bandmates will quietly wonder when you joined a jazz cult. Full PDF and Guitar Pro files live on my Patreon, where the triads are even wider and the puns are exactly this bad.