Could you have a minor chord in a Major scale song?

Question

I haven't experimented with this much - so, the reason for asking this is in order to know whether it is even possible:
Could you have a minor chord in a Major scale or no?
I am thinking more in terms of chord progressions.

Answer 1

Sure, even within limits of the most traditional tonal harmony, you naturally have some major and some minor (and one diminshed, to be thorough) chords within a major tonality. let's take for example the tonality of C major, and produce the natural (more properly "diatonic") chords (more properly, "triads") contained in this tonality, one per degree of the respective scale:

• I : C-E-G --> C major
• ii : D-F-A --> D minor
• iii : E-G-B --> E minor
• IV : F-A-C --> F major
• V : G-B-D --> G major
• vi : A-C-E --> E minor
• viiº : B-D-F --> b diminished

Let's not go for this explanation into the details of the diminished chord, suffice to say that this structure is the same for all tonalities: the triad for the first degree is always major, the one for the second degree always minor, and so forth (the roman numerals are a convention to represent the triads for each scale degree, upper or lower caps as the respective triad is major or minor).

All these chords belong to the tonality, because they are built only with notes the are part of the tonality's scale.