Cool chord progressions guitar
The II and V chords - D minor 7 and G7 would normally last a bar each with the I chord, C major 7 lasting two bars ( | Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | Cmaj7 | ).
If you want to extend that you can add the vi chord (more on that in a bit). The most common chords used for popular music are the I chord, the IV chord, and the V chord. What I’m saying is that the progression uses the I chord, then the IV chord, then the V chord. That way, you can take these ideas into any key.Īnd I’ll use terminology like “that’s a I-IV-V pattern”. You’ll see what I mean! I’m going to switch to mostly roman numerals now, with chords listed as examples to tie it together. The 5 (V) chord especially pulls very strongly to the I chord. They create enough tension that resolves on the root (I) chord. The chords tend to pull to the root chord. When writing your progression, a good rule of thumb is to end it on the 4 (IV) or 5 (V) chord. They’ll sound OK and make sense to your ears. You can pretty much choose any three or four of these chords and play them together. Many, many, many progressions are built with these six chords. And in the case of the key of C, that's going to be three major chords and 3 minor chords. The chords were going to be dealing with are 1 through 6. Using our roman numerals, here is how every chord naturally falls:ĭiminished chords don’t show up much in popular music, so we’ll skip it for now. That just means they’re made up strictly of notes in the scale and you haven’t borrowed from other scales. By itself, a chord is just a static thinga few notes stacked togetherbut a group of chords arranged artfully in a progression creates a little harmonic journey. The melodic or lyrical hook may be what lodges in people’s heads, and an insistent beat may dominate the mix, but the chord progression is what makes everything move.
That’s all there is to it! These chords are called diatonic chords. Chord progressions are the engine of songwriting.
For the D, you’d have D, G, and A for a D minor chord. With C, E, and G you have a C Major chord. Start with C and skip over one note to get the second note in your chord (skip over the D and you’ll land on the E), then skip over another note to get your third note in the chord (skip over the F and you’ll land on the G). So we’ll need two more notes to make our chords. Every Major and minor chord has three notes. To make any chord in the key, start on the note you want, we’ll say C. The seventh chord is a little different, in that it’s a diminished chord. Here’s what the chords would look like (and yes, each note also represents a chord in the key!):Īre you wondering why some are lowercase and some are uppercase? The upper case are Major chords, and the lowercase are minor chords. When we’re talking about chords in a scale, we change to roman numerals.