🟢 how pros do chord progressions
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The 🟢 Start Here Series
In Part One, we gave names to the sections of songs—verse, chorus, etc
In Part Two, we talked about our musical ruler of time: beats & bars.
In Part Three, we looked at our musical ruler for pitch: the major scale
Here in part five, we’ll look at chord progressions.
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You can’t unsee it
Chess grandmasters sometimes do “simuls”—play multiple games at once.
They’re able to read the board at a glance. They can memorize entire games.
But there’s a catch. It’s not brute-force mental GPS.
They’re thinking of the pieces in context—based on things they expect to see based on the hundreds of games they’ve played. If we put pieces on the board at random—in a way they’d never be in an actual game—then those grandmasters can’t memorize them any better than you or me.
It’s the same way with chords, progressions, and cadences (mini progressions).
If you think of them in isolation, they won’t make any sense… and they’ll be hard to memorize. But once you learn to see (and hear) them in context, you’ll see them everywhere.
Chords don’t exist in a vacuum.
They’re part of progressions.
Knowing what key a song is in isn’t just about finding a scale to solo with. Giving scale degree numbers to chords lets us see how they function.
It lets us see that D G D A…
…is the same basic idea as G C G D…
…only in a different key.
Surprisingly, learning to think of chords this way also improves our musical memory (and our ability to hear chord changes).
Take It Easy
To see these in action, let’s look at the Eagles’ Take It Easy.
It’s in the key of G. How do we know that? We looked at the chords…
…and knew that these are the “diatonic” chords in the key of G.
G
Am
Bm
C
D
Em
Just like we saw in part one, songs are built out of sections.
Let’s go through the chord progression section by section.
INTRO
Just like a blues song, we’re using 1, 4, & 5:
VERSE
Notice that the third bar is split—two beats of G & two beats of D:
CHORUS
It’s a 16-bar chorus. Let’s look at it in little 4-bar subsections:
1️⃣ First four bars: 6541
2️⃣ Second four bars: 2466
3️⃣ Third four bars: 4141
4️⃣ Fourth four bars: 2411
OUTRO
The very end of the song has an unexpected chord: F
But when we look at this chart… there’s no F:
That’s because F isn’t “diatonic” to the key of G—it’s not made up exclusively of notes from the key of G major.
That’s ok! It still sounds awesome, and that’s the only thing that matters.
It also gives us our first glimpse of “borrowed” chords.
Borrowed Chords
Chords from outside the key are “non-diatonic” or “borrowed.”
There’s a bunch of them, and we’ll run through a few real-world examples in a minute.
But first, let’s look at how this fits with what we’ve learned in the Start Here series:
The major scale is still our measuring stick!
So when we’re talking about an F chord in the key of G, we call it the “flat seven.”
As in: It’s the major chord built on the note a half-step below the 7!
Other times, you might see majors & minors swapped.
A major version of a chord that’s normally minor in this key. Or the minor version of a chord that’s normally major in this key.
When that happens, we call out the fact that it’s unexpected:
the “four minor”
the “two major”
etc
Again, if we look at this table of chords without any additional context…
…it seems like we’re trying to reduce the pure joy of music into an unfun periodic table.
That’s why it’s so important to apply this framework to actual songs.
Borrowed chords in real songs
We’ll look at:
Majors that are normally minor:
II (“two major”)
III (“three major”)
VI (six major”)
Minors that are normally major:
iv (“four minor”)
v (“five minor”)
and “flat” chords:
♭III (“flat three”)
♭VI (“flat six”)
♭VII (“flat seven”)
Majors that are normally minor
II - “two major” - Big River, Johnny Cash
III - “three major” - Dock Of The Bay, Otis Redding
VI - “six major” - Good Day Sunshine, The Beatles
Minors that are normally major
iv - “four minor” - Don’t Look Back In Anger, Oasis
v = “five minor” - The Joke, Brandi Carlisle
Flat chords
♭III - Three More Days - Ray LaMontagne
♭VI - Gravity - John Mayer
♭VII - Take It Easy - Eagles
Want to dig a little deeper on this?
Check out How To Figure Out The Key Of A Song.
Next week we’ll look at some basic rhythm concepts. The week after that we’ll pull all of the Start Here ideas together & see how they fit on the page.
That’s all I got this week.
See you next Wednesday,
Josh