Why learn chord progressions

The musical mood will always outweigh the lyrical message. Whatever musical mood we are creating, it will pull out hues of that same mood in the lyric. When we feel limited with our harmonic ideas, a good exercise is to try to add one new chord to our vocabulary with each song we write. Most of our songs utilize in some way the I chord, the IV chord, the V chord, and the vi minor chord.

For some basic theory for songwriters, check out my book, Beginning Songwriting , available on Amazon. So we might try adding to that the iii minor chord. We might try a new cadence, and instead of moving from the IV chord to the V chord, we might try using the flat vi chord to the flat vii chord.

Or, we might try the flat iii to the flat IV. These and other cadences are explained and listed in the book and speak directly to songwriters who may be shaky on their theory knowledge.

Learn these and you will be able to play lots of different songs and easily use them in your composing. They will work in both major and minor keys. Start with the following 4 progressions. Circle Chord Progressions are progressions where the chords seem to naturally follow on from one another.

You will find the following 2 circle progressions really useful. Have a listen to the audio examples for each again, each recording contains an example in a major key followed by an example in a minor key.

Even though the letters of the words are mixed up, we understand it because our brain recognises the shape of the words, not the individual letters. Rather, we read each group of letters as one word. This is exactly how we want to approach reading music. Instead of looking at each individual note, or each individual chord, we read the group of notes as one chord, or the group of chords as one chord progression.

We could view this as 15 different chords and try to memorise the order that they go in, or we could read it as four different chord progressions, which is easier to remember:. When we break it down like this we can see that three of the chord progressions are very similar, and two of them are the same! That means there are only three unique chord progressions we need to memorize. All of a sudden this is much easier than trying to get our head around the 15 chords we originally had.

All of these chords are from the key of G major, and we can see that they each correspond with a number in the scale:. We can take these numbers and rewrite the chord progressions we have above using numbers:. This system of using numbers to represent chords is known as the Nashville Number System. Roman numerals are often a better indication of the chord we are playing, so they are often used instead of numbers.