Common Chord Progressions

Description

In the previous lesson you saw how you can dramatically alter the feel of a chord progression by changing the I and the IV chord to minor chords. In this lesson we're going to look at a less dramatic way to use minor chords within the progressions. The idea is that each of the major chords has a kind of a "minor partner" that has the same basic sound, but a slightly more bittersweet emotion to it. Ultimately you'll be able to use theory to find these major and minor relationships, but for right now we'll just explore how it sounds!

I hope you've had fun with this tutorial on our common chord progressions. I know it can be a bit confusing at first to remember all of these different sequences of chords, but if you spend some time with each of the examples, playing along and transposing them to different keys, you'll most likely start to notice these progressions when you listen to your classic country records. And again, there are endless variations on these, but many things repeat within this style of music. Maybe you'll also start to pick up on the difference between the happy sounding major chords and the sadder sounding minor chords. And we'll use all of this much more in the coming lessons, so don't be frustrated if it's still a bit confusing. You'll understand it soon enough! Have fun with it!