Chords

Common Chord Progressions

This guitar lesson covers a few common guitar chord progressions that you will be sure to come across as you play the guitar. This video will cover progressions that are commonly used such as the I – IV – V or the ii – V – I. Once you learn your scales, these chord progression are easily moved to any key. (For more on learning scales, be sure to check out the Major Scale post.) When you learn all the most common progressions in the style of music you plan to play, you will be well on your way to writing great songs. Knowing your progressions will help you when you are learning songs – you will be able to easily predict where the song is going 90% of the time!

Remember, it is more important to learn the the chord number according to scale then the actual chords being played. In other words, know that you are going I – IV -V instead of learning it as G – C – D. It will help you later on in your playing.

Basic Open Chords Diagram

Pictured below is a diagram of the 5 basic open Major chords and 3 basic open minor chord. If you are wondering how the chords are formed, check out my post on how chords are formed. Feel free to use this diagram where ever and to print one out so you can use it to practice. Once you master these basic chords, you will be well on your way to developing great guitar knowledge! Make sure you practice your fingering and that you are pushing down correctly on all strings so that the chord sounds smooth. (Perfect) Practice makes perfect!

(Click on the diagram to bring up a printable version!)

Chord Progression: D, Cadd9, G

In this post, I have included a great video on one of the most popular chord progressions used in popular music. I will just give you an overview of the notes in the three chords that you will be playing. It is important to try and learn all the notes in the chords. While it may be a little too much to take in if you are a beginner, you should try and learn what notes make up what chords. I promise that this will all help you later when it comes to melodies and improvising solos. Anyway, here are the notes in the chords according to how they will be played in this video on guitar:

Now, memorize those notes, but you can go ahead an practice the other type of techniques in this video – like the strumming technique. Learn this progression and you are well on your way to playing a quarter of every popular song ever written! (No, really!)

Easy Tip For Chords Forming

IF you are looking for more tips on forming chords, this is a great video (by an excellent teacher) giving you the information I gave you on my last post about forming a chord. However, she goes into a little more detail on figuring out all the basic major and minor chords in a major scale. She gives an easy formula (the one I went over earlier) on forming your chords. This works for minor chords in the scale too as you will see. So, now that you know how to figure out how to form a basic triad chord let’s watch the video!

I hope that this visualization helped you understand what I was talking about in my past post. Not only that, I hope it helped you learn just a little bit more about what to do with the chords when you know the majors, minors, and the diminished in each key. But until then, go through each of your major scales for each of the 12 notes (C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B) and figure out the major and minor triads for each scale. (No, you don’t have to memorize them all right now – just get familiar with them.) Repetition is key when learning and playing music!

How Chords Are Formed

Chords are composed of two or more notes. A chord can be played by playing all notes (the two or more that make up the chord) at once, or it can be played one note at a time. The most common and basic chord is called a triad (containing three notes). More complex chords are built upon triads. For simplicity, I am just going to go over how to build a basic major triad chord. Later we will get into minor chords and more complex chords, but you have to start with the basic and build.

To build a chord you start with a root (or tonic) note which is usually the basis for naming the chord – i.e. C Major chord’s root is C. After you find the root, you continue building the chord by going up two intervals in the root note’s scale. So, in the case of C major, your root note would be C and your 3rd would be E and your 5th would be G. (The root, 3rd, and 5th of a scale is your triad chord.) Let’s look at the C Major scale to see more in depth on how this works.

Notice the I (or root) is C and the III is E and the V is G – and there you have it a C Major is C E G. Of course, this works the same for every major scale. Let’s try to figure out an E Major chord.

Okay, did you figure it out? If you think that the notes E G# B make up an E Major chord, you are right! Good Job. Let’s look at one more.

Above is a G Major scale. Note that G B D are the I III V notes of the scale therefore the notes that make up a G Major chord. Now, I will give you two more major scales (D and F) and you can figure out what the major chord is by applying the same techniques you have been shown throughout this post.

If you want a chord diagram of the basic open chords, check out this post on chords.