Topic: Make your own color wheel Supplies: One (1) copy of the color wheel kit PDF printout Six (6) colored pencils (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) One (1) regular pencil or pen Scissors One (1) paper clip (bigger is better, but any clip will work) Vocabulary: color wheel square primary colors secondary colors complementary

As musicians, our lives are built around the tonic chord (I) of a song. It’s like our home … which is a pleasant place to spend much of our time. But to keep things interesting, we also have to venture out every once in a while. Otherwise, life might start to get a little boring.

After playing through each major scale progression, you might have noticed something cool. For some crazy reason, Mother Nature totally loves us. Instead of throwing us some curveball, she decided to make things easy. When it comes to chord progressions, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Because they’re really just based on the same,

Musicians are always creating cool, new sounds by using different chord patterns in a song. Together with scales and melodies, chords and progressions are like the nuts and bolts of music. All we have to do is combine these patterns, and we really start to see the payoff of everything we’ve learned so far. You see, it

In most of the music you’ll play, each chord will have only three notes. The average song includes only basic major triads and minor triads. And occasionally, you might see a few augmented triads and diminished chords. But for the most part, musicians keep it simple … and they stick with the major chords and minor

So … major chords are easy to play. They’re all built from a basic note pattern of “1-3-5” … and each one has a nice, strong sound that goes well with most songs. But the truth is, the major chord isn’t our only option. Because, really, it’s just one of fourbasic chords in music: In the key

After you’ve had a little practice, it’s easy to add chords to any melody. You just have to play the melody with your right … and hit the chords with your left hand. It’s as simple as that. And this combination of notes makes our music sound a lot more interesting. But things get even more

The nice thing about chords is that they use the same 12 notes we all know and love. Sure … we have to play those notes together in a chord … instead of only one at a time. But there’s nothing too special about that. In fact, you might even say that chords are easier to play

Now that we know how to play music’s most popular chord—the major triad—let’s see it in action, shall we? In our next song, we’ll focus on hitting each major chord with the left hand … while playing the melody line with the right hand. In music notation, we show this by splitting the bass staff and

Okay, so this is how chords work … just like scale patterns, chords are totally simple. We use the same 12 notes to make them. And just like before, we label each note using the same number names, or “scale degrees.” Based on these 12 notes, we can create all sorts of cool chords. But