Now that we’ve played through a few chord progressions, we’re definitely getting better. Our brains are bigger and our hands have gotten a lot of target practice moving back and forth between chords. But after a while, life would get pretty boring with only three primary chords, right? So to keep things interesting, musicians often

You’ve got to admit, the flow between the tonic chord (I) and the dominant chord (V) is nice. And that’s because the movement from one triad to the next is like a short visit with a good friend. But after a while it’s fun to with hang out with other friends, too. So musicians like

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,

Chord progressions are really easy to play. And that’s because they’re based on the old, familiar scale patterns we already know. Using the C major scale, for example, we can come up with a chord progression that sounds awesome. We simply build one chord on the tonic (1) note … and another on the major-second

It’s fun to add chords to a song. Because each one helps “fatten out” the melody and propel the music forward. But at some point, you may be wondering how we decide on which chords to use. In other words, do we just randomly throw chords into a song … or is there some logic

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

The nice thing about seventh chords is that they have just four notes … which means they’re as easy to play as our old friends, the basic triads. And while you’ll sometimes see different types of seventh chords in music, the most common one is definitely the dominant seventh chord. For some reason, notes “1-3-5-b7” just sound good together.

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

Because all four basic triads are similar, they’re all easy to play. Each one has just three notes … and each one is pretty common in music. But the major triad and minor triad are (by far) the most popular. Together, they just sound more pleasant to the ears. So musicians use them a lot more often. To see what