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

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

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 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

Right now, it might still be difficult to get your hands playing together. But honestly, that’s okay. If you’ve already mastered the art of playing chords with a melody, then you’re a fast learner. And if you need some more practice (don’t we all?), then try playing this next song. It’s a classic and one

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

Now that we know how to illustrate time (or “duration”) in music, we can play anything we’d like. After all, music is really about two basic things: Pitch (that is, the 12 notes of the chromatic scale), and Duration (like whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc.) All we have to do is combine these

Music is cool because we can always come up with new and interesting patterns. For example, we’ve already seen how the major scale can be rearranged into other note patterns … like the minor scale, pentatonic scale, and blues scale. It turns out that music is simple because it’s all just a bunch of notes … in different combinations …

The chromatic scale is important because it’s the basic layout of all 12 notes in music. In other words, it includes every interval of half-steps and whole-steps. But, as we’ve seen before, the chromatic scale is also kind of boring … because it doesn’t sound very interesting. The major scale, on the other hand, sounds really good.