The Harmonized Major Scale part 1:
-or, how to understand and find common chord progressions in pop and rock music, and understand how music works.
You may have heard the expression ‘this song is in the key of G’, or similar. A key is a way of describing a set of relationships between notes. Every key has a family of associated chords that are in the key. There is a formula to work out what the notes in each of those chords are based on the key’s major scale, but for now you just need to know that each key has seven chords, one starting on each of the seven notes of the scale. Those seven notes are the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti or 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ascending run you’ll have heard many times.
Whatever key you’re in, these chords come in an identical sequence of major and minor chords. Knowing this sequence makes it much easier to make an educated guess as to what chord might come next in a song, and it also means you can create a ‘diatonic’ (= in key, ‘fitting together)’ progression type of sound deliberately, or a non diatonic type of sound deliberately. There’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about something being in a key or not, it’s just a different type of sound. You’ll be able to identify what type of sound a chord progression has in time, and indeed you might already be able to tell the difference between a diatonic and a non-diatonic chord progression.
Certain chords in the sequence have a powerful relationship with one another, and where you see one, you can predict with quite a high probability the other will be somewhere close.
This is the sequence of chords you get for every major key:
|
I maj |
iim |
iiim |
IVmaj |
Vmaj |
vim |
|
G |
Am |
Bm |
C |
D |
Em |
There is a seventh chord, built on the seventh degree of the scale, but this chord is a diminished chord and is less commonly used.
Here’s the really good bit: whatever major key you are in, (and as there are 12 notes, there are 12 possible major keys) these chords appear in this order. You always get the same sequence of major and minor chords. So all you need to do is memorise the order they come in, plug in the notes of the major scale, and you generate a series of chords that are in the same key. Try it for these common keys. You’ll soon see that you’ll already have played songs with these chords in them. *Don’t worry if you are not yet holding all of this in your head *- you don’t need to understand this completely to use it, and using it helps you understand it.
The other important and good bit is that in any key, the relationships between different chord numbers will sound the same. This is why we can play hundreds of songs with a capo and G, D, Em and C.
A Vim to a I chord sounds similar in the key of C, the key of G, the key of F#….and once you get used to the sounds, you can even tell what chord relationship is being played just by listening. Makes it a LOT easier to transcribe songs, because rather than there being theoretically hundreds of possible chords to choose from, if a song sounds diatonic, the field of likely chords can be narrowed down quite quickly to 3-6 chords.
|
I maj |
iim |
iiim |
IVmaj |
Vmaj |
vim |
|
C |
|||||
|
F |
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|
D |
|||||
|
A |
When you use a sequence of chords that are all in a certain key, they have a particular consonant sound of ‘fitting’ together. You can rely on them sounding pretty good, or at least very harmonious.
1. Try this out. Choose sets of four numbers between 1 and 6. Eg 2, 5, 1, 3.
Now map those numbers to the corresponding chords.
So in C, the two chord is Dm, the five chord is G major, and the one chord is C. The three chord is Em. So if I write down 2, 5, 1, 3, I get a chord progression of Dm, G, C, Em.
Play this chord progression and see how you like it. You’ll probably find that there are some progressions that appeal to you more strongly than others. Notice the difference in how it feels when you have the I chord in different positions in the sequence, or when it is omitted entirely. Notice which chords generate momentum. Very often, the V chord is a movement chord, and if it’s at the end of the sequence it propels you back to the start in a way which keeps the music going.
My four progressions are:
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To take this further: change one of the chords that should be a major into a minor, or that should be a minor into a major, and contrast the effect. If you play Dm, G, C E, (instead of Dm, G, C and Em, key of C) you’ll notice that last E suddenly pops out of the texture quite strongly, and creates a very different effect to playing Dm, G, C and Em.
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Any other observations about how these chords sound or feel to you?
