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Posted by: paolo on:27 Apr 2011 Guitar » Intervals and Chord Progressions |
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Intervals and chord progressions
When writing a song many people can become confused on how
to link chords, and this could be because of a lack of musical theory knowledge
or just the fact they have never composed music. But with the basic theory knowledge
you can compose a master piece.
The most basic chord progression is major scale.
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
The intervals are counted: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or I, ii,
iii, IV, V, vi, vii, VII
If we want to express an interval with a word these are the
terms we use.
I Tonic
ii
Supertonic
iii Mediant
IV
Subdominant
V Dominant
vi
Submediant
vii Leading
Tone
In the major
scale when we are using chords we need to understand in what way we need to
play a certain degree in a scale, i.e. major, minor, diminished ECT
This is how
we play every degree of the major scale.
I major
ii minor
iii minor
IV major
V major
vi minor
vii
diminished
VII major
So that is
the basic theory behind major chord progressions but now I'm going to explain
how to use the chord progressions in our playing.
When writing
a chord sequence on paper(or in a book) we generally use the roman numerals
method because we can show the difference between major and minor chords. If
the chord is MAJOR it would be written in capitals, if the chord is MINOR we
would write in lower case so for example if we were playing a song in the key
of C and I wrote down;
I - VI - V -
I
The chords i
would play would be,
C major - F
major - G major - C major
If i wrote
I - iii - vi -VI
The chords i
play would be
C major - E
minor - A minor - F major
By
experimenting with different chords and different variations we can write many
different chord progressions ( or basis to a song ) so by putting all the pieces together the
playing and the theory we can write many songs or even learn some of our
favourite songs.