Throughout the long tumultuous history of Rock 'n' Roll,
there have been certain song patterns that have shown up
over and over. Many of them are cliches by now (how many
times have you heard the fire/desire rhyme?), but others are
classics, comfortable sounds we recognize in our
bones. We've heard them a million times, but can't help but
feel inspired anew every time. Today I'll cover one of
those: The I-vi-IV-V Chord Progression. Yeah, just rolls of
the tongue, right? Well, trust me that it sounds better
when you play it than when you try to name it.
I covered major and minor chords in a previous lesson. A
suspended chord is what you get when you take a major or
minor chord and replace the interval of the third with
another interval.
To review, here are the interval formulas for major and
minor chords.
Major
Minor
root, major third, perfect fifth
root, minor third, perfect fifth
(You can refer back to my intervals lesson if you don't
remember what the interval names mean.)
You'll notice that the two chord formulas only differ in the
second note added, which is an interval of either a major
third or a minor third. So if you take that out there is
nothing to distinguish a major chord from a minor chord. In
fact Read the rest...
Previously, I talked about the basic three-note chord types,
the triads. To review, there are four basic types that are
commonly used. Here they are with their interval formulas:
Major
Minor
Augmented
Diminished
root, major third, perfect fifth
root, minor third, perfect fifth
root, major third, augmented fifth
root, minor third, diminished fifth
To each of these chord types, we can add more notes to create
more complicated chords. There is no limit to what we can add,
but the most common type of note to add is a seventh, either a minor
seventh, major seventh, or
diminished seventh. As you can
imagine, when combined with the four chord types we have to
start with, this leads to, like, a million different chords (ok,
actually 12, but you get the idea). Fortunately, some are used
more frequently than others, and some are almost never used, so
I'll present the most common ones first.
From the previous lessons, you now hopefully understand how
notes and intervals are named. Here I will cover the
construction and naming of some simple chords.
We already know that the space between two notes is called an
interval. If we play the notes one after the other, it's called
a melodic interval, because it's as if you're playing a
melody. If we play them at the same time, it's called a harmonic
interval, because it's, you know, a harmony. Now if we take a
harmonic interval, and add a third different note, we have a
chord. That was easy, right? After that, we can keep adding more
notes to make more and more complicated chords, but for this
lesson let's stick with three-note chords, also called triads,
for all you Latin-speakers.
By the way, does anybody else remember the old game Rise
of the Triad? Back in I think '95 or '96, I think it
was. Somewhere between Doom and Duke Nukem 3-D, it was my
favorite game. Anyway, that's irrelevant.
Where were we? Oh yeah, so basically, the definition of a chord
is just any three different notes played at the same time. The
intervals between these three notes define what the chord sounds
like. There are a lot of different possible combinations of
intervals, but only a few that are commonly used.
