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All About Chords, part 1
(20 Nov 02)
What can you do with it?
What can we use this all fourths progression for? For one thing, use it to write tunes. Let's say you've come up with a melody and you don't know what chords to put to it. No problem. Assuming the melody is in C major, sing the melody while strumming the all fourths progression given a little while ago. Play it slowly; listen carefully; feel the Force...whoa, sorry. Wrong movie.
Chances are, your melody will sound pretty good over those chords for at least some of the notes. Wherever it doesn't sound so good, either change the melody, or swap out the chord.
How to practice
The V7-I progression is pretty important, so you want to practice it in as many keys as you can manage. The progression we did in this section is in C. Let's transpose the progression to other common keys.
Keep in mind that you can play the following chords anywhere on the fretboard — at least at first. Don't worry about playing a particular voicing, playing all over the neck, or playing on just a certain string or strings. Just play the form of the chord you feel most comfy with.
Let's do V7-I in these keys: F, G, A, E, D and for extra credit, Gb.
Here are the chords:
Key F: C7, F
Key G: D7, G
Key A: E7, A
Key E: B7, E
Key D: A7, D
Key Gb: Db7, Gb
Now, that shows *what* to practice. But, *how* do you practice 'em? That breaks down into where to practice 'em, then how often, and other questions.
First, as said a short while ago, play the above progressions in each key wherever you feel most comfortable playing them. This would likely mean open position chords if you're a beginner.
Practice the V7-I progressions until you can play them in time with a metronome. Start with 90 BPM, and play a phrase like this:
| V7 V7 | I I | V7 V7 | I I |
In other words, strum the V7 twice, then the one twice, and repeat that sequence. Then, go on to the next key. This might be more fun if you had a playalong partner to do it with. So, here's the midi file that you can use for that: FiveOne5keys
And here is the notation for the V7-I progressions in the list above:
Once you get good at playing these progressions, you'll want to keep playing *while you switch keys*. In other words, if you're strumming along to G7 and C, you'd want to have a buddy or a computer program call out the next key at random. "Key A!" "Key E!" and so on. It's your job and your joy to play through without missing a beat.
In the next installment of All About Chords, we'll look at why chords are built in thirds, the progression every guitarist must know, how to practice it, and the many uses of regurgitated cat hairballs.
Copyright 2002. Darrin Koltow. All rights reserved.
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Darrin Koltow is webmaster of MaximumMusician.com, which offers free guitar lessons, articles, ebooks with tabs and MIDI files, and links to other music sites.
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