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Easy Guitar Tips – Quick Chord Progressions
By Mike Hayes | March 22, 2010
One of the most often overlooked aspects of learning to play the
guitar is the concept of learning songs via chord progressions.
It’s popular to look up a song on YouTube or go to a TAB site to
learn a song however at the end of the day you might know what
the guitarist played you will never have a clue as to why they
played it.
Some players think that it’s cool to be musically ignorant and
prefer not to be bothered with the boring details as to how and
why things work and that’s fine … it just means these guy’s and
gal’s have to start from scratch every time that want to learn a
new song.
In other words if a player doesn’t know what they are doing every
song will appear to be a completely new set of information to
learn and it’s very difficult to remember chunks of unrelated
information … a much more effective way to learn is by
associating new material with things we already know that way we
can build on past successes and have a much greater chance of
learning, remembering and recalling songs.
With so much information available to the budding guitarist the
trick is to know how to go about learning the most important
stuff. I recommend the following quick and easy chord
progressions to get you fingers and ears connected.
Quick and Easy Chord progressions
Tip #1: Learn to play your chord progressions in guitar friendly
keys such as G, D, A & E
Tip #2: Learn and practice the basic three chords in each key
e.g., in each key the most common chords used by popular
musicians are the 1 – 4 – 5 chords, This means that in each key
you need to know what the first, fourth and fifth chords are and
most importantly how they sound.
Key of G
1st chord = G
4th chord = C
5th chord = D
Key of D
1st chord = D
4th chord = G
5th chord = A
Key of A
1st chord = A
4th chord = D
5th chord = E
Key of E
1st chord = E
4th chord = A
5th chord = B
Tip#3: Start by using chord progression templates with four bars
to a line e.g.,
//// | //// | //// | //// |
It’s important to understand the underlying musical structure of
songs, one of the most common problems guitar players encounter
when learning via the popular ‘TAB’ and ‘chord symbol over the
lyrics’ format is they are never sure exactly when to change
chords.
By setting out your songs in ‘four to the line’ templates it is
easy to spot similarities in songs.
Most songs are constructed of either eight, twelve or sixteen bar
templates like this:
8 bar version
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// ||
12 bar version
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// ||
16 bar version
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// |
//// | //// | //// | //// ||
Notice how all the templates are even numbers, you can also have
24 bar versions, but odd bar numbers do not work! This is the
type of important information you can’t identify when looking at
page full of lyrics with random chord symbol placement.
Tip#4: Study the most important chord progressions in each
template such as … (all examples shown in the key of G).
8 bar version
G/// | G/// | G/// | D/// |
D/// | D/// | D/// | G/// ||
This simple two chord progression will covers songs like “Hang
Down Your Head Tom Dooley” and “Achy Breaky Heart” … yes, they
use the exact same chord progression!
12 bar version
G/// | G/// | G/// | G/// |
C/// | C/// | G/// | G/// |
D/// | C/// | G/// | G/// ||
“Hound Dog”, “Let’s Stick Together” and hundreds of other songs
all use this progression, you absolutely must learn this one.
16 bar version
G/// | G/// | G/// | G/// |
G/// | G/// | G/// | G/// |
C/// | C/// | G/// | G/// |
D/// | C/// | G/// | G/// ||
All – time favorites such as “Be Bop a Lula” feature this 16 bar
variation of the blues.
Remember, the name of the game is to associate each song with
information already learnt, that’s the quickest way to learn to
play the guitar.
Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson, Guitar Chords, Guitar Tips | No Comments »
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