Common Chord Progressions

Chord progressions for guitar are easy to learn once you have a basic understanding of how the major scales work. Acquiring this knowledge will enable you to see how every degree of the major scale can be used to create a chord. Each of the guitar chords created from a particular scale will also have a unique relationship to the Key.

The letters associated with the Key of C Major are:

C D E F G A B C

Here is the C Major scale:

Today, I want to show you how to put a chord progression together using any given Key. So, with that in mind lets continue...

I'll use the letters of the C Major Scale: C D E F G A B C to help you understand some basic music principles. For instance, these letters can be used to represent either notes or chords.

Remember:

a note is a single tone



a chord is 3 or more tones sounded simultaneously

Because of this, the numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 are commonly used to represent each note, or degree of the scale,

and the Roman Numerals: I II III IV V VI VII VIII are use to represent each of the chords in a given Key.

The chords will correspond with, and have the same letter name as, the degrees of the major scale that they are associated with.

Lets look at how a chord progression is made when using the C Major Scale above:

Notice how the I chord has the same letter name as the 1st degree of the scale, the IV chord has the same letter name as the 4th degree and the V chord has the same letter name as the 5th degree. This is called a I IV V chord progression. The progression ends by returning again to the I chord.

• C = 1 = I
• D = 2 = II
• E = 3 = III
• F = 4 = IV
• G = 5 = V
• A = 6 = VI
• B = 7 = VII
• C = 8 = VIII (same as I)

I IV V chord progressions are used for the 12 bar blues, plus many rock, blue-grass, folk and other popular tunes. The V chord (G) is commonly played as a dominant 7th in order to create more tension or pull back toward the I chord (C).

This would slightly alter the chord progression given above to:

In other words, the G7 chord can be used as a substitute for the G Major chord and vice-versa.

Now, if you are new to the guitar, this chord progression might be a little hard to play in the Key of C. In that case, we can simply transpose it into another Key!

For example, the next Key in order of sharps is G. The scale degrees are:

G A B C D E F# G

So, our I IV V I chord progression for the Key of G is: G C D G

If we convert the V chord to a dominant 7th chord we have:

Here are the remaining I IV V7 I chord progressions for the Keys of D A and E. This completes the first five Keys (in order of sharps).

Now that you are equiped with this information, you have the tools to start playing a wide variety of songs!

Here is a simple strumming pattern you can use...

Remember- two eighth notes equal one quarter note. Since a quarter note has a value of one beat, an eighth note has a value of only 1/2 a beat. That means you will have twice as many eighth notes when counting a 4/4 rhythm. Therefore, eighth notes are counted: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &

Another thing that will help your understanding is to realize that the numbers are thought of as downbeats and the &s are upbeats (ignore the arrows for now).

Try this simple arrangement of the song...

Wild Thing

Feel free to download it if you'd like. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it. Don't worry, it's free!

The strummming pattern for Wild Thing is:

The first and second beats are DOWN strums. Then there is an eight rest on the third beat. This is followed by an UP, DOWN, UP strum to end the measure. Notice that the arrows are pointing in the direction of the first string, which is DOWN. This can be a bit confusing at first, because the arrows are pointing up on paper. But if you think in terms of your guitar strings you should be ok.