Write a Chord Progression on Guitar: Major Key

1. Introduction: Writing chord progressions is a great first step toward writing your own music. If you can play a few chords on guitar and you're interested in songwriting, this lesson is for you. I'm not going to cover any of the music theory involved today because that's just too much stuff to deal with in one lesson. But if you want to know why lookout for a lesson on music theory. For now, this will just be a fun, usable, weighted craft jon chord progressions. I hope you enjoy it. I'm starting with the key of G, because most of the chords in the key are pretty easy to play, and I will be supplying easier versions of the chords if there are any bar chords or difficult chords to play. This means you get to spend more time writing chord progressions and less time learning how to play complicated chords. There will be a few projects to work on along the way, and I hope you feel comfortable sharing your progression progress. I'd love to see what you come up with. 2. Chords in the Key of G Major: The chords in the key of G are based on every note energy scale, G, A, B, C, D, E, F sharp, G. Actually, for every major scale, every note of the scale is the start note of a chord. We'll get into that another time, but for now, here are the chords G major, A minor, B minor, C, D, D minor, F sharp half diminished. This particular chord, this F sharp half diminished, we're not really going to touch it today. You don't see it a lot in major chord progressions, you see it more in the minor key for reasons that will become clear when you watch the minor key chord progressions video. We're going to leave it out for the rest of this lesson, but if you want to learn it, I'll still include it. It's a funky chord. 3. How to Play the Chords + Easier Fingerings: If you already feel like you know all those chords, feel free to skip this section. But if you want to maybe find some easier ways to play the chords or couple of different ways to play them, let's do it. We'll start with G. It's a standard way to play G. You can also play it like this or like this with the same notes but different fingers. Also if you'd like an even easier version of the chord, I often like to play like this, where I'm actually leaning my second finger over on A string here and it mutes that A string so that the only notes you're hearing are. I really like the ease of use on that one, and I like the sound of it a lot as well. The next chord is A minor. Pretty straightforward, isn't a whole lot of variation we can do in open position here. We'll move on to B minor. If you want to play the bar chord, go right ahead. If you'd like an easier version, you can play B minor 7, and you can substitute that anywhere that you see B minor, you can play B minor 7. Now on to C. This a standard way to play C. This is technically part of the chord, the low E string here, but a lot of people try to avoid it. If it's hard for you to avoid, you can throw your third finger up here, put your pinky where your third finger was and you've got this nice. Technically it's called a C over G, but most people just call it a C chord. Just fine. Now we've got a D chord, pretty standard chord here. Definitely want to avoid the low E string here and if that's difficult to do and you're picking, you could throw your thumb over and actually fret the second fret here. It's nice sounding chord. Our next chord is E minor. They don't get a whole lot easier than this, so I'll just move on to F sharp half diminished. Technically like I said earlier, we're not really going to use this chord, but feel free to learn it anyways. These are all the chords in the key of G. By the way, if any of these chords are too difficult to play, practice them. But for now, just make chord progressions out of the ones you can play. Why not? It's still going to sound great. 4. Writing Basic Chord Progressions: Now we get to talk about making chord progressions from chords in the key of G. We're going to start out, we're going to pick a couple of chords, 2-4 chords let's say, we'll pick Q and then we'll pick let's say, A minor and E minor. Now, we have three chords selected, let's put them in an order that sounds fun. I've got this chord progression scratch paper that you can download and might help you kind of plot out a couple of these things or you can just draw some brackets that look like this. But here you go. We got eight beats to deal with here. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, we want to plot this out in a nice way that we can repeat it and it sounds interesting. Let's say we put G for four beats, and then we put A minor for two beats and E minor for two more beats. So we get 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's play that just with down strokes for now I think that'll be fine. I'll do a little slower. 1, 2, 3, 4. That's pretty cool. If you want to use a more interesting strumming pattern, you can plot out one chord per measure. Let's pick a new set of chords. Let's say G, E minor, let's do another measure E minor and then C. Let's see how that sounds. Always repeat your progression to get comfortable with it and see how it feels. We got, that's cool, that sounds like it could be a song. If starting on G feels too predictable for you, I recommend starting on C. Let's just make sure that G is in there at some point. Let's pick a four chord, chord progression. Let's go with C, E minor, A minor, G. Let's see how that sounds. Let's do two strums per chord. Let's go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Yeah, that sounds fun. Let's do. It's cool. 5. First Project: Your first project is, download this scratch paper, fill it up with chord progressions and make sure that you play them and see how they sound. You can use any strumming pattern you want.You can use just down strums, you could even use finger-picking patterns, It's up to you. Be creative. As long as it fills up the measures and you can repeat it, you've made a chord progression. Try out that project and then come back and we'll talk about how to make your chord progressions tell a little more of a story. 6. Organizing Cohesive Sets of Chords: The reason I recommend using 2-4 chords for your chord progressions is sometimes if a chord progression is too long, it can feel hard to relate to. Let me show you what I'm talking about. If we're going. Where we go in there? I don't know. It sounds nice, but it there's nothing to lock onto. What I want to talk about here is how to create sections that feel like they go together. The idea is you take your set of chords. Earlier I had. That was a nice chord progression. G, A minor. Noticed I mixed and matched strumming patterns. I did down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, down, down. Totally acceptable. You can mix and match as long as it feels like it repeats well, it's great. What I want to do here is I want to double my chord progression. There's one. Let's do two of those. Now here's the cool thing. I want to change it the second time around. I could change the last chord to, let's say D. Now I have this progression that is double the length and sets up this cool expectation and then breaks it. Here's what I'm talking about. Your chord progression has a little bit of a common response to it. It's got, this downward ending and then it has this uplifting ending, and it starts to tell more of a story. It has more of a push and pull to it. You could also change a chord in the middle, maybe one of the prominent chords. We've got this G, A minor, E minor. Maybe the second time around I could go C, A minor, E minor. Let's see how that sounds, and I always make sure to repeat it a couple of times to make sure it feels nice. That's cool. The idea here is whatever chord progression you have, double it, change something about it the second time around and then treat that whole thing like a loopable set. It can make some really dynamic, interesting chord progressions. 7. Second Project: Your project is, you can either take some chord progressions you wrote earlier or write some new ones and see if you can double them and then change something about it the second time and then treat that whole thing like one big loopable chord progression. It's going to feel nice. It's going to be fun, and please share what you've been working on. I'd love to see what you come up with. 8. Other Major Keys & Final Thoughts: If you're curious about writing chord progressions in other keys, feel free to download the PDF of chords in the key of C and chords in the key of D. Those PDFs also, just like the previous one, have easier or just different versions of the chords if you want other options to play around with. Especially if there's barre chords, I like to give people an interesting option to play around with. Mess around, make some chord progressions, try it out and feel free to share what you're working on, I'd love to listen to it. I hope you enjoyed this lesson on making chord progressions in the major key. The next lesson I would check out is making chord progressions in the minor key, which is a little bit fancier, but still along the same lines. Also, watch out for lessons on music theory, why are the chords in this order? and also writing melodies. Writing melodies and writing chord progressions are the stuff of songwriting and music composition and it's the stuff I love. If that sounds fun to learn, let me know and I'll try to get these lessons out. Thanks for watching.