Page 12 - Guitar Book

Chord Progression

That’s enough chords for now. We shall now move on to using chords in
songs. You may have heard the phrase “in the key of….” This means that most
songs are adaptable to suit individual voices by playing different sets of chords.

To accommodate this we need to know how a song is made. Most songs have
three basic chords which we know as a triad. These are sometimes known as
the 1st, the 4th and the 5th. All will be revealed soon Grasshopper, don’t get
too confused just yet. The 1st is normally the “Key chord”. That means it’s the
key the song is played in. Let’s say the key chord is ‘C’.

To find the other 2 chords is very simple. Firstly I will refer you to that very
nice film “The Sound of Music”. Julie Andrews sings a song called Doe Ray
Me. If you don’t know this song you need to get out of your cave a bit more!!!
What she actually sings about is, what we call in the profession, a Scale. It goes
like this :

C D E F G A B C

This scale is the most common one used in music today, comprised of all of
the major notes, or in our case, chords.

If I use the 1st C as my Key chord and then count to 4 on the scale I will
stop at F. And if I go one further to the 5th, I will find G. Therefore our three
chords are C, F and G. Easy!!!

If you look below I will take the work out of it for you and give you some of
the most common for all of the major triads used..

1st 4th 5th

C F G

G C D

A D E

D G A

E A B7

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