Chord Progressions Some Simple Chord Formulas Part 1

I'd like to share some formulas for Chord Progressions that I learned from one of my mentors Fianko Yirenchi in Ghana West Africa. During my 10 year stay in Africa I met many accomplished musicians trained in African and Western music. Fianko was one of them. He was an accomplished instrumentalist playing the guitar, bass guitar and upright bass. He played classical, jazz, reggae, R&B,African funk just to name a few. He taught me how to analyze music which gave me the ability to learn songs quickly and eventually to write music.

One of the things that helped me was learning the different chord scales and how to apply them to playing songs. It made it easier to be able to play by ear and sit in with musicians and play even if I didn't know the song. I want to share a little of that with you here.

The first chord scale I will share with you is the basic major scale. Root-1-1-1/2-1-1-1-1/2. Starting with the key of C. This first scale is all major chords. Starting with C D E F G A B. These are the 7 basic chords for the C major scale.

The key of D would be as follows D E F# G A B C# This formula would follow for every key.

There are several ways to play these chords on the guitar. Look at the examples in the chord diagrams below:



The above chords are diagrams of moveable major chords. So if you

wanted to use the C major chord scale you could start as follows:

1) Locate the fingering for the chord with the root (R on chord

diagram) on the 5th string (middle diagram)

2) Locate C (the start of C scale) on 5th string, which is fret 3

3) Follow fingering on chart and play chord

4) Follow steps 1-3 for the next two notes on C scale (D and E)

For the chords for F,G,A,B you can repeat steps 1-3 using either

the moveable chords with the root on the 4th string or the

moveable chords with the root on the on the 6th string. both work

equally as well depending on the sound you prefer.

Stay tuned to this web site for more on this in the future.

There are several more advanced chord scales that I will cover in Part 2.

From Chord Progressions to HOME

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