Olly’s Guitar World

Now you have seen how chords are written, the next part is stringing chords together to make music. This is where your time in learning the previous lessons pay off and the goal of making something sound musical is achieved.

Most songs will be made up of more than one chord. One chord is played and the next follows. We call this a chord progression.

Some chords when played after each other sound better than others. We will get to why later on.

Chord progressions often from the rhythm section of a song. In other words they provide the backing whilst the singer sing the melody. Often in songbooks or music on the Internet, words will be written out for the song and the chords will be shown above the words indicating when to play or change chords.

Chord progressions can be written in several formats. Some will show the chord charts that we have previously been looking at. some will have all the chord charts you will need in the song then just write the names of the chords above the music. Others will just list the chord name (e.g Em, G, C etc) This is where you are expected to know the different chord shapes - Don’t worry too much about this as it’s much easier to do than it may seem right now.

So now with this basic understanding of chords, how they are written and knowing what a chord progression is we are ready to start making some music……….

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Guitar Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.