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Lesson 5

Musical

Example

Lesson 5

Secret

Score

Lesson 5

Score/

Music

Expanding the Chord Progression

In Lesson 4, we introduced thirteen common chord progressions. As you can hear in those examples, each chord progression contains its own distinct sound and emotion.

Therefore, you could build an entire composition by laying down a series of different chord progressions and then creating a melody on top of them. Or you could expand and vary just one chord progression and create your melody over that. For this lesson, we will pick Chord Progression #13 from Lesson 4 to demonstrate this process.

Reviewing the progression

Let's reacquaint ourselves with Chord Progression #13:

In this version, the acoustic guitar strums the chords while the electric bass plays the familiar bass line that usually accompanies this progression.

About the guitar and bass notation for this lesson

As you can see, this progression ends with the V chord (G chord) and begins with the I chord (C chord).

Since the V chord has a tendency to go to the I chord, we can comfortably repeat the progression for a second cycle. But this time, instead of ending on the V chord (G chord), let’s end on the I chord (C chord):

As you can see, we just played the entire progression and then added the return to the I chord (C chord).