chord progression | Learn To Play the Ukulele

Common Chord Progressions

One of the best aspects of playing the ukulele, is getting to write your own songs. Of course we all begin by learning some of the more popular Uke tunes, but as time progresses most players want to pen their own unique tunes. To do that we need to learn a little about chord progressions. I’m going to let you in on a little secret, writing songs is really not that difficult. There are specific formulas that nearly every songwriter uses and progressions that have stood the test of time, yes of course a great songwriter knows when to bend the rules, but the basics are nearly always followed. In fact, by the end of this article you will realize just how many songs share the same chord progressions! A quick legal note: it is perfectly acceptable to use common chord progressions, they cannot be copyrighted. It is the melody[…]

Chord Progression within a Key

The chord progression within a key is a succession of chords that concur with each scale degree. In a word, each scale interval or degree has its corresponding chord. We are going to study the chord progressions in a major key and in a minor key. Let’s start from a major scale, for example the C scale: C D E F G A B We assign a chord to each interval, just as follows: I -> major chord -> C II -> minor chord -> Dm III -> minor chord -> Em IV -> major chord -> F V -> major chord -> G VI -> minor chord -> Am VII -> half-diminished chord-> Bm7b5 (forget about it) All right, well, if we are in the key of C, any of these chords could work just fine (some better than others), but we would always be playing within the harmony.[…]

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