A Simple Chord Progression Trick You Should Know

welcome back to another lesson and in this lesson we're going to cover a simple but very effective uh progression in actually chord voicing that reappears in many popular songs i'm going to play it and then we're going to look at some variations to it and different ways of maybe voicing it or playing it across the keyboard i'm going to start with an a minor chord in the right hand so i have an a c and e and then i'm just going to go to play it in alternating fashion and then the lowest note the a is just going to go down as i play so this is the progression and it's it's very pervasive you can hear it in many many different songs and different variations uh let's play it with the bass so my bass is also going to go down starting from a now i don't have to use this particular inversion for a minor this works well with other the other inversions let's say i started out from this particular inversion which is also an a minor so i'm playing an e a and c and again i'm taking this a note and going down a semitone each time again i'm going to add the bass in the left hand and the other inversion c e and a and take this a and go down now how can you use this inversion in an actual song well the question is or the questions that you should ask yourself are the following what does this resolve to so after you play this what can you resolve it to there are many different answers but there are some very natural ones so one answer is to f major so you're playing you can do this by the way with any minor chord and there is the resolution would be to a major chord that is two whole semito sorry two whole tones beneath the minor chord another natural resolution for this is to wherever the minor chord was going in the first place what do i mean by that let's say i have a progression c major to a minor to d minor to g back to c now i can take any of the two minor chords here which are a minor and d minor and just add this additional progression within them as i play the progression i'm not going to play it in exactly the same way but have a listen and you'll get an idea of what i mean so notice what i've done there i've taken the c major as is the a minor as is and then in the d minor i started out lowering the bass note i didn't get so i did a d minor the d then goes down a semitone another semitone and finally the last position which is this was simply replaced by the last chord in the progression which is a g so the d minor was going to the g in the first place and it went to the g in this variation as well all i did was stick this thing in the middle and i didn't really have time for the last chords in the sequence we can also do this sort of trick with the a minor in there so now i'm doing this moving bass trick both with the a minor and the d minor here's another variation exactly the same thing with just different inversions for the chords let's look or let's look at another voicing for this same progression what i'm going to do is as i'm going to take this a minor and as my a is going down i'm going to add a counter motion with a note that's going up put together the sound now this last combination is usually too difficult to play in one hand so you have to give up something uh let me just play it together for you and you'll see what i mean now this is going to go in two ways here's the next step and the last step i can't really stretch my hand to fit it so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to sort of let go of this c here i'm just going to play the e but together this is how it sounds like the same trick can be done with we've seen a d minor let's do it with a d minor the same sort of counter motion can also be applied to the left hand so i can do this decreasing uh trick decreasing no trick and instead of doing the counter motion in the right hand i'm going to do it in the left hand so instead of playing a bass that goes down i like to play a bass that goes up but together it's going to sound like this and then i can go to the d minor the same sort of trick can also be applied to major chords uh i'm going to start with that c and i'm going to let the c go down a semitone each time the thing here is that the last chord this doesn't really have very good uh definition so you can actually change it we're going to change it just by a bit by it looks like an a minor seventh or an a major seven so we're just going to play one of these instead so instead of playing going to add either the major third or minor third so i get two possible variations and this a dominant seventh goes to well naturally a d minor that's a perfect fourth above it it's a five one it's a classic uh harmonic progression but together we get so that's it for now i hope you've learned something interesting and i hope to see you next time if you've made it this far then i'm happy to put in a shameless plug for my sister's online jewelry store she makes handcrafted jewelry and she has an online jewelry store in etsy you should check it out that's your thing there is a link in the description description also in this thumbnail that's it i'll see you next time

Channel: MangoldProject

Views: 637,097

Keywords: simple chord progression, chord progression trick, descending chord progression, smooth voice leading, smooth chord progression, simple chord trick, chord trick, simple chord voicing

Id: lkoh4CoohO8

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2016