The ONLY chords you NEED to know

if you want to become a really good songwriter on the guitar the truth is there are only a few chords that you have to know and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how many chords which chords specifically and how they all relate the music theory behind them so you know how to string them into meaningful chord progressions that sound great now whether you're a beginner you're new to the guitar or you've been playing for a long time by the end of this you will know way more than most people care to admit and you'll be able to just jump to the fun part of actually making your own music so when it comes to songwriting you may have heard the old saying all you need is three chords and the truth which is a quote by the songwriter Harlan Howard in the 1950s to describe country music though really you could say that this applies to most styles of music by truth he meant lyrics that are honest and tell a real and relatable story and when he said three chords he was referring to the one four five chords in any given key since these harmonies are so satisfying and fundamental that entire songs are often composed from the one four and five chords alone now you really should know more than three chords otherwise you start to feel limited pretty fast so that's not really the number of chords that you should know but it is true that tons of songs at least hundreds of great Tunes are based on chords one four and five alone like every song of the 12 Bar Blues For example which was the foundation of rock and roll in the 1950s they all basically include just these three chords whether it's Hound Dog by Elvis or Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and all of the other Classics that were written with just these three chords like I say we're about to expand Beyond just these basic chords but let's take a little closer look at them because they actually help us figure out the full set of chords that you really need to know and that's because chords one four and five are generic labels that apply to various chords in all 12 keys in other words these Roman numerals describe three chords in the key of C specifically chords C major F major and G major and in the key of D flat these same labels apply to a group of three totally different chords d-flat Major G flat major and a flat major and in the key of D chords one four and five are D Major G major and a major and so on in each separate key the specific chords are different but they share the same general labels the same Roman numerals because of how chords are built from the underlying scale of a key for example in the key of C the c major scale is formed by playing intervals one two three four five six seven eight which I explain in detail in another video but the basic idea is that to build chords from this pattern all you have to do is combine every other note in groups of three starting on each scale degree or interval to get these seven chords in the key of C as our example C Major D Minor E minor F major G major a minor and B where each chord is labeled with a Roman numeral that corresponds with the scale degree of its root note in the key of C C major Roman numeral one starts on scale degree 1 D Minor Roman numeral two begins on scale degree two and so on down the line where the capitalized numerals one four and five are major chords the lowercase numerals 2 3 and 6 are minor chords and this little O symbol here means the seven chord is diminished so in total there are seven chords in this one key in the key of C and since all 12 Keys follow the same pattern the same chords are formed in each one where these tables show the structure of chords in each key but looking at them another way as guitar chord diagrams you can see that in total it's a lot in fact when you count them all up seven chords times 12 keys they add up to 84 chords which is a lot to memorize and learn though I'm not saying that's how many chords you need to know that's not the number either it's not as many as 84 and it's not as little as three it is somewhere in between and it's a lot less than 84 as it turns out because really most of these chord diagrams are redundant the same chords show up in multiple keys so let's weed out the repeats starting with the key of C we have C Major D Minor E minor F major G major a minor and B diminished so we'll keep all of these since none of them are repeats yet then in the key of G we have G major which is already in the key of C so let's get rid of that then a minor also another repeat from the key of C so we'll strike that one too then B minor which is new since the key of C includes a b diminished chord not a B minor chord so this one's a keeper and the next chord in the key of G is C major already included in the key of C so delete then D major which is new here so keep E minor a repeat so delete and F sharp diminished new so we keep it and going through the chords in every key in the same way you can see that actually there's a lot of repeated chords where the same harmonies appear in multiple keys so once we remove them weeding out all of the Redundant chord diagrams we're left with way less than half of the original 84. so what first looked like a daunting list of chords to memorize is now reduced to only a fraction to a total of just 36 basically 12 major chords one major chord for each key 12 minor chords and 12 diminished chords together these 36 chords are what make up the full set of harmonies in every key it's just that this basic set of chords is repeated and rearranged into different patterns in various keys but when you get down to it and eliminate the repeats we're left with only 36 chords which is much more manageable but even then we can condense this all even further which I'll show you in a second though I have to say that if I had known this when I first started back in the day when I got into guitar it would have saved me a bunch of time and heartache because I wanted to know all of the options available so I got a guitar chord dictionary like this and went through the grind of trying to memorize every finger position for hundreds of chords up and down the fretboard it was painful frankly but I felt lucky at the time thinking that this was a fairly concise summary of what I had to learn and it was nice that I didn't have to ride a bus across town like the Beatles did according to Legend to learn how to play a B7 chord from some guy they'd heard of who knew this exotic chord they had to travel far and wide to collect chords but with a book like this I didn't have to go on a scavenger hunt since everything had been collected and perfectly organized or so I thought but it wasn't true the idea that it was a perfect collection for a couple of reasons first because most of these chords are redundant as you've already seen it's just the same harmonies repeated to fill up a lot of pages and look more impressive to then raise the price I paid for this dictionary while just giving me busy work to practice on the guitar in seconds even more importantly because all of the chords shown here are out of context in other words all of these diagrams show you how to play the various chords Monkey C Monkey Do style but they don't illustrate why certain chords sound good together or show how to play various chords in sequence to write good chord progressions which is what matters in songwriting and what brings us back to the short list of chords we'd whittled down a minute ago the 12 major chords 12 minor chords and 12 diminished chords together these are the 36 harmonies that make up every key in reality all of the extra chords found in books and chord dictionaries are just variations and extensions of this core set of chords so to begin their extraneous and distracting but once you narrow things down to the smaller group it's more manageable it's not so overwhelming and you can start to see important patterns that show how they're all related to each other which you can then use you can use these relationships and patterns to compose chord progressions so what are these patterns that I'm talking about well instead of listing each type of chord laid out in a row like this all the major minor and diminished chords instead let's start with the major chords and place them in a loop like this in a circle of fifths Arrangement where the name of each Harmony C Major G Major D major Etc forms a visible color wheel that highlights the closer relationships between all neighboring chords in this ring and what's really helpful is that if you take any three chords that are adjacent like C major F major and G major for example they are the one four and five chords together with one being the middle chord in this group these are the three essential chords that Harlan Howard was talking about when he said that all you need are three chords and the truth in the key of C with C being the middle chord of this group C major F major and G major Are chords one four and five respectively so if you just move back and forth between these chords alone you can make some good music [Music] all the time well you ain't never gonna rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine and since these same relationships are consistent everywhere in the circle of fifths you can focus on any three chords that are neighbors in the same 145 pattern is there in the key of G G major is one C major is four and D major is five and even way over here A flat major is one d flat major is four and E flat major is five this pattern these relationships are consistent all around the circle so now all of these major chords are arranged in a way that give you context so it's not just about memorizing the finger positions in each diagram but now the positions of these chord charts in relation to each other already guide you in the process of playing chord progressions which is a good start but again after a while the 12 Bar Blues and simple 145 progressions can start to sound boring no matter how many keys you play them in so to expand the options even more we can add in all of the minor chords wrapping them in a loop around the inner ring of major chords and aligning each minor chord with its relative major so a minor is above C major E minor is above G major and so on all the way around the circle of fifths and by arranging the chords in this way you can Branch out from using only the one four five of Any Given key to include the minor harmonies of minor two minor three and minor six as well for example in the key of C C major is the major one chord D Minor is the minor two E minor is the minor three F major is the major four and G major is the major five and a minor sees relative minor is the minor six chord in the key of C so now we have a larger palette of chords to play in a given key and since all of the chords in a key are formed from the same underlying Source scale they sound compatible foreign meaning you can play chord progressions that move within a group of neighbors like this and it will sound good like in the classic Pachelbel progression which has more harmonic depth and variety than the old 12 Bar Blues and again because all 12 keys are symmetrical following the same patterns this arrangement of the major one four and five chords in relation to the relative minor chords is consistent in every key no matter what key you're in so now we have 24 chords to work with 12 major and 12 minor and really that's all you need that's the answer the core number of chords to learn to write an almost endless variety of songs but to round things out you can also add in that last set of 12 diminished chords to the circle of fifths which gives you an even bigger pool of options to choose from just aligning each diminished chord with its respective major chord in each key so B diminished is in this outer ring above of C major and F sharp diminished is above G major Etc all around the circle of fifths and with this Arrangement you can now play all of the chords in a given key anywhere in the circle so now you have all of the essential chords on the guitar arranged in a way that lends itself to writing chord progressions there are of course many other chords augmented chords seventh chords extended chords and all of that which I talk about in other videos but when you get right down to it these are the most fundamental chords and in this diagram again you're not limiting yourself to merely memorizing finger positions which are important knowing how to play each chord is essential but this illustration goes beyond that because the positioning of each chord also shows you which chords naturally go together in pleasing ways which ultimately is even more important than just knowing how to play the chords and if you watch my video on modes in the circle of fifths which explains where borrowed chords come from you can expand your songwriting even further so definitely check that out but the point here is that this one diagram packs a one-two punch showing you exactly how to play each of these chords on the guitar fretboard the mechanics of playing while at the same time also illustrating why the various chords sound good together the logic or theory of progressions due to their relationships within each key and in the circle of fifths which allows you to immediately start making your own music even as you learn to play chords granted the chords in this diagram are the most common fingering just one set of inversions and the open chords and in other videos I explain other chord shapes all across the fretboard so you can play any possible position but honestly if I'd had this when I first learned the guitar or hell even after years of playing it would have saved me so much time and frustration and instead of kind of blindly trying to piece together what chords go well together I could have just cut to the Chase and jumped into the fun part of creation of making my own music which is what I always wanted to do in the first place so hopefully this was helpful in the video notes there's a link to a PDF with all of the diagrams that we've been looking at here and in the community there are hundreds tons of diagrams that explain music theory further for songwriting so thank you for watching please let the algorithm know if you liked it and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Mike George

Views: 738,669

Keywords: music theory, guitar, learn guitar, songwriting, colormusic, scale degrees, intervals, patterns, color wheel, geometry, key, composition, circle of fifths, music, learn to play, music lesson, guitar lesson, piano theory, guitar theory, chromatic scale, notes, chords, progressions, key signatures, I-V-vi-IV, Pachelbel, 12-bar blues, sacred geometry, 3 chords and the truth

Id: eiC5YeVFpqo

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2022