Chords in a key for beginners

[Cyniq]

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For me, a lot of the explanations here are still too complicated for a beginners introduction (although thorough and extremely generous). This is a great forum. KVR has expanded beautifully since I was around last.


Theres only a few things you need to know.....

1) The major scale

This is the familiar... do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do, that you often learned at school. All our music is based on it. It's just a sequence of notes that sound good together.

2) The simple formulas for major and minor chords.

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Major  1  3  5

Minor  1 3b  5 

(3b means a flattened 3rd, one semitone less).

This means that to find the notes for an A major chord, you apply the formula to an A major scale (always the major scale). Which has the notes.....

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#

Using the formula, count along the scale. For an A major chord ....

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#    =   A C# E
1     3      5

and for A minor.....

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#    =   A C E 
1     3b     5

(notice the C# is flattened by a semitone down to C)

Easy. Even the most horrific looking chords like D7sus4 are just a simple formula and you just count along the same major scale and add a few notes. Stupid, simple stuff. On guitar, you often only play 4 notes for some of the very complex looking things.

Note that the major and minor chords as outlined above always have only three different notes. If a pianist uses both hands to play an A major chord, it's still just A, C#, E. It's just that they play maybe three A's, two C#'s and two E's.
Same when an orchestra plays the chord, maybe 10 of each note is getting played. But always just those three different notes that define that chord.

3) If you're playing in a key (and you should be) it means, strictly and for our purposes, that you can only use notes from that key.

For the Key of A major, the notes are the notes of the A major scale....

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#

Ok, that means you can't play a D# (Eb) note for example, in the key of A.

So, what chords can we use in the key of A?

Well, only chords that have notes in our key.

Ok, I guess that means we can only have....

some sort of A chord,
some sort of B chord,
some sort of C# chord,
some sort of D chord,
some sort of E chord,
some sort of F# chord,
some sort of G# chord.

Ok, what sort of A chord? As we did above, we check our formulas against an A major scale and find....

For an A major chord....

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#    =   A C# E
1     3      5 

This is ok, since we can see that these notes are in the key of A. So there we are, we can use an A major chord.

Hmmm... How about the A minor chord. Lets check it out...

Applying our A minor formula...

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A  B  C#  D  E  F#  G#    =   A C E 
1     3b     5

Hell, that ain't gonna work, we need a C for A minor and the key of A only has a C#. No A minor.

This is all you have to do for each of your notes.

To find which B chord we can use we need to apply our formulas to the B major scale....

B major....

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B  C#  D#  E  F#  G#  A#   =   B  D#  F#
1      3      5

No way, there ain't no D# in the key of A. Can't use B major.

Lets try B minor....

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B  C#  D#  E  F#  G#  A#   =   B  D  F#
1      3b      5

Hey, that's better, those notes are in the key of A.

So we can use A major and B minor.

And so on....... with all the other notes.

You need to know the major scales for the rest of the notes so you can extract the chords as we did above. You can find a list of the scales somewhere on the net. Jesus, don't remember them.

Also, to start with, just make the last chord a G major chord. It should, theoretically, be a G# diminished but don't worry. For popular music, plenty of people just flatten the last chord by a semitone and make it major. It was good enough for the Beatles and it will be good enough for you to get started. Don't even bother with diminished and seventh chords and the like until later.

Ok, doing all this will give you.....

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A  major    A   C#  E
B  minor    B   D   F#
C# minor    C#  E   G#
D  major    D   F#  A
E  major    E   G#  B
F# minor    F#  A   C#
G  major    G   B   D

Now, dig this groovy fact. Once you have your list of chords you will see that each note of your key is contained in 3 of the chords.

Eg: The note A is contained in....

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A major  ..... A   C#   E  (obviously)
D major  ..... D   F#   A  
F# minor ..... F#  A    C#

Another example: Say, the note C# can be harmonised by...

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C# minor ..... C#  E   G#  (obviously)
F# minor ..... F#  A   C#  
A  major ..... A   C#  E

You can see that in each chord the note acts as either the 1 or the 3 or the 5.

This means that you can harmonise a note with any of these three chords that contain that note and it will sound fine. One of them will instantly sound right to you though. In addition to your note melody, there will be a certain chord progression 'melody' that will seem to have a mind of its own.

And this is the simple beauty of a song. A melody going in a certain direction supported by a chord progression going in a different direction.

Therefore you can have melody note A supported by D major (D, F#, A) and then a C# melody note supported by changing to F# minor (F#, A, C#). Beautiful.

You can see now how the situation arises where you can hold a note for a long time and have the chords change under it, a common phenomenon in music. As long as the chords have the note in them, it will sound fine.

Any notes that last a fair duration (more than a couple of beats) should be chord notes and connecting notes of short duration can be sourced from the key as your melodic taste sees fit.

By the way, for songwriting, I recommend you pick a key and stick with it. I play guitar and bass and I use A. E is good for guitar as well. You will quickly become familiar with the same chords performing their same role and still sounding fresh for each new melody. It is a trivial thing to transpose to a different key later if you have to.

Stick to the notes and chords in that key. You only need to know 7 notes and 7 chords. Don't concern yourself with the others until you've written a few songs at least. It may be enough for ever.


And here's the thing.

That's all you need to know to get you started. Now go and write ten songs.

And when you have, you will have naturally accumulated a lot more experience and you will be able to go on to more advanced theory (and believe me there is plenty of that).

But..... tons of people have based entire careers on just the theory I've outlined above. Plenty of guitarists and bass players (even those in bands) don't know these basics. Don't go anywhere near the more advanced stuff until you've written some songs. If you are interested I can post songs I've written that are based on just the basic major and minor chords exactly as shown above.

Good Luck.......
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[Caleb]

I really like this post and it was definitely worth separating into its own thread.

I do have a question though - this was the chords based on a major scale. What about the minor scale. Does it work the same way?

A minor scale is:

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A B C D E F G# A

Using your method I would say the corresponding chords are...

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A minor - A C E
B dim - B D F 
C aug - C E G# 
D minor - D F A
E major - E G# B
F major - F A C
G# dim - G# B D

Now this isn't right and I'm guessing it's because the G# in A minor isn't part of the key signature?? It's an accidental. Is that right?

In fact the chords should be:

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A minor - A C E
B dim - B D F 
C major - C E G
D minor - D F A
E minor - E G B
F major - F A C
G major - G B D

I just want to make sure I understand the reasoning behind what I'm seeing.

Also - in the minor key example, would people be commonly substituting B dim with Bb major for convenience?

Regards
Caleb

[Cyniq]

Hi Caleb,

I don't even want to go there. A beginner will just get freaked. You can play around with just a major key for years and learn so much. It's enough to start with.

[nuffink]

edit: Cyniq's right. I don't want to overload the thread.

[Barbed Wire Kiss]

f**king marvelous post!

If this simple method doesn't work for minor scales I can see now why people advise to start only with the major scales.

Thanks, I leant a lot.

[Cyniq]

Thanks Barbed,

I fixed a few typos (I believe there is a C#, not a C in an A major chord!).

I really do feel that this is an easy way to get into it.

Cheers

[Caleb]

I really do feel that this is an easy way to get into it.

I agree.

I'm only up on theory to a point - that which was covered in High School and piano lessons, but although I learned a reasonable amount regarding scales, arpeggios and some chord related concepts, something simple like this was never covered and it's immediately useful to me.

I was actually bringing in the minor scale concepts for my own benefit. I tend to compose quite a bit in minor keys so I was trying to make sure I understood the concept there as well. But all is good.

Regards
Caleb

[Cyniq]

Hi Caleb,

Thanks. Yeah, I like to use a minor key too but it's a bit more clumsy to explain it so I thought I'd keep it simple.

Ask Sascha, he'll steer you right.

[sushishiva]

Excellent post

[Cyniq]

Hey, thanks Sushishiva.

I would really love more people to have a bit more understanding of the basics. It will liberate them.

[antiacid]

I really loved reading this. I tried reading this book about scale and chord progression and really got bored and lost, but now.. I feel reborn

[Cyniq]

Hi antiacid,

Thanks, that makes my day. The basics need to be demystified.

[psylevation]

very good posting, though I was a bit disappointed that it doesn't work for minor scales Alot of the sound I like is based on minor scales. I guess I'll just try it out though at least and see how this sounds. Thanx for the great information.

[original flipper]

HI

Thanks for that - with some illustrations (!) you have a book chapter there!

This was sorely needed; I really think people underestimate how difficult it is to understand the basics; it might be reasonably (?) clear sat with a teacher, but from a book/site this stuff quickly runs away from you.

If you ever go onto the 'minor' chord stuff, perhaps someone might put it all together in a PDF; now that would be nice.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge/time.

Flipper.

[spuddle]

Shit no, that ain't gonna work, we need a C for A minor and the key of A only has a C#. Bugger off, no A minor.

Quality! Made my day