Just know that the root note will change from Eb to E, but you can keep the same Gdim shape underneath that root to sound both chords. 1 4 5 is essentially the backbone of blues. From there, the 7th tells you if the chord is a major, dominant, or minor. Plus, it often adds diminished chords, for example a half step up from the 4 chord position (e.g. three notes) to find the minor 3rd. Finally, it plays the chord and holds it for 4 beats. Minor Blues Progression 6. [CEG] [FAC] [B,GD] [CEG] z2 G, C D F [G,CDF]4 EXAMPLE 3: JAZZ CHORD PROGRESSIONS. The 1 chord can be thought of as "home" in our progression journey. No room here to explain in details, but just this. Here is some clarification for certain chord choices made in the study: In this section, you’ll be looking at fun and relatively easy to build jazz blues chords that every jazz guitarist should have under their fingers at one point or another in their development, rootless jazz blues chords. To help you get started with taking these chords onto the fretboard, here is a chord study you can learn and apply to your own playing over the basic blues changes. Try chopping and changing chords. The foundation, however, stays the 12 bar blues with a set of 3 chord changes. The minor seventh chord is special because it is the only four-note chord that sounds as stable and consonant as a simple major or minor triad. Keep these variations in mind as you go through the examples below... 12 bar blues is the most commonly used blues form. Some common variations below. Listen to an example of this chord progression in the audio file below. Plus, grab your free Uncommon Chords book and get personal help from me when you need it. Most blues you'll hear is in a major key. Learn useful chord progressions. Love the history lesson. But the above, 1 4 5 visual relationship is a quick way to determine which chords should be used in any chosen key. Have a listen to the audio examples for each (again, each recording contains an example in a major key followed by an example in a minor key). In roman numerals, tritone substitutions can either be notated as bII7 or as subV. But there are consistencies such as the 1 chord on the first, third and fourth bars, and the 4 chord on the fifth and sixth bars. In this part of our blues lesson, you will learn how to play the jazz blues chord progression in the gypsy style. It is worth noting that in the 12th bar often appears a dominant chord , that corresponds to acceleration of harmonic rhythm doubly every four bars. What’s missing? Great balls and fire, Greg, This’d cool even am not getting the theory I mean the staff notation am trying with the tabs supplied along big thanks, Would you mind giving some examples of the tri tone blues. Here is a chord study over a quick-change blues in F progression. This pattern of 3 major/3 minor/1 diminished chord is the same no matter which of the twelve major keys you use.. Here’s a trick that musicians use to tell which chords to play next, no matter what key you’re in: If you use a pick, play the lowest two notes with your pick and middle finger. Before you look down your nose at country music for being too musically simple, think again. In blues, the 1 chord is always the same as the key name. Start by finding your tonic/1 chord root (A in this case) and build an appropriate chord shape on that position (e.g. The seventh as a blue note is a little sharper than a minor 7 but lower than a major 7, it’s intended use is (1), embellishing the sound. Let us know using the comments form below. To keep things practical, the chord voicings on the chart are written as you would see them on a lead sheet, G7, Dm7, Cmaj7, etc. The tonic chord of a blues is a dominant 7 chord, a fact that doesn’t fit very well in traditional music theory. While you may think that chord melodies are more suited for other jazz standards, that doesn’t have to be the case. Bars (also called measures) in blues can best be described as consisting of a count of four. In this lesson, you learn how to play a chord melody to the jazz blues tune Tenor Madness. There's a count in (intro) of four beats before the bars begin... And below is an example of the full 12 bars in action. Piano chord progressions: Minor Triads. 16 bar blues can be seen as an extension of the standard 12 bar form (four additional bars). The 3 and 7 are the two most important notes of any chord you are playing in a jazz context. Try transposing these progressions to different keys to challenge your knowledge! The audio examples are played at a relatively quick tempo. There are many different 12 bar blues forms though. This is the climax of the 12 bar blues sequence that prepares the listener for the return to the tonic (the return home) and a new 12 bars. The Impact of Major or Minor on a Chord Progression First, you should learn to visualise this 1 4 5 relationship in whatever key you might be playing. Let’s look at an example: building a C Minor chord. Note that BbM7 with a capital M is an abbreviation for "Bbmaj7" or "B flat major 7th". If you think of each chord as a word in a book, you can think of the guitar chord progressions as a sentence in that book. Simple enough! Tenor Madness was released in 1956 as the title track of Sonny Rollins’ album Tenor Madness and is the only known recording of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane playing together. Eb7 to Edim7). Below are some common variations. Intervals can also be harmonic, meaning that the two notes are played together at the same time. Blues is a flexible style, beyond its simple roots, so it's up to you how you use and modify what we're about to learn! In short, you don't always have to start on the tonic chord! Here’s the basic blues chord progression (in the key of G), together with the chord voicings and scales we are going to use: To give each chord its own sound, we’ll start with two blues scales, the G major blues scale (to play over the G13) and the G minor blues scale (to play over C9 and D9). If you use your fingers, play the 3 and 7 with your thumb and index finger. The dominant chord is derived from the fifth degree of the scale, and the fourth degree also renders a major seventh chord. That means the first chord (the tonic or 1) in the progression is either a major chord or a dominant 7th chord (which is a major chord with an additional tone). Now that we have focused our turnaround substitutions on the tonic key, we can start to turnaround to secondary keys/chords.. The extra note gives the minor seventh a fluffy cloud feel. Remember also, for heavier blues styles, power chords are often used in place of full blown 7th chords. not completely clear the presence of Eb7 in bar 6 and of ABm7 and Bb7 in bar 8! So is Am – Dm. In this section, you will learn six different variations of the blues progression. 1 4 5 is essentially the backbone of blues. Please log in again. The G major blues scale has the same notes as the G major pentatonic scale, but with an added blue note. Try starting on a different note and create another major chord. Those are the chords in my available “chord alphabet” that I have in C major.I can make any progression I want with these 7 chords. ", they're talking about resolving to the 1 chord. Which in the next step will be replaced with its sub5 Bb7. But, while many of us love to play jazz blues tunes, we often learn single-note melodies and move on from there. There are a number of embellishments you can apply during these last two bars to enhance the turnaround function, but we'll cover those in a separate lesson on blues technique. I would offer the example of King Oliver’s Creole band playing ‘Dipper mouth Blues’ in 1923 which does provide some question over when the chord II in bar 9 came about. So, if you hear or see a G13 chord and it’s written as G7, that’s a common approach to comping over lead sheet chords. A chord built upon the note E is an E chord of some type (major, minor, diminished, etc.) Simply change the chord type of each chord to minor! Sad chord progressions. An interval is the distance (in scale steps) between two pitches. Sadness is an unavoidable part of life. I love comping like this. The terminology in both examples is explained in FIGURE 1, which illustrates triads (three-note chord voicings) built on major scales in the guitar friendly keys of C, D, E, G and A. The previous two bars (Cm7-F7/Bbm7-Eb7) act as a iii-VI/ii-V progression that resolves when it reaches the Ab7 chord in bar nine. If you use a pick, play the lowest note with your pick and the highest note with your middle finger. The first thing we’ll check out is how to build rootless jazz blues chords so that you can understand the theory behind these shapes before applying them to the fretboard. Let's break it down, bar by bar. The tune starts and ends with an Fmaj7 chord, which is odd for a blues progression, but it does help to make these changes stand out from the rest of the jazz-blues you will encounter. C G/B Am F Fm C – The Fm in this progression is called a “modal mixture”, and adds a nice melancholy flavour to your song. This is a very common Jazz chord progression. You can learn all about the chord types used in blues in a separate lesson. In other words, we only change the 1 and 4 chords to minor. What sounds sad changes from person to person, but there’s a few emotional chord progressions that signal sadness right away. However, sometimes a dominant 7th 5 chord is used to create more tension before the return "home" to the minor tonic. It is easy in theory, but the delicate aspect is to find great, and perhaps original, combinations. Start by learning this etude as written, then start to alter the rhythms to make it more of your own. A major)... Then, up to the 4 chord, building another typical chord shape on that root position (D7)... And finally, the 5 chord, again using our relationships from earlier. To get these changes into your ears, and understand how they look on paper, here is an audio example and lead sheet for a Bird Blues in F. Here is a chord study over a Bird blues in F that you can use to get these chords under your fingers: As you can see, there is a wide variety of approaches when playing the blues progression in a jazz setting. I'll cover jazz variation more in its own section, but the above examples should give you a solid grounding in jazz blues form, which you can build on in your own way. In G minor, the 5 chord would be D minor OR major (more on this variation later). Drop 2 chords are great for chord melody arrangements in a band setting, as they outline the changes and stay out of the way of the bassist at the same time. If you use your fingers, play the lowest note with your thumb and highest note with your index finger. Take a listen to this "rock and roll" 12-bar example which involves a stop-start section at the start of some of the 12 bars... And a minor key 12 bar blues track. Try each of these progressions and find your own favorites to pursue further, and get the others under your fingers in case they come up in a jam. To keep things simple, this study is written in a basic riff style, where a short chord riff is played over each change in the progression. Having only 3 notes in their construction, yet still sounding the underlying chord and progression, these rootless shapes are a great way to expand your chord vocabulary and free up your fretting hand at the same time. When this is the case, the chord change will occur on the third count, in the middle of the four count bar. Have any questions, thoughts or ideas about this lesson? Notice how they sound very similar, but the rootless voicings are a little “lighter” sounding. One should not think of the seventh chord on the tonic as a dominant 7, but as a root triad colored by a blue note, so not requiring any resolution. Using A major as our example key, I might play the following chords. For example, in the key of G major, G major would be our 1 chord. There are also variations such as minor key blues and the more elaborate jazz blues which we'll touch on later. There are many different 12 bar blues forms though. The G Major Blues Scale [3:56 in the video]. If you listen to blues, you'll already be familiar with some turnaround variations. A chord progression is a sequence of chords. In G minor, the 5 chord would be D minor OR major (more on this variation later). Chord Progressions Learn Common Chord Sequences and How to Expand Them On your music journey so far you have moved from pitches, to scales , to intervals , making chords , and now we come to the next step to include in our guitar practice routine : chord progressions. Most blues chord progressions are 12 bars long, although there are also 8, 14, 16, 24 or more bar blues changes. On this page you will be presented to typical chord progressions. In this example, the target chord of the new turnaround is the Ab7 chord found in bar nine.. The first step is getting comfortable with the chords that are in each key signature. IMPORTANT: In Table 42, the chord progressions in the “Examples” column represent only a smattering of the possibilities in the key of C / Am. The final chord in typical blues progressions is the 5 chord, also called the dominant. Understanding and writing your own chord progressions is an important skill for both musicians and songwriters.It’s important to listen to the harmony in well-known songs; learning chordal relationships and popular progressions that could be used in your future career. Less common than 12 bar blues, the 8 bar blues form condenses the 1 4 5 sequence into... 8 bars! Music written with compelling chord progressions are compatible to the ears and will make a song sound “finished” or “complete”. You will find the following 2 circle progressions really useful. It’s the guitarist’s equivalent to a bassist playing a walking bass line. Reflecting the bebop love of ii-Vs, this progression is full of various ii-V progressions in a number of different keys. To help you get started with applying these rootless jazz blues chords to the guitar, here is an etude for you to learn. There are several ways to resolve a diminished chord to either a major chord or minor chord. Leading a song into the vi chord is one common use of diminished chords in popular music. Examples of Epic Chord Progressions This is a selection of my personal favourites when it comes to chord progressions that fit into the definition of “epic.” I’m writing these down as they come to me, and I’ll try to include an equal number of examples from film and video game soundtracks. Lenny Breau was one of the all-time great jazz guitarists. The only true dominants are bar 4, bars 9 and 10 (in varying configurations) and during the turnaround. This blue note is the b3 of the scale (Bb in G): Here’s the scale diagram of the G major blues scale with the root on the 6th string: The G minor blues scale has the same notes as the G minor pentatonic scale, but with an added blue note. Here I'm playing E7... Of course, you can also use open chords if they fit within the key (e.g. Because of this, they are often referred to as I-IV-V blues chord changes. While there are many aspects of Lenny’s playing that you can break down and work on in the practice room, one of the most important is Lenny’s two-note comping technique. A typical example of this in the key of E would be: E, A, Am, E, B7, E. You could see this is mixing major and minor key blues. The primary dominant of a blues in C is G7, which you’ll find in bars 10 and 12. But underpinning it all are those three simple chords: 1, 4, 5. F Minor 7 Drop 2 Patterns. The vi chord … Example of Diminished Chord Progressions. A minor chord consists of a root note (1st), a minor third (+3 semitones), and a perfect 5th (+7 semitones). Substitute #2 – Tritone Substitution [12:54 in the video]. One can add notes to a chord (1) for ornamentation-coloration or (2) to support harmonic function (=horizontal movement, drive, tension/resolution). In G minor, the 4 chord would be C minor. Tritone substitution (aka sub 5 or substitute dominant) is replacing a dominant chord with another dominant chord a tritone (three whole steps) away from the original dominant chord. Below are some of the most common variations. Chord Progressions And The Circle Of Fifths. The 5 chord stays the same as it would in its major key. Because of that, it almost never sounds as stable. Time for a cold one I think. Tip:  The 5 chord root is always one whole step, or two frets up, from the 4 chord root! In G major, that would be D major. Each hit of the symbol represents a count. When you hear musicians say "take it home! Now let us practice using some of these voicings in ii-V-I chord progressions. Thus the G major chord family is the same as the Em chord family, C and Am, D and Bm, A and F#m, etc… There are some nuances as there is a natural minor scale (using the above examples), a melodic minor and a harmonic minor scale. Plus, it'll get you thinking about timing - something that throws a lot of musicians. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to play 3rd and 7th chords over an F blues on the guitar, as well as learn a full chorus of F blues that mixes these two-note chords with melody notes to bring a cool-sounding jazz blues into your vocabulary. Take a listen to the following 16-bar example... Jazz often uses the staple blues chord progressions from above as the foundation and embellishes them by adding other chords from the diatonic scale, such as the 2 and 6 chords. Excellent article. They are also easier on your fretting hand when shifting from one shape to the next, as they use fewer notes and smaller barres in their construction. Moving on to the next blues form, you will now add a IV7 chord in bar 2 of the blues, as well as a II7-V7 turnaround in the last four bars. The blue note for the minor scale is different compared to the major scale blue note, it is the b5 of the scale (Db in G): Here’s the scale diagram for the G minor blues scale with the root on the 6th string: Next, we’ll move away from the basic blues progression and add some variation. THE JAZZ GUITAR CHORD DICTIONARY (FREE eBOOK). In G minor, the 4 chord would be C minor. And the chord change F – B x in the key of C / Am is a chromatic progression, exiting. Blues influenced many derivative styles, but many stay true to the 12-bar form. The secondary dominant is a dominant chord that leads to any other degree in the scale. Most blues chord progressions are 12 bars long, although there are also 8, 14, 16, 24 or more bar blues changes. Now that you have explored the background behind two-note chord voicings, you are now ready to work on the full blues in F study. Many guitarists just use open chords or barre chords in their blues progressions. Play the upper notes with the other fingers of your picking hand. The last two bars typically contain what is often referred to as the "turnaround". You can learn all about these other chord degrees back in the main section. 6th string, 5th fret) and position the 4 and 5 chords based on the formation above. Sometimes, the 4 chord is played as a minor 4 chord. You all know the chord progression for a typical blues, but there are so many variations that it’s hard to know them all. Using all of this information, you will be well on your way to writing stronger and catchier chord progressions. There are many different sets of blues progressions, going from the basic original blues to more modern variations like the changes played by Charlie Parker. A fixed formation of three chords. Let’s take a look at how the basic blues changes look from a chord name standpoint: Notice how this simple blues chord progression uses only three chords: the I7, IV7, and V7. Substitute #1 – The Secondary Dominant [11:10 in the video]. You will also see in the examples below that there is a iim7-V7/IV in bar 4 of the tune, as well as a VI7b9 chord in bar 8. Note that, in this blues form, chord changes can occur within the same bar, as indicated in the some of the variations below. Start by learning the chords on your own slowly, then play along with the given audio, and finally take them to a backing track on your own. This chord lesson is all about the blues. The last blues progression you’ll look into is named after Charlie Parker and is found in one of his most famous compositions, Blues for Alice. The blues originated in the USA and evolved from African, European and Latin influences. This is the blues chord progression that is commonly used in gypsy jazz (in the key of C): You might have noticed that the turnaround chord progression (the last 4 bars of the previous blues progression) doesn’t sound very bluesy. Work on these shapes until you can play them from memory with the audio track, then move on to the full blues in F chord study in the next section of this lesson. Before we dive into the blues in F chord study, let’s take a look at the two-note chords, how they’re built and how they look on the fretboard.  This way you can have an understanding of the building blocks of this lesson, which focusses on the 3rd and 4th string set. Blues had a very big influence on jazz and nowadays every jazz musician has some blues in his repertoire. The thing to take note of is, Blues progressions are not diatonic, they’re parallel progressions! Here is how those changes sound and look on a lead sheet. We can number these chords 1, 4 and 5. Pretty cool right! If we want our progression to have a minor sound, the vi chord will typically serve as the ‘home base,’ making it a common choice as the first chord in the progression. The Circle Progressions. Try to keep the count in your mind as it goes - 1 2 3 4 etc. Thanks. The minor v chord doesn’t use a leading scale tone like its counterpart from the major scale, the major V chord. 5. So some of the rules about diatonic harmony get left by the way side…perhaps you can ask Matt to expound on the topic, or even look it up in Wikipedia, but it’s too lengthy to explain in this comment box. In the second step we replace G7 with its sub5 Db7. Getting into the bebop era with these changes, you will notice 2 things that showcase the bebopper’s love of ii-Vs and fast-moving changes: Here is how the bebop blues changes look in the key of F: To get these changes into your ears, here is an audio example and lead sheet for the bebop blues. The 5 chord only comes in during the last four bars. Experiment with using this variation in the different forms later in this lesson. BUILDING CHORD PROGRESSIONS: In music we use roman numerals to indicate the order of chords in a chord progression. Nice article! But it’s also the basis for lots of great music. The secondary dominant is a dominant chord that leads into any chord in the song other than the 1st degree. To remedy that, we’ll have a look at some common chord substitutions for the I-vi-ii-V turnaround progression. The login page will open in a new tab. So 12 bars would be 12 x 4, before the sequence repeats. Since Eb7 and Edim use the same shape I have only included one of those in this example. Thus you will find frequent changes in a minor key that don’t exactly follow minor chord families. These chords that are now commonly used were popularized by the Count Basie Band. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. Simple chord progressions are not to be counted among country music’s faults. You will always find the secondary dominant on the 5th degree of the chord you want to lead to. A melodic interval occurs when two notes are played in sequence, one after the other. When playing these two notes on the fretboard, you can use your fingers, or a pick and fingers for each two-note shape.