Music Theory, 3E

CHAPTER10

Chord Progressions

In This Chapter

• Understanding scale-based chords
• Learning the rules of chord leading
• Figuring out how to end a progression
• Discovering the most common chord progressions
• Fitting chords to a melody—and a melody to a chord progression

In Chapter 9, you learned how to group notes together to form chords. Individual chords alone are interesting, but they become really useful when you string them together to form a succession of chords—what we call a chord progression. These chord progressions provide the harmonic underpinning of a song, “fattening out” the melody and propelling the music forward.

Of course, to create ...