Your First Chord Progression

Once you've learned how to play a few chords and you can keep a fairly steady rhythm you might want to try putting them together into something you could call a song.

A simple chord progression might start off by playing one bar of E Minor and then switch over to A Minor for the next bar, repeating the process as many times as you want. That would mean playing Em four times and then Am four times, counting from one to four as you go, before changing back to Em and doing the same thing again. Written down it would often look like this:

Em  /  /  /  Am  /  /  /  Em  /  /  /

(and so on)

In this case the first beat of each bar (where you would count "1") is shown by the chord name and the other beats are shown by each of these ... /

It takes a while before you can change chords without having to hesitate and lose your beat. You might need to start by practising each chord one at a time, changing back and forth between Em and Am to get your fingers used to the movement before you worry about playing them four times each or at a particular speed.

The same thing can be done with any two chords. If you've got the hang of doing it with Em and Am, or if you feel you'd be more comfortable practising with some other chords pick two you like and try playing them for one bar each at a time, switching from one to the other and back again until you feel that you can do it comfortably without having to pause at any point.

One of the most popular chord progressions used in modern music is the 12 bar blues progression. The beginning is easy enough, you play 4 bars (that's sixteen beats) of A Major. It gets more difficult when you have to change over to D Major for the next two bars and then back to A Major for the two bars after that (that's 8 beats each, first on D and then on A).

Written down, it would look like this:

A / / / A / / / A / / / A / / /

D / / / D / / / A / / / A / / /

Like with Em and Am, you might need to practise the chord changes on their own before you can worry about playing them in time to a beat. Don't worry if you need to spend a while just playing them once each until you're comfortable enough to change between them without having to stop and think where your fingers want to be.

Once you're feel ok about playing these eight bars without too many mishaps you can have a bash at playing the rest of the progression. There are only four bars left to learn but these are more tricky because you're only playing each chord for one bar:

E / / / D / / / A / / / E / / /

That's one bar of E Major, then D Major, then A Major and finally back to E Major. Each chord gets four beats. From beginning to end the whole progression would be written like this:

A / / / A / / / A / / / A / / /

D / / / D / / / A / / / A / / /

E / / / D / / / A / / / E / / /

This chord progression forms much of the basis for all blues and rock music today. Lots of songs are written using this pattern and even more are just simple variations of it. Each time you get to the end start over again without pausing, slap some words on top and you've got a song. If you feel confident enough try re-arranging the chords in different ways to see what sort of sounds you come up with.