Or the I-IV-V dominant seventh blues progression. About 50 trillion
songs use it.
Oh and something I recently discovered for variation, you can play any tonality of chord (i.e. major, minor, diminished, dominant, etc.) over every note of any scale. For example. Play all major chords with the notes in C minor as the roots. So you could write a progression that went, C Major, Eb Major, F Major, and even though you're using a C Major chord, the Eb Major tricks your ears into wanting to hear the melody in C minor. It's kind of fun to screw around with, also gets a funk jazz color to it.
By the way, here's the diatonic chord scale, which has helped more than anything else in theory. For your own knowledge, a Capital roman numeral indicates a Major Chord, a lower case a minor chord, a capital with a + sign after is augmented, and a lower case with a circle or circle with a slash is diminished or half diminished. However, the diminished symbol doens't appear on the keyboard so I'll be using a lower case "o" for diminished.
Numbers in paranthesis indicate what the scale degree is called beyond the octave, for example, at the octave 1 becomes 8, 2 becomes 9.
I've seperated it into three columns, one showing you the roman numeral chord symbol and the scale degrees within the key, the second column showing you the "color" of the chord, and the third column showing you what the notes in the chords would be in the key of C Major.
Major Diatonic Chord Scale:
I : 1 3 5-----Major-----C E G
ii : 2 4 6-----Minor-----D F A
iii : 3 5 7-----Minor-----E G B
IV: 4 6 1(😎-----Major-----F A C
V : 5 7 2(9)-----Major-----G B D
vi: 6 1(😎 3(10)----- Minor-----A C E
viio: 7 2(9) 4(11)-----Diminished-----B D F
The I and vi chords are your Major and minor tonic chords respectively, meaning all other chords eventually resolve back to these two chords, in most practical cases at least. I chords flow to the IV chord and V chord most fluently. V chords like to go back to the I chord. The same is true for the minors, vi chords like to go to ii and iii chords, but its normal to raise the third (meaning the second note in the chord) of a iii chord a half step to make it major, which gives it a strong pull back to vi.
So the I-IV-V and vi-ii-iii(III) progressions are typical major and minor progressions. Now of course there are dozens more progressions, in fact you can use any combination of these chords in the diatonic chord scale you like to make a nice musical progressions, but the two listed above are your most basic progression. Amazingly you'll find that almost every song you know is a diatonic chord progression. Lets look at smells like teen spirit.
It's in the Key of F minor, which is the same thing as G# major. Though kurt uses teh pouer kords and he does a slight modulation after every chorus, essentially the basic diatonic chords used are these.
F minor-Bb minor-Ab Major-Db Major
vi-ii-I-IV
minor-minor-Major-Major
See even deh kertz music follows basic rules of music, even though he probably didn't know they did.
For those of you who know more about theory, yes I am well aware you normally change the order of the roman numerals when referring to minor keys, making the vi chord your i chord, but I didn't want to confuse anyone. I also know I left out the true harmonic minor and the melodic minor diatonic chord scales, but I think this is enough to get people started.
