The ONLY chords you NEED to know

If you want to become a really good guitar songwriter, the truth is that there are

only

a few

chords

you

need

to

know

and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how many

chords

, which chords specifically, and how they all relate. music theory behind them so you

know

how to chain them into meaningful chord progressions that sound great now, whether you're a beginner, new to guitar, or have been playing for a long time, by the end of this you'll know. much more than most people want to admit and you'll be able to move on to the fun part of making your own music, so when it comes to songwriting, you may have heard the old saying: all you

need

are three chords and the truth is that it is a quote from songwriter Harlan Howard in the 1950s to describe country music, although in reality you could say that this applies to most styles of music, the truth is that he was referring to lyrics that are honest and tell a real, relatable story, and when he said three chords, I meant chords one, four and five in any given key, since these harmonies are so satisfying and fundamental that entire songs are often composed just with chords one, four and five.

Now you really should know more than three chords, otherwise you start to feel quite limited. fast, so that's not really how many chords you should know, but it's true that tons of songs, at least hundreds of great tunes, are based on just chords one, four and five, like all 12 Bar songs Blues, for example, which was the basis. of rock and roll in the 1950s, basically all of them include just these three chords, whether it's Hound Dog by Elvis or Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and all the other classics that were written with just these three chords, like I say, we're about to expand Beyond these basic chords, let's take a closer look because they actually help us discover the full set of chords that you really need to know and that's because chords one, four and five are generic labels which apply to various chords.

In other words, there are 12 keys, these Roman numerals describe three chords in the key of C, specifically the chords of C major, F major and G major, and in the key of D flat, these same labels apply to a group of three totally different chords in D flat major. G flat major and flat major and in the key of D the chords one four and five are D major G major and A major and so on in each key separately the specific chords are different but they share the same general labels the same Roman numerals because how chords are constructed from the underlying scale of a key, for example, in the key of C, the C major scale is formed by playing intervals one two three four five six seven eight, which I explain in detail elsewhere video, but the basic idea is that To build chords from this pattern, all you have to do is combine every two notes in groups of three starting at each scale degree or interval to get these seven chords in the key of C like our example C Major D Minor E minor F major G major A minor and B, where each chord is labeled with a Roman numeral that corresponds to the scale degree of its root note in the key of C C major, the Roman numeral one starts at scale degree 1, D minor, the Roman numeral two starts at scale degree two, and so on.

Along the line where the uppercase numbers one, four and five are major chords, the lowercase numbers 2, 3 and 6 are minor chords and this little O symbol here means that the seven chord is diminished, so in total there are seven chords in this key in the key. of C and since the 12 Keys follow the same pattern the same chords are formed in each one where these tables show the chord structure in each key but looking at them in another way as guitar chord diagrams you can see that in total it is a lot in De In fact, when you count all seven chords multiplied by 12 keys, they add up to 84 chords, which is a lot to memorize and learn, although I'm not saying how many chords you need to know, that's not the number either, it's not that many either. 84 and it's not just three, it's somewhere in between and it turns out to be a lot less than 84 because actually most of these chord diagrams are redundant, the same chords appear in various keys, so let's eliminate the repetitions that start with In the key of C we have C Major D Minor E minor F major G major A minor and B diminished, so we'll keep all of these since none of them are repeated yet, then in the key of G we have G major which is already in the key of C, so let's remove that, then a minor and another repeat of the key of C, so we'll play that one too and then B minor, which is new since the key of C includes a diminished B chord, not a B minor chord, so this one is a keeper and the next chord in the key of G is C major already included in the key of C, so delete then D major, which is new here, so keep E minor one repetition, so delete and F sharp diminished new, so we keep it and continue.

By going through the chords in each key in the same way, you can see that there are actually many repeating chords where the same harmonies appear in multiple keys, so once we remove them and remove all the redundant chord diagrams, we are left much less than half of the original 84. So what at first seemed like a daunting list of chords to memorize is now reduced to just a fraction to a total of just 36, basically 12 major chords, one major chord for each key, 12 minor chords, and 12 diminished chords together. 36 chords are what make up the complete set of harmonies in each key, it's just that this basic set of chords is repeated and rearranged in different patterns in various keys, but when you get down to it and eliminate the repetitions, we are left with

only

36. chords, which is much more manageable, but even then we can condense all of this even further, which I'll show you in a second, although I must say that if I had known this when I started back in the day I started playing guitar, I would have Saved myself a lot of time and headaches because I wanted to know all the options available, so I bought a guitar chord dictionary like this one and went out of my way to try to memorize every finger position on hundreds of chords across the fretboard.

Frankly, it was painful, but I felt lucky at the time to think that this was a pretty concise summary of what I had to learn and it was nice not to have to ride a bus across the city like the Beatles did, according to Legend, to learn. . how to play a B7 chord from a guy they had heard of and who knew this exotic chord. They had to travel all over to collect chords, but with a book like this I didn't have to go on a treasure hunt as everything had been collected and perfectly organized or so I thought, but the idea that it was a perfect collection was not true for a couple of reasons first because most of these chords are redundant as you have already seen they are just the same harmonies repeated to fill many pages and it looks more impressive to then increase the price I paid for this dictionary and at the same time give me work to practice guitar in seconds, which is even more important because all the chords shown here are taken out of context, in other words, all of these diagrams show you how to play the various chords in the Monkey C Monkey Do style, but They don't illustrate why certain chords sound good together or show how to play multiple chords in sequence to write good chord progressions, which is what matters when writing songs and what it adds.

Let's go back to the short list of chords that we had narrowed down a minute ago: the 12 major chords, 12 minor chords and 12 diminished chords together, these are the 36 harmonies that make up each key, actually all the additional chords found in the books and in the chords. Dictionaries are just variations and extensions of this core set of chords, so they're strange and distracting to begin with, but once you narrow things down to the smallest group, it's more manageable, not as overwhelming, and you can start to See important patterns that show how they are doing. all related to each other that you can then use, you can use these relationships and patterns to compose chord progressions, so what are these patterns that I'm talking about instead of listing each type of chord arranged in a row like this, all the main? minor and diminished chords instead, let's start with the major chords and loop them like this in a circle of fifths.

Arrangement where the name of each Harmony C Major G Major D Major Etc forms a visible color wheel that highlights the closest relationships between all the neighboring chords in this ring and what's really useful is that if you take three adjacent chords as C major, F major and G major, for example, are chords one four and five along with one that is the middle chord in this group, these are The Three Essential Chords that Harlan Howard was talking about when he said that all you need are three chords and truth in the key of C, C being the middle chord of this group.

C major, F major and G major. They are chords one, four and five. respectively, so if you move back and forth between these chords alone, you can make good music all the time, well, you're never going to be a rabbit and you're not friends with me, and since these same relationships are consistent everywhere of the circle. of fifths, you can focus on any three chords that are neighbors in the same pattern 145. Is there in the key of G G major is a C major is four and D major is five and even very around here A flat major is a D flat major is four and E flat major is five.

This pattern, these relationships are consistent throughout the circle, so now all of these major chords are organized in a way that gives you context, so it's not just about memorizing the finger positions in each diagram, but now The positions of these chord charts in relation to each other already guide you in the process of playing chord progressions, which is a good start, but again, after a while, the 12-bar Blues and simple 145 progressions can start to sound boring no matter how many keys you play them on. So, to expand the options even further, we can add all the minor chords by wrapping them in a loop around the inner ring of the major chords and aligning each minor chord with its relative major so that a minor is above C major, E minor. is above G major. and so on around the circle of fifths and by arranging the chords in this way you can stop using just the one four five of any given key to include the minor harmonies of minor two minor three and minor six also for example in the key of C C major is the major chord one D minor is the minor two E minor is the minor three F major is the major four and G major is the major five and a minor ve relative minor is the minor six chord in the key of C, so that we now have a larger palette of chords to play in a given key and since all chords in a key are formed from the same underlying source scale, they sound foreign compatible, meaning you can play chord progressions that are move within a group. of neighbors like this and it will sound good like in the classic Pachelbel progression, which has more harmonic depth and variety than the old 12 Bar Blues and again, because the 12 keys are symmetrical, they follow the same patterns, this arrangement of the chords older than four and five. relative to relative minor chords is consistent in every key, no matter what key you're in, so now we have 24 chords to work with with 12 major and 12 minor and really that's all you need, that's the answer, the number main chords to learn. write a nearly infinite variety of songs, but to round things out, you can also add that last set of 12 diminished chords to the circle of fifths, giving you an even larger set of options to choose from, simply by lining up each diminished chord with its respective . major chord in each key, so if diminished is in this outer ring above C major and F sharp diminished is above G major, etc., around the circle of fifths and with this arrangement you can now play all the chords in one determined tone anywhere. the circle, so now you have all the essential guitar chords organized in a way that lends itself to writing chord progressions.

Of course, there are many other chords, augmented chords, seventh chords, extended chords and all that stuff that I talk about in other videos, but at the end of the day, these are the most fundamental chords and, again, in this diagram it is not limited simply to memorize the positions of the fingers, which are important. Knowing how to play each chord is essential, but this illustration goes further because the position of each chord also shows you which chords naturally go together nicely, which is ultimately even more important than just knowing how to play the chords and if you look at my video about the modes in the circle of fifths that explains where the modes come fromborrowed chords, you can expand them. your composition even further, so definitely check it out, but the point here is that this diagram has a double impact of showing you exactly how to play each of these chords on the guitar fretboard, the playing mechanics and at the same time also illustrating because.

The various chords sound good together the logic or theory of progressions because of their relationships within each key and on the circle of fifths, allowing you to immediately start making your own music even as you learn to play the chords, the chords in this diagram is the The most common fingering is just a set of inversions and open chords and in other videos I explain other chord shapes all over the fretboard so you can play any position possible, but honestly, if I had had this when I learned to play the guitar for the first time or even later.

Years of playing it would have saved me a lot of time and frustration and instead of blindly trying to piece together which chords go well together, I could have gone to the Chase and skipped to the fun part of creation of making my own music, which is what I always do. I wanted to do in the first place, so I hope this was helpful in the video notes. There's a link to a PDF with all the diagrams we've been looking at here and in the community there are hundreds of tons of diagrams that further explain music theory for song writing, so thanks for watching, let the algorithm know if you liked it and I'll see you around .in the next video