Chord Progression

This is an excerpt from The Guitar Conspiracy!

What is a chord progression?

All songs have a key center, this means that a song is “in the key of.”

Every key has seven chords and you can number them from 1 to 7.

In the key of C we have these chords: C – Dm – Em – F – G – Am – Bdim.

To replace this with roman numerals you simply number them:

C (I) – Dm (II) – Em (III) – F (IV) – G (V) – Am (VI) – Bdim (VII)

Song Example

Let’s take the song The Drugs Don’t Work as an example.

The first part of the verse chord progression is: C – Am – Em – F – G – C

That means the roman numerals are: I – VI – III – IV – V – I

Since there are only 7 chords we can start seeing different combination’s, these are called “Chord Progressions”.

As long as we translate a chord letter to a number we can hear and even predict musical movement.