Chord progression
A sequence of chords played in order, forming the harmonic basis of a song or section.
Progressions are the harmonic skeleton of almost all popular music, and a small number of patterns account for an enormous share of it, since the movement from the tonic to the subdominant to the dominant and back is built into how the ear expects music to travel. Guitarists often learn progressions as shapes rather than as numbered degrees, which makes them easy to play but harder to transpose, and moving between the two ways of thinking is one of the marks of an experienced player.
Example: A verse that moves through four chords in a repeating pattern is built on a chord progression.
See also
Related
- PageChord
- PageCadence
- PageRoman numeral analysis
- PageAugmented chord
- PageBlue note
- PageBlues scale
- PageAaron Dessner
- PageAce Frehley