Chord Progressions

Chord progressions are an ambiguous part of Music Theory because they aim to create a system of playing music, which is always left to the creative musician to decide what chords he/she chooses. For the most part, the chord progressions displayed here are based on hundreds of years of music theory and are a fair representation of what classical composers used to develop music theory.

If you’ve reviewed the concept of scale degrees and chords, this article will go further in explaining the roles that the scale degrees play with one another. The scale degrees, aside from a number of the scale, also each have a name. These are given below. We’ll continue using the C major scale as an example:

1 – C – tonic
2 – D – supertonic
3 – E – mediant
4 – F – sub-dominant
5 – G – dominant
6 – A – sub-mediant
7 – B – subtonic (more commonly referred to as the leading tone)

All these notes have a special relationship with the tonic, which is the strongest and most important note of the key. The leading tone is the second most important note, because it has a very strong pull towards the tonic. Therefore, all chords that use the leading tone, especially the V (G, B, D) and vii (B, D, F) are the most-likely to precede the I chord (C, E, G).

To refresh your memory, the diatonic chords in C major are:

The same rules that follow for the leading tone go for the other notes. For example, D (the supertonic) also has a strong pull to the tonic, because it is only one note away from both the C (tonic) and E (mediant). These two notes, as you can see above make up the I chord. It is important to note, that notes which make up a given chord, have a relationship with the notes of surrounding chords by their distance.

For example, F to G has a stronger pull than F to A because of the shorter distance. This is also why the two cases of half-tone distance (E to F, and B to C) have the strongest pull. An example of that would be the iii chord going to IV (E to F) and the vii chord going to I (B to C). A common chord progression is given below, in roman numerals: