http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

So what are those chords?

To be more specific, it’s not just four chords, it’s four chords in a specific order. It’s one single progression that underpins literally hundreds of songs.

In general, it is the I-V-vi-IV chord progression. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of keys and the roman numerals, don’t worry, just read on, my examples are specific.

A specific example, if you have a guitar in hand and know some basic chords, is G-D-Em-C. Those are the first, fifth, sixth, and fourth chords of the key G major. This happens to be the progression Green Day – “When I Come Around” is based on.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Under the Bridge” also uses this progression, but it’s played higher on the fretboard, in the key of E. Its chords are E, B, C# minor, and A.

Photo-scanned from my composition notebook, illustrating the four chord progressions from “Under the Bridge” and “When I Come Around” on the fretboard.

If you play through it enough times, you’ll get familiar with and start to hear it everywhere. When writing your own music, you’ll find it’s a good, but boring, place to start.

Here’s a simple way to make it more interesting: substution. What substitutes for what?

Short answer: I = vi. IV=ii. V=iii.

Now, just that information should give you a ton of variation to explore.

Using the key of G as an example, the progression goes with “When I Come Around”: G-D-Em-C

Those are the I-V-vi-IV chords, respectively. We can change any of them out for their “equivalents”. In G, the ii and iii chords are Am and Bm.

Example variations. Our “four chord song” progression in G could be altered to give us new progressions to try.

If I flip just the first chord, exchanging I for vi, or G for Em, I get: Em-D-Em-C

It’s going to sound a little darker, and a little more tense because there isn’t the same resolution as having the G chord.

More advanced detail (ignore if this isn’t yet clear at your current level of playing. you’ll get there): It’s still going to sound like a major progression and not a minor one, though. Because there’s no B7 chord to make E the tone the progression resolves toward.

If I flip the second chord, exhanging the V chord for iii, or D for Bm, I get: G-Bm-Em-C, which is going to sound like a darker, weaker, progression, possibly good for a verse.

If I flip the third chord, exchanging the vi for I, or Em for G, it gets more sing-songy: G-D-G-C. These are all very strong, “happy” sounding chords.

Flipping the fourth chord, exhanging IV for ii, or C for Am, it’s going to sound a little odd: G-D-Em-Am. But then again, that’s good, it means that we can change things out and get potentially more interesting sounds. Some of those sounds are going to be too boring or too “interesting”.

Part of making music is the struggle to try things where we aren’t sure how the “experiment” is going to turn out.

Longer answer: This is a simple introduction to harmony. However, given the nature of modern music and the songs that most of us want to play, it’s also THE single best starting point.

Pushing this simple introduction to its extreme, it’s also just fine to change the order and substitute chords in the I-V-vi-IV progression in almost whatever way you want. In most instances, it will sound just like popular music.

In order to get a proper understanding of what’s going on here requires history lessons about blues, classical music, jazz, and a great deal of music theory.

The root of Western music as we know it goes back to Bach, and as time went on, it came to be understood as a system known by many names, one of which is Functional Harmony. Functional Harmony boils down to a composer’s method for knowing what chords sound good together without actually hearing it played. The jargon quickly gets obnoxious if you aren’t into that kind of thing. We start saying things like the Tonic goes to the subdominant.. to the dominant.. and Mixolydian mode… leading tone voicing triad quatrad… I’m wearing a white wig.. blah blah blah *sips English tea*

It’s worth looking into, if you take yourself to be a serious student of music. Even if you go that route, you’re still going to end up right back here playing the four chord song with everyone else. The music we grow up with tends to have a strong hold over us, and even has a monoply on what whole masses of people interpret as “good music”.

To effectively imitate the tone of a guitar part in a song, you have to have a working knowledge of the tools guitarists use to get that tone. Which means a knowledge of what those tones are made of, and what tones are common.

Cutting to the chase, guitar tone comes down to tubes and pedals.

TUBES

Vacuum tubes are remnants of the old days which we can’t seem to replace, because they sound so damn good. The Guitar Amplifier Player’s Guide by Dave Zimmerman provides a good overview of tube amp istory and detailed chapters on the innerworkings of tubes and what they do for your tone.

An experiment for getting tone from a tube amp:

Step 1. Turn the master volume up half way to three quarters. In order to get the speaker to overdrive and contribute a smoothness to your tone, it needs power, at least 3 to 5 watts. This means LOUD. The speaker will actually move quite a bit. Unlike stereo speakers, guitar speakers behave differently at different volumes, and the sounds you want for guitar are generally not in the lower volumes. So wear earplugs. There is no substitute for power stage overdrive which the speaker cabinet can provide.

Step 2. Turn the guitar’s volume all the way up. This is so we can back it off in Step 4.

Step 3. Turn the Gain or Preamp up and play some stuff until the amp just goes from clean to gritty. Generally this will be somewhere between 4 and 6. This will be loud.

Step 4. Turn the volume on the guitar down until the sound cleans up.

Essentially what happens in this little experiment is we’re taking the electric guitars signal, and we’re messing with it. We’re extending the highs, taking off some of the attack, and making the amp more responsive to the guitar. The sound gets thick and soothing.

Because it can be so loud, you’ll generally never need more than 20 to 30 watts, unless you’re playing in big venues onstage, at which point you just might need a big nasty 100W with 4×12″ speakers in a half stack.

The market for 5W tube amps is getting more attention in recent years. Even those can be loud if you’re playing in a bedroom or apartment setting. Vox attempts to address this with the AC4 which goes all the way down to 1/4W, but it does it with attenuators. Essentially a big resistor between the amp and the speaker. This however, screws with the natural response of the tube amp, which just won’t sound the same. Also, even if the signal coming from the amp is good, the speaker still needs 3-5W before it even wakes up.

For reasonable volume levels, we turn to the next category of tone tweaking: pedals.

PEDALS

The thing about pedals is that we combine them largely to emulate tube tone.. haha. But at reasonable volumes. Or hey, maybe the sound you’re going for just isn’t tubey, but more modern and edgy.

In any case, here’s a quick breakdown of the categories of effects and their usage:

Compression: these pedals are meant to thicken up the sound by pushing them into soft-clipping. This si where the top of the wave is cut off smoothly and it actually looks rounded if you look at it on an oscilliscope.  We want to do this to add even harmonics into the sound. *pushes up glasses* In a tube amp, this comes from power stage distortion, the speaker, and power supply sag.

Compression pedals are generally best operated on the lower settings where they make the sound thicker, but responsive. If you turn them up really high, it kind of makes everything the same volume (read: boring).

Boost: This original idea was just to make the signal bigger for solos, and not change the sound, but that’s not totally true. They do make the signal bigger, but generally they also boost the high frequencies, and push tube amps into overdrive. They can be thought of as the smoothest form of overdrive.

Overdrive: The next step up from boost. Once again, it comes in many flavors and aims to imitate the soft clipping of a tube amp. Boosts the signal and causes a little bit of grit on the higher settings.

Distortion: This is just unabashedly messing with the sound of the guitar. It’s gritty, it’s hard clipping. Playing chords with more than about two notes becomes unreasonable.

Fuzz: Intense distortion. Also a very simple circuit. The original intent of these was to make the guitar imitate the evenly weighted harmonic series of something like a blaring trumpet. That’s not quite what it does, but it has similarities. More than anything, when you think fuzz, think Hendrix. It’s all over his tracks. The gritty ones anyway.

Phaser: Messes with the phase of the sound. Sound hits our ears in pressure waves. There is a point where the pressure is highest, and a point where the pressure is lowest. It’s like at the beach, peak and trough of a wave. A phaser takes multiple copies of the signal and sends them past each other at different speeds. Imagine if two ocean waves of the same size went at each other, and if they collided at the peak and trough, they would cancel out. Phasers essentially do that with a guitar signal, the waves add and substract from each other depending on how the signals are combining in relation to each other. It creates a very cool sound and is related to a chorus. Flangers are a more extreme version of this effect.

Echo: Well.. Does what the name implies. The most popular of the effects.

Reverb: Make the guitar sound like it’s in a big church. Also the most popular of the effects. It’s best at the end of a signal chain. And preferably, after the preamp.

It helps to know the history of these devices as well, to get into the various brands and getting familiar with what sounds you’ve heard before and just don’t know by name. Guitar Effects the Practical Handbook by Dave Hunter is my formal education source on pedals, aside from years of playing with the gear. After reading it, I had a more than a few epiphanies about the experiences I’ve already had with my gear.

As a matter of fact, that’s a huge point to make. The reason for learning the history of guitar gear is because when we become guitarists, we’re sort of exploring a world of sound that’s already in our head. You’ve heard the songs you like, and you know the guitar sounds you like, and now you have to figure out how they’re made. Often we aren’t trying to create something new, sometimes we are, but more often, we’re trying to learn so that we can make practical use of the memories of sounds that are already in our heads.

The most complete understanding of this skill comes from reading books on harmony. I recommend Harmony for Computer Musicians by Michael Hewitt. It’s my favorite book on the subject, and it’s a very practical modern approach to understanding chord progressions and harmony. Knowing how chord progressions work provides a solid guide for understanding what does and doesn’t sound good.

Even when you know the rules, though, it still needs to be applied or it’s useless. This means digging into music we know and figuring out how to play the things our favorite musicians have put into our heads.

Whether you know it or not, your own musical ideas in your head are imitations of songs you’ve already heard and like. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to cover your favorite songs, or at least pieces of them, because the musical ideas in those songs have pieces of what you want to play in your own music.

Today’s example is the rising bass lines from the songs ”Everlong”  by the Foo Fighters.

“Everlong”

e|------------------------|------------------------|
B|------------------------|------------------------|
G|-6--6--6--7--7--7--9--9-|-9--11-11-11-11-12-14---|
D|-0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|-0--0--0--0--0--0--0--7-|
A|-4--4--4--5--5--5--7--7-|-7--9--9--9--9--10-12-7-|
D|-0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|-0--0--0--0--0--0--0--7-|

So you can see the frets rising on the 5th string: frets 4-5-7-9-10-12.

Even though you can play this riff with two fingers, a lot of things are happening musically.

What’s happening is that Everlong is in D major. So the D’s on the 4th and 6th string are ringing in the background. On top of that, octaves are being played. An octave might be the simplest chord, and they sound good with distortion. Adding the complexity of playing them over the D’s and it sounds awesome.

What octaves are being played certainly matters. On the 5th string, fret 4 is C#, which is degree 7 of a D major scale. On the same string, fret 5 is D again, which is degree 1 of the D major scale, obviously. Then it continues ascending. Fret 7 is E, fret 9 is F#, fret 10 is G, and 12 is A.

Looking at that sequence of notes, C# – D – E – F# – G – A, it’s clear that it’s just climbing the D major scale, which makes sense because the song is in D major.

The fact that the line ends on A is important, because A is the root of degree 5, which is the most dominant degree of the key. The strongest chord relationship in music is the relationship between the I chord, and the V chord of any key. The I chord feels like resting, and the V chord feels strong, or tense. In order to sound interesting, a song has to take us through these states of rest and tension. 

These rising chord progressions have a very energetic feeling to them. It’s like they’re building us up. That’s why they’re used a lot in fast punk music where the goal is to get the crowd going. It’s just how the music feels. Dave Grohl, of the Foo Fighters, has a long history of playing just that kind of music, and so naturally, these rising progressions show up a lot his music.

“My Hero” also has these rising octaves in the chorus. Coincidentally, it was also on the same album as Everlong.

Think of this as a songwriting tool. So if you’re trying to develop a musical idea that’s stuck in your head, and if  it needs a powerful building sound, a rising chord progression is a place to start. Start at I and walk up to V. Now you know a song where you’ve heard it before, and how to do it.

Being a musician is about taking the music in your head and getting it to come out of the instrument just like you imagined it. A big part of being able to do that is knowing why music you already know sounds the way it does.

You’ve got to pick fights with your instruments… and win those fights.

-Jack White

Clarence Greenwood is one of the best song-writers out there right now. His guitar parts are interesting because they focus on the use of thirds and are very simple to play, but they sound amazing.

Depending on where you’re at with your guitar playing, you need different advice at different times.

Use ideas that immediately start making you better, and discard the rest. Focus in the area where improvement is actually happening. Maybe the new ability will open up doors.

Lets say you really want to work on speed picking, and you’ve been on a plateau around 110 BPM for some reason. Then during one of your warmup exercises, you suddenly make a new distinction about a chord change, and so you work on that.

You find the added balance in the hands from getting a chord grip down a bit better made your fingers address the fretboard at a better angle, and now you pass through your 110 BPM plateau with your speed playing. These kind of trade-offs happen all the time, where one thign helps another.

Be aware of these these tradeoffs in your own playing.

How fast you can go is really a measure of how well you know the guitar. Speed is a byproduct of having a rock solid mental map of the guitar, and well-coordinated hands.

The way to build that map is a powerful combination of short sequences, and a metronome technique I call gear shifting.

The way to build well-coordinated hands, is lots of repetition doing things on the beat at different speeds. That click provides the guide to syncing up the hands.

What are sequences?

A sequence, for the purpose of this lesson, is four groups of four notes. It’s important that the sequence is short for several reasons.

1. We can hold a short sequence in our short-term memory
2. It keeps the time requirement of this exercise reasonable
3. Short sequences are more likely to get used while soloing
4. We can dramatically speed up a short sequence quickly

There’s also reasons for doing things in fours.

1. Four is the most common grouping in popular music. Four chord songs, Four bar sections, Four beats per measure.
2. It’s really easy to cut four in half twice for gear shifting.

The most important map we want to build in our mind is the CAGED pattern. So we pick a part of it, and make a sequence. Let’s choose columns C and A of the pattern, and place it in the key of D.

Our example sequence might be like this:

||---------|---------|---------|---------||
||---------|---------|---------|-------2-||
||---------|-------2-|-----2-4-|---2-4---||
||---2-4-5-|-2-4-5---|-4-5-----|-5-------||
||-5-------|---------|---------|---------||
||---------|---------|---------|---------||

Gear Shifting

“Gear shifting” is a metronome technique where we start playing a sequence at rate of 1 note per beat of the metronome gradually increasing from speed from 60 to 120 beats per minute (BPM). When reach 120 BPM, we “shift” back down to 60, this time playing 2 notes/beat. Again, gradually increase speed from 60 to 120 BPM, and shift down to 60, this time playing 4 notes/beat. Gradually increase the speed as high as possible.

The difference in speed from 1 note/beat at 60 BPM, to 4 notes/beat at 120 BPM is a factor of 8. We’re going 8 times faster than we we started! That means taking a sequence that took 16 seconds to play, and ending by playing through it in 2 seconds.

Step-by-Step, here’s how to do it: 

Step 1. Set your metronome at 40 BPM, and play the sequence.

Starting extra slow is possibly the most important part of the process. Slow speed helps the brain begin to insulate the neural firings needed to play the sequence from everything else. The process is called myelination. It feels like giving our mind extra time to make decisions: “Okay, this finger here… NOW.. this finger here… NOW”, over and over. We are programming the brain and fitting the sequence into the grid of a clear rhythm. Without precise rhythm, we can’t go fast.

Step 2. The first time you can play sequence at very slow speed without a mistake, turn up the metronome 10 BPM, and play through it this faster speed. With every successful repetition, increase the speed until you reach 120 BPM.

Step 3. Here’s our first “gear shift”. At 120BPM, turn the metronome back down to 60 BPM. Play the sequence again, this time playing 2 notes per beat.

Step 4. Continue raising the speed 10 BPM after every successful repetition until you reach 120 BPM. 

Personally, I find that somewhere around 80 or 90 BPM, the sequence starts getting handed over from my conscious to unconscious mind. That is, it’s going so fast that I’m no longer directly in control, I’ve either learned the sequence or I haven’t. Learning the sequence is done, now it becomes as a physical exercise.

Step 5. When you hit 120 BPM, shift down to 60 BPM again. A play 4 notes per beat.

Step 6. Escalating the speed 5 BPM after every successful repetition. 10 BPM is a bit aggressive. Besides, it only takes a couple seconds to do a repetition at this speed. Increase to the limit of your ability.

For me, I find 70 to 90 BPM is the range where it really has to clean up.

If your problem is here, it’s not the sequence, it’s an imbalance in your hands, which can be addressed by checking a few things.

I call 100BPM the “speed barrier”. It’s like making the transition from walking to running. Beyond this barrier is speed playing, and it’s where shredders and metal heads play. Making that “walking to running” transition is the hard part.

Around 120 BPM and 4 notes per beat, you should be enjoying a nice blur of notes. Personally, my need for speed doesn’t get much beyond about 120 or 130 BPM. Push it as high as you need to go for your playing.

Technique

What I’ve aimed to do here is illustrate a reliable, reproducible way to go from a crawl to a sprint with whatever sequence you’re aiming to brush up. 

Using this technique, you’ll quickly develop an intuition for speeding up riffs from songs and planning other sequences as well, depending on what you need.

In my experience, this process can be used to take even a completely unfamiliar combination of notes up to blazing speed in about 20 minutes. This is assuming that you don’t have larger technical issues holding you back. 

In the right hand, with my particular brand of technique, the wrist gets pretty rigid, and control of pick strokes moves up to the elbow. On an upstroke, it feels like the pick just touches the string and then bounces up away from the guitar to avoid plucking the next lower string. Down strokes feels similar, but easier, because gravity is helps the hand fall into the string. Increasing speed comes with smaller, more precise movements. It takes time to develop.

In my left hand, my middle and ring fingers stay very perpendicular to the fretboard, and my knuckles stay generally parallel to the bottom of the fretboard. My index and pinky fingers lean away from the middle two fingers. This seems to be the only way that the fretting hand doesn’t get tired or make the tendons that are connected to my fingers ache.

The metronome is very important. It aids visualization while learning the sequence at slow speeds, and at full speed, it gives us a clear criteria for giving ourselves feedback about whether we can or can’t play it.

Poor posture of the spine is a common stressor inhibiting speed. If this is you, try going classical – guitar on left leg, guitar all the way up to bottom of your chest. Focus on keeping your back straight, and picking over the center of your body.

Check for imbalance of the left hand. All the fingers might be ”leaning” to one side as opposed to coming straight down. The middle and ringer finger must be perpendicular to fret board. The index and pinky fingers lean away from each other. The thumb should stay straight and press flatly on the middle of the neck, somewhere between the index and ring finger, wherever it needs to be in order to help balance the hand. This stops muscular tension from creeping up the arm all the way into the shoulder and back.