Chordal
Piano Intro
When we listen to music, the first things we usually hear are the melody, the beat, or the lyrics. What's also present throughout almost all kinds of music is a harmonic language. This language is much simpler than a spoken language, often using only a few common chords.
Being aware of and fluent in this harmonic language is an essential part of playing and understanding popular music. Most beginner musicians learn songs through the aid of chord charts, online tutorials, or sheet music. Even some intermediate and professional musicians are dependent on learning this way. These methods temporarily work but only focus on the 'what' and not the 'why' of music. Chordal offers a more streamlined way to learn this language by always teaching music in context.
This harmonic language focuses on recognizing chords by their sound within a key. Most people are already able to do this with individual notes. For example, chances are you can recognize the correct pitch of ‘Happy Birthday’ if given a starting chord, or recognize if someone is in or out of key while singing something like The National Anthem. The chords under those notes act in the same way. The only difference is that melody happens in the foreground; everyone can easily hear it. Chords happen in the background and serve as a foundation for melody and music as a whole; recognizing their sound and distance takes a bit of practice. This is where numbers come in.
How Numbers Work
Chords always have a home together in a musical key. A key is an exclusive group of notes and chords that sound good and work predictably together. In order to see the relationship between these chords, we need to put them in order in the music alphabet and number them.
The musical alphabet consists of the notes:
A, B, C, D, E, F, and G
There are five additional notes referred to as sharps(#) or flats (b), their names changing depending on context. These 12 total pitches are all the possible notes names of tones in Western music.
A, A#/Bb, B, C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab
Though the sharp and flat notes can go by two different names, they are the exact same pitch. Viewed on piano, these notes really come into focus.
The 12 pitches in music repeat lower and higher. There are two instances of no #/b note; between B/C and E/F.
Out of these 12 notes, 7 come together to form a major scale (Do, Re, Mi...)* the backbone of our harmonic language. The simplest major scale to understand is the C major scale: the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C (the white keys on a piano from C-C). To work with major scales, we number each note.
C-1 D-2 E-3 F-4 G-5 A-6 B-7
*The pattern that determines how the major scale is built is covered in detail later.
A key not only includes the major scale notes, but also chords built off each scale note. The most common chords used in music include chords built off the 1, 4, 5, and 6 scale notes. The chords built off of 1, 4, and 5 (C, F, G) are major. The 6 chord is naturally minor (Am)*. There are less common chords built off of the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th notes of the scale that will be covered down the road. A great walkthrough of the above concept can be found here.
*Why the 6 chord is naturally minor will be covered later on.
These chords are constructed by placing your right hand thumb on the root (the note the chord is named after), and playing every other key with your middle finger and pinky.
C Chord- C E G
F Chord- F A C
G Chord- G B D
Am Chord- A C E
Though a C chord can be played all over the piano, playing it around middle C is most common. Sticking to one location for a chord at first quickly develops muscle-memory.
Why Numbers Work
The 1, 4, 5, and 6m chords have come to represent sounds that are essential to popular music. C, F, G, and Am are simple to play on piano and guitar, and any ordering of these chords should sound familiar. In fact, thousands of songs have been written with just those four chords. There is nothing special about those particular chords. What makes these chords work so well is the distance between them and how they sound and function in a musical key. These chords operate very much like a language. Using numbers in place of chords makes it possible to highlight and learn this aspect of music.
Of course, there are countless songs that use other sets of chords from other keys. Just like there are many languages, there are several musical keys that songs are written in (12 keys to be exact*). This means that there are 12 unique major scales, and 12 unique groupings of 1, 4, 5, and 6m built off of those scales. The key of a song depends on a few factors (what a vocalist prefers, which key inspiration struck, which instrument was used to write a song, etc). So depending on the key, our numbers could be defined 12 different ways. In C, C is 1, but in the key of G (where G is 1) C is a 4 chord. In the key of F (where F is 1), C is a 5 chord. Switching fluently between keys and keeping track of which number is what is an impossible task for a beginner. Chordal charts make this concept accessible by only focusing on one key and one set of numbers as long as it takes for it to become effortless.
*There are a few ways to answer “How many musical keys are there?” but for popular music and the vast majority of purposes, 12 is a sufficient answer.
Because songs are constantly played in different keys, and all those keys have different sets of chords, it might seem pointless to further complicate things and add another step by replacing chords with numbers. What makes numbers actually easier in the long run to think in is that numbers sound the same in any key, on any instrument, and in any style of music.
Let that sink in.
The 1, 4, 5, and 6m chords (and all other chords), no matter what kind of music or instrument, will relatively sound the same in every musical key. This is why it’s possible to transpose the same song in different keys and for it to retain the same sound (only sounding higher or lower). When changing keys, the actual chords change; the numbers stay the same. What makes music sound a certain way aren’t the specific notes but the distance and relation between them.
The incredible commonality of these 4 particular chords can’t be overstated- chances are if you turn on the radio or pull up Spotify or Pandora and play a song at random, it’s these four chords working together in a key. There is plenty of music where the chords are much more complex and unrelated, jumping outside of keys and easily confusing the ear. The vast majority of popular music, however, isn’t this way. If there is more than 1, 4, 5, and 6m to a chord progression, chances are those chords are still heavily involved. Keeping this probability in mind greatly simplifies learning new music and playing by ear. Could there be 20 chords in this song? Chances are there are only 4 or so. Are the chords totally randomly chosen? Probably not, they belong in a key together and probably act as a combo and ordering of either 1, 4, 5, or 6m. Thinking in numbers trains our ear to recognize a handful of sounds instead of thousand.
Similar to a synonym, the same chord can vary in its specific sound, timbre, and texture. These differences are due to many factors: the instrument, the genre of music, the rhythm of the chord, or the voicing (the specific way the chord is constructed).. Though these differences can at first be a distraction, numbers orient the ear to hear the underlying progression.
A good example of the prevalence of these 4 chords can be found in this viral video that jokingly (but rather accurately) reveals that many well-known songs have the same chord progression. Though those songs partially do share chord progressions (meaning they have the same numbers), they all are actually in different keys. By transposing them into the same key, the fact that they share the same chords is easy to hear. With training, even songs that share progressions but are in different keys can sound incredibly similar.*
*Sometimes too legally similar- the similarities between Lana Del Rey’s Get Free, Radiohead’s Creep, and The Hollie’s The Air That I Breathe caused various legal copyright infringement battles between the artists over the years. The issue wasn’t a stolen melody but that the chord progression (numbers) and overall feel of the songs bore a striking resemblance to one another.
This is why using numbers instead of chords gets to the heart of how music sounds and why it works. The actual notes and chords (like the physical words and letters used in a language) don’t matter too much by themselves. The meaning comes from thinking in context of a key, and numbers highlight this context in a way that chords and even sheet music just don’t.
The most cited benefit of numbers is that it easily facilitates transposing a song into other keys, which is true (and immensely useful). But thinking in numbers represents so much more than that. Imagine you could fluently and effortlessly speak all the world’s major languages. Because of this incredible skill, you constantly travel around the world doing interviews and giving speeches, instantly adapting your meaning of what you wanted to communicate to the particular language you encounter. This is what it’s like to be fluent in numbers in music. Enough work with numbers and it’s possible to pick out the chord progression immediately for a song heard on the radio, in the grocery store, in a band rehearsal - anywhere and at any time.
Like learning a language, remember, attaining fluency with one key and one set of numbers is really the only way to learn this concept. Because numbers sound the same in every key, practice in even one key is immediately and permanently beneficial.
In practice, numbers look like this:
Another example:
Because music is usually grouped in sets of 4 beats to a chord and keeps steady time, we don’t even need the lyrics.
You Are My Sunshine, Traditional (Key of C)
(Parenthesis indicate 2 beat chords)
Verse- 1 1 4 1 / 4 4 1 (1 5) 1
Chorus- 1 1 4 1 / 4 4 1 (1 5) 1
Try to follow along with the below recordings and see if you meet up with the choruses at the right time.
Let It Be, The Beatles (Key of C)
(Parenthesis indicate 2 beat chords)
This is the often the simplest way to learn chords to a song. The real benefit to using numbers is that we are actively speaking a harmonic language and becoming fluent in hearing and understanding music. Countless professional musicians, amateurs, hobbyists, composers, and others with a developed musical ear perceive music in this way because it gets to the heart of understanding the harmony and connectedness that links music together.
The Charts
Chordal charts are organized by key. In each key’s subgroup, charts are organized by the amount chords they contain, then genre, then difficulty.
C charts are grouped together on one page. The charts at first contain only 1, 4, 5, and 6m in C. These charts might have less than 4 chords (like 1, 4, and 5 or 1, 4, and 6m)- just any iteration of 1, 4, 5, and 6m.
5 chord charts appear right below the 4 chord charts. They can contain any iteration of 1, 4, 5, 6m, and the 2m (Dm).
After that, the charts can contain any amount of chords both in and out of the key (6+ charts).
The Resources links are essential reading before any charts:
How to Read Charts
Song Sections and Forms
Simple Song Charts
Circle of 5ths (for playing in other keys besides C)
Diatonic Chords for Sharp Keys
Diatonic Chords for Flat Keys