New Post Tomorrow…!!!

Charted waters

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!!

Tomorrow’s post will be another way to visualize keys and the chords that make up a given key. Keep in mind these will be (mostly) consistent with the “rules” of music theory, and thus the common language of musicians playing together. Rules in music are often broken, and should be - music is most interesting when the rules are broken in ways that sound “different” from what is expected, but normally only when the tension or dissonance created by breaking the rules is resolved in a pleasing way. The language of music is like any other, really - there are the rules of proper grammar, and then there is “slang” and dialect - not quite proper grammar, but interesting and convey meaning outside the rules. Where would we be without the supposedly improper (by the rules) word, “ain’t”?!?!?!?

Here’s a (mostly) proper chart of the chords in a number of keys, some common, others less so, but each key follows the WWHWWWH pattern, thus these are all Major chords:

I copied this chart from an Instagram account I follow called @_music_theory - lots of good stuff there, no copyright information for this chart.

Bonus Round: there are 2 things in this chart that break the “rules of music theory” - one is common to each key depicted, the other occurs in only one - can you spot them?

See you tomorrow!!

Cheers, and keep playing!!

Michael Acoustic