how to not be musically illiterate when it comes to chord progressions

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

how to not be musically illiterate when it comes to chord progressions

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

I don't want to learn theory I want our brain to know where it wants the chords to go and how to play them

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

I know that describing making music as “just decide on the next chord” is like describing what an LLM does as “just predicting the next word” but it's still, essentially, the one skill we desperately need to develop

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

it would probably help if we weren't idiots who are terminally unwilling to read other people's tabs but also seemingly lack the patience or skill to make our own from our favourite music and also half the stuff we like is too complicated for us to even make out the guitar parts

[hikari@social.noyu.me]

maybe that one idea of obtaining a jazz fake book and then learning random songs from it on guitar by figuring out plausible fingerings for the notated chords… wouldn't be the worst idea

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@hikari while I'm all about the Real Book as a tool for learning, I'm going to make a crazy-seeming recommendation, but it really will help: Try to learn some old country songs. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, etc. The chords are _stupid_ simple. It's gonna be I, IV, V, and maybe ii or vi, for like 95% of those songs. Once you've found the key center, finding all the chords can be a process of elimination even if you can't grab it out of thin air just by hearing it.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@hikari and, once you've learned to recognize I, IV, and V, you're more than halfway there (the diminished chord never appears in popular music, leaving just two other chords you have to find by process of elimination until you can pick them out). And, if the diminished chord does appear in something you want to learn, it is extremely distinctive. In jazz, the rules get fuzzy and it's not all chords within a single key, like it is in country and pop, so it's much harder to start from zero there.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@hikari if you do want to aim for jazz pretty quickly, older jazz has the ii V7 I progression that you can count on to be there in most songs, sometimes it'll be several ii V7 I progressions in different keys, so you can't pick a key center and just hunt for chords in that key, like you can with country or pop/rock, but the ii V7 I always tells you what key you're in on that bar.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@hikari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ii%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93I_progression