Chords & Chord Progressions 101 [TUTORIAL]

This course is designed to help beginner pianists and music theorists learn about harmony through a focus towards chords and chord progressions. We start this course series at the most fundamental level, so that an absolute beginner can get started right away.

From understanding the difference between major and minor scales, to extracting chords out of scales to create full chord progressions, this course will help kickstart your understanding of chord progressions. The course works within the keys of C major and C minor, so that you aren’t expected to know every scale on the piano to get started. While this later expands in the following courses within this series, we start this course as simple as possible.

The course is designed to help beginner pianists learn enough about the basics of harmony so that they can start to create their own songs, and better understand the harmonic decisions of other composers. All that’s needed from the student to get things started is knowledge of the notes on a piano, that’s it!

We decided to go with a built-from-the-ground-up approach to accommodate players of all levels. So whether you’re new to the concept of harmony and chords, or you want to fill in your knowledge and strengthen your understanding of the basics of harmony, there’s room for you in this course.

What you’ll learn:

  • Understand the fundamentals of western music harmony
  • Build major, natural minor and harmonic minor scales
  • Extract chords out of scales
  • Learn about cadences and chord progressions

Download link