Chords Within a Key

Hi, everybody. This week at Guitar 101, we’re going to look at one of the more technical aspects of rhythm guitar playing. Now that we’ve learned our major, minor, and dominant seventh chords, we can start learning how to figure out what chords can be played in a certain key.

One of the most basic aspects of music is a little thing called cadence. Cadence describes the relationship between chords. Chords that contain only notes that are found within a certain key have good cadence. In simpler terms, these chords sound good together. “Perfect” cadence is the movement from the V chord to the I chord, which will make more sense once you read a little bit further.

Every scale has a set of chords that corresponds with its notes. These chords are labeled with Roman numerals, from I to VII, and each Roman numeral corresponds to a specific tone in the scale. It may sound confusing, but it is really pretty simple.

Let’s use C major as an example. There are seven tones in the C major scale—C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Since C is the root, it gets the I label. After that, you just follow the scale right on up. D is II, E is III, F is IV, G is V, A is VI, and B is VII.

But they are not all major chords. If you played all major chords, some of the notes that you played would not be in the key of C major. In C major, there are no sharps or flats, every note is natural. But a D major chord is made up of D, A, and F#. The F# is not a natural note, so it does not fit into the scale of C major.

You could take the time to figure out which notes could be used to construct all of the chords for the seven tones in C major, but there is a much easier solution. Memorization.

Every major scale has the same pattern of chords. It goes like this: The I chord is major, the II chord is minor, the III chord is minor, the IV chord is major, the V chord is major (or dominant seventh), the VI chord is minor, and the VII chord is diminished. (A diminished chord is the same as a minor chord, except that the fifth is flatted.)

So for C major, the I chord is C, the II chord is D minor, the III chord is E minor, the IV chord is F, the V chord is G or G7, the VI chord is A minor, and the VII chord is B diminished.

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