What's your favorite chord progressions?

[Fade]

I know there's standard formulas, but what do YOU like to use? It would be great if we could share them and build up a nice reference here for others.

Here's a dope video too:

 

[Armani]

I honestly love this thread, at the moment my favourite chord progression is a f minor, followed by g major, then c minor, then g minor. and in my opinion the most beautiful thing in chords is when u put a b note in c minor song.

 

[TaylorV]

I’m a fan of the minor 6-5-1 progression. Like a FMaj. , Emin. , Amin.

 

[Danswift]

I like to detune acoustic or electric guitars to DADGAD (low to high) for interesting chord progressions which I'll either sample or transpose to a keyboard ..with this tuning you can get a lot of natural sounding drones within these unorthordox chord structures .. it works best to think in terms of chord scales, i.e. find a suitable chord for each note in that scale. This gives you a lot more possibilities than the often-used I-IV-V chord progression, and is less obtrusive than trying to "jazz it up" with all kinds of complex chords and it almost always naturally results in very cool sounding ascending or descending bass lines...you can get everything from a gritty funky vibe to something really pretty and intricate with the DADGAD tuning..I use several alternate tunings quite a bit and actually find standard tunings pretty boring in comparison to be honest.

 

[Memento Beats]

I use VI-V-IV a lot. It is the most basic chord progression and it creates a lot of tension. It's widely used in metal music but to be honest it works very well in almost every genre. The second one I use is VI-III-V-IV. But frankly speaking, it all depends on the song and most of the times I let the music flow and see where it will take me.

I like to detune acoustic or electric guitars to DADGAD (low to high) for interesting chord progressions which I'll either sample or transpose to a keyboard ..with this tuning you can get a lot of natural sounding drones within these unorthordox chord structures .. it works best to think in terms of chord scales, i.e. find a suitable chord for each note in that scale. This gives you a lot more possibilities than the often-used I-IV-V chord progression, and is less obtrusive than trying to "jazz it up" with all kinds of complex chords and it almost always naturally results in very cool sounding ascending or descending bass lines...you can get everything from a gritty funky vibe to something really pretty and intricate with the DADGAD tuning..I use several alternate tunings quite a bit and actually find standard tunings pretty boring in comparison to be honest.

I also experimented with open tunings and indeed they can create very interesting melodies. Yet, now I'm not so convinced to them because I'm quite afraid to get out of the standard tuning. I don't where to start and how to build melodies in DADGAD. Do you have any suggestions that would help me start with the open tunings again?

 

[Danswift]

II don't where to start and how to build melodies in DADGAD. Do you have any suggestions that would help me start with the open tunings again?

First off, as you're probably already aware, compared to standard, DADGAD is a dropped tuning so assuming we're in the key of D, the third and second strings are adjacent scale tones—G and A. This simple fact allows you to easily play scale fragments and melodies using combinations of fretting notes and open strings for harp like sounds


With the DADGAD tuning you can play awesome stuff with literally just one finger, (no kidding), and after a day or two, you should be able to switch between the standard tuning and DADGAD relatively easily.

The thing I like about this tuning is the fact that you can play most styles of music with it.. it's used frequently in Folk music but will work really well for Blues ,Funky stuff and things that have an Eastern type of feel to them.

Even though I'm not one of their greatest fans a good example of the DADGAD tuning is the Led Zeppelin track 'Kashmir'.. as the main riff of the guitar is playing John Paul Jones plays some very cool melodies within the progression and the music really feels like it's taking you somewhere,sonically..the riff is actually pretty basic but the counter melodies from Jones' keyboard have an almost orchestral feel to them.

With any alternate tuning I think it's just a simple case of trial and error and the more you experiment with them the more you'll discover what does or doesn't work within these non standard tunings.

 

[RhetroChips]

I love doing 8 bar loops so one I really like going for is like a Imaj7, Imaj7, IIV-7, III 7, vi... then I'll usually just do whatever to get back to the V7 on bar 8 to loop back to the Imaj7