A Very Cool Chord Progression You Can Play…

Good morning, this is Duane, your Headless Piano Teacher with another little lesson about chords and chord progressions. I’d like to show you the four to four to one chord progression today, which is a very very useful chord progression, you can use it in a wide variety of songs and settings and so on, lots of things you can do with it. It’s really very simple, but until you understand it, it doesn’t seem simple, but all it is is the one chord, say you’re in the key of C, as you know, in the key of C, C is the one chord. What would the four chord be? That’d be the four chord, wouldn’t it? What would be the four of the four, in other words, what’s four notes up from F? It’s B flat.

So those are the three chords we’re dealing with. The four chord, which is B flat, the four chord which is F, and the one chord which is C. Let me say that again. The one which is C, the four chord which is F, and really the flat seventh chord which is B flat. B flat is four of F, but in the key of C it’s a flat seventh, isn’t it? So it’s the flat seventh to four to one chord progression really.

Now what you do is you play those chords inverted. In other words, that would be awkward to play it like that, so what you do is you play the four of the four in first inversion, that would be … Here’s B flat in root position, here’s first inversion. So you play the four of the four in first inversion, and then you play the four chord, which is F, in second inversion. And then you play the one chord in root position. As you know, there’s three possible chord positions of a triad, there’s root position, first inversion, and second inversion. We’re using all three inversions, but on three different chords. On B flat, we’re using the first inversion, on F we’re using the second inversion, and on C we’re using the root position.

Here we go, the four of the four, to the four, to the one. Try that with me. Four, four, one. Four, four, one. Now let’s slide off a note or two. Four, four, one. Four, four, one. Let’s use an ostinato on the left hand, a solid bass, say like C. Four, four, one. Four, four, one. Get that?

Now we can do it, say we’re playing the blues, we’ve just been on the C chord so far, so now we go up a fourth to the F chord. The one chord is F, if we’re considering F is our root. The four chord is B flat, and the four of the four is E flat. So we do the same thing on F as we did on C. We take the E flat chord in first inversion, the B flat chord in second inversion, and the F chord in root position. So we have this.

Now any time you’re playing the blues or want kind of a funky sound, it’s good to put a seventh in it. Hear that, I put a seventh in the one chord. Now I’m doing the same thing to … I should have stopped there, I did the same thing to the B flat chord as I did to C and F. So the root, the four, and the four of the four, which is A flat, back to the four, and then back to one. You can play through the blues just doing that, couldn’t you? I’ll do that real slowly here. Then you go around again.

That was a waltz, actually that I got into, a little waltz in the key of C using the blues format and using the four of four format. So there’s lots and lots of things you can do for it. Just one more thing you need to know about piano playing. If you like tips like this, come on over to PlayPiano.com and sign up for our free newsletter. That’s www.PlayPiano.com, and you’ll get a tip like this every three days or so. Thanks for being with me, we’ll see you again soon, bye-bye for now.