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This is a theory lesson based on ways of representing a chord structure without specifying the actual key of the song. I’ve included it because it is sometimes encountered. Its not essential but it will be used in one of the blues section lessons and hence its here for completeness. Its not a subject I know a great deal about, but I’ll pass on what it means to me. This lesson also covers the transposing of song keys which is relatively easy when you know how. Read on !!!

This requires knowledge of the major scale. To start with, we will keep it simple by using C major which has seven notes, with no sharps or flats. That is C D E F G A B being the seven notes. N.B. the Major scale will be discussed in more detail in a future lesson.

In music, certain standard chord progressions exist that crop up frequently but in different keys. Its is convenient to relate such chord progressions to the major scale itself rather than a particular key. The following table will help:

A degree is a note within a scale which is numbered in order to indicate its relationship to other notes in the scale. The first degree of C major is C, the second note is D etc. 

The relevance of this can be seen in the degree column. You may have seen chord progressions before written with roman numerals, eg. I IV V which is typical for a blues progression. 

The names are included for one simple reason, being that I usually find that you only hear these names when someone is trying to impress you about their knowledge of music. For instance they are referred to, all the time in the "Guitar Player" magazine which just isn’t written with a down to earth approach. I wouldn’t worry about memorizing these, just have a look and if you hear them being used you can always come back and see what they mean. E.g. if someone says the subdominant of C major, you know they mean F, etc.

So what does this have to do with chord progressions. Well lets take the I IV V (typical blues progression) for instance, looking at the table above, we can see this gives us C F G, and in fact if you play a 12 bar blues progression in the key of C, these are the chord roots you will need. Referring to the table below, if you wanted to play in the key of A you would need A D and E.

So if you are armed with the table above and some one quotes a chord progression using the degrees of the scale involved, you can figure out what the chords would be in any key desired.

Here is a practical example. The chords to "knockin on heavens door" are G D Am G D C in that order. the degrees are therefore I V II I V IV. Thus using the above table you can now translate that to any key. Which is one method of transposing from one key to another.

Transposing is the method of changing the key of a song.

Its worth noting that the method of using degrees only gives the root of the chord. The root of a chord is the note that forms the "foundation" of the chord, eg. for any type of C chord, the root is a C note. For the "knockin on heavens door" example, its not obvious that the 2nd degree (II) is a minor chord and that the others are majors. Now this varies for different styles of music. So for instance in blues a 7th or 9th chord could be used for the I IV an V chords, but maybe a minor would sound out of place for any one of them. Unfortunately I dont have the background to pass on why that is. But if you know what the chord type is in one key, when you transpose it will be the same in another key e.g. in "knockin on heavens door" the II chord is always a minor, the others (I IV & V) are always majors.

Another method of transposing songs that I use is based on exactly the same principle, but you dont have to remember all of the notes for all of the scales, nor the intervals between the notes in the major scale. Just to recap, 1/2 tone between B&C, E &F and one tone between all others. Sharps and flats lie 1/2 half tone of either side of a "normal" note. A one fret interval is a half tone and a two fret interval is a whole tone.

This method relies on just simply counting the number of tones between chords. So for "knockin on heavens door" our normal chord progression is in G Major. But lets change that to A major. Now we know that there is a 1 tone interval between G and A. So all we do is apply that one tone increase to all of the chords in the song to transpose to the key of A major. The chords go from G D Am G D C (G Major) to A E Bm A E D (A major). For that we didnt have to know anything about the major scale itself.

Yet another way to transpose is to play a song using bar chords and simply count the number of frets in the key change. e.g. from G major to B major, there is an interval of 2 tones, or four frets in guitar terms. So move all bar chords up by four frets. Therefore we go from G D Am G D C (G Major) to B F# C# B F# E.

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