Upgrade Boring Chord Progressions With These 6 Moves

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]A good chord progression sets the foundation for your playing. And I love a progression with a surprise chord.

[00:00:07]It's so satisfying to hear a musician who can take an unexpected chord and bring it back home.

[00:00:15]But that surprise chord isn't random.

[00:00:18]These movements come from a small set of rules that anyone can learn. And by the end, you'll know everything you need to do to come up with your own satisfying chord progressions.

[00:00:30]Every key has chords that naturally belong to it. In the key of C major, we can make chords using only notes of the C major scale. This is our home base, and a lot of great songs never leave these chords. Now, C is not my favorite key to play in, but it's a good one to show you here on camera because it's all white notes. So, when you see me play a chord that has a black key in it, like this one, you're going to know that this chord is from outside the key. So, here's our starting progression, and it's one that you've heard a million times.

[00:01:08]These are the four chords of pop, the same four chords that are used to play millions of pop songs. The first way to add some color is with a diminish chord.

[00:01:18]These diminish chords are pure tension and so they're a great way to create chromatic movement between other chords, but they don't belong to our key of C.

[00:01:27]They act more like glue between the chords. And here in our progression, the G and the A minor chords are a whole step apart. They have this half step a flat note right in between them. So we're going to put an A flat diminished in between those two chords.

[00:01:46]Here's G.

[00:01:48]A flat diminished to a minor.

[00:01:55]Now, that's a small move, but it makes a big difference. So, let's take it a little bit further. By the way, I made a PDF for you with all of these progressions written out. If you want to follow along with that, you can grab it for free down in the description. So, here's the idea that changed everything for me. Most people build their chord progressions going forwards. So they'll play a chord like C major and they'll think to themselves, what would be a good chord to come next? But the most satisfying progressions are built backwards. You pick where you want to land and then you find chords that pull you in that direction. I think of it kind of like gravity. Certain chords are going to have a natural pull towards the next chord. My jazz nerd friends call this functional harmony. A set of rules for each chord and how those chords function within the chords around it in the key. But we're not going to go there. We're just going to keep this simpler and just call it gravity. And the chord with the strongest gravity of all is the dominant chord. A dominant chord wants to resolve. It has more pull than any other chord type. Here in the key of C, we have only one dominant chord, G7. That is our five chord, and it wants to pull us back home to C.

[00:03:07]But here's the thing. We're not limited to just one dominant chord. You can create a dominant chord that pulls toward any of these other chords here in the key of C. But to do that, we're going to have to go outside the key. So here in our chord progression, let's say we want to aim for the A minor chord, which is right here.

[00:03:27]So we can find the dominant chord that belongs with A minor by going up to its five. Going up five notes. 1 2 3 four five. This is E. And so we're going to use an E7 chord, which is going to take us to A minor, E7.

[00:03:53]So you notice this E7 chord isn't in the key of C. Notice it has a black note, G sharp, in it. But because it's a dominant chord, it has all that gravity pulling us to A minor. Now, let's do this again, but this time we're going to aim for our F chord. So, we're going to look for the note five notes above F.

[00:04:11]That's C7. And so, we get this progression.

[00:04:29]We call these secondary dominance. And we can do this for any chord in our progression. But there is so much more that we can do with this. Once a month, I host a free master class on Zoom with a special guest artist. Recently, we've had Dave Frank, Theren Brown, and Joe Alterman. Amy Noli was here a couple weeks ago, and in the next few months, we've got John Pru, Jeffrey Keyser, Noah Kelman, and Molly Gabrien coming up. I would love to have you join us for these, but they fill up quickly. So, to see the dates and RSVP to hold your spot, you need to check out the link down in the description. Now, here's where this starts to get really fun.

[00:05:04]This E7 chord that resolves to A minor is just one path. And a dominant chord can actually resolve in three different ways. And each one sounds completely different. The first one is the one we just heard. This is called a secondary dominant where the dominant resolves down a fifth, E7 to A minor. The second one is called a trionee substitution.

[00:05:26]And instead of E7, we're gonna play a dominant chord that is a tritone away from that E7. A tritone is just a nerdy word that means three whole steps.

[00:05:35]Starting on E, we go G flat, A flat, B flat. And so here, our trionee substitution chord is going to be B flat 7. So let's try swapping those two chords out.

[00:06:04]The third path is what we call the back door. And to find it, we're going to look a whole step below our destination.

[00:06:10]So, still aiming here for our A minor chord, our back door is going to be a whole step below G7. So, let's swap it out.

[00:06:30]It's a little bit more subtle, but it's really nice.

[00:06:34]These are three different dominant chord pathways, all that aim to the same destination. And we can explore this over any of our chords. So, let's try going over all three of these options, but this time to our F chord.

[00:06:47]All right. So, here's our first one, the secondary dominant, and it's going to go from C7 to F. Here it is.

[00:06:56]All right. Our next one, it's called the trionee substitution, and it's going to come from a half step above. So, that's G flat 7 right here.

[00:07:09]And our last one is called the back door. And our back door comes from a whole step below the destination. So we're aiming for F. So that's going to be E flat 7.

[00:07:22]I almost missed it. And we could also do this at the end of our loop going back to our home key of C major. Let's do this a little bit faster.

[00:07:33]Secondary dominant back to C is going to be G7.

[00:07:38]Here it is.

[00:07:41]Our tronee substitution is going to be a half step up.

[00:07:47]So that's D flat 7 right here.

[00:07:53]Or we can do our back door, which is a whole step above the destination.

[00:07:58]So that's going to be B flat.

[00:08:04]I've done a whole video deep diving on these pathways which you can watch right here including a fourth pathway that I haven't talked about today which I learned from Peter Martin. Now remember we're working backwards from our destination. So once you know what dominant chord we're going to be using, you can put more chords in front of that dominant chord to set it up. The most common is the two of a two5. So let's go back to our secondary dominant chord that's aiming at a minor. That was our E7 chord. And so we need to think backwards one more step from here. So ask yourself a question. If E7 is our five chord, what would the two chord be?

[00:08:42]Five 4 3 2. It would be B.

[00:08:48]Now this gets a little bit tricky. Since our destination is this A minor chord, the chords we're using on this pathway need to be in that key, the key of A minor. Lucky for us, A minor is still all white notes. So, we're going to play a B chord using all white notes. This is a B minor 7 flat 5. And then our E7 chord when we get to it is going to be at E7 flat 9. So, it has a white key as its ninth.

[00:09:16]All right, let's see if we can put it in our progression. Here it is.

[00:09:21]It's something really kind of modern that maybe Snarky Puppy would play or something.

[00:09:36]Let's do this two five thing again.

[00:09:38]Looking at the backdoor progression though. Remember our back door is coming from a whole step below the target. So let's aim for our C chord this time. Our back door is B flat. And so we need to ask ourselves that question again. If B flat 7 is our five chord, what is the two chord going to be? So starting on B flat. 5 4 3 2 F F minor.

[00:10:05]All right, let's put this in our progression.

[00:10:08]Here's F major, but it becomes F minor to B flat 7 to C. These two fives make the progression much more interesting because we're walking the pathway longer. We're creating even more tension and gravity to set up the resolution.

[00:10:21]But there's a completely different approach that we can try for yet another great sound. See, everything we've done so far has been about approaching chords from the outside of our home key. But there's one more way to change the sound. Instead of going outside, we can just change what the quality of our home scale is. This is another nerdy jazz term called modal mixture. We're going to think about just C major versus C natural minor.

[00:10:51]Now, to be clear, we're not changing our home key into C minor. That would be a complete key change. We're actually just going to swap a chord or two for the chord with the same number, but from the other scale. Now, comparing these two scales, you can see that our C major scale, right, is all white notes. But in C natural minor, our E, our A, and our B have all been flatted. So if we take our starting progression C, G, A, and F, and we're going to give each of these chords a number related to the root. So C in the key of C is 1. G is our five, A minor is our six, and F is our four. 1 5 6 4. So let's look at this five chord in C major. This is a G major chord, right?

[00:11:41]All white notes. has a B natural in it.

[00:11:43]But when we switch our thinking to be in C minor, our B becomes B flat. And so our five chord is now G minor. And now check out how amazing this sounds.

[00:11:56]Here it is.

[00:11:58]Oh, it's a not very subtle difference. I love it.

[00:12:18]And now just for funsies, let's do this for the F chord also. So it's the same kind of idea in C. Our four chord F is major because it has an A natural in it.

[00:12:28]But when we switch our thinking to be C minor, that A becomes A flat and therefore our F chord becomes F minor.

[00:12:36]So if we put both of these modal mixture chords in here, C major to G minor, oh to A minor, and now to F minor.

[00:12:52]So dark and creepy. I love it.

[00:12:57]Now, Adam Manis taught me another way to do this. We keep the same numbers again, 1 5 64. But every chord is going to be in the key of E flat except for the one chord which we're going to keep here in C major. All right, this is pretty cool but a little bit tricky. So let's go slow through it. Remember our numbers 1 5 6 4. So in the key of C major, our one chord is C major. Now we're going to switch our thinking to being in the key of E flat. We're on our five chord. So what's the five chord of E flat? That's B flat major.

[00:13:30]Then the six chord in E flat is C minor.

[00:13:34]And the four chord is A flat.

[00:13:38]And then we go back at the top of our loop to C major, B flat to C minor to A flat major.

[00:13:57]All right, let's try to put them all together and loop through this a few times and let's just see what we come up with.

[00:14:37]These are the rules behind satisfying chord progressions. And to really get to the core of this, I suggest you go deeper on these dominant pathways, which you can do by watching this video next.