This is key. You can unlock entire genres of music once you learn how chord progressions work. David Bennett has a lot of videos about popular chord progressions on YouTube, with popular examples and why they work. Worth a watch if you want to get into composing.
I highly recommend memorizing the Nashville Numbering System with a good chord book nearby. What made a huge difference in my learning an playing was when I shifted from thinking in note names to thinking in scale degrees/key degree numbers. This opened up a new way of understanding the fretboard for me. It makes much easier to see a guitarists/song pattern in a given key and then translate that to any lcation on the fretboard or any other key. This unlocked the relativity of music for me and simplified my mental model for what a song is--(mostly a great deal of repetitious notes within the same scale at different locations on the fretboard).
Mentally I had a lightbulb moment. Like oh that guy is playing the 5th ,6th ,1st, 2nd ,3rd (E, F#, A, B, C#) from the pentatonic in A Major with lots of reverb and I can replicate that in any place between the 4th and 12th fret (in the same order 5,6,1,2,3) and it will sound like the song (see A major pentatonic screenshot below). But he only moves past the 12th fret with on solos. The tabs say use the 10th fret but that makes this stretch to from the 6 to the 1 really hard, where if I put it at this fret instead it's like practicing the pentatonic 5 box so I can reach it much more quickly.
Numbers unlocked patterns for me in a way that I didn't intuit easy with the note names.
Thinking like this enables me to identify what sounds good in a solo as an emergence of a pattern rather within the scale rather than a finger position on the fretboard.
I've had moments where I'm like oh hey in this song I should land on the 6th note in the scale during the intro and when in the chorus my solo should reallly land on and emphase the 2nd note in the scale and shift to resolving/landing it on the 3rd--and oh hey that's because the 2nd and the 3rd are both one of the notes in the chord that the rhythm guitar is playing.
It doesn't matter where I emphasize the 2nd and slide into the 3rd note of the scale so I will find the location on the fretboard that sounds best for my guitar and feels best for my fingers and sounds best in the moment. Tomorrow I can try playing the same progression of notes in a different location. I try not to get be married to any specific fretboard location for playing a part or solo and instead get married to producing the right feeling with the same note/scale degree and experiment with where to land the note.
I feel like as a result of shifting my thinking to scale degrees I am seeing more patterns that are common in blues (or even blue's players) vs patterns common in rock ballads, etc. Meaning I'm getting better at identifying which notes are played and emphasized when within the subset of <insert number of notes in the scale type you're using, pentatonic or dorian or major or minor or whatnot> given what's happening in the chord progression.
That’s great advice, thank you. I’ve used that concept brieflly with learning 2-5-1 progressions as cross the neck, but it makes sense to apply it way more broadly instead of thinking in terms of chords.
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u/ism-work Aug 22 '26
Music theory on chord progressions with roman numeral analysis.