The three chords most old songs ran on
Okay. New module, and I want to get one thing out of the way first.
People think they need to know a lot before they start writing songs. Scales, theory, seven chords with names like they're ordering off a menu. You don't. Most of the songs that outlived their writers ran on three chords. Three. That's it. Learn the fancy stuff later if you want. Or don't. I never really did.
I get a little contrarian on this point, so bear with me.
The three chords
If you're in the key of G, the three chords are G, C, and D. That's the whole set. Almost every hymn you grew up singing, most of the old folk songs, half of what's on the radio still—three chords, arranged in different orders, played at different speeds.
If you're in the key of C, it's C, F, and G. Same idea, just shifted over.
You don't need to know why these three go together. I don't, not really, not in the technical sense. Somebody could probably explain it to me with proper names for everything and I'd nod and forget it in a week. What I know is that they sound right together, and after forty years of noticing that, I trust it.
Try it at home
Here's what I want you to do this week. Doesn't take long.
- Pick G, C, D or C, F, G. Whichever your hands find easier—if you're brand new, G-C-D tends to be a little friendlier on the fingers.
- Practice switching between them slowly. Not fast, not clean. Just G, then C, then back to G, then D. Let your fingers learn the shape of the change before you worry about timing.
- Once the switches aren't a total fight, strum a simple pattern—down, down, down, down—and just cycle through the three chords for a minute or two. Doesn't need to go anywhere. You're not writing yet. You're finding out what the three of them sound like living next to each other.
- Now try humming something over it. Anything. Doesn't need words. This is where a melody starts to show up, if one's going to.
That's the whole lesson, mechanically speaking. Three chords, a slow switch, a hum over the top.
A caution, since we're talking hands
If you're new to guitar, your fingertips are going to hurt after a session like this. That's normal, it's not an injury, it's just skin that hasn't built calluses yet. Don't push through pain that's sharp or in a joint—that's different and you should stop. But the dull soreness on the pads of your fingers, that's just what learning feels like for a couple weeks. Everybody who plays has been through it.
Where I actually thought about all this
I was sitting in traffic at the point of the mountain a while back—one of those days the fog just sits in the valley and doesn't move, you can't see American Fork from the freeway at all, just this gray soup below you. And I had my little notebook on the seat, the one I keep in the truck for lines that show up at stoplights.
I wasn't thinking about chords right then. I was thinking about how simple things hold up. The fog does the same thing every winter. It's not creative. It just does what fog does, reliably, and somehow that's more useful to me than a fog that tried something new every year.
I wrote a line down that day that actually held up later, which doesn't happen often—most of what goes in that notebook makes no sense when I read it back. But that one stuck, and it got me thinking about the three chords the same way. They're not exciting. They just do what they do, reliably, and a huge stack of songs got built on exactly that. Nobody ever finished a good song by refusing to use G until they understood why it worked.
The opinion, plainly
Three chords is plenty. I'll say it again because people don't believe me the first time. You can learn the ninth chords and the diminished whatever-they-ares down the road, if that interests you. Some of you it will. But don't let not knowing them stop you from writing tonight. The songs your grandparents knew by heart weren't held back by three chords. They were built on them.
Before next time
Get comfortable moving between your three chords, even if it's clumsy. Next time we'll put words on top of that shape and see what happens.