Transforming Boring Chord Progressions | The I to V7

If there we're ever such thing as committing an unforgivable sin when playing music, it would be the sin of being boring. If your music was terrible (off key, full of mistakes, etc.) it would at least be interesting enough for people to actually notice.

But sounding boring is a whole new level of bad. An audience of any size would likely not even remember what you played or if you played anything at all after the fact.

What I'm really referring to is making the simplest piece of music interesting to listen to. Just because you're in the position of playing as little as two chords, doesn't mean that your hands are tied and your only option is to go through the motions.

This very situation happened to a musician friend of mine named Doug who plays events such as weddings and parties.

He told me he had a corporate gig where he found himself thrown together with some other musicians. He also told me that overall things went okay even though he had never rehearsed with any of them. But with that being said, he told me there was one song with the most simple chord progression in the chorus that was mind numbingly dull.

To make things worse, he and his new found band mates had to play that particular song three times that evening.

He didn't name the song. But he did tell me the simple chord progression was a I to V7 progression. If you're not familiar with chord progressions or notating them with roman numerals, let me explain.

I prefer to use the key of C Major as an example because of the sheer simplicity of it. So if we're in the key of C Major, our I (Roman numeral 1) chord of course is going to be C Major.

Our V7 chord in the key of C Major is G7. If the 7 throws you off a bit, just remember that the V chord in any Major key of music is a dominant 7th chord. This just means that a flatted 7th is added to the Major chord. The flatted 7th is a whole step below the root (the bottom note) of the chord. By definition, it's often played an octave higher.

So here we have the I and the V7 chord. If you play these two chords consecutively as in the progression I mentioned earlier, you can tell it sounds quite dull. However, according to Doug, this I to V7 progression was the chorus of the song. So how can you actually transform these chords to sound interesting?

There's more than one option when you're trying to freshen up a chord progression. For example, you could use a variety of chord substitutions. But that's a subject for another article. For now, we'll focus on these two chords in this I to V7 progression.

Our I chord is a simple C Major triad. We'll voice it in a much more realistic fashion by playing a four note triad with the root in our left hand.

Our V7 chord is a pretty standard dominant 7th chord voicing as shown below.Again, these chords aren't very inspiring to play through for more than a couple of bars. So how to do we transform them?

Let's start with out I chord. We could easily add the 2nd to it which would make it a C add2 chord. Adding the 2nd to a Major triad gives another dimension to the sound of this chord.

The C Major 7 chord is a very flavorful sound. You're just adding the note that's a half step below the root.

We can also play a C sus4 chord. This is known as a suspended chord in which the 3rd is suspended for the 4th tone in the chord.

The C 6/9 chord is another option for the I chord. It's simply adding the 2nd (also referred to as the 9th) and the 6th of a chord.The last voicing we'll look at for the I chord is C sus2. This is similar to the C sus4. However, the 3rd is suspended for the 2nd tone in the chord.

Moving on to our V7 chord, we could transform it into G minor 7. This simple alteration would be to just lower the major 3rd to a minor 3rd (B flat).  It's really a good option as it sounds really good against the I chord.   Just be aware that this wouldn't be a good option if the melody note is a Major 3rd (B). This would a be a conflict between a Major and minor third. If you hear it for yourself, you'll know what I'm talking about.

G11 would be also be a possible voicing for out V7 chord. It's similar to the a sus4 chord. But in this case, we're playing a dominant 7th which defines the chord as an 11th. The major 3rd (B) as you can see is not being played.If we really want to add an interesting texture to the V7 chord, we can play a G7 flat 5 voicing. This is known as an altered chord because the 5th is being lowered a half step. There's quite a contrast between it and a plain sounding V7 chord.The last voicing we'll look at for the V7 chord is a G9. We're just adding the 9th which is a color tone.