Emotional Chords: 2 Tips to Create Chord Progressions in Major Keys (Without Being Too Cheesy)

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Which chords to choose in a Major key to create good progressions that are not souding cheesy?

In this video I show you 2 ways you can create happy, but mature chord progresions:

1 - Balancing Major and minor chords
2 - Using the Mixolydian mode

Hope you'll enjoy!

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This is the Ambient Guitar youtube channel of Canadian multi-instrumentist Antoine Michaud. Through original ambient music, chordal guitar lessons and tips on guitar pedals, Antoine is looking to educate and inspire aspiring ambient musicians to learn everything about the world of ambient guitar and chordal voicings on guitar.

[musiceclipse]

Very useful. Another way to find substitutions is to see what chords have common tones. For C major, Em contains E, G, Am includes CE as an example

[alistairwood]

This is tremendous - I’ve been falling into this trap for a long time, it’s very easy to be drawn to I-IV-V chords due to the dominant tension and push to resolve. Cheese factor indeed, thank you for reframing this.

[degoshrai]

I think i found a gold mine.thank you for your lessons

[ghfdt]

Great lesson Antoine. I think also doing what you showed here and as well making the chords extended also helps a lot to sound less cheesy. So using 6th, 9th 11. 13th sus, add chords too so for example E - Bm9 - C#m7 - F#m - D. Also weirdly just using inversions can really help just simple triads but in different positions can give the chords a different flavour and sound much less jumpy at least to my ear.

[yelyel]

Do you have any lick ideas for upbeat songs (for intro or extro) so it wouldnt be too chessy? Like for a Emaj and Gmaj. Love your vid btw, hope i can watch more 💗

[ElephantTusks]

You need to create a shirt that has the 1-4-5 SUS chord diagrams on it that says “Let’s get cheesy!”.

[muhammadrezahaghiri]

Had a lot of cheese in my dinner, and then your video showed up in my feed. Coincidence? I think not 😁
My personal opinion about "less-cheesy" major progression is something like this : I - iii - bVI - bVII. It does magic!

[MD-fpfy]

Shoegaze chord pls friend ( standard tuning)

[TheLostHarmony]

You need crackers to spread that cheese!

[mediumshreddercheese]

You should narrate audiobooks! I could listen to you reading an algebra textbook and stay interested