{"id":20798,"date":"2023-08-30T10:39:46","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T17:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=20798"},"modified":"2023-08-30T10:44:56","modified_gmt":"2023-08-30T17:44:56","slug":"pachelbels-chord-progression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2023\/08\/30\/pachelbels-chord-progression\/","title":{"rendered":"Pachelbel\u2019s chord progression"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

The other day, Simply Piano added a chords-only version of Maroon 5\u2019s song \u201cMemories.\u201d So I played the chords along with their recording of the song, and something sounded really familiar about that sequence of chords.<\/p>\r\n

I thought about it for a while, and hummed it, and then realized: it\u2019s the same chord progression as Pachelbel\u2019s \u201cCanon in D.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

I knew that there were modern songs that used those chords, because a while back, Stevonnie pointed me to Rob Paravonian\u2019s comedy routine \u201cPachelbel Rant<\/a>.\u201d But \u201cMemories\u201d wasn\u2019t one of the songs that Paravonian had listed. And regardless, it was neat (and a little disconcerting) to discover for myself that \u201cMemories\u201d used the same chord progression as a piece I\u2019m familiar with. (Turns out \u201cMemories\u201d also uses some of the same melody as the Canon, but I didn\u2019t notice that on my own.)<\/p>\r\n

And I\u2019m in the process of getting a clearer understanding of the Roman-numeral notation for chords, and so I started poking around and I came across this video from David Bennett Piano: \u201c21 Songs that use Pachelbel's Canon chord progression<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

As usual with this sort of thing, I\u2019m unfamiliar with most of the songs shown, and in several of them I can\u2019t really hear the Pachelbel chords. But I did find something Bennett said about the Pachelbel chord sequence really useful.<\/p>\r\n

In Roman numeral notation, the sequence goes like this:<\/p>\r\n

I V vi iii IV I IV V<\/p>\r\n

which at first just looked to me like a random set of numbers, and I was thinking if I wanted to learn that, I was just going to have to rote-memorize it.<\/p>\r\n

But then Bennett pointed out that there\u2019s a bit of a pattern in the first three pairs of chords: to get from the first chord in the sequence to the second one, you go down a major fourth (five half-steps), and the same is true for going from the third chord to the fourth chord, and from the fifth chord to the sixth chord.<\/p>\r\n

So I tried that out on the piano, and saw that there\u2019s even more of a (quasi-)pattern than that if you play those first six chords on a piano keyboard, starting out with a C chord, because then you can play it entirely as chords that consist of every other white key.<\/p>\r\n

Specifically: You do a three-note chord on C (C+E+G), then move your hand three white keys left and play the chord that\u2019s there (G+B+D), then move your hand one white key right and play that (A+C+E), then three left, then one right, then three left.<\/p>\r\n

Like this:<\/p>\r\n

    \r\n
  1. C+E+G; then left three white keys:<\/li>\r\n
  2. G+B+D; then right one white key:<\/li>\r\n
  3. A+C+E;<\/li>\r\n
  4. E+G+B;<\/li>\r\n
  5. F+A+C;<\/li>\r\n
  6. C+E+G (which is down an octave from the starting point)<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n

    And then the final two chords of the full sequence are back up to F+A+C and G+B+D.<\/p>\r\n

    Anyway, I dunno whether this is all obvious to anyone who has a more intuitive grasp than I do on the Roman numeral notation. But I thought it was neat, and now I can pretty easily remember how to play Pachelbel\u2019s chord progression on a piano.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20798"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20803,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20798\/revisions\/20803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}