In this lesson and the next, I’m going to cover an old musical staple, a familiar-sounding four-chord progression that has an endearing, poignantly sentimental quality that tugs on...
In this lesson and the next, I’m going to cover an old musical staple, a familiar-sounding four-chord progression that has an endearing, poignantly sentimental quality that tugs on some people’s heart strings and has, with variations, been used and abused by many songwriters over the past 80 years (especially during the Sixties and Seventies), and I’ll present a variety of ways to play it on the guitar. We’ll start by identifying various incarnations of the progression and examples of its use in popular music, and in the next lesson, I’ll show you some fun ways to outline it melodically.
The progression is called the minor drop, and like stock blues turnarounds and other familiar moves that countless songwriters have “borrowed,” it has become an enticingly useful musical cliché. It begins on a minor chord, the root note of which then descends, or “drops,” chromatically (one fret at a time) while the other chord tones remain stationary. (This is an example of what music theoreticians called oblique voice-leading.)
The introductions to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the Beatles’ “Michelle” and Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open” are but a few of many well-known examples of this signature move, performed in the keys of A minor, F minor and E minor, respectively.
Other famous songs from the twentieth century that incorporate the minor drop, in varying keys, in each instance used as part of a longer progression, are Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” the old jazz standard “My Funny Valentine,” “This Masquerade” by Leon Russell, “Veronica” by Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Gentle on My Mind” (famously covered by Glen Campbell), the Beatles’ “Something,” "All My Loving" and “Got to Get