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  #31  
Old 11-15-2022, 01:49 PM
aK_bAsh7 aK_bAsh7 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Monsum View Post
I'm not a beginner guitarist but I feel like I'm often stuck with the same unoriginal, cliche chord progressions.
How do you stay away from boring repetitions of I, iii, IV and V chords?
All ideas, suggestions, techniques are welcome.
It would help to know what genres/style(s) you are playing.
Also, what you mean exactly, by "boring repetitions" as there are certain common changes that run through even sophisticated Jazz tunes.

Do you know how to play all the diatonic triads and dom7th chords in all their inversions, for example? What is the extent of your chord vocabularly?
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  #32  
Old 11-15-2022, 11:01 PM
hatamoto hatamoto is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Monsum View Post
I'm not a beginner guitarist but I feel like I'm often stuck with the same unoriginal, cliche chord progressions.
How do you stay away from boring repetitions of I, iii, IV and V chords?
All ideas, suggestions, techniques are welcome.
This may not be popular but I would suggest exploring another instrument if you can. Try to make music WITHOUT the guitar. After exploring different ideas on the guitar, I realized that I was just getting tired of the sound, texture, timbre and the patterns associated with the instrument and I needed a different perspective. In fact, I needed to get away from the musical genres that heavily relied on the guitar.

I'm dabbling with synthesizers and keyboards right now and I was surprised to see that the same 456, 145, whatever chord progressions I played on the guitar sounded really different and it's turning out to be an inspiring journey. Now when I play those same chord progressions on the guitar I'm hearing it from another angle and it doesn't sound so bland and boring like it used to. It's hard to explain, but now I just don't hear the guitar in it. I hear other instruments. There are certain rhythmical patterns that's easier to play on the guitar but it's easy to overplay it. After a while, everything starts to sound and feel the same. Playing another instrument forces you to get out of that rut. Then it's your job to try to emulate that back into the guitar and you may get an interesting result.

And it's not just chord progressions. It can be as simple as a single note. Different instruments will operate at a different sound wave length and sometimes that's enough for me to get into a creative headspace.

So yeah, that's my two cents. Take a break from the instrument and see what resources you have to make music without it. Sometimes all we need is a break from it, not complicated theory.

Last edited by hatamoto; 11-15-2022 at 11:46 PM.
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  #33  
Old 11-18-2022, 08:08 AM
Bluenose Bluenose is offline
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I've had my breakfast now and am working on my second cup of coffee so now I feel like writing something. Please bear with me if you can.

In my early days of guitar playing I was very concerned with chord progressions but over these many years I've come to the conclusion that they are just musical vehicles and I gave up trying to develop new progressions. I decided smarter people than me have been doing this for hundreds of years and me trying to "reinvent the wheel" is just time wasted.

Anyway lets look at a standard progression sometimes used as a turnaround. The III,VI,II,V,I progression. These chords could also be written a series of resolving V, I progressions. For example in the key of C which of course is the I chord, the III chord is E which happens to be the V chord of the VI chord which is A, which in turn is the V chord of of the II chord D, which is the V chord of the of the the V chord G and finally the V chord G is the V chord of the I chord C. Therefore we can refer to the II chord as the 'V chord of the V chord' or the III chord as the 'V chord of the VI chord'. You can plainly see how this makes the II and III chords 'sub dominant' chords. I hope somebody gets something useful from this caffeine fueled discourse. And now I'm done and thanks for reading.
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  #34  
Old 11-20-2022, 01:56 PM
Andyrondack Andyrondack is offline
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I learn't my chords playing songs from a Bob Dylan songbook . His chord progressions are nothing novel, mostly just the same 'boring progressions' that the op is wanting to get away from, one of his songs has such a boring progression it's just 1 chord all the way through, Ballad of Hollis Brown, some of his songs use bits of jazzy circle of 5ths but mostly they are pretty dull.
Yet musically his songs are great, despite using all these boring chords in all his thousands of songs he must have written by now he never used the same melody twice.
That should tell you something about the function of a chord progression.
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