Pop Harmony is More Complicated Than You Think

Guitar TABs/Chords sites often offer shotty sets of chord progressions for favorite songs, and these chords often give a basic, incomplete, and sometimes not 100% accurate picture of what’s happening in the song. They often lose that special quality to the music that made it to so good.

This is because there are subtleties in the voicings of the harmony that sometimes bringing entirely new colors to the way a usually boring chord progression sounds.These subtleties include chord inversions, open vs. closed voicings, specific voice leading, and added suspensions and color notes. To play a song correctly, one must not only play accurate chords, but try to replicate these harmonic subtleties found in the recording. Then you can bring some of that magic back to life in your playing. Or, you could just learn how to play better… =p