so this is the Royal rad progression a major 4 a major 5 a minor 3 and a minor six and in this video I'll show you how to play it why these chords go well together and lastly show you two easy ways you can stitch Melody ideas around these chords hey there I hope you're doing well if you're new to the channel my name is Steve and I'm a guitarist on a mission to help others develop their own unique math Rock style voice on guitar and as part of that mission I'm sharing core progressions just like the one in this video which I've learned over the last 20 years of playing in my early days I struggled to understand what chord names were what these confusing names meant and why certain chords you know work well together in the progression and of course this left me feeling very frustrated and stuck in my progress but now after many years of learning I've developed strategies for understanding cords and progressions and I want to pass that on to you through these videos so what is the Royal Road progression exactly and how can you play it well this cor progression is hugely popular in Japan in J-pop Jrock anime anime soundtrack sorry and even jrpgs well I'm not the biggest fan of anime or Jrock or Jpop I have played quite a few jrpgs over the years so there's no wonder why this core progression feels so familiar to me oh by the way Final Fantasy 7 is my favorite jrpg for those who wanted to know so this cor progression is a major 4 major 5 minor 3rd and minor 6th and in the kefc major we could play it all as seventh chords so we've got F major 7 as our fourth chord G7 so G dominant 7 as the fifth E minor 7 as the third and an A Minor 7 as the sixth there to me it feels like this core progression is telling some kind of story that keeps on looping and that's the power of this core progression the fact that it doesn't go to the primary tonic in our case the first the key in the key of C that's going to be the the c major meaning this core progression doesn't feel fully resolved and it can just happily keep on looping away these chords go together well because our major four is starting off as a subdominant and that sets up our dominant chord here and our dominant chord it's got a lot of tension build up and it wants to resolve usually to the to the first to give that stable sense of resolution but in instead we go five to the minor third which gives a subtle sense of resolution because it shares two of the notes with our home chord there and we call this chord in functional terms the median this third naturally leads to the sixth this acts as like a a soft resolution more of a passing chord back to the start of the cycle again so now that you're more familiar with how to play this chord progression and why these chords work well together now I want to show you two easy ways I like to play chords and Melody using this progression as an example back when I was a music student at University I remember finally mastering the extended seventh chords the kind that I'm using in this video I told my guitar teacher and he said great now learn the three inversions of each of those chords my heart kind of sank because it felt like I had to start all over again so instead of following his advice I put it off for years before I finally went and learned these inversions properly and looking back if my teacher had just shown me some ways that I could have implied inversions it probably would have motivated me to put the effort into learn them so in this segment I want to show you a quick way you can apply chord inversions so you don't have to make the same mistake I did and don't worry you don't need to know any inversions already and if you didn't know already an aversion is where you take a chord you keep the same notes but you're going to use the other notes as the root of that chord so for example here's a C major 7 and going up a third we can find its funky second inversion there then we got the fifth note here for the second inversion and then the last possible one is going to be that seventh as the root and then back an octave higher so my process works like this for every chord you play in the progression there's a complimentary chord inversion hiding from the fifth note of each chord if that all sounds confusing let me just show you so for our F major 7 we've got the fifth here if you're familiar with your power chords you can find it easily here and there's going to be a second inversion that you can play starting from that fourth string root [Music] there like so and we can do the same for the G7 again here's our Fifth and there's that second inversion and then again and then from there our E minor 7 here's the fifth there's the second inversion and then lastly our a minor 7 do you need to play inversions after each chord well of course not I'm just trying to get you to think about how you could use inversions creatively but by doing so you'll soon find that they're only so far that this cord inversion trick can take you when it comes to crafting an idea so I'd like to add one more thing to be able to confidently Stitch Melody ideas in between these chords interrupting Steve here if you're interested in learning core progressions just like the one that's in this video then be sure to join my free Weekly Newsletter where you'll join hundreds of other guitarists getting a juicy core progression Landing in your inbox every single Wednesday There's a link in the description to join and thank you and back to the video as guitarist one of the first scales we typically learn is the minor [Music] pentatonic and then we're encouraged to learn all of the other five shapes when I went to college I knew shape one of the minor pentatonic but I wasn't familiar with the other four our lecture at the time was well aware of this common problem and he came up with a clever way to help us learn these shapes quickly he sat us all in a circle and each person had to play a different shape of the minor pentatonic scale starting from shape one and as a scale got passed around the circle so to speak it kept us really on our toes thinking about paying attention to what each shape sounded like and thinking about which shape that I would be playing next when it came to my turn I ended up using a lot of these shapes in improvisation classes and now later in life one of the ways I use them is for creating Melody ideas alongside core progressions so let me show you how when it comes to writing Melody using the pentatonic first I'll work out which pentatonic scale I can primarily use for our examp in our case we're just in the key of C major which means I could use the the c major pentatonic or or the a minor pentatonic next I'll go through each chord in the progression and work out where the nearest pentatonic shape is around that particular chord so for example our F major there is [Music] the there's that second shape there or I could play the um that Melody around that third shape there the G7 again it's set definitely around that that third shape or or I could even be playing that fourth shape there for the a uh E minor 7 it's going to be mostly that fourth shape I'm thinking and then same goes for the a minor 7 and then what I like to do is combine the using the pentatonic and using the chord inversions to create some kind of Melody idea in this case kind of a funky idea so let me go through chord by chord here I know I can play this inversion but I can also use that minor pentatonic shape [Music] right that could even lead to that fifth chord there quite nicely with voice leading there right [Music] I can do the same here cord Invision and that sets up the E minor chord nicely there and here I could do the I could use that fourth shape of the a minor pentatonic and lastly it's getting a bit too much around that maybe that same shape there so maybe I could if I can fit it on the [Music] guitar play some tapping thing like that and when you put it all together it can sound something like [Applause] [Music] this oh and to leave you with one last thing I want to test your knowledge about this chord progression by asking you what chord would you add to the end of this progression for the most smooth [Music] change let me know Down Below in the comments if you'd like to learn another beautiful chord progression like the one in this video then be sure to check out this video next a big thanks to the patrons that support this channel you can grab yourself a lovely cord chart by checking the link in the description or by heading over to patreon thanks for the support thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video goodbye