Making Music with Chords: Where Theory Becomes Songs

The short answer: you can study chord construction forever, but a pile of chords isn't music — motion between chords is. Gitori's Making Music with Chords course is where the theory track cashes out: chaining chords into progressions, hearing why some sequences feel inevitable, and writing your own.

From chords to progressions

A progression is a journey around the key's chord family. The course builds the core intuitions:

• Home and away. The I chord is home; everything else is somewhere on the way back. Tension and release come from how far you wander and how you return.
• The heavy hitters. I, IV, V, and vi power an absurd fraction of popular music — the four-chord loop is a cliché because it works.
• Numbers over names. Thinking I–V–vi–IV instead of C–G–Am–F makes every progression portable to any key (Roman numerals and the Nashville Number System).
• Why the pull happens. The V chord's tension and the vi chord's bittersweetness aren't taste — they're baked into how the chords share and lead tones.

What the course covers

Diatonic chord families in practice, the classic progressions and what makes each tick, cadences (how phrases end), and guided experiments where you assemble progressions yourself and hear the result. It assumes the construction side is handled and focuses entirely on usage.

Before you start

Basic Chords is the hard prerequisite; How chords are built from scales explains where the chord family comes from, and the Circle of Fifths course supercharges the key-awareness this course leans on. Afterwards, Non-Diatonic Chords covers the spicy chords outside the family.