String Theory - That Old Familiar Feeling

The standard minor-drop progression

- Jimmy Brown

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, 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 call 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 well known examples of this signature move, performed in the keys of A minor, F minor and E minor, respectively.