[snorkel]

Reason: It's easier to play these chords on a 6 string guitar, which has been the dominant instrument of choice for pop song composers.

The first C chord on a guitar is easy to hit with no finger twisting required. It's also easy to switch between the first C, Am, and G chord, you can even do it quickly and repeatedly while drunk as you can imagine many pop songs are written. The first F chord requires a little more careful finger placement but still easy to get too. Sure enough you hear this over and over in pop songs, some simple sequence of C F G A chords over and over.

Not surprising that the complex guitar chords that require six pencil-thin rubber fingers and a degree in music theory to know how to play aren't heard as often.

[coliveira]

Your thinking is backwards here. It's not that the music is written like this because it is played on a guitar, it is the guitar that was created to make simple music easy to play.

This is the reason why the guitar strings have the tuning they have, and not any of the million other possible combinations.

[wheels]

Unfortunately your explanation doesn't hold water if you consider other instruments.

C major / A minor are even easier on piano. (C major and A minor are relative keys – they contains the same notes, just with a different note emphasized as the root, or tonic.) They're the two keys that are made up of just playing the white keys on the piano. In contrast, G major / E minor is probably the easiest key to play in on guitar (containing G, C, D, Em and Am), and it comes in second place.

[zellyn]

IMHO C major / A minor, C scales, etc. start out easier, but don't necessarily stay that way: sometimes it's nice to have a couple of black notes in there as a reference point. Especially if you aren't looking at the keyboard.

[UrLicht]

Only easy because they are traditionally taught first. This is because from a music theory standpoint the keys in which those chords are tonic have the least number of sharps and flats. From a memory and hand position standpoint chords that have a black key in the middle (D maj. E maj. etc) are the easiest.

[anigbrowl]

From a memory and hand position standpoint chords that have a black key in the middle (D maj. E maj. etc) are the easiest.

Disagree. You can move around the chords on the white keys without changing your hand shape and everything will sound harmonically related and therefore in key, plus it's easier to count on the white keys. I've been playing music as an adult for 15 years (and had 5 or 6 years of piano lessons as a kid), I know a great deal of music theory and am familiar with a wide variety of scales, modes, and alternate tuning systems, and I still find it easier to move around on the white keys. I happen to particularly like the Phrygian mode, but tend to just play things in E Major when I'm trying out ideas and then transpose afterwards, because as long as I'm playing on the white keys and remember what the root is I literally can't hit a wrong note.

Some people just stick with the original key that lets them play this way; music teachers refer it as 'white note fever.'

[pge]

I think you are misunderstanding the article - All the songs were transposed to the key of C for the purpose of analyzing chords, so don't draw conclusions from the actual chord names presented as the most populat. Instead, what the article is saying is that the I, IV, V chords are the three most common (as one would expect from basic music theory). In the key of C, these are C, F, and G, so that is how it is presented.

[dooq]

Em is probably the very simplest guitar chord to play, only needing 2 fingers beside each other. Yet it doesn't come in at the top of the list. So I don't think your explanation is the dominant force here.

[kevincennis]

No way. Em7add11 is waaaayyy easier if you use the right voicing.

[dfan]

Yeah, if you went by novice guitar player easiness, the keys of G and D would be at the top, not C.

Also, barre chords enable you to play in any key you want, so it's not like playing in C# is particularly harder than playing in C.

[te_platt]

Except that C is a (the?) natural third cord to use with G and D. And then it's a bit tricky to not get something that sounds like a John Denver song.

[glenntzke]

Don't leave out the fact that these are the "home row" power chords too - even easier to play and sound like you have an idea about what you're doing. Many popular songs (and of course 'garage band' simpleton songs) are unimaginative power chord arrangements.

[corry]

I think it's simpler than that:

(1) People learn to play guitar by playing popular songs. These popular songs feature a subset of chords in certain combinations that sound good (eg. C->G->Am->F, C->Am-F-G, Am->F->C->G).

(2) People start creating their own songs using the mental maps of "what chords sound good together" from step #1.

(3) Rinse, repeat

My feeling is that it helps that these patterns are easier to play in C, but I think it's really about matching the "what chord comes next" pattern to a particular key.

[mistercow]

I'm going to have to disagree with you pretty strongly. F is just about the most difficult basic chord to play. In fact, besides B flat, it's the only one on the graph that requires four fingers (or a barre). Similarly, A minor is much easier to play than C, yet it is far less common.

The popularity of C and Em as keys is undoubtedly a result of what's easy to play on a standard guitar with no capo, but I see no correlation between chord popularity and ease of playing.

[gnaritas]

Playing an F requires neither 4 fingers or a barre; a chord only requires 3 notes. Playing an F with 4 fingers is playing the root note twice, you can drop the high F (the hard one) and you're still playing a full F chord. The full barre has the root note in the chord 3 times, only one is necessary.

[mistercow]

Technically, yes, but a) that generally sounds weak, and b) it increases the difficulty of playing the chord because it means you have to either mute or pass over the first string.

[gnaritas]

Muting the first string is natural, trying not to mute it and fret it correctly is what makes it hard to play. It's vastly easier to just play the triad on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings with the first 3 fingers; forget the bar. And if it sounds weak, turn up the volume or strum harder. :)

[mistercow]

Yeah, turning up the volume or strumming harder isn't exactly going to fill out that frequency spectrum.

[gnaritas]

Perhaps you missed the smiley. In any case, you can drop the low root and add the high one and it still only takes 3 fingers. I generally leave out the high note and play the middle triad and the bass with the thumb Hendrix style as it feels the most comfortable.

But your main point was that the F was the most difficult to play, when what you really mean is your favorite 4 note version of the F is more difficult to play. A simple F triad, or even the triad with the bass is trivial to play, certainly no harder than any other first position chord except perhaps Em.

[cliffbean]

There may be some truth to this, but it also goes the other way.

The modern 6-string guitar became popular in part because it was good for the kinds of music people wanted to play. I, IV, V, and vi (C, F, G, and Am) have a long history after all.

It's an interesting idea, that the evolution of music might be guided by an interplay between people choosing and designing new instruments to suit their tastes, and people developing new musical tastes using whatever existing instruments happen to be available.

[dgcoffman]

Only if you're playing open chords. The shape for every chord of the same type is the same in any key when played as a barre chord.

[its_so_on]

Very good analysis. I wasn't even going to comment, since my reaction (personal impression) to the article was "too bad there might be 2 of the 1300 songs that have chords that don't sound like crap" - since they all do, there might be a couple of dozen well-orchestrated popular songs over the last several decades. (I should add that, despite this fact, I do avidly listen to popular songs and don't have a problem. I wouldn't try to reverse engineer their chord patterns though...)

At least your response tells me why this is the case. Thanks!

[cnanders]

That is a fair critique of the article. The vast majority of the songs that came into the analysis were in fact billboard top 100 so that naturally filters out songs with chords that might sound bad (chords that as a rule are not built off of the major scale the song uses). What we found most interesting, however, was that there are certain patterns that really do show up. The one that was most striking, and that we pointed out in the article, is that the iii chord is almost always followed by IV or vi in pop music. There were similar trends for other some of the other chords that we'll be posting in a later article.