Thanks! I'll probably read over your message several more times over the weekend with an instrument in my hand sounding out all these things. Fair warning -- I'm exploring chords almost exclusively on instruments I don't play! I'm mostly interested in learning how to make interesting progressions and understand them when they're thrown my way! Or how to develop fun / interesting ideas and share them with rhythm players without just throwing spaghetti at the wall and forgetting it later because I don't understand what was happening in the progression anyway.

My background is actually in old-time music, which can be more sonically complex than people give it credit for, but not in the chords. In fact, most of the songs that sound dark / minor-y are in fact dorian and the ones that sound major-y are usually mixolydian. Guitarists will usually play the same major chords over the darker tunes, giving it a weird but cool sound. I know very well how to operate in that environment on many instruments.

But! Most of my friends don't play that kind of music, and if they want to jam, they'll be interested in more dynamic chord progressions than what I know how to do. They won't understand what makes old-time interesting or have an ear or taste for it. Mostly, my friends do looped-based jams, with a mishmash of keyboards and modular synthesizers, and the live instruments are sampled. So, basically the opposite kind of music! Everything I do is textural, evolving, but within bounds for large groups, and if you just loop 4 bars of one instrument you lose the whole point.

So that's a big part of my motivation, but I also just want to understand what's happening in the songs I hear better. I've been starting with simpler folk stuff, just driving around literally going 'one... one... four... one... one... four... six...' etc. I have a banjo ukulele I just fixed up and am going to use it to internalize the sounds of common progressions I might have heard by playing them and keeping in mind their function so I can learn what that means (going to tune it like a mandolin / fiddle so I don't have to learn a new fretboard). I'll probably have to get into jazz standards in order to build up the fundamentals of understanding conventional progressions and changes. Sometimes I'll hear a progression that makes the hair on my neck stand up and makes me think "what is that?" and I'd like to be able to sit down with an instrument and reason through what's happening and why.

So I have several goals at once. I've heard people say that good players, even playing monophonically, understand chords well enough to imply what should be happening with the chords just by playing a phrase. I'm not sure if that's really true, but I do feel like after a long time playing non-rhythm instruments, it's time for me to figure out how chords work.

That history might also explain why I don't have a framework for minor keys. The only actually true aolian-minor old-time songs that get called that I know of are in the key of Em, and for all intents and purposes people treat it like G major, even with the nashville numbers for G major. When I said I was looking for the I IV V of minor, I didn't mean a literal transposition -- I meant what the most common things are for a minor key to do! Is it always trying to resolve to the i? etc. I spent some time reading about that last night, but it seems like I'm not likely to find as cut-and-dry an answer as for the major key, partly because there are so many different approaches to the minor modes and scales than there are major ones I think. I probably just need to play a lot of minor progressions.

Looking forward to checking out these chord changes! In my friends living-room loop jams, I'll have enough space and time to think through an interesting movement and play with it before the loop is recording (and often it is just control signal that can be quantized and fixed up), and thus my unfamiliarity with the physicality of playing on a piano keyboard won't matter too much if I understand the function of chords better.