Gospel Chord Progressions, Transitions & More

If you want to learn gospel chord progressions, transitions, and other ways to get that distinct gospel sound, you’ve come to the right place! In this lesson, Brett Ziegler will take a standard pop progression and add some transformations to make it sound more gospel.

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Gospel Chord Progressions: What to Know First

Gospel piano involves more advanced theory knowledge. If at any point you want to take a step back and review the basics, check out these fundamental lessons:

1. All About Chord Progressions
2. Gospel 101: Your First Gospel Piano Lesson
3. The Gospel Piano Chord Progression You Need to Know

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The Basic Progression

First things first: let’s take a look at the chord progression we’re working with. To keep things simple, we’ll be in the key of G Major (one sharp – F#) and in common time (4/4).

Here’s the basic progression. The dots indicate quarter note beats. Since we’re in common time, remember that there are four quarter notes per measure:

Practice the “base” progression a few times on its own to get a hang of it.

Once you’re ready, let’s add some fluff to make it more “gospel-y.”

The 2-5-1 (ii⁷-V⁷-I) Gospel Transition

The first thing we’ll add is a ii⁷-V⁷-I transition right before the C (IV) chord.

Think of this as “setting up” that C chord. To do this, we’ll modulate (change keys) into C Major temporarily.

In C Major, ii⁷ is Dm⁷ and V⁷ is G7. So instead of playing just D, we’ll substitute Dm7 and G7 into that measure. Like this:

The 2-5-1 progression is very common in gospel and jazz piano. You can learn more about it here.

What makes this transition sound interesting is because we move into a new key and, consequently, play an F-natural instead of an F-sharp in those Dm7 and G7 chords.

Adding an Augmented 7th Chord

Now let’s add another set-up chord, this time before the vi chord (Em) at the beginning of the progression.

Again, we’ll modulate briefly into the chord that’s being set up. Meaning, we’ll change keys into Em. The fancy word for this is secondary dominants.

The V⁷ chord of Em is B7. To make things sound even more gospel-y, Brett uses an augmented (V⁺⁷) chord. That means we’ll be playing Baug7.

Our progression now looks like this:

“Augmented” means we raise the fifth of the chord (F#) up another half-step. This is also known as double-sharping (or augmenting) that note.

Bridging With a Half-Diminished 7th Chord

Adding chromaticism can make a progression sound more gospel. We can do this with our progression by bridging the C chord to the D chord with a half-diminished chord called C#m7b5 (#IV^o7).

A half-diminished 7th chord consists of a minor third, a diminished fifth, and a minor seventh. Our chord can either be called “C#m7 half-diminished” or “C#m7 flat 5.” You can learn more about the different types of seventh chords here.

You can hear this as “walking up” chromatically from C to D. 

The 4-Over-5 Ending

We’ve walked up. Now it’s time to walk back down. 

We can do this by playing the IV chord (our C chord) over the fifth note of the scale (D). This is essentially a slash chord.

All the Gospel Chords and Transitions Together

Whoo…that’s a lot of transitions.

It’s time to see how everything sounds together! As a refresher, here’s our original progression:

And here’s our progression with the 2-5-1 progression, the augmented 7th, the half-diminished flat 5 bridge, and the 4-over-5 ending. We’ve highlighted the added parts in red:

We hope you enjoyed this introduction to gospel chord progressions! For more piano lessons like this, try Pianote free for seven days.

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