Parallel chords are chords borrowed from a key parallel to the one your song is in. Let’s take a look at what it would look like to borrow a chord from a parallel key. The result is a different, yet compatible sound which is commonly used in Neo Soul, Jazz, R&B. What keys and modes should you borrow from? Well, in R&B it’s common to borrow chords from the parallel minor or to switch to Dorian mode for a short period of time. Using borrowed chords means to incorporate a chord in your chord progression that belongs to another key or mode. The progression now has a totally different feel.

For example, let’s take the familiar major 3-chord riff from En Vogue’s “ Dont Let Go (Love)” (F – Db – Eb), and change the order of the chords to Db – F – Eb, adjust the timing, and throw in an extra Cmin7 at the end of the sequence. Once you learn the chords of your favorite songs, you can study them to understand why they work as you’re learning how to use R&B chord progressions in your own songs. These sites catalog auto-generated and crowd-sourced chord progressions and show you the guitar or piano chord shapes as the songs play through, so you can learn about R&B piano chord progressions and R&B guitar chord progressions in real time. You can use websites such as Chordify or Hooktheory to learn the chord progressions of your favorite songs. If you already have a basic foundation of music theory and want to learn R&B chord progress a good place to start is to simply play along to a lot of R&B music. Deconstruct your favorite R&B chord progressions

E-flat major to g maj transition