Most useful 5 chords/notes

The_B_Man

Hi,
I hope this is in the right forum.

I'm making a little piece of software where I'm hooking up a Guitar Hero guitar to my laptop and converting the signal to MIDI. As there are only 5 buttons, I can only choose 5 notes, or chords, to play at any time.
The exception to this however, is if I choose to have a different chord on the upstroke, which is easy to do, and which will give me 10 chords to choose from. Also, the open note might give me another extra chord or two to play with.


Anyway, my question on here is, if you could only use a limited number of chords, which would they be?

At the moment I have FGACD with E as the open note. I'm thinking of switch the A to Am but I need to tinker a bit more. The ultimate goal is to have 5/6 or 10/12 notes that I can combine in some ways to make a high number of chord combinations. Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help.

Dord

I'd go with A, C#m, D, E, and F#m. That'd give you the I, iii, IV, V, and vi from the key of A. You should be able to play quite a few songs with that.

Thomas from Presence

You could also save yourself a world of pain and check one of these out.

Well worth the price for the performance.