FRED.. Play It Again 2
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Inspired by Fred again..
When you sit down to create the music for a new song, it’s a reasonable assumption that you’ll start with chords. There are two ways of creating music, fundamentally, with scales or with chords. Certainly, the riff is a valid way of writing that’s perhaps more scale-based, and if you don’t play an instrument, then the melody you sing is also scale-based.
However, somewhere along the line, you’ll need a harmonic framework. Single-note melodies can suggest moods, but they need structure to really blossom into a full-featured musical expression, and that’s where chords come in.
In fact, since chords have harmonic structure and you can play them in rhythmic fashion, coming up with a cool chord progression gives you a sense of a finished song early in the game. Fitting a melody or riff over a chord progression may feel easier, since you have a better impression of the overall song, its mood, and its harmonic direction.
One of the amazingly powerful things about music creation these days is that you don’t have to be an instrumentalist in the traditional sense. Loops, sequencers, samplers, and software provide you with alternative tools to make music.
At first glance, music theory knowledge may seem superfluous. However, when it comes to pitch shifting, taking a single loop or sample, and altering it to create a harmonic framework, some fundamental knowledge could be the difference to successfully using your creative components.
When you’re taking song elements and arranging them into a work, there are a few music theory aspects that streamline your efforts. Knowing notes, keys, and chord progressions provide both a foundation for your own work and a common language with other music creators.
This knowledge isn’t essential in today’s recording world; however, it offers many advantages, including improved workflow and more control. Consider internalizing this Chord Progressions 101 as the “need to know” fundamentals of theory, even if you never absorb a single hemidemisemiquaver beyond the basics.
Chords are harmonically related groups of three or more notes. That’s it. Guitarists reading this might exclaim, “hey, what about power chords?” Indeed, power chords are the common name of the two-note fifth interval that commonly make up the rhythm of rock songs, particularly when played with heavy distortion.
Technically, though, power chords are simply an interval. They’re harmonically ambiguous, neither major nor minor, but able to suggest either one. In typical ensemble situations, the power chord interval provides weight – power – to the structure that’s created by other instruments or voices, so they contribute to harmonic structure though they don’t define it.
A chord, like a straight line, needs three notes minimum to establish itself. Major and minor chords, the two most common types, create different feelings. Most people describe major chords as “happy” and minor chords as “sad.” That’s perhaps overly simple, but it demonstrates the importance of harmonic structure when you’re creating a song with the intention of communicating a feeling.
That third note is crucial when creating emotional content, therefore a chord is the most basic unit of music that’s capable of transmitting emotion through harmonic structure. Play a D minor chord and it sounds sad. Sing a D note by itself and it has no emotional context, nor does a D power chord.
Chords with more than three notes provide more complex, yet subtle variations on the emotions they evoke. A chord played alone starts the emotional context of a piece, and then subsequent chords create a musical story or background that expands on the emotion.
Yes! It’s possible to compose a song around a single chord. Gregorian chants, for instance, often base around a single chord. The drones on bagpipes play a similar role. The Beatles even experimented with a single-chord progression with their song, “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
One problem with single-chord progressions is their monotony. The occasional song built this way may have impact, but string a series of them together, and auditory interest is harder to maintain. The same is often true with two-chord progressions. A listener’s ear can become bored fast with repetition, so just as you need three or more notes to create a chord, it’s often necessary to use three or more chords to create a viable progression. That takes us to the most commonly used chord progression, which uses three specific chords.
For purposes of this article, it’s assumed that the reader has some knowledge of scales and keys. Chords have a shorthand that helps communicate across key signatures and this method also gives some insight into the construction of chord progressions. This shorthand is Roman Numeral chord numbering.
Any key in Western music has an arrangement of seven notes that starts on the tonic, or the note that provides the scale’s identity. For the key of C, the tonic is C. In the key of G, G is the tonic. The tonic is the point where you start naming notes of the scale. The key of C is therefore C, D, E, F, G, A, B before starting another octave on the next C. The key of G includes G, A, B, C, D, E, F#.
We can, though, refer to the tonic as I in Roman numerals. So, I refers to C if you’re in the key of C, or it means G in the key of G, and so on. Logically, you could expect the other scale divisions expressed as II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII. That’s almost it. We need one refinement, though, that proves very valuable.
Looking at the structure of major scales first, the chords that correspond to the scale notes can be major, minor, or diminished chords. This pattern doesn’t change when you change keys, so we can use Roman numerals with capital letters representing major chords, small letters representing minor chords and a combination of small letters and a symbol to denote the diminished chord. Therefore, the major scale chord progression, expressed in Roman numerals, looks like this:
Let’s look at the key of D. Chords in the key of D from which we can build progressions are:
If you’re not sure about how sharps and flats work to preserve the correct intervals in a scale, see this article on the Circle of Fifths for a more detailed explanation.
We can extrapolate that for every major key. For the sake of space, the chart below doesn’t include keys such as A#/Bb, C#/Db, D#/Eb etc., but the same patterns apply to all major scales. You can easily find chord charts with all notes and permutations with a simple online search.
Minor scales work in a similar way. If you understand relative minors you know, for example, that A minor is the relative minor of the C scale. From the chart above, you can see that A minor is the vi chord of the C major scale. You can make a similar chord chart for minor scales, and if you did this for A minor, you’d get:
Technically, these would have their own Roman numeral names, I, iio, III and so on, but the relative minor keys are closely integrated with their major key, so it’s typical to use one chord scale for both the major and its relative minor.
Okay, let’s step away from the theory now and get to the beautiful heart of understanding chord scales. It’s simply this:
Consider how handy this is for a songwriter. Say, for instance, you’ve got a great chorus with a strong hook, but nothing else, no verses, no intro, no bridge. Where do you turn for inspiration? How about the chord scale? If your chorus uses C major and G major and you’re in the key of C, then you automatically know that D minor, E minor, F, A minor, and B diminished will naturally work as chords.
Say you decide to build a verse around A minor and E minor, but the melody of the verse is a bit too low for your vocal range. The Roman numeral system helps you out here. Expressed in Roman numerals, your verse uses the vi and iii chords, while your chorus uses I and V.
Bump the key up to D and check the chord scale chart. Your new chords are B minor and F# minor for the verse and D and A for the chorus. Easy.
When you’re working with loops or other non-performed song elements, knowing the chord scale permits you to transpose blocks knowledgeably, even if you can’t find an A on any instrument. Music and math have many overlaps, and there are times like these when you can “calculate” instead of “perform” and your results simply end up working.
Because the chord scale concept presents itself so clearly and obviously, it’s tempting to think of the seven chords of any scale as “correct,” that is, the only chords you can use when working in each key. For your early efforts, it’s probably best to stick with this idea, but it’s important to note that there’s no law or rule of music that says you can’t throw chords from outside of the chord scale into a song.
For example, you might like the sound of a V chord in its minor form against the notes of the melody, or perhaps the ii chord sounds better as a major. If it works, use it. There aren’t any chord police waiting to bust you for diminishing a chord other than vii.
As you learn more about keys and chords, you may find you like the sound of modulation. This is simply a mid-song key change. Fully understanding how that works goes beyond the scope of this article, but you may find yourself playing a chord completely outside of your original key, even though it sounds natural and fits the way you want.
Say you’re working in G major and you find that a transition to an B flat chord sounds good. However, you can’t find a chord in the G major scale that you like. Try moving to the B flat scale. You might find that the IV and V chords, E flat and F, make perfect sense.
If that’s the case, you may have modulated to the B flat major scale. It can sometimes be tricky to modulate back, particularly in your early days of chord and music theory, but when it works the results often sound fresh and exciting. In music, learning the rules and then breaking them deliberately is occasionally a valid approach.
Anyone with rudimentary chording skills on guitar or piano usually finds they can hum many songs over the same three or four-chord progressions. The origins of popular music in the blues and folk traditions gave us patterns that dominate what sounds “right” to our ears. The I-IV-V pattern is so fundamental, you can play thousands of songs with those three chords only, no matter what key you’re in. It’s the basis of 12-bar blues and blues-related song forms.
Add the vi chord and the song list expands even wider. In fact, the I-V-vi-IV progression is so prevalent in contemporary popular music that simply playing those chords in that order likely brings several hits to mind, no matter what genre of music you prefer. Rearrange those same chords into I-vi-IV-V and instantly take a trip back to the 1950s.
For all the information we’ve covered here, you’re just scratching the surface of chords and their complexity. Seventh chords, both major and minor, give you further voices to color your songs. Suspended chords give a melodically pleasing tension that cries out for resolution, a musical effect that often pulls a song forward. Chord inversions give different feelings using the same notes, but without using the tonic as the lowest.
However, you have the basics to start building songs. Don’t be surprised if your ear begins to search for more complex colorations, but even if it doesn’t, chord scales have a world of potential for you, no matter what media, genre, or method you use. It’s time to sit down and start creating.
When you sit down to create the music for a new song, it’s a reasonable assumption that you’ll start with chords. There are two ways of creating music, fundamentally, with scales or with chords. Certainly, the riff is a valid way of writing that’s perhaps more scale-based, and if you don’t play an instrument, then the melody you sing is also scale-based.
However, somewhere along the line, you’ll need a harmonic framework. Single-note melodies can suggest moods, but they need structure to really blossom into a full-featured musical expression, and that’s where chords come in.
In fact, since chords have harmonic structure and you can play them in rhythmic fashion, coming up with a cool chord progression gives you a sense of a finished song early in the game. Fitting a melody or riff over a chord progression may feel easier, since you have a better impression of the overall song, its mood, and its harmonic direction.
One of the amazingly powerful things about music creation these days is that you don’t have to be an instrumentalist in the traditional sense. Loops, sequencers, samplers, and software provide you with alternative tools to make music.
At first glance, music theory knowledge may seem superfluous. However, when it comes to pitch shifting, taking a single loop or sample, and altering it to create a harmonic framework, some fundamental knowledge could be the difference to successfully using your creative components.
When you’re taking song elements and arranging them into a work, there are a few music theory aspects that streamline your efforts. Knowing notes, keys, and chord progressions provide both a foundation for your own work and a common language with other music creators.
This knowledge isn’t essential in today’s recording world; however, it offers many advantages, including improved workflow and more control. Consider internalizing this Chord Progressions 101 as the “need to know” fundamentals of theory, even if you never absorb a single hemidemisemiquaver beyond the basics.
Chords are harmonically related groups of three or more notes. That’s it. Guitarists reading this might exclaim, “hey, what about power chords?” Indeed, power chords are the common name of the two-note fifth interval that commonly make up the rhythm of rock songs, particularly when played with heavy distortion.
Technically, though, power chords are simply an interval. They’re harmonically ambiguous, neither major nor minor, but able to suggest either one. In typical ensemble situations, the power chord interval provides weight – power – to the structure that’s created by other instruments or voices, so they contribute to harmonic structure though they don’t define it.
A chord, like a straight line, needs three notes minimum to establish itself. Major and minor chords, the two most common types, create different feelings. Most people describe major chords as “happy” and minor chords as “sad.” That’s perhaps overly simple, but it demonstrates the importance of harmonic structure when you’re creating a song with the intention of communicating a feeling.
That third note is crucial when creating emotional content, therefore a chord is the most basic unit of music that’s capable of transmitting emotion through harmonic structure. Play a D minor chord and it sounds sad. Sing a D note by itself and it has no emotional context, nor does a D power chord.
Chords with more than three notes provide more complex, yet subtle variations on the emotions they evoke. A chord played alone starts the emotional context of a piece, and then subsequent chords create a musical story or background that expands on the emotion.
Yes! It’s possible to compose a song around a single chord. Gregorian chants, for instance, often base around a single chord. The drones on bagpipes play a similar role. The Beatles even experimented with a single-chord progression with their song, “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
One problem with single-chord progressions is their monotony. The occasional song built this way may have impact, but string a series of them together, and auditory interest is harder to maintain. The same is often true with two-chord progressions. A listener’s ear can become bored fast with repetition, so just as you need three or more notes to create a chord, it’s often necessary to use three or more chords to create a viable progression. That takes us to the most commonly used chord progression, which uses three specific chords.
For purposes of this article, it’s assumed that the reader has some knowledge of scales and keys. Chords have a shorthand that helps communicate across key signatures and this method also gives some insight into the construction of chord progressions. This shorthand is Roman Numeral chord numbering.
Any key in Western music has an arrangement of seven notes that starts on the tonic, or the note that provides the scale’s identity. For the key of C, the tonic is C. In the key of G, G is the tonic. The tonic is the point where you start naming notes of the scale. The key of C is therefore C, D, E, F, G, A, B before starting another octave on the next C. The key of G includes G, A, B, C, D, E, F#.
We can, though, refer to the tonic as I in Roman numerals. So, I refers to C if you’re in the key of C, or it means G in the key of G, and so on. Logically, you could expect the other scale divisions expressed as II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII. That’s almost it. We need one refinement, though, that proves very valuable.
Looking at the structure of major scales first, the chords that correspond to the scale notes can be major, minor, or diminished chords. This pattern doesn’t change when you change keys, so we can use Roman numerals with capital letters representing major chords, small letters representing minor chords and a combination of small letters and a symbol to denote the diminished chord. Therefore, the major scale chord progression, expressed in Roman numerals, looks like this:
Let’s look at the key of D. Chords in the key of D from which we can build progressions are:
If you’re not sure about how sharps and flats work to preserve the correct intervals in a scale, see this article on the Circle of Fifths for a more detailed explanation.
We can extrapolate that for every major key. For the sake of space, the chart below doesn’t include keys such as A#/Bb, C#/Db, D#/Eb etc., but the same patterns apply to all major scales. You can easily find chord charts with all notes and permutations with a simple online search.
Minor scales work in a similar way. If you understand relative minors you know, for example, that A minor is the relative minor of the C scale. From the chart above, you can see that A minor is the vi chord of the C major scale. You can make a similar chord chart for minor scales, and if you did this for A minor, you’d get:
Technically, these would have their own Roman numeral names, I, iio, III and so on, but the relative minor keys are closely integrated with their major key, so it’s typical to use one chord scale for both the major and its relative minor.
Okay, let’s step away from the theory now and get to the beautiful heart of understanding chord scales. It’s simply this:
Consider how handy this is for a songwriter. Say, for instance, you’ve got a great chorus with a strong hook, but nothing else, no verses, no intro, no bridge. Where do you turn for inspiration? How about the chord scale? If your chorus uses C major and G major and you’re in the key of C, then you automatically know that D minor, E minor, F, A minor, and B diminished will naturally work as chords.
Say you decide to build a verse around A minor and E minor, but the melody of the verse is a bit too low for your vocal range. The Roman numeral system helps you out here. Expressed in Roman numerals, your verse uses the vi and iii chords, while your chorus uses I and V.
Bump the key up to D and check the chord scale chart. Your new chords are B minor and F# minor for the verse and D and A for the chorus. Easy.
When you’re working with loops or other non-performed song elements, knowing the chord scale permits you to transpose blocks knowledgeably, even if you can’t find an A on any instrument. Music and math have many overlaps, and there are times like these when you can “calculate” instead of “perform” and your results simply end up working.
Because the chord scale concept presents itself so clearly and obviously, it’s tempting to think of the seven chords of any scale as “correct,” that is, the only chords you can use when working in each key. For your early efforts, it’s probably best to stick with this idea, but it’s important to note that there’s no law or rule of music that says you can’t throw chords from outside of the chord scale into a song.
For example, you might like the sound of a V chord in its minor form against the notes of the melody, or perhaps the ii chord sounds better as a major. If it works, use it. There aren’t any chord police waiting to bust you for diminishing a chord other than vii.
As you learn more about keys and chords, you may find you like the sound of modulation. This is simply a mid-song key change. Fully understanding how that works goes beyond the scope of this article, but you may find yourself playing a chord completely outside of your original key, even though it sounds natural and fits the way you want.
Say you’re working in G major and you find that a transition to an B flat chord sounds good. However, you can’t find a chord in the G major scale that you like. Try moving to the B flat scale. You might find that the IV and V chords, E flat and F, make perfect sense.
If that’s the case, you may have modulated to the B flat major scale. It can sometimes be tricky to modulate back, particularly in your early days of chord and music theory, but when it works the results often sound fresh and exciting. In music, learning the rules and then breaking them deliberately is occasionally a valid approach.
Anyone with rudimentary chording skills on guitar or piano usually finds they can hum many songs over the same three or four-chord progressions. The origins of popular music in the blues and folk traditions gave us patterns that dominate what sounds “right” to our ears. The I-IV-V pattern is so fundamental, you can play thousands of songs with those three chords only, no matter what key you’re in. It’s the basis of 12-bar blues and blues-related song forms.
Add the vi chord and the song list expands even wider. In fact, the I-V-vi-IV progression is so prevalent in contemporary popular music that simply playing those chords in that order likely brings several hits to mind, no matter what genre of music you prefer. Rearrange those same chords into I-vi-IV-V and instantly take a trip back to the 1950s.
For all the information we’ve covered here, you’re just scratching the surface of chords and their complexity. Seventh chords, both major and minor, give you further voices to color your songs. Suspended chords give a melodically pleasing tension that cries out for resolution, a musical effect that often pulls a song forward. Chord inversions give different feelings using the same notes, but without using the tonic as the lowest.
However, you have the basics to start building songs. Don’t be surprised if your ear begins to search for more complex colorations, but even if it doesn’t, chord scales have a world of potential for you, no matter what media, genre, or method you use. It’s time to sit down and start creating.
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