Category : songwriting

How to write chord progressions a pro would love, Part 2: Harmonic Rhythm

First, a definition.

Bar (often called a measure)

 

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The secret to making chord progressions a pro would love, Part 1

 Step 1

Be able to recite a 7 note alphabet from A to G.

Step 2

Be able to recite that same alphabet, but start on C.

What? C to G?

This was my dilemma. Everyone knows that the alphabet has 26 letters. Fine. I understood that. Now I was being told that there was only seven. Well, ok. That seemed fine, too, but the thing that really screwed me up was arbitrarily treating any one of those letters as the first letter in the alphabet, and then going through the whole alphabet by going to A once you got past G.

I know! It doesn’t sound that hard. It was that hard. I’m not sure why anymore, but it was.

Think of going in a circle from C to C – CDEFGAB/C, I was told. Remember, there are only 7 letters in this alphabet, I was told. Once you get to G (CDEFG), add the rest of the alphabet  – A and B. Now you have the 7 letters of the alphabet. Then add a C at the end to complete the circle. I wanted to cry.

It seems obvious now, but it took about a week before it made sense to me. Sometimes your brain gets stuck.

Scale

A scale is a series of notes. It could be 5, 6, 7, or more notes.  I learned the most common scale first – the 7 note major scale.

Know what we call that C to C order? The C major scale. And we use those 7 letters/notes to make 7 different chords, and those 7 chords just happen to be in the same key. They were so excited to tell me this. I stared at them uncomprehendingly.

I don’t remember them checking to see if I understood what the hell they were talking about…

I thought that they meant that combining all 7 notes 7 different times would somehow result in 7 different chords. That’s not possible. You’d just get 7 of the same thing.

I was getting ahead of myself. They kept talking and started making sense. You don’t use all 7 notes. You use 3 different notes from the scale. And the name for a 3 note chord is a triad. Tri = 3. Oh my god, it was starting to make sense!

Here are the chords in the key of C with the C major scale below it:

These are the first seven chords I learned, and I have to say, they’re pretty useful. Except for that Bdim7 chord. That doesn’t get much attention.

(Before I go any further: There are clearly more than 3 notes in all of those chords. But here’s the thing: some of the notes get repeated. So the C chord up there has 2 Cs, 2 Es, and 1 G – CEG. Three different note names on 5 different strings.)

Chord progressions (otherwise known as a series of chords)

“Now the fun part,” they said. “We’re going to put the chords together in a progression and they’’ll sound great!” I didn’t believe them. I was done and I didn’t really care about the guitar anymore. I just wanted to home with my inadequate brain that was full and sore.

But I decided to try. What choice did I have? My dad wasn’t going to be picking me up for about ½ an hour anyway. I wasn’t the kind of kid that just refused to do what adults told me to do.

They told me to take those 7 chords and play them in random order. D minor to G major to A minor to E minor to C major to F major to B diminished, whatever. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care.

What I heard when I did this were chord progressions that I’d heard people play before. It was really cool. My teacher sat there looking smug. That’s because this has been around for centuries, he said. You’ve just tapped into the history of music in a powerful way. Yes, he said that. I’m not making it up.

So I went home and played around with it. I made some chord progressions with 3 chords by just randomly choosing three from the chords in the key of C. I didn’t even play them at first; I just wrote three of them on a piece of paper in different orders and then played them. It was like I had a different song with every order. A different kind of not so good song. But it was a start. I was ridiculously excited.

Then I tried this with four chords, then five. I went kind of crazy and did some with six. But the more chords I used, the less focused the progressions seemed to become. There was a meandering, lost kind of feeling. Then I discovered harmonic rhythm.

What’s harmonic rhythm? Next post.

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Becoming a musician

Just imagine…

At some point I started imagining myself as a working musician. Every day I got up, and imagined myself working on new ways of putting chords together, new ways of putting melody with words.  Imaginary songs would get written. After a while, these things started happening for real. I actually started writing songs.

Then I imagined myself singing them for other people. I almost puked.

That can be your reality. The music writing part, not the puking. But maybe the puking, too.

No illusions

Somehow, I became a musician. I’m not sure how. I don’t have the personality to do it, really. I don’t like talking about myself. I don’t like talking about what I do. I do, however, like working really hard. And I like being by myself.

So I worked the last two attributes, until the other two started showing up. It wasn’t easy. Nothing worth doing is, really.

But here’s the thing.

Learning this stuff was interesting and fun, and at the end of the process I could play the guitar and write songs.  And if you do anything long enough, things start happening. Opportunities to make music just sort of pop up.

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