How to write chord progressions a pro would love, Part 12: Interlude February 3, 2014 No CommentMusic Theory So at this point you’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about music theory, but this kind of smells like it. Key signatures, sharps, flats, roman numerals. Please tell me we’re not doing music theory.” We’re not doing music theory. We’re looking at the building blocks of music. The stuff you need if you want go as far as you can. You may not want to go that far. I get it. One of my students once said to me, “You’ve taken something I love and made it into homework.” He didn’t like practicing. He did like being able to play solos, write songs, and play different styles, though. He wasn’t doing any of that before he started doing homework. But I get it. It feels like work. I want to convince you that it’s worth it. I can’t. But I can try to make it easier. So no new information. Instead, here’s a list of all the terms I’ve introduced so far. Presumably, you didn’t know some of this before you started reading this blog. Now you do. Congratulations. You’re a better musician than you were before. Bar A unit of 4 beats. Bar lines The short, vertical lines on the staff that visually create the bars. Bars exist between two bar lines. Function (as in chord function) This refers to what a chord is used for, whether for ending a song, or a verse, or a chorus (like the I chord) or to create tension (like the V chord). The ii chord and the IV chord have the function of usually going to the V chord. These are conventional functions. There are exceptions to everything. Don’t be a slave to convention. Harmonic rhythm Refers to how many chords you have in a bar and where those chords are placed. Hook That musical idea that you can’t forget. If you can’t remember a song, it’s usually because there’s no hook. Hash marks Bold diagonal lines that show the beats in the bar. Staff/Staves A staff is the 5 horizontal lines that musical notes are placed on. Stave is plural for staff. Parts Sheet music that musicians read from. A part is specific to the player (bass part, guitar part, etc.). Lead sheet A copy of the whole song that usually has melody, chords and lyrics. Scale A series of 7 notes. Up to now, we’ve only looked at the major scale. Key A collection of 7 notes, with one note being more important than the others. If you think this sounds like the description of a scale, you’d be right. But key is different than scale, because it tells you what the sharps and/or flats in any scale. Think of the scale as something that can only be made once you know the key. The key is like the parent, the scale is the child. songwritingShare : Tweet
How to write chord progressions a pro would love, part 7: Process II January 22, 2014 No CommentSimple is better In the last post, I gave you six choices for a verse/chorus song form. Let’s use number 1: the 8 bar verse/8bar chorus. Keep in mind that there are lots of variations; we”l look at some of those later. For now, it’s important to keep it simple. The container The verse/chorus form (any form really) is a container that we place ideas into. In our case, we’re placing chord progression ideas there. Take a look at our container below. There are 16 bars to fill up. Before we do that though. we need to talk about some of the things you might be wondering about. Letters = sections First, those letters in boxes. “A” is the verse, and “B” is the chorus. Why not just go with “verse” and “chorus”? It’s a good question. For this example, the letters aren’t really necessary, but you’ll find them useful for describing other types of forms. For instance, the standard AABA form. Aside from that, letters allow you to think more abstractly than “verse” and “chorus.” Verse and chorus are distinct things that go in particular places. “A” and “B” are just…letters. We can put them together any way we like. How about ABAABA? You don’t normally see verse and chorus in an ABAABA sequence. And yes, you can put “verse” and “chorus” together in any way you want, too. But certain words can send our brains down well-worn paths without our awareness. For songwriters, verse and chorus are two of those words. Think in letters, and you can create possibilities you may not have thought about. Double bar lines Next, the two vertical lines at the end of the second staff. Those are called double barlines, and they’re used to signal the end of a major section and the beginning of another. The end of the fourth staff has a different type of double barline, one line being thicker than the other. This type of barline is always at the end of a song. Filling it up Ok. You need a strategy. Is the verse going to have a lot of chords, or just a few? Will there be one chord every bar, or one chord every two bars? Maybe you want two chords in every bar. Identifying the possibilities like this is the first step. But that’s only one possibility. Another big one is chord quality (meaning major chord or minor chord). Will you use mostly major chords in the verse, or minor chords? Will there be more of one than the other? Contrast I’ve only mentioned the verse so far. Define clearly what you want here, because the chorus should contrast it somehow. If you start the verse with a major chord, you might want to start the chorus with a minor chord. If there aren’t many chords in the verse (which means it has a slow harmonic rhythm) you may want the chorus to be busier (fast harmonic rhythm). Keep this in mind as a useful technique. Imagining the different ways you might contrast the verse and chorus increases possibilities. This produces more ideas. The next post is for all you people who aren’t comfortable with the do-whatever-you-want approach to choosing chords. There are actually chord progression patterns that have been used for centuries. I’m going to tell you what they are. songwritingShare : Tweet
How to write chord progressions a pro would love, Part 5: The process January 17, 2014 No CommentThe act of creation Making stuff involves organization and experimentation. At the end of the last post I outlined one way to do it, but some people like to break it down. First: organization. Choose from a pool of chords to make your song. The pool we’ve been looking at so far is the chords in the key of C. Don’t us them all, but include them all as possible choices. This allows for experimentation. So we have our possible chords: C Dm Em F G Am Bdim. But which ones do we use? Time to Experiment Try this. Take the C chord and place it at the beginning of the first bar. In the next bar, place a G chord. Like it? Now do the same thing, but use an Am chord in the second bar. Do this with every chord: go from the C major chord to the F major chord, E minor chord, D minor chord and B diminished chord. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that you have a different emotional reaction to each pairing. Write down those reactions in a journal. You’ll be tempted to fill in those empty bars at the end of each line. Resist this impulse. Now change the harmonic rhythm. Same thing: pay attention and see how each chord pairing makes you feel. What you’re doing here is getting your personal reactions to what the possibilities are. This connects the feeling in the music to feelings in the lyrics. Now try putting the second chord on the 4th beat instead of the 3rd. Maybe wait until the 2nd beat of the 2nd bar. There are quite a few possibilities and we’ve only used two chords in two bars. Just think of the fun you can have. Remember: write every new idea down. Discipline This takes discipline. But if you stick with it through all the possibilities (and it won’t take that long), then when you add that third chord, you’ll feel like you’ve entered a new world. Make sure you write down how you feel about that. Of course, you can just write down some words, and then hammer out some chords while saying those words… So far… We’ve talked about chords in the key of C, and we’ve talked about harmonic rhythm. We’ve talked about a process of discovering how to use these two things. We haven’t talked about lyrics. For that I’m referring you to Sheila Davis’s books. She’s better at that than I am. Here’s a couple: The Craft of Lyric Writing TheSongwriters Idea Book And another one by Pat Pattison: Writing Better Lyrics Next post: song form! You get a container to put all this stuff into! songwritingShare : Tweet
How to write chord progressions a pro would love, part 4: Writing down the chords January 15, 2014 No CommentLet’s take a look at some of those chords from part 2. First, those diagonal lines. Those are called hash marks. Hash Marks Diagonal marks that show the beats in the bar. A chord at the beginning of the bar always starts on beat 1. If you place a chord over the third hash mark (like our example above) it’s played on the third beat. Place it over the second hash mark and it’s played on the second beat. I hear you saying, “Didn’t he say that we’d be writing 8 bar verses? All I’ve seen is 4 bar examples.” Good point. Here’s 8 bars. So if you’ve printed off a couple of sheets of staff paper like I asked you to, you’ll see 8 staves with nothing in them. No hash marks, no bar lines, no treble clef. Go ahead and put some hash marks in those blank bars to get the image above. Then put in some chords from the key of C. Be aware of where you’re placing your chords. Are they mostly on the 1st and 3rd beats? Experiment by placing them randomly without worrying what it’ll sound like. Then play what you’ve got, and decide what you like. Bar Lines The vertical lines on the staff that separate hash marks into groups of four. Treble Clef The thing with all the curves at the beginning of each staff. Don’t worry about this. It’s used for figuring out notes. We’re only talking about chords right now. I’ll deal with notes in another post. How to put in chords The first thing you want to do is draw bar lines. Draw in five on the first staff. One at the beginning of the staff, one at the end, and three in the middle. Do the same on the staff below it. Then draw in the hash marks. Use the example above as a model. Now you need the chords. Remember the chords in the key of C from part 1? Taking those, write in one chord per bar. It doesn’t matter which ones go where for now. Just put in some chords. You can always change them later. Once you have the chords written down, play what you’ve got. Pay attention to what you like and what you don’t. Change the harmonic rhythm if you feel it needs that. It’s easy to say all that. It’s not as easy to do it. Part 5 and 6 will outline the process in detail. songwritingShare : Tweet
The secret to making chord progressions a pro would love, Part 1 January 5, 2014 No Comment 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. songwritingShare : Tweet
