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CHORD PROGRESSIONS:
Welcome back! I hope you’ve had a chance to rest your mind a bit and you’re ready to learn about chord progressions. Chord progressions are what typically will describe the emotional story of a song over time. The chords create the basis for a melody and can be considered the harmonic blueprint of an entire piece of music. As you know there is a lot of pre-learning to get to this topic but now that you know about pitches, scales and chords you’re well equipped to start experimenting with this crucial building block of music. Circling back to the last video when we learned the degrees of a scale written in Roman numerals, you can now read and utilize readily available information about the harmonic content of your favourite music. Specifically, the chord progressions used in those songs. A fantastic resource I like to use when I’m studying a beloved favourite is a website called hookrtheory.com
This website displays the chord patterns of a huge number of popular and some less-than-popular music, and you can even download the midi information as well. Looking at the list of popular chord progressions, we can see that an astounding number of very popular songs use the chord progression I V vi IV, or 1 5 6 4 in the scale of C major.
Let’s look at another popular progression like the vi V IV V, or 6 5 4 5 used by artists like Madonna, Oasis, and Guns n Roses. Lots of artists! This is a tried tested and true chord progression for pop music.
Of course, if we wanted to we could save some time constructing these chord progressions by simply downloading the MIDI information, but it’s in your best interest to practice building these chord progressions manually for a while until you grasp these concepts fully.
So let’s build these chord progressions from scratch using the C major scale. So, first, we’ll create a major scale on our piano roll using the major scale interval pattern WWHWWWH. We get C,D,E,F,G,A, AND B.
Now let’s build the chords that are available in this scale starting with the root triad, C major. We’ll add a note 4 semitones about the root to find the third, then 3 semitones about that to find the fifth. So our chord is C E G. Now let’s repeat the process for the next note in the scale, D, skip a degree to F, then from F skip a degree to A. The next is DFA. Let’s keep going.
So the chords we have in the key of C major are
1. C major
2. D minor
3. E minor
4. F major
5. G major
6. A minor
7. B diminished
Now that we have these chords, let’s apply the chord progression. So, a 6 5 4 5 chord progression in the key of C major would be: A minor, G major, F major, G major.
Let’s arrange these chords in a handy way before we make the next progression. I’ll start by duplicating the clip I made that contains all of the triad chords in the key of C major. I’ll do this 7 times so I have a clip for each degree of the scale.
I’ll now name each clip the degree of the scale. You’ll about clips and naming and all of this useful information later on in this course so don’t worry too much about knowing how to do what I’m showing you now. You’ll learn it all in great detail.
Now that I’ve named each of these clips, I’m going to adjust the start position of each one so that when I trigger them they will play the correct chord.
Now that this is set up we can easily play any chord progression in C major. So the 6545 progression sounds like this.
And let’s try a 1 5 6 4 progression now. This sounds like…
I encourage you to revisit this crash course as you become familiar with Ableton Live, apply these techniques on your own and experiment with different possible chord combinations. Eventually, you’ll begin to discover progressions and chord voicing that you really like. Once you make these realizations, which will only come from LOTS of practice, you’ll be better equipped to create music intensionally.
We’ve almost covered all of the fundamentals of music theory for electronic music producers. In the next video, I’d like to introduce you to a few new chord voicings before moving on to rhythm. See you there!
