Chromatic chords – A few options

chromatic adj. Relating to colours or colour

Chord choice can be a tricky thing for songwriters. It’s often a balance between the desire to be musically interesting and the need to not confuse the listener with too outlandish a change.

Thankfully, the modern listener is actually pretty sophisticated. After all, western audiences have had about three hundred years to get used to chords I IV and V in the major key, and just as long to get used to the modal harmonies from folk and all sorts of other harmonic ideas.

Making a choice

If there are all these different chord ideas to choose from, where do you start?

I’ve linked to Jeremy Yew’s blog before, but now I shall do so again. Late last month he wrote an interesting post about the ‘non-family’chords he’s trying to incorporate into his songwriting.

By non-family, he means chromatic chords ie. chords that don’t occur in a given scale. For example, in the key of C major you can’t get an E major chord, because E major needs a G sharp and there’s no G sharp in C major.

Does that mean that you can’t have an E major chord in a C major song? Of course not, it’s actually a very common chord in that key and there are countless songs that use it. The first two chords of the verse Bowie’s Space Oddity is one example (which I’ve talked about before) .

There are several common chromatic chords that Jeremy, and any other songwriter, might want to try.

1. The Secondary Dominant

(There seems to be more than one idea about what this term means, possibly because of the differences between European and American musical terms.)

In C major, the dominant chord is G. Why? Because it is a fifth above the root chord and has a very clear ‘gravity’ and sounds like it has to ‘come home’ to the C. The tension between root and dominant has been the basis of literally thousands of pieces of Western music.

The secondary dominant is the chord you find if you take the same idea a step further. G is the dominant of C, but what is the dominant of G? It’s D. So going from a D to a G and then to a C sounds good, even though D isn’t in the key of C.

How do you find the secondary dominant in a scale if you’re not too good on music theory? Just turn the second chord in the scale into a major chord. So in C, instead of D minor, play D major, then G, then C.

In the key of F it would be G, C, F.

2. The Flattened Seventh

In the normal major scale, the seventh chord is diminished, and in pop music it’s rarely used. A common chromatic alternative is found by flattening the seventh note and building a major chord on that. A bluesy sounding chord choice.

In C major? Play a Bb chord.

3. The Minor Fourth

Exactly as the name implies, take the fourth chord and turn it minor.

In C major? Play an F minor chord.

If you can bare it, listen to this example (the first two chords in the verse):

In summary

There are lots of other alternatives. There’s also a lot more that could be said about each of these examples, for example about the use of secondary dominants in jazz or the modal implications of the flattened seventh.

The main point though, is that there are plenty of chromatic or ‘non-family’ chords you can try out to bring a little extra colour to your songwriting. The key is too try things out and find something that works for you.

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