The Essential Secrets of Songwriting

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Tom

There’s a new songwriting blog (or at least, a new one to me) called ‘Essential secrets of Songwriting‘. It’s written by a man named Gary Ewer who, like me, is a music educator who writes about songwriting.

I’ve just been reading his post about what he calls Chord Planing.

I’ve not heard the term ‘planing’ used in this context before, but I know exactly what he means when he says:

…you can take dissonant chords (chords that seem to have no basis in normal keys or tonality) and plane those, and it opens up a whole new world of sound possibilities.

The basic idea he’s trying to get across with the post is that you can take any chord, for example D minor 7 chord, and move it to any other minor 7 chord (eg. Bbm7) regardless of key.

He’s right, you really can. As songwriters, we often get obsessed with the ‘rules’ for chords, but staying in key isn’t really too important. One slight niggle I have with Gary’s post is when he says:

Once you start planing a chord, the listener ignores its function, and focuses more on the overall sound of the chord stripped of its function..

I don’t that’s entirely true. Any listener of Western music is going to have a load of harmonic preconceptions, for example the gravity of a dominant 7 or diminished 7 chord. We expect them to go to certain places, and hearing them do something unexpected can be very interesting.

So when you move to an ‘unrelated’ chord that I wasn’t expecting, the chord hasn’t been stripped of it’s function, I was expecting it to perform that function. The fact that it didn’t potentially (hopefully) entertains me.

I’ll leave you with Gary’s example chord progressions, and a last request that you check his blog out: Click Here.