The most interesting part from version 2 is the E chord. It isn’t in the C major key, strictly speaking, but because the melody uses an E at this point, and the C and E chords both share the E note, it sounds good.
So, the idea to steal is using interesting chords, and thinking about your chord choices.
Try looking for chords that sound good with your melody notes, but don’t just follow the tired I IV V chord progressions we’re all used to.
For example, in the key of G, you might try a Bb chord, an Eb chord, or an F chord. None of them are in G major, but they can sound good, depending on your melody.
Acknowledgements
I had this idea after follow a link on this useful list which led me to this article about the Beatles (which is mostly badly written and pretentious, but still interesting).
In my everyday life as a music teacher, I tend to design quite a lot of worksheets.
In my online life trying to share songwriting ideas, I’ve never put this skill into use. Until now, that is.
You see, a written worksheet can be a very useful thing. As songwriters we’re often scribbling on random bits of paper. A worksheet, properly designed, can give order to the chaos of our ideas, doodlings and scribbles.
It can help us make sense of what we’re writing.
So, to help out all you songwriting guitarists out there, I’ve put together four worksheets that should help you out. You get:
1. The Chord Diary
2. The Lyric Brainstormer
3. The Chord Progression Chart
4. The Song Analysis Guide
What free?
Yes, just sign up to the songwright.co.uk mailing list using the form below and you’ll get the free ebook, plus a monthly update on all the new posts and songwriting tips that have featured on songwright.co.uk.
You won’t be spammed, and I won’t give your email to anyone else.
well… lots of reasons, but I’m going to try: ‘because it gives a sense of mood, emotion and character.’ Whatever the character of the songs you’re working on, you’ll need to decide what kind o harmony you need.
Even an unnacompanied solo vocal song will have an implied harmony, so it’s a musical idea that’s vital to songwriters. Even a one chord song has a harmony.
What is harmony?
We’re used to thinking of vocal harmony – Beach Boys-esque intertwining voices singing different notes at the same time. But harmony is more than that. It’s the choice of notes – the group of pitches you use to write your sng.
What harmonic options do you have? Lots. Here are just a few:
Major – the major scale, for example G major (G A B C D E F# G) characterised by the dominant to tonic chord relationship. Try playing a D7 chord, then a G chord.
Harmonic Minor – The dominant 7th chord to tonic or ‘home’ chord relationship in the major scale was so important that it worked its way into the minor scale – Try playing an A minor chord, then an E7 chord. Maybe try working in an F chord as well
Natural Minor – The standard minor ‘flavour’ try an A minor chord as your ‘Home’ and a G as your ‘Away’ chord.
Home and Away?
Although some 20th century composers tried to escape it, most Western music has a ‘Home’ note, and by extension a home chord. For example in C major, the chord of C is home. By changing chord we create a tension, by moving back we release that tension.
Different harmonies have different flavours of Home and Away.
Eg.
E phrygian might have E minor as ‘Home’ and F or Dminor as an ‘away’ chord
G Mixolydian might have G major as home, F as away.
Phrygian? Mixolydian?
Modes – different scales, different moods and flavours of harmony.
There are a lot of other harmonies ideas , but in summary I would say that the important thing is to experiment and explore, to try out as many different flavours to find the harmony that best suits your song.
As my previous post on standard chord progression has been sitting at the top of my ‘top posts’ list for quite a while, I thought I’d write a follow-up.
These progressions all come with a warning – they have been used extensively before, you might want to add your own variations. However, sometimes we need to compose quickly, and using a standard progression can save you a lot of time (another option is to just use one chord).
The progressions from the previous post were:
C Am F G (used in Stand by Me, Every Breath you Take and many more)
C G Am F (used in all sorts including ‘Today’ by the Smashing Pumpkins)
Twelve Bar Blues: C C C C F F C C G F C C (each chord for a bar. Used in countless blues and rock ‘n’ roll numbers)
Circle of fifths: C F Bb Eb Ab Db etc (lots of variations on this, often used in Jazz standards)
C Bb F (As used in Sweet Home Alabama)
Em C D (a common heavy rock/metal progression. See: most Iron Maiden songs)
To which we can add:
Em C G D (as used in the chorus of the mildly obscure, but very good Bruce Dickinson song above, as well as countless others.)
C Am D7 G7 (a common jazz turn around, mildly cheesey. Turn the D7 back into a Dminor if you want).
Am F E7 (the basis of a great many songs, for example Seven Nation Army by the White Strips)
Just to be nice, I’ve put all of these into a handy PDF worksheet. Print yourself out a copy for reference, or to pass on to others. I’m a teacher, and I know we teachers can always use a worksheet to hand out: Click Here
The idea for it came from this post over at songwritingapples.com. It’s about learning new chord shapes in a new tuning, but even if you stick to standard tunings I think this could be useful.
The Chord Diary
You’ve probably seen the many guitar chord books on sale. You might even own one or two and be quite familiar with the chord diagrams within. They certainly can be useful, but I don’t like them.
Why not?
For three reasons.
1. They only ever contain ‘standard’ chord shapes.
2. There’s no room for creativity, for filling in your own chord shapes.
3. They don’t encourage you to think about WHY chords are called what they are.
The Chord Diary worksheet allows you to record chord shapes that are unique to you, allowing you to
● Record shapes as and when you learn/invent them
● Make any relevant notes about the chord
How do I use the sheet?
Simply fill in the chord symbol as I have below (click on the picture to make it bigger) , and make some notes about it. Whatever you think is relevant. Pretty soon you’ll have a library full of chord voicings to choose from.
APOLOGIES!! These files aren’t in the place they used to be! I’m in the process of getting them back online, but in the meantime, you can get a copy of the finished Ebook if yousubscribe?
We often think of chords in vertical blocks, a bar of C, a bar of A minor and so on. Another way of thinking about chords is to imagine several linear melodies, of different pitches, weaving together to create the chords.
That’s how vertical harmonies work.
Ropes around the Sun
I’m using my song Ropes Around the Sun, which I completed for this year’s FAWM.
Another possibility, and one your hear a lot, is to sing the notes a third up in the scale.
What does that mean?
It means, if you’ve got a melody that goes C C B A, you take each of those as the first and go up to the third, giving you E E D C. It sounds like this:
Or you can do both at the same time: Download Example 5
In Summary
These are only the basics, and admittedly none of the examples are perfectly sung. However, that should give you the idea if you’ve never arranged harmony before.
Have fun.
If you enjoyed the post, why not take a look at this post? It’s about the ebook I’ve just started writing called ‘How to Harmonise‘.
I’ve chosen this song for two reasons: It isn’t hugely well known, and I loved it when I was thirteen. Bush were a pretty good rock band (and Gavin Rossdale is still making music) who did very well in the States but not as well in their native England.
It also has a few ideas that I think are worth stealing. They’re not unique to this song, but they are all neatly packaged up for you to hear.
In no particular order:
A simple but memorable riff – The riff at the start, in octaves rising up a C# minor scale – C# D# E F# is very simple, but combine it with first a C# minor chord then an A major chord and you get an effective, memorable little hook. (incidentally that chord progression – chord I then chord VI in the natural minor scale is used in most bush songs. It’s also used in a lot of heavy metal songs, particularly in the big, majestic ‘sing along’ parts).
The tonality – C# minor for the verse, but the chorus is in the relative major key E major. There’s a definite contrast in mood between the two sections because of it.
The arrangement – in particular the fact that the guitars play a lot less in the first verse, giving the vocals lots of room. Also, the first chorus is quiet with no drums. We’re used to the chorus being loud all the time, but as you can hear in Machine Head, it’s often very effective to have the first version of the chorus quieter and more subdued. You can save the big singalong version till later.
So, steal away. Machinehead is a great example of how interesting a song can become with just tiny tweaks to common ideas.
There are chord progressions that get used over and over again. So often, that you already know them. Even if you’ve never thought about it, once you’ve had it pointed out, you will recognise them.
The purpose of this post is to show you a few of the more common ones. I’ll show you them in the key of C, but obviously they can be played in any key you like.
Beware of Cliche!
Before we start, let’s make one thing clear. If you use these chord progressions as they are, your song will be in danger of sounding like several others. These are standard progression, so they’ve been used hundreds of times before.
Does that mean you should just avoid them?
Maybe. It’s up to you. I certainly think you should be aware of what you’re doing. After all you can’t break a ‘rule’ if you don’t know it exists.
Standard progressions.
C Am F G (used in Stand by Me, Every Breath you Take and many more)
C G Am F (used in all sorts including ‘Today’ by the Smashing Pumpkins)
Twelve Bar Blues: C C C C F F C C G F C C (each chord for a bar. Used in countless blues and rock ‘n’ roll numbers)
Circle of fifths: C F Bb Eb Ab Db etc (lots of variations on this, often used in Jazz standards)
C Bb F (As used in Sweet Home Alabama)
Em C D (a common heavy rock/metal progression. See: most Iron Maiden songs)
I started off by saying these chord changes get used over and over again. Now, sometimes we need to be original when writing songs, and sometimes we don’t. Knowing these common tools gives you a short cut, a place to start.
Besides which, Every Breath you Take was composed a long time after Stand by Me, and it more than makes up for having common chord changes, doesn’t it?
Over the weekend I also got involved in a very silly debate about the comparative ‘cultural significance’ of Radiohead and Aqua. It involved the sort of long pretentious discussion I was thankful to have left behind in my student days, and I should probably be ashamed of myself, but it was fun.
And it also made me think of that overplayed early Radiohead hit ‘Creep’.
The chord progression in this song is worth a look because it uses two chromatic chords I mentioned before. The song is in the key of G, and starts of with a G major chord. There then follows a B Major chord.
Is B major in G major? No it isn’t, it requires a D sharp that you don’t find in the key. So it’s a chromatic chord – the third chord of the scale only major when it ‘should’ be minor.
After that we get chord IV, C major. Which is in key, but the next chord isn’t because it’s C minor. Chord IV only minor.
So G B C Cminor. The B and C minor chords are chromatic. If you turn it into a C major version you also get the first chords to the verse of Space Oddity C E F Fm. Isn’t that interesting?
So don’t be afraid of stealing those ideas, definitely nothing new about them.
I promise I’ll stop talking about Radiohead sometime soon.
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?
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.
