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.

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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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House of Fun is a breezy, quirky, cheersome little pop song by Madness. It has an up-tempo ska groove to it and a video that steals liberally from Monty Python sketches.

It’s great fun, but this is Songwright so the important question is: are there any songwriting ideas we can steal from this song?

Of course there are! And in particular House of Fun includes a fantastic idea for changing key.

1. The structure

Intro, verse 1, verse 2, chorus, verse 3, chorus, middle section, verse 4, chorus to end.

That, in a nutshell is the stucture of ‘House of Fun’. Each section is very short, made even shorter by the tempo, and in between most sections the song returns to the opening groove of the intro.

It isn’t a unique structure, it’s been used many times, and it works brilliantly. In particular it’s worth noting that the middle section (I’m sorry son, but we don’t stock…) is the only part of the song that breaks from the up-beat groove. Contrast is very important in songwriting and if there’s anyplace that contrast really needs to stand out it’s after the second chorus.

2. The chord choices

Or rather the order that they’re put in. In particular I want to point out the chords in the chorus.

Why?

Because they’re different every time.

Chorus one: Em C Em Bm, F#m D F#m C#m (which, as you’ll see is the same idea twice, but the second time it’s changed key and moved up a tone)

Chorus two: F#m D F#m C#m Em C

Chorus three is the big one, and it’s here that we find out the song has actually been building to one circular repeating chorus. Em C Em Bm, then a tone up to F#m D F#m C#m, then a tone down when it goes back to the beginning.

Yup, it’s changing key, and yup it’s doing so in exactly the same way that those cheesy boy band songs do. Except it’s doing it over and over again in a short space of time.

Why?

To stop things getting boring. By constantly changing key and changing back like this a manic, unresolved mood is developed, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the song.

So there you go, ideas to take from House of Fun, and a new variation on this key changing idea that we’ve been talking about recently.

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Who says key changes are just for boy bands?

Yes, I’m abandoning any hint of respectability I might have retained. I like cheesy heavy metal. Love it. And in this post we’re going to see a very different use the basic key change idea we talked about before.

First a little background

Last post I mentioned the interview I did with Sean McGhaughey. During that interview, I talked about the dissertation I wrote when I was at Uni. It was about genre distinctions in Heavy Metal. (Don’t laugh)

This reminded me of Aces High by Iron Maiden, a song that fits neatly into our little series on changing key.

So many keys…

Iron Maiden songs are often built on the chord progression i VI VII in the aeolian mode. What does that mean? It means Em C D in the key of E minor. Or in the key of A minor Am F G. I’m sure you’ll recognise it if you play it.

Just as embarrassingly cheesy boy bands can change key by taking the same progression and leaping into another key, so can heavy metal bands:

Aces High

Intro: The aeolian i VI VII progression in F#.

First riff: the same progression, but now in A. The guitar parts are different, but listen to the bass line and you’ll hear what I mean.

Verse and Bridge: We don’t have the same progression here, but we have changed to E minor.

Chorus: this is the fun part, the first half is the progression in E, then half way through it leaps up and plays the same thing in G.

Break: A riff in A minor

Solo: a similar chord progression, first in A, then B

Break, Verse, Chorus, Main Riff again and we’re done.

So by the end of the song you’ve gone through the aeolian mode in F#, E, G, A and B. And they managed it without a single longing gaze into the camera.

Who said key changes were just for boy bands?

First a recap

Last post-about-key-changes we reached a conclusion:

Being ‘in C’ means two things.

• Only the notes from the C scale
• The C note as a ‘home’ or tonic note

Which can be generalised as

Being in a key means two things:

• Using only the notes from that key
• Using one of that group of notes as a ‘home’ or tonic note

Therefore… da da daaaaa!

To change key you can do one of these or both:

• Change the group of notes you’re using.
• Change the note you’re using as a tonic note.

Got that?

The obvious next step would be to go straight to the kind of key change we are most used to, which is the cheesey up-a-tone boy band change.

So we will.

The chords in C major are: C Dm Em F G A m Bdim.

A tone up from this is D major, and the chords in D major are: D Em F#m G A Bm C#dim.

According to an old podcast episode of chord facts, we can generalise the chords in the major scale as: I ii iii IV V vi VIIdim (lower case means minor).

So… if we had the chord progression C G Am F, we could generalise and say that’s I V vi IV. So in D major we’d get D A Bm G.

Neatly, this changes both the group of notes you’re using (there are different notes in C Major and D Major) and the tonic note (from C to D). So one is higher pitched than the other, but both progressions sound the same apart from that.

Which means the same melody will fit if you play it a tone up.

For an example, do a youtube search for Westlife. If you can bear it.

Key changes? I hear you wail, The cheesey bit in the final chorus of boy band ballads? I have no need of such cheap tricks!

Well, no I don’t just mean that particular cliché, although a key change in the final chorus doesn’t have to be cheesy. What I mean is all the ways tonality can change in a song. That could mean the simple ‘everything up a major second’ technique we’ve heard too many times in pop songs, but it could mean a ‘pitch of axis’ change, a change of mode, or a whole host of other ideas.

Before we look at the idea in any detail, let’s finish this post by defining what a ‘key’ is. I’m sure you know that being ‘in the key of C’ means using only the natural notes and not the sharps or flats. but does it only mean that?

Not quite. Being ‘in C’ also means having C as a home note, or ‘tonic’. The note C sounds consonant, or ‘home’ and all the other notes in the scale, to varying degrees, sound at odds with that note.

What? you say. This idea of a ‘home’ or tonic note is central to music in our part of the world. To illustrate, let’s look at the melody Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The first line goes: C C G G A A G F F E E D D C. It ends on a C, and therefore sounds finished. The second line: G G F F E E D G G F F E E D, ends on a D, which is not the tonic note. The second line therefore sound unfinished and it needs the first line repeating n order to bring the melody ‘home’ to the tonic C.

So, being ‘in C’ means two things.

• Only the notes from the C scale
• The C note as a ‘home’ or tonic note

If either changes, you have a change of key