Well, I’ve written 10 songs I wouldn’t have otherwise, so that’s not exactly failure is it? But I’m not going to hit fourteen and a half, simply because I’m running out of time!
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.
My listening over the last few days has consisted mostly of In Rainbows by Radiohead and Paradise Lost by Symphony x, and it’s got me thinking about change in music.
Generally, music has to change over time in some way. These two bands, from different genres, have quite different methods of achieving that change.
I’ve posted about Radiohead before, and mentioned that to begin with I wasn’t blown away by In Rainbows. Generally the reviews it has recieved have been pretty positive, however, and after paying it a bit more attention my opinion of it has grown considerably.
One thing that stands out about later Radiohead songs is the structure. Almost every song is built around the idea of gradual change, and movement towards a climax. Yes there’s very often a verse chorus thing going on, and the songs aren’t a million miles away from the normal pop song form, but very often the main point seems to be to get to that final third of the song where everything is different.
This builds up through the layering of arpeggios (who’da thunk it with a title like that?) reaching a glorious climax of complicated repeating patterns, that then suddenly drop away for line ‘I get eaten by the worms/and weird fishes’.
Nude
Another slow climax that peaks with the line ‘You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking’. The word ‘thinking’ a long, falsetto melisma followed by a pregnant pause, and then some wonderfully melodic ‘ooohs’.
Both these songs, and plenty of others, rely on the idea that the song should build and grow towards a climax. That climax is sometimes a single line, and sometimes a new, larger, different passage of music. This is often followed by a quiet coda that restates some of the opening.
This is quite different from how the songs on Paradise Lost are structured. There’s a long tradition of using elements of classical music in heavy metal, particularly Baroque and Classical ideas. Symphony X do this more than most and have built a reputation as the ‘classical music’ prog metal band.
Whereas modern minimalist classical music, of the type that I’d guess has had some influence on Radiohead, is sometimes about gradual change from one soundscape to the other, a lot of pre-romantic classical music had more clearly defined sections. And that’s the case with Symphony X as well.
Rifftastic
The average Symphony X song is far from an ordinary verse-chorus affair. Heavy metal often extends the introduction and middle sections of the traditional pop song structure, and prog metal bands go even further, adding all sorts of different interludes and breaks.
On the whole what they don’t do is build up and layer loops in order to get towards a single climax point.
So?
So, there are two structural ideas you could think about using here. One, the idea of gradual change, building towards the ‘aah’ moment. The other is the idea of sticking to clearly defined riffs and sections. Music requires change, but will that change be sudden or gradual?
I’ve written and demoed two more songs for Fawm which puts me up to four. Technically this means I’m ahead of schedule, but I’m sure things will happen in the rest of the month to balance this out.
Fourths and fifths. Both songs have harmonies that emphasise fourths or fifths. The guitar chords of To The Empty Sky are built using collections parallel fifths, the vox harmonies in Spinning the Compass are sometimes parallel fourths
Build up to something. To the Empty Sky is a big build up to the final line. It sticks with the same two chords until that point.
Move from Major to Minor. To the Empty Sky also move from A minor to a Major frequently
Change time signature if you need to. Spinning the compass does so frequently.
Treading water, wound in my side
Overboard in the dark of the night
grinning faces threw me to my doom
and now my arms and legs burn with the strain
Threw me right in, cursing my sins
here alone, I’ll admit that they’re right
All the traces, the things that I’ve done
I thought I’d get away with all that pain
Black water, Floating out on the tide
Salt water, filling me up inside
Once a while ago, thought I might stop
Though I’d sinned there was time to make right
And now pace has, become too much,
as I go under I begin to pray
Black water, Floating out on the tide
Salt water, filling me up inside
But a rescue comes at last
Rough hands pull me out
cold lips on mine
some god took pity on me
some ragged angel came to my side
And if I’ve my time back,
Might I make things right?
But who’s gonna take me in?
If I find a way out of here?
Ideas to steal:
Main riff is in 7/8
chorus melody is the same little phrase twice with very different chords underneath: Eb Maj 7 F#min7 Bmin Faug.
Structure is dictated by the story, so there’ s a big change in pace on the line ‘But a rescue comes at last’
Yes, I’ve decided to take the February Album Writing Month challenge. I may be mad. But, if all goes well, you’ll be hearing a new song from me every two days for the month of Febraury, plus a collaboration (don’t yet know who with) on the 29th.
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.
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.
I briefly mentioned this song in a recent post. This isn’t the best performance of it, but it will do for our purposes (here’s another recording).
There are some songwriting ideas worth pointing out (and stealing).
1. The lyrics
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows Anything goes.
Do I really need to say anything about these, other than to mention that they’re brilliant?
2. The choice of scale
That verse melody only uses a Major pentatonic scale. That, combined with a three note pattern over a 4/4 time signature, followed by a high-note climax and you’ve got a killer eight bar melody
3. The Structure.
Notable structural elements include an extended introduction and the use of what was a standard form in the ‘Great American Songbook’: the AABA, or 32 bar song structure.
What is that? Simple: take an 8 bar melody, like the one that fits the lyrics above, repeat it with different words ala Strophic form, then throw in a middle 8 bars that contrast in some way, before finally repeating the first 8 bar melody.
None of them are new ideas, and Cole Porter didn’t invent them (though he did use them particularly well), so why not see if you can use them too?
Way back when Songwright was more podcast than blog I talked about tension notes.
This episode of the podcast is along the same lines: it demonstrates how you can build up melodic ideas using chords notes and notes that aren’t in the chord. This time I’m using the chord A minor rather than C major.
