A NEW way to write Chord Progressions - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=282afh7FM_A Transcript: (00:00) stop trying to come up with chord progressions today I want to show you just a couple of Concepts that we can use to transform the way we think about chord progressions and turn something like this [Music] into this [Music] everyone wants a shortcut to better chord progressions well too bad because this isn't about a new core generator that will magically do it for you or an ad for Midi cord packs and this is super good for you especially if you like struggle with making Melodies chords stuff like that because those exist apparently I'm just (00:44) going to show you an actual proven method that I use in my own music that's pretty old actually but it's also still very very effective and there's probably a reason that it stood the test of time and if you would like to make music that stands out from the crowd today you might find it kind of interesting a few months ago I wrote a free ebook containing just some practical tips on composition that I've used for a lot of years now and to my surprise thousands of people downloaded it in the section (01:15) of this guide that talked about Harmony and chord progressions I mentioned something along the lines of think horizontally not vertically and then later it occurred to me that not everyone might understand what that meant because some people reached out and said that they didn't understand and what that meant so let's dig a little deeper into what that means and how to actually do it I know you're here for quick chord progression tips not even the midi cord pack guys use but before we get there let's talk very briefly (01:45) about Melody not stay with me it ties in I promise I'm not going to go into how to write a melody today because at that last week but there are some characteristics of strong Melodies that we can directly apply to our chord progressions writing Melodies that are singable almost always leads to Melodies that are more memorable but what actually makes a Melody singable well to oversimplify for the sake of this demonstration linear stepwise motion and smaller intervals if you've ever taken a piano lesson or had the privilege of (02:20) listening to a student practice you've probably heard something like this you might notice though if we look at the score that these don't look like our standard snowman Triads in fact if we were to play this progression in that way it would look and sound like this notice how unnatural that looks and sounds and how we're kind of Leaping and jumping all over the place but by using inversions which just means that we're taking all the same notes of that chord and rearranging them a bit each of the (03:07) three notes of the progression seem to go on their own linear melodic Journey so if we were singing each part it would feel more natural to us it's almost like we're thinking of a bunch of horizontal lines instead of a series of vertical chords so let's start by not really thinking of chords in isolation it is called a chord progression after all and that means that no chord exists by itself and also that those chord tier ranking charts that I've seen on Twitter lately really make no sense at all so we've (03:42) already seen that through redistributing our notes slightly inversions they start to take on the characteristics of a group of Melodies rather than just a clump of notes this is an older concept because it's the way that choirs work [Music] here or ensembles like a string quartet for example each individual player or singer is responsible for their own melodic line and then when you put all of those together it forms the vertical chord I have before me a synthesizer and I'm going to use it to write something in this sort of horizontal (04:38) style in fact I'm going to start with just three voices now I could do something simple like this [Music] and because the patch is interesting and the sound design is pretty cool maybe I could get away with that or I could make the part writing itself more interesting doing something like this [Music] notice how it's mostly stepwise motion and not only that we have contrary Motion in other words the parts are moving in opposite directions between the soprano and the bass [Music] we mentioned that a singable Melody (05:31) tends to have a lot of stepwise motion or smaller intervals but that doesn't mean that we don't have any leaps whatsoever it means we're saving the leaps for moments of emphasis and this serves as a kind of plot twist in our musical narrative thanks Melodies we'll be taking that one to use in our chord progressions as well the second time I do that I'm going to make it a little bit more interesting by adding a plot twist or a leap [Music] so not only does this method make our progressions more interesting it also (06:08) gives us a sense of line Independence which means we have more options with each of the lines themselves since they are their own independent Melody I could play it in just two parts at a time [Music] thank you [Music] or I could even record this as like a synth quartet in other words kind of like a string quartet but with well you get the idea I think I want a grungier base on this no I already hate it I need a conductor we still have inner voices to record but I have to set up my camera so that you can see that (07:01) [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign (08:20) I don't just write ambient synth music what if I wanted to do something a little bit more energetic I don't really understand why you would want to do such a thing but if you did I actually think that these same methods thinking about chord progressions in this way can really help any style of music any genre let's see if I can whip up something real quick to pull that off thank you what if we did like an ARP with that because you know the thing about Arps is they're chords they're just broken (09:08) chords instead of block chords and since we're thinking of things kind of horizontally and linearly anyway let's try it [Music] you know I'm actually going to record just [Music] just a layer of grungy overdriven [Music] just to tuck away in the background next we need a really Snappy bass part I gotta stand up for this one sorry [Music] I'm just gonna put four on the floor [Music] and let's do some sort of weird pattern (10:12) like maybe seven steps like so oh so in my attempt to answer the question definitively yeah but can it slap here's this thing foreign thank you (11:24) [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so I think this can be used in multiple applications regardless of what style or (12:30) genre you write in and it's going to make your work stand out because people typically aren't thinking about chord progressions in this way anymore we stole a lot of these techniques that we use today from Melody writing and if you'd like to learn more about what makes a Melody memorable and how to make your own Melodies more memorable you can click on this tiny rectangle right here [Music] foreign [Music]