Hi, I'm Pedro, and welcome back. Today we're diving into a topic
that stripped me up more times than I can count, creating chord
progressions from scratch. You know when you want to start
a musical idea with a chord progression, but your mind just
draws a blank? Starting anything from scratch
can be tough, but here's the twist.
While we often want to escape using the same chord
progressions everyone else does, those very chord progressions
can be the perfect starting point.
They give us a foundation to build on, and from there we can
transform them into something fresh and unique.
Hopefully, these following tips will help you break out of your
creative slumber. It's worked for me, and I think
it can work for you too, so stick around.
There's a reason why common card progressions are, well, so
common. It's because they work.
It's progressions like the 1451 or a 6451 that are great for
getting the ball rolling and you can even try to play them in
different order like this. And just like that, now you have
a structure to work with. If you just stick with these, it
is likely that you'll get bored or feel like you're not going
places with the Harmony because you're probably looking for
something a bit more unique. But don't get me wrong, if you
have a killer idea that works perfectly with one of these
progressions, then by all means go for it.
Let me show you how I go about mangling these chord
progressions to squeeze something fresh out of them.
OK, so for our first technique, let's use those simple chord
progressions as guide posts. And what I mean is that we will
use them as a foundation for longer sections of music.
In this example, we'll just use this 451 throughout 8 bars,
including the silent sections for now.
The trick is to use these chords as anchor points in a larger
progression as a way to keep a good overall sense of harmonic
direction. And now to bring in more flavor
and have more harmonic movement, I will be inserting some chords
between them. For the sake of simplicity, I
will just be picking chords from the C major key.
See how I've kept the main chords, the one, the four and
the five, but added some extra steps to make the journey more
interesting. And again, I use these common
chords to create a road map guiding me through the harmonic
context that I'm creating. Another cool trick to try is to
keep the same distance between chords, but starting on a
different home chord. This means that I'll be
transposing the entire rogression while staying within
the same key. Let's say we have this 1251
going. And now let's transpose the
whole thing a fourth down, meaning that we will start on G
instead of C and so on, but keep the same interval distance from
chord to chord. This can give you a completely
different vibe. Choosing a different home chord,
of course, should be in keeping with the type of vibe you are
also exploring, so take that in consideration.
All right, let's get into chord substitutions.
This is where things start to get really interesting.
The idea here is that you can replace a chord with another
chord that has a similar function within the key.
In other words, you can replace a chord with its median or sub
median 1/3 above or below, respectively.
Let's take our Guru 1451, which now can sound like this.
As you heard, I substituted the first two chords and capped the
last two, and all of a sudden there is a new subtle twist in
this familiar chord progression. You can also expand progressions
by adding more chords, and you can do that using functional
harmony through secondary dominance or other credential
devices to lead you to a target chord of your choosing.
I've put links in the description that will take you
to the appropriate blog posts explaining everything in case
you don't follow what's going to happen.
I'm just going to briefly go for the possibilities as this is not
necessarily something that you would do everywhere.
So let's pick our last chord progression with the chord
substitutions. We will start with E minor, but
before we go to D minor, I want to target it with another chord.
In this case, I implied a minor plagal cadence using AG minor.
Then I also targeted the G major with the secondary dominant D9
chord. And after that, I used yet
another minor plagal cadence with the F minor going to the
target C And finally I used another secondary dominant in
the form of a tritone substitute, the F7 to return to
E minor. You could really go over the top
with this one. Just consider this if you have a
secondary dominance A5 chord. Basically it means that before
that you can also experiment with adding a 2 chords, a minor
2 or a tritone substitute for that minor 2 chords.
Not to mention that you can try also different cadences to lead
you to different target chords. So you see where this is going.
This approach has a certain sound to it, and it's up to you
to decide if that's the type of harmonic sound that your music
will need. Now that we got some nice chords
going from the previous exploration, why not take some
of them and experiment with putting them in a different
order without thinking about their function?
Just think about the chord colors that may sound nice when
played after the other. In this case, I like the sound
of going from G minor to D minor and then the F7 to return to E
minor. Changing the base note of a
chord can completely transform a simple chord progression by
smoothing out the voice leading and add a touch of harmonic
elegance. So instead of just playing the
root note of each chord in the base, try adding a note that
would serve you better to get to the next chord.
Let me pick up this 5241 chord progression and try out some
chording versions. You can do it when the chord is
played, but also as a way of adding movement between chords.
This way you will also be thinking more melodically in
terms of how the baseline moves. And finally, don't forget about
the good old pedal notes. That can be very helpful in
creating nice harmonic colors and ambiences if that's your
goal. And don't forget to try out
different base notes, as the harmonic colors can shift
drastically. Modal interchange is the fancy
term for borrowing chords from parallel modes.
This is a great way to add some unexpected color to your
harmonies. For example, we are in the key
of C major, so you could borrow chords from another key where C
exists and insert them in our previous chord progression.
In this case, I borrowed from C minor.
Or you can take it even further and replace all the chords
except for your home chord with the respective chord degrees of
the parallel key you'll be borrowing from Indiana.
The following example we will be replacing chords using the key
of B flat major or from C Dorian.
You could also experiment with picking one other chord not to
replace. The idea is to keep a surprise
in the chord progression. This time, let's keep the last
chord as we borrow from C Phrygian or a flat major,
or don't replace the second chord.
So there you have it, a few simple strategies for breaking
through harmonic blocks using common chord progressions as a
starting point. To recap, we talked about using
these common chord progressions as guideposts for longer chord
structures, transposing the chord progression within the
same key, chord substitutions and secondary dominance, and
exploring our harmonic palettes using the newfound chords, using
chord inversions, creating new baselines, using pedal notes,
and also added modal interchange to the mix.
The beauty of this approach is that it gives you a starting
point, a framework to build upon.
From there, you can let your creativity run wild and explore
all sorts of harmonic possibilities.
I highly encourage you to try this as an exercise.
Don't be afraid to experiment. And you never know, one of those
ideas might just make it into your next song.
If you want to dive deeper in chord progressions, check out
the Beyond Music Theory ebook and the online course Creating
Unique Chord Progressions. The links, as usual, are in the
description. And as always, don't forget to
like and subscribe for more ideas like this.
Thanks for listening and until next time.