Hi, I'm Pedro and in today's video I'll be showing you more
tips for writing ambient chord progressions.
I have approached the creation of ambient chords in another
video, but now I'm going to expand on some of those ideas
and show you other creative ways for you to explore and try out
in your music. I'll be dividing the content in
two videos, this and the other one, Part 1 and 2, and I'll show
you the emotional impact on slow changes, how you can use voice
leading to create new chords, and how to make your chords as
interesting as possible. Ready.
Let's go. I'm just going to quickly
mention some things that you should keep in mind while
creating ambient chord progressions.
Usually ambient music uses a slow tempo or has a slow
harmonic rhythm, which means that you are not changing chords
all that fast. The idea is to give time to the
listener to get accustomed and feel immersed in the soundscapes
you are creating. So slow moving chords can help
you to create momentum so that when the next chord change
happens, it has more impact. I'll show you in the following
example how important this consideration is for any style
of music really. Here we just went from C minor
to F major. It sounds good, feels nice, but
here the impact you are able to make just by delaying the
harmonic movement. It feels more satisfying to me.
You have more space to create momentum and build some tension
if you like, and when the next chord hits, it can make a big
difference and means so much more than if you had just
changed, as we did in the first example.
But what if you feel like your chords still sound bland?
Let's look into that. Chords play a big part in the
reason why we feel the way we feel when we hear music, so it's
no wonder that you may be worrying about it.
With that said, our goal here is to make chords that sound as
interesting and colorful as possible, and there's a nice
technique that I will share with you in a moment.
Now, a simple triad can feel a bit too rooted and definitive as
to the type of vibe it gives away, so an interesting
alternative is to explore suspended chords if you wish to
avoid that major minor vibe. Instead of C minor you could use
or try to use a SUS 2 or SUS 4 chords like in this example.
Another thing to consider is adding chord extensions.
As you add more notes to the chords, that strong chord
quality starts to dissipate and become a bit more vague or
ambiguous as you add the extensions.
And on top of that, you can arrange the notes of these
chords in other ways. One, because you may want to
avoid the necessary leaps and to have better voice leading
between chords. And 2nd because if you arrange
the notes of a chord in different ways, you get
different sounds. Now let's stick to this D minor
11 chords. You can either arrange or stack
its notes in 3rd intervals and it sounds nice, but probably to
normal. You can also find a way to voice
your chord in fourths or mostly also sounds cool, a bit more
modern and all. And now let's try to use mixed
intervals. If you happen to prefer, let's
say, the crunchy sound of seconds, try to voice your chord
in a way where this interval predominates like this.
So now you went through all this trouble just to find a good
voicing for the first chord, and now you have to do the same for
the rest of the chords. Sounds like a lot of work,
right? And the answer is yes.
So you are able to have some harmonic coherence.
And the first tip I can give you at this point is to try and have
the same amount of notes per chord throughout.
This can be especially important for that technique I mentioned
before. Let's say you have these four
chords and that you adjusted the voices in the first chord in a
way that you like. As you could see and hear, there
is incoherence in terms of how the voices of the first chord
move to the next and also in its quality, which is very different
from the rest. And what I'm going to do is to
adjust the chord voicing so that we adhere to good voice leading
practices and try to use the same type of intervals that we
used in the voicing of the first chord.
What you'll hear next is the same 4 chords voiced in a
similar way as the first one, and the result is this.
So on one hand, voice leading helps you to create smooth
transitions between chords, but on the other, it can also be
used as a guide to maintain a certain harmonic coherence and
chord voicing arrangement throughout the chord
progression. So create your first chord
sounding as cool as possible and then apply that voicing formula
to the following chords using voice leading.
And there is more that you can do with voice leading in mind.
Let's check it out. Let's say that you decided the
first chord you want to start with, and further along you also
have an idea of the chord that you want to land on.
But in between you decided that you will need another chord that
you didn't quite figure out. Again, this is a technique that
you can use in whatever context or musical style.
What we will be doing is to build a chord that serves as a
bridge between the previous and the target chord, and how are we
going to do that voice leading of all things?
The cool thing is that you don't need to think about what that
chord will be, just the type of voicing arrangement you want to
favor and focus on how the notes could move or be maintained.
Here we have some notes that are maintained while others move by
step, half or whole. Also, the nice thing about this
technique is that you don't even need to think in keys as long as
you are moving according to good voice leading principles.
And with all this in mind, it's also a good opportunity to
explore other aspects that contribute to the chord color,
in this case according versions, but that I leave for Part 2.
There is more that I'll cover in the next video, but in the
meantime, try to explore and apply some of these tips in your
music. The point of all this is that it
inspires you to create music. In the description of this
video, I've added links to the blog, to the Beyond Music Theory
book, online lessons and courses.
So please check them out and as always, don't forget to like and
subscribe for more videos like this and again so that you can
make sure not to miss Part 2 with more tips.
Thanks for watching and until next time.