4 Steps To Chords: How To Make Insanely Good Chords

guys i got to show you how to make chords i've been listening to a lot of music from the students who are taking my boot camp course i'm just not thrilled with the quality of chords that i've been hearing so what i'm going to do is show you the four steps to making amazing chords every single time and i guarantee this is going to be the last chord tutorial you will ever need the first step to making chords is to give yourself either a soundscape or a drone for you to go ahead and harmonize the chords with so i'm going to take this vocal chop and just spread it out across this track now what i'm going to do is just add a lot of reverb to it and some echo i'm going to use echoboy jr you could use your stock echo plug-in or delay plug-in it's up to you we're gonna echo it at a half speed and then the next thing i'm gonna add is a little bit of reverb i'm gonna use valhalla shimmer you could use your stock reverb in your daw as well then one last thing i'm going to do to make this ultravivy is just add an eq and cut off the top so it kind of sounds like it's underwater now i'm really going to juice this drone up by adding a midi track loading up a synthesizer of choice or sound bank it's up to you sound that i'm using sounds like this then i'm going to pick the same note as my vocal chop now if you don't know how to listen to a vocal and be able to match the exact same note on your midi keyboard do not use a vocal just use a single midi note like i'm about to do [Music] we're d and all we do is just spread this note across the grid i'm going to add reverb to the sound now to make it just like a big pad same deal as last time we're going to cut off the top with an eq to make it just deep and vibey so now we have that beautiful foundation to start working with go ahead and load up a piano just pick four notes that are this long literally one bar long these notes are going to be the bass notes and they have to harmonize with our soundscape all that harmonization means that they have to sound good they don't sound good they're not nothing's gonna make them better you have to pick notes that sound good to your drone one note per bar so now we have four notes that sound pretty good [Music] so now what we're going to do is we're going to take these four notes hold option and go seven semitones above those notes seven semitones is just one or one starts above that note two three four five six seven now each of these notes are seven semitones above these bass notes now what we're going to do is grab these again and place them in between these bottom notes and these top notes [Music] so now one of the two middle notes is actually going to be the note that sounds good so i'm going to take this note because it sounds better [Music] so now let's go ahead and take these notes these middle notes now that they're in place and start opening up the chord a little bit by grabbing these and putting them an octave up so these are diatonic chords in their most basic form so now we're going to do is we're going to get a little creative with these chords to start making them sound better so what i like to do with chords is i like to pick the tonic it's called the tonic note which is the note that's comfortable throughout the entire chord progression so if you just pick any note and you play it on top of the chords literally nine times out of ten it's not gonna sound good but there's one tonic note there's actually two notes that sound good if played over the whole chord progression but we're gonna take the tonic note [Music] which is the note that sounds good no matter what and i'm just gonna add that over the whole chord progression and there was one no other note that sounded good in this progression in particular and it was this note we could do that or we could do this [Music] so that sounds gorgeous but we're not done what we have to do now is we have to take these chords and we have to resolve the chord progression if we just ran this throughout the whole song it's going to get really boring and repetitive so we're going to take this and just duplicate it but what we do on this second half here and this is what i learned from making my guitars pack we just got to do something to it to make it different than the first one but not too different i'm gonna take the first one [Music] and i'm gonna just copy it and then rebuild the cord here and keep the same top nodes see if that sounds good so i'm gonna do just so this chord doesn't hit you in the face is i'm gonna turn down the velocity a little bit [Music] oh my god i could like go to heaven now so nice wait i'll show you guys my soundscape from earlier it sounds a little bit better than the one we just made and that's literally how you make the most beautiful chords in the world doesn't matter what genre you're working in this will work for any genre if you guys enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about every element of music production you can join my edm bootcamp i have a link for you at the top of the description below my edm bootcamp is not just a self-paced course that teaches you all the elements of music production but it is also an entire back end mastermind group where you can get unlimited feedback on your music from me and ask me any music production question that you wish that sounds like something you're into like i said there's a link at the top of the description below and stay tuned for more [Music] you

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 27,940

Rating: 4.9275498 out of 5

Keywords: Chord writing tricks every producer MUST know, Chord Writing, How to make Chords, Chord Writing Tutorial, Ableton Tutorial, Beginner Chord Writing, Chord Writing for Beginners, Chord Writing Techniques, How to make music, Writing chords, EDM, Dubstep, electronic, Midi Chords, How to use Ableton, How to write chords, How to make music for beginners, Alex Rome, Tutorial, How to write chords for a song

Id: YXJkzVzKoBA

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021