4 Tips for Writing Ambient Chord Progressions

I often talk about the value of music that tells a story or takes you on a journey from one place to another whether through motivic development harmonics surprise or just a solid arrangement creating some sort of musical growth is vital to writing an effective composition or is it most people learn about harmony as a way to get from one place to another so to speak basing everything on a predominant dominant tonic framework but there's a huge swath of music out there that specifically doesn't tell a story opting instead to paint a picture that is the music creates one specific mood or evokes a specific time or place and then just keeps the listener there for the duration of the song this kind of musical goal requires a different conception of harmony than the point A to point B type of composition that I usually focus on so can we think of harmony in a way better suited to this kind of ambient music well these types of tunes usually consist of a chord progression between two and four chords long that loops infinitely from beginning to end or at least until a new section comes along with the constant repetition these chords sort of congeal into one big meta chord where we stop hearing each individual chord movement and start hearing the basic relationship between all of the chords as one unified musical mood this technique isn't just used in ambient music in fact it's used in pretty much all modern popular music but there's a little more to it than just repeating four chords if you want to sound like say the king of ambient video game music David why's that being said here are my four tips for writing wise like ambient chord progressions one key element of David wises ambient music is the use of chord progressions that are buttery smooth to eliminate any sort of jarring movement between chords it's important to use smooth voice leading meaning each note or voice in each chord moves as little as possible to get to each note in the following chord this is an extremely powerful tool because any chord progression can sound smooth with the right voice leading a very basic example of can be seen in the bridge to donkey kong country 2 zurich notice how only one note changes between each chord in the progression and the note in question moves only by a step each time [Music] this sort of progression intentionally tries to create as little harmonic momentum as possible which aids in bringing out the one unified met accord concept I mentioned earlier a slightly less basic example of smooth voice leading can be found in the intro to Donkey Kong countries aquatic ambience this efj latg devoicing stays constant over the repeating C minor nine - a flat major seven sharp eleven vamp when the voice leading is this smooth with literally no motion between each court the music risks becoming stagnant to counterbalance this david wise often makes each chord in a progression as interesting as possible on its own which brings us to our next tip as you could see from comparing the two previous examples using chord extensions can not only make smooth voice leading between chords easier but also it can make each chord on its own more interesting and colorful this is especially important when you take your tempos as slowly as the more ambient tracks in the Donkey Kong Country series tend to do moving ahead in aquatic ambience we see the chord extensions are laid on thick our tonic C minor chord is consistently voiced as a minor 9th chord with the other chords used throughout the tune being an a-flat major nine and F minor eleven and this b-flat ad two over D you can't just make a chord progression interesting by laying on extra notes however how you arrange these notes makes a huge difference different intervals within a chord each have inherent musical qualities to them and using a variety of different intervals within one chord is what makes it sound so lush and dense [Music] once the bass kicks in here david wise stacks a third and a fifth above the third of our C minor chord to get the C minor nine voicing he then moves this exact voicing down to fit the following a flat chord only this time he stacks another six on top to get an even bigger lusher sound [Music] [Music] further in we see an F minor chord make use of this same interval structure with a voicing that starts on the fifth of the chord C rather than the third like in our previous examples this leads into a voicing that I absolutely adore the b-flat ad two over D voicing this inverted flat seven chord is voiced from the bass up as a minor seventh interval with two perfect fourths stacked on top of it and I just can't get enough of it here check it out in the context of the piece [Music] this inversion of the flat seven chord here is notable - because of the distinct lack of extensions compared to the other chords in the tune if you did add more diatonic extensions specifically the seventh it would create a dominant seventh chord which wise specifically avoided this brings us nicely to our next tip in order to create the kind of meta chord that I was talking about earlier you're going to want to avoid chords that create too much of an expectation if a chord really feels like it wants to resolve to another chord whether we get that resolution or not it's going to create some harmonic motion and that runs counter to the whole ambient philosophy this means that basically all dominant seven chords are out as creating tension that begs to be resolved is basically the whole point of dominant seven chords even without its seventh naturally dominant triads like the five in a major key and the flat seven in a minor key can still sometimes create too much harmonic motion for a really ambient piece david wise often counters this by using these chords in first inversion like we saw in aquatic ambience or as we see frequently in sticker bush symphony [Music] using an inversion adds a little more color to these chords than just the basic root position triad which makes up for the inability to add color with the seventh now these tips are by no means hard and fast guidelines and under the right circumstances a lot of musical rules can be broken as we'll see in our next and final tip similar to the smooth voice leading idea one technique you can use to create unity in your chord progression is by writing one melodic line that stays constant over every single chord sticker bush symphony is a great example of this the tune starts off establishing our key of a minor while introducing this simple three note line [Music] this line never stops playing even once throughout the entire tune doesn't matter if it even really fits over the underlying chords that well it just keeps plowing through everything [Music] there are points where you'd think this would sound pretty dissonant with the line hitting the sharp four over the safcord or the natural fourth over this G over B which creates a minor ninth interval against the bass which is typically a big no-no and even emphasizing the flat sixth over this a minor chord it doesn't sound dissonant in context because the line has been repeating constantly throughout the entire tune up until these points using constants like this helps unify your chords into one solid ambient mood one of my favorite examples of this technique has to be the intro to forest interlude this eighth note line outlining an a-flat major seven chord repeats over each chord in this three chord progression and with each chord the line is recontextualized as progressively more colorful [Music] this turns this B flat chord into the rarely-seen full b-flat 13 chord with every extension included having both the 11th and the 3rd in a chord is allways frowned upon by music educators because of the dissonant minor 9th interval created between the 3rd and the 11th if you voice the chord from the bottom up avoiding this dissonance is one of the first rules of voicing extended chords luckily for us David wise never got a formal music education because this intro sounds awesome the dissonance is offset by the fact that the line is being repeated over every chord so even though the tension is there our ears expect it and embrace it this turns it from gross tension to tasty tension there are a lot more interesting ideas you can derive on ambient music from David wisest work but I hope you got something out of this video that you can play around with in your own writing you can follow me on twitter at 8-bit music theory if you want to catch my biannual tweet and if you're interested in supporting the channel you can check out my patreon here special thanks to patron drew Kunin for the request thanks to you all for watching and I'll see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 464,806

Keywords: 8bit, music theory, theory, analysis, 8-bit, 8 bit, video game, music, vgm, donkey kong, country, dkc, diddy's kong quest, diddy kong, aquatic ambience, ambient music, stickerbush symphony, stickerbrush symphony, forest interlude, songs, composition

Id: MycI9ZOSPRk

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018