7 ways to make better chord progressions!

good morning andrew morning brick so uh this is what i'm doing for food in space every meal i eat a green yellow a red and a blue and supposedly that's all the calories i need and they taste disgusting oh oh god all right let's jump in hey it's andrew huang yes i brought a guitar to space with me and this is theory thursday so a question i've gotten a lot and something that i used to struggle with myself is creating more interesting chord progressions it's easy to fall into some of the same old writing traps and feel like the progressions you're coming up with aren't that original or aren't that interesting so i want to show you a few techniques today that will help you turn even the most basic progression into something a lot more compelling to listen to so let's start with something that's very very basic a two chord progression i'm in the key of e and i'm just gonna play an a and a b chord [Music] two chords doesn't get much plainer than that so the first thing we're gonna do is add some passing chords a passing chord is just like a shorter chord in between the main chords and you can do this and still retain a lot of the original vibe of the chord progression you're working with like say you've already written a melody to it but you just feel like the chords aren't great the easiest passing chord to use is probably the one that's right next to the one that you're going to and since we're already going from a to b which are right next to each other in the key that we're in uh we can go to one above the b and then come back down to it so i'll be playing a c sharp minor and just play it for like one beat before changing over to the next chord [Music] but you can pretty much throw in any other chord from the key and it'll probably be okay as a passing chord definitely experiment and see what sounds good to you but just to give you a demonstration we've got this a with a passing chord of c sharp minor to b and i'll just play a bunch of other chords from e major leading back in to the a so being a passing chord from b to a [Music] [Music] me i think i like that last one the best there the e major going back to the a major so let's keep that in our example and then we'll keep developing it so the next thing i want to suggest is changing up the rhythm plenty of songs just change chords every bar or every two bars and a lot of the times that's fine but sometimes it's just more interesting to add a bit of syncopation so maybe going to the next chord early could be nice here i like that so another way that we could develop this is to extend the chord progression and this doesn't have to mean like adding a whole bunch of new chords adding a whole different progression on top of the one that you've already made actually often it works better to just repeat most of it and then make a little variation so you could change a chord like maybe i'll play this twice in a row but change one of the passing chords but you could also take a less is more approach so in this next playthrough i'm actually going to take away the last passing chord and just hold the b the second time that i play it [Music] tip number whatever we're on now uh you could change the chord shape there are tons of different ways to play every chord so experimenting with different registers and different inversions you know like this is an a chord this is an a chord this is an a chord we can even take away some notes and it would still be an a chord so instead of the original thing i was playing like this what if we just played two notes a and c sharp an octave and a third apart so if we continue that with the other chords it would be like this another way to change the shape of a chord is to have the bass note be one of the notes that's not the root so uh normally we would play say an e major like this [Music] but you can still have it have the e major feeling uh but with a slightly different flavor by moving say that bass note to the g sharp this is a weird way to play a chord but uh it'll work for our demo and that would lead nicely back into our a because g sharp is just one note below a [Music] this is such a wacky shape to play but just you know program it or ask your bass player to do it don't don't do this with your hand that feels like it'll cause problems down the road interestingly if i go back to this spaced out thirds method of playing chords if i play a g sharp minor it's kind of the same as playing an e major with a g sharp in the bass [Music] [Music] so tell me [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we've played with uh the standard chords we've played with taking some notes out of those chords extended chords are when you add notes to the typical root third fifth of a chord so if we put a seventh on every chord in our progression it would sound like this i'll kind of batch that you could do ninths [Music] typically i wouldn't put the exact same type of extension on every chord every extension has its own type of flavor so it's really a matter of getting to know them and what kind of emotions they impart and choosing how you want to use them uh there might be some interesting things where the seventh of a chord leads into like the third of the next chord that kind of thing actually that makes me think of something that i wasn't planning on talking about but it totally fits in with kind of the extended chord thing and also notes leading into other notes suspensions typically this happens with a fourth uh fourth going to a third but you could also do a nine coming down to the octave you could do a six going down to a fifth the last technique i want to share with you today is inserting some chords that are not from the key that you're in and this one is the wackiest thing that we're going to be looking at today it'll definitely take the most experimentation because once you start going outside the key things can start to sound a little bit jarring much more easily so just take some playing around to find some interesting flavors that you like but working with cords that are outside of a single key can lead to some of the most interesting music so i don't know let's let's just mess around with what we were playing with [Music] [Laughter] [Music] before [Music] i'm reaching for more passing chords basically stuff that leads into what comes next in an even more outside the box an interesting way than just like another note from the key but you can also do chord progressions where uh the main chords are just completely outside the box you know i used to say it's all the same [Music] is [Music] don't forget to like and subscribe and turn on notifications there's also this playlist of my space videos that you can check out if you need to catch up a lot of adventures happening up here i'll see you next time

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 230,242

Rating: 4.9762859 out of 5

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, ontario, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to, how to make music, music producer, making music, ableton, how to write a song, making a song, sing, songwriting, learn music, space, spacetime, chord, chords, progression, chord progression, better, tips, technique, hack, trick, music theory, theory, theory thursday, thursday, guitar, electric guitar, pop, rock, edm, electronic, piano

Id: rUwh459aGfo

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021

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