Chord Progressions with NO MUSIC THEORY! (LOGIC PRO X)

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I'll show you an easy way to create chord progressions with zero music theory knowledge whatsoever now although I consider this a quick trick this will end up being another longer format video so I'll leave bookmarks to each of the different sections of the video in the video description and in the comments below now don't get me wrong I have a master's degree in music I teach college-level music and audio classes I'm not diminishing the importance of understanding music theory or even just having a basic fundamental understanding of music concepts and music fundamentals I'm not diminishing that whatsoever but if you're just looking to start creating music and you really don't understand chords and you don't understand the make up of chords you can sort of bypass that for a little bit using the trick that I'll show you in this video now if you are interested in learning formal theory I just created a course called music theory 1:09 music theory for Dom musicians over at Mac Pro video.com it goes through understanding notes how to read notes on the staff and reading them in piano roll understanding rhythm major and minor key structure scale structure chord structure and building chord progressions so if that's something you're interested in go check that out I'll leave a link to it in the video description below but it's sort of a primer to that you can do this with very minimal music theory knowledge now to expand on core progressions and create things like 7th chords and other expanded harmony you're gonna need some at least a fundamental understanding of music theory so while this video may be helpful to you it's only gonna take you so far ok so to start I've just got a drum loop here which I'm gonna mute for now I've got just a stock piano instrument here I'm gonna start with piano and then I'll add something that's a little bit more texturally interesting later so the first thing I'm gonna do is just create an empty MIDI region open it up in piano roll here and we're going to create a scale and chords really are based on scale structure C major for example or a minor for example and those are the two that we're going to use in this video to construct chord progressions if you just start with all of the white keys on the piano start up here on c3 and you sort of stack notes vertically you get the C major scale and I'm just using the white keys now that does not mean if I start on D that that's a D major scale it's not really correct if I wanted a D major scale I'd have to shift all of these notes up and you'll note that some of the notes like f-sharp here and c-sharp here are on black keys so the reason why I'm using C major as a starting reference point it's at first of all it's the easiest scale to learn it has no sharps no flats so no black keys and you can easily transpose any chord progressions you create with it over to another key using your DW so what I like to do is stack up one octave C to C and actually what I like to do stack up one octave not including the top C and then duplicate this up in octaves I'm going to hold option and duplicate this c3 up to c4 so now essentially what I have is two octaves of the C major scale [Music] and by the way if you're wondering about minor chord progressions and minor scales we're gonna get to that in just a second what I use this is sort of like a skeleton to figure out all of the chords that are normally in the key of C major so for example if I start on the bottom note here C skip a note then go up to e skip a note and go up to G I get AC major triad or a C major chord a triad is just another name for a chord with only three notes so mostly what I'll be dealing with in this video are triads three note chords now you could add other notes like you could say I want to duplicate the C up an octave that's still technically a C triad even though there's four notes the C's are duplicates or I could add another E or I could add another G still a C major chord or still a C major triad because you're only using those three notes C E and G what you can do is keep continuing this on all the way up the scale so let me just sort of build my scale horizontally as well so c d e f g a b c and again I'm using all white keys on the piano I'm skipping all the Black Keys so then what I'm going to do is skip notes vertically like I did before so I'm not going to use EB but I'll use F skip G go up to a and you can just continue this process on and on and on all the way up you'll notice that the interval the space of the middle note changes across time and that's because the quality of each of the chords changes now again I told you we're gonna do this with no pretty much no theory knowledge so I'm not gonna talk about the quality of the different chords you can learn more about that and my music theory for Dom musicians course if you're interested in that but basically I want you to think about these chords as numbers think of the first known as the one chord the 2 chord three four five six seven when you get to eight it's just a one chord again they're the same notes just up an octave so I can kind of just delete that one but note that all of the notes and each of the chords are derived from the scale so now when it comes to building chord progressions you have to do something with this information you're never gonna just have a chord progression that goes up in a scale like this doesn't really sound that great what you want to do is sort of pick and choose different chords and play around with what they sound like together like I could go one four five where I could go one four six five or I could try one five six three you know you can sort of jump around a bit and some chord progressions will sound better than others but essentially what this is it's just a tool for you to start building chord progressions so over here on measure two I'll start building out a chord progression just a really basic one now what I like to do is select all of these notes in my reference here and hit ctrl M because I don't really want to have them play I just want to see them as a reference so if I start over here on measure two I'm gonna build down I'll start on the one chord so I'll do like half note chords so each chord is one half of a measure and then maybe I'll go up to six so six was e C e or AC e rather and then maybe I want to go down to four so four was F a C and then maybe I want to go down to three E G B you okay not that interesting let's maybe try swapping the four and three cord let's move the three cord over and again the four chord is FAC okay so now we're getting somewhere it sounds like it has some motion to it the other thing you can do is you can play with the inversion of the chords or the voicing of the chord so that basically describes how the notes are arranged in each of the chords so you see how this chord starts down here the one chord jumps all the way up to the six up here that's quite a jump that's quite a leap so chords generally will sound better when the voicing is more compact one thing you can do is we could take one of these notes and drop it down an octave so I'll hit shift option down to drop it down an octave and now sort of the corridor voicing the motion of the chords is more compact I could even go a step further and take this one down an octave but let's listen to what this sounds like right now let's try dropping this one down an octave as well and that's shift option up and down moves notes up or down an octave I'm not a big fan of this four chord let's try a different one there let's try something that's got more of like a somber sound to it let me try putting the three chord at the end and let me try putting the two chord in between the six chord and the three chord so the two chord is D F a so I'll just type D F a over here let's see what that sounds like we're not really getting a somber feeling as much of a somber feeling as I'd like because we're in a major key right now so let me try the four chord again but instead of at the end we'll put it in between the six and the three chords so the four chord again was f AC but let's try pulling the top note down an octave just to kind of play with that voicing and you'll see we've got this voice that just the bottom note that just stays the same it's it's a common tone and all three of these chords start pulling this one down as well we could throw like a different instrument on that let me go into my library here I'll use one of my divine waves settings here let me use this one called beautiful creatures and then you could loop it out if you wanted to just hitting command R throw a bead under it or throw some other instruments under it we try a different different patch here with some called into the storm I think this is like a string patch [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's not quite somber enough though it's kind of kind of uplifting and happy sounding even though I've sort of picked you know some of the chords that are more somber in in tone so let me try doing a minor chord progression instead of a major chord progression by the way shameless plug if you're interested in the this set of exs24 sample instruments here I created this set of exs24 sample based instruments it's called divine waves I'll leave I'll also leave a link to that in the video description below it's like 29 bucks for like 25 gigs in samples so if you like what you hear go check it out below it supports me and it helps support the channel as well okay let's try minor Keys let's go back to just a stock piano sound here and let's do this same thing here but in minor so the great thing about the minor and major Keys is that can be relative to each other so just like there is a major scale with all white keys there is a minor scale with all white keys so for example the minor scale with all white keys is the a minor scale so you start on a and you just build the scale vertically one octave and that I just like to have a second octave so I'll duplicate it and then you can do the same thing we did before building sort of a set of reference chords so what I'll do I'll just get the library out of the way here a-b-c-d-e-f-g and then the a chord is the one chord that repeats again and then I just skip every other note so I skip B go up to C skip D go to e we just follow this same pattern like before skipping white keys not using any black keys and we'll get into transposing in just a bit and now we have all of the chords that we can use in the key of a minor so again we call this 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I'm not going to like I said because this is not theory heavy video or tutorial don't want to focus too much on on the theory just think of them as like scale degrees like one through seven so let's try the one chord by the way you don't always have to start on the 1 chord I'll show you an example of that in just a bit but here's one let's say I want to go up to six which is f AC and then let's go down to through let's go to four D F a and then we'll land on five which is e G B and another thing too is chord progressions don't have to be four chords long you can use as many chords as you want I just for this example I'm just kind of keeping it simple let's see what this sounds like let me just mute the drum loop so once again let me play around with some of the voicings let me drop all of these notes up top here down an octave [Music] that sounds really good let me duplicate it and instead of going back to the one chord here let me go to the three chord so the three chord is C E G so if c e g and then instead of going to the 6th chord then i'll go to the 4 chord so the 4 chord is d fa so d if a drop this top note down an octave and then I'll do six and seven so the 6th chord is FAC excuse me yeah f AC f a see the seven chord is G B D drop these top two notes on each one down an octave let's see what this chord progression sounds like [Music] yeah that sounds really nice let's actually throw a different instrument in here other than piano once again I'll just use my divine waves instruments let's do some called ocean born if I wanted I could duplicate this so hit command R repeat it rather let me just sort of like filter this loop it's a little to give it sort of like a loaf I sound [Music] remember the chord progression that you created the numbers because it's gonna come in helpful later when you try to add additional chords or additional instruments or maybe like a bass line to your song so after you start inverting things and changing these voices it's a little more difficult to sort of remember and identify you know what these chord progressions are without having any music theory knowledge I'm gonna copy this clip down that I had in my reference info on I wrap my chord note reference on its create a new blank region I'll join these together now I can come in here and lay in a bass line so if I'm gonna write this down just I don't have to keep going back but one is a and I'm just looking at the bottom note by the way one is a six is F 4 is d 5 is e 3 is C 4 is d 6 is F and 7 is G so I've now I've got like my all my bass notes that I can use and you can use them in this octave or a lower octave for bass probably going to want to go lower down to the zero and one octave so what I'll do is I'll type in a four one six which is F and I can go up or I can go down for is d e is five seen was three for is D and then F is six and then G was seven so now I have a corresponding baseline a bass note for each of the chords in my other instrument let's try that out let's drop drop these three down an octave now the other thing you can do with the bass is you can we can do this with the chords too but you can sort of give it some rhythm maybe I wanted to add like a little dome but home but um but um we could play around at this so maybe this first note a maybe I'll put like a high name up here right then here's an F maybe I'll put like a high F up here [Music] here's a e we put it LOI down here here's a C let me put like a little see down here [Music] so you give you things like that or if you remember what each of the notes in each of the chords were you could make this sort of extra note be a note within one of those chords like the one chord was AC e so instead of this being a I could make it E I could make it C same thing here this is an F core this is f AC I could make this C because it fits within the chord progression at that particular time it fits within the harmony of the Triad at that particular time you know this chord is DFA so I could put an F in here there's all these little passing tones this one was eg B so instead of going down a full octave I could maybe just go down to B so it's all about remembering the structure of each of these chords and what I highly recommend you do is if you don't you know even if you just do this you might even want to grab some staff pay if you know how to read music that is grab some staff paper and write it out or just on a piece of paper write out the note names for each one of these notes because then it's going to make the whole chord progression and it's going to make MIDI editing and composition a lot easier for you let me try quantizing these two sixteenth notes but then pulling up the swing a bit because the songs got a bit of like a swing tour the loop has a bit of a swing to it now the other thing about this is you can do anything you want with the rhythm of a chord progression I'm just using half notes because it's simple but you could you know you could change this up a bit you could maybe shorten these chords and then maybe I'll choose a different sort of like a harder-hitting patch maybe I'll go up an octave you can also try different rhythms for the chord part as well and then use this as a reference for your bass line all you have to do is select both of the regions up in the main window and logic and it'll show both of their midi data down in the piano roll editor like maybe I'll do so this is this is still AC e but maybe I'll try doing like an e here on my little passing tone or I could try a C because it's in the court as well [Music] now this is ceg so let's try to find something that makes sense here see is the same no II sort of go downward now not so sure about this one this is B E G and I have it on C so let's try B now let's try E [Music] let's try G [Music] yeah that sounds better and then this little passing chord is fa fa D so let's try F first let's try a [Music] the other option was D let's try D cool and the last two were six and seven which is F and G I'm starting to repeat this we drop this down an octave actually let me add something on here to give the base some motion maybe I'll throw like the arpeggiator on here like a swung 16th pattern so this is a chord preset I don't want that let me choose a different preset up here oh yeah that's funky [Music] [Music] [Music] cool let me take that filter off [Music] [Music] [Music] there's just a way to get started another thing you could do is let's say you don't want to work in a minor if you don't want to work in a minor you can simply transpose the cords to any key they maintain their relative numbers they relevant and their relative sort of position within the scale one through seven but there's two ways you can do it one you can just drag over all of your MIDI regions and you can just hit command a and you can hit option up or down so like let's say I want to go from the key of a minor to the key of C minor all I'm going to do is make sure that I'm shifting this bottom note here up to C so I'm just hitting option up to shift everything up including the reference so now I'm in C minor or maybe I want to shift up to maybe I want to go up to E flat minor so I'll go up a few more so again I'm just paying attention to that root that bottom note there or if that's too high I can try a lower octave of a flat minor just hit shift option down [Music] so sometimes when you transpose your your progression up or down you may have to play around with where the base is located because sometimes the base can be so low that doesn't really come through so here I've transposed the chords down to e-flat but I've transposed the base up to e-flat another thing you can do sort of like a quick way to do it without having to move any MIDI notes is you can simply use the MIDI effect called the Transposer so right now I'm in the key of E flat or D sharp let's say I wanted to go up to F what I could do is go up two semitones or half steps up to F so one two so I could just say transpose this up two semitones and it will pull all of those up but the problems you to put this transpose are on all of these channels [Music] I prefer not to do things this way because I actually like to look at the notes and see exactly what note is being used you can also transpose within the inspector here so you could click on a region and you could say transpose plus four semitones you know and I'd do that for both of these and it transposes them up but again the problem is it's still showing E flat in the MIDI editor and the piano roll editor so it's you just have to remember that all everything's been transposed up for half steps so I don't like doing that you can do it that way but I prefer just shifting the notes and knowing exactly with what I'm working with so that's my method of building chord progressions with basically no music theory knowledge other than being able to read notes on the piano at least the white keys on the piano I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this you can also check me out on social media and if you'd like to make a monthly contribution to the channel you can also check me out over at patreon.com ford slash music tech help guy thanks to the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 69,711

Keywords: Music Theory, logic pro, logic, logic pro x, chord, progressions, chord progressions, musictechhelpguy, producer, beat, composition, divinewaves

Id: aB6xeLXNLfE

Length: 29min 50sec (1790 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 23 2020