How to create a chord progression on the piano for songwriting or improvisation

okay in today's tutorial I'm going to teach you how to create a chord progression of the piano it's kind of a useful skill in all kinds of contexts and if you're interested in songwriting or composition then knowing how to create chord progressions is super useful yeah a lot of songwriters start with a chord progression but you know before they even think of melody or words and equally if you're interested in improvisation whether it's pop of jazz or cocktail or whatever then being able to build a progression of your own kind of unleashes all kinds of possibilities for creativity and for practice you know usually if I post a tutorial about improv and you know I give you the chord progression whereas you know if you can create your own you know you can you can and think of your own improvisation exercises and and finally knowing this kind of thing is also a great way of reinforcing your understanding of how music theory of how chords work okay so let's get started creating a chord progression I'm going to imagine that we are in the key of C major because it's nice and simple and clear and I'm going to assume that you know the basic identities of basic chords like C and D minor and G and all the rest if you don't we're back in my timeline look at my earlier videos have a look at my book head really play the piano stuff you teach and I've taught you all the chords are in there and but I'm going to assume for now that you know that stuff okay so we're in the key of C major and we have that scale of C major now as you may know any a major or minor key has a certain number of chords that come naturally to it that are naturally occurring to that key and they are built on the scale that key and in major keys we call those the diatonic chords okay probably seen how I'm building those chords on the scale there's a scale there on diatonic chords C major let's just quickly go through and name them we've got seen D minor E minor a minor B diminished doesn't occur that often but you know it crops up in the scale and back to C we've also got the kind of basic extensions and developments of those chords you know you know C major seven E minor seven g seven that kind of thing yeah so if we're going to create a chord progression those diatonic chords the diatonic chords of C major are our basic toolkit for doing so we might use other chords that are non diatonic to the key of C you know an A flat chord might creep up in there but by and large most of the time the chords we're going to be using are the diatonic chords of C major and you know you will you know you're right whole songs create whole progressions that use nothing but those diatonic chord okay so the underlying principle to understand in any chord progression is that it is a journey or in fact a series of journeys it's a series of journeys from what we call the tonic chord the chord that the keys named after see out far from that chord and back again okay so we're always starting at C we're going on a journey and we're coming back again and the furthest point that we will often get to on that journey is what we call the dominant chord the court is built on the fifth note of the scale in this case in the key of C major G or often g7 yeah that's what we call the dominant chord of the key yeah and it's kind of as far away from C as we can get sometimes we'll jump there straight away sometimes we won't but once we're there once we're on key thee and the progression really wants to come back to C it really wants to resolve on - see you can hear that strong resolving effect g7 C or it wants to resolve onto a chord that is like C okay for example a minor which is also in the ad you know the diatonic chords of C major so the first thing to do is to think of your chord progression as the journey out and back out and back I'm going up and down the keyboard you know did you know you have to go hiring and get lower in the keyboard but just think of it as that journey between C and far distant places maybe as far as the dominant chord the number five chord and back again okay the second important thing to know is that chord progressions usually but not always have a number of bars in them that is divisible by four okay and that's a very big generalization and it is fundamentally based on the principles of songwriting yeah if you are interested in classical music or you know prog rock or anything like that where where things get much more complex that won't hold true but in the average song you will find that the subdivisions of that song or you know the whole song itself will have number of bars it's divisible by four yeah so and you know twelve bar blues divisible by four a lot of songs have eight or sixteen bar verses and choruses yeah again divisible by four so although that won't always be the case you know we might create ten or twenty of them as well right for 10 or 17 bars or whatever more often than not our corpora is going to be 8 or 12 or 16 or 24 or 32 bars in length yeah and one of the things you can do is start off if you like with a grid like this okay so there I've got an empty grid of 16 bars and I started it with C at the beginning and a C at the end the final chord might also be a G okay a dominant chord to leaders back to the start again but for now we're going to leave it as C so we can see that that's kind of the the conclusion so we've got those two bars and we've got all the stuff in the middle to fill in okay so how do we go about doing that one of the things that I typically do is and and this sound really kind of amateurish but it's not it's just kind of sit at the piano and see where my fingers leave me okay now look at what's going on on my left hand there in particular notice how I instinctively followed a fairly natural bassline okay that baseline had a shape to it often that's really important in defining the kind of chords that you're going to use so I had seen the left and then I went there okay because B seems to suggest a G chord which as I said is a long jump out straight away out into the unknown we've got seen the tonic chord way out to the dominant role miles away okay where are we going to go back to what a good place would be a chord that is like C but isn't C because it you know if we just go back to see whether that you know and what we could you know some songs will do that but you know it's kind of you know not adventurous you know there are cooler places to go so a natural place to go might be a chord like C which is a minor which as you'll as you'll notice shares two notes with C okay so just by playing around am I thinking about a natural kind of shape of bass line in the left I've got C key but with a B in the bass okay just because we're playing a G chord doesn't mean we have to use and you know the note G in the bass to a minor and then I went to F okay and that has got me or can get me four bars the first four bars of my progression okay and after that the natural place to go is back to see again okay we've we've kind of reached a far-out point at the F it's not quite a number five god it's not quite a dominant chord but it's quite a long way out from C and the kind of the harmonic grammar suggests now is the time to go back to C let's just revisit those first four bars again and think about some of the stuff that I did there and you know you might be saying why why do I have to choose that if I've got the B in the bass why do I have to choose that G in the second bar you know there are other chords in C major that have a being them for example there's B diminished which we could use although it's kind of similar to to g7 anyway or maybe we could use a minor okay there's no real reason why we couldn't okay so we could swap out that G and put an E minor in instead okay and it works just as well for my money though and certainly in this progression I'm going to stick with the G I kind of like the kind of like the clarity in the punch of this C to G okay to a minor there's a very um there's kind of an elegance in there that I don't think you get quite as much with the C II minor and a minor perhaps because the E minor to the a minor doesn't resolve quite as well one thing I should say and I'm very studiously avoiding a lot of technical language here there are if you have a study harmony formerly there are a lot of rules about what what chord can follow what color and so on and so forth and people start talking about Cadence's and sub medians and medians and dominance and super you know and you know Sigma tonics and all that kind of thing and and that's cool and if you're ever going to be a music student and get really into formal analysis of music then you need to know that stuff if you're going to be a songwriter you don't need all that stuff yeah much better to just have some sort of understanding of how the chords fit together and and learn using your ear really learn with what sounds right but there are one or two things to bear in mind and in particular that natural flowing line in the left is good and also and this is something I talked about before moving from chord to chord by shared notes so a lot of thee and chords that I'm using them that I'm moving to in their share some notes so C goes to G and there's that shared notes up there go step a minor yet no shared notes unless I make it a - cell it's quite a cool sound and keep the key okay and then to F which again has got shared notes with the and the a minor chord so progressions tend to work best and sound most natural when they're quite organic okay let's go back and look at our 16 bar progression again we have now got our first line filled in okay so I've got four bars there four measures I should say if you're you in the US and I don't have to have just one chords per bar you know I could quite easily you know put two chords in a bar you know to two beats for each chord but for now I'm keeping it simple I'm going like that so as I said I've got those four bars and then and at the start of the fifth bar it seems to be natural to go back to C now what I could do here is just repeat exactly the progression that I've just had see me a minor F but it would be kind of cool to do something a bit different so again thinking about shared notes and maybe thinking about a natural bass line would you do something like C e minor F King and again look how I've got that quite natural baseline yeah so my first four bars the baseline went down there now it's coming up like this okay and you'll see now on bar right we're on we're kind of at the furthest point out on that dominant chord the G chord yep so let's just have a player on a listen playing it really simply okay something interesting about those and those final three chords actually E minor F G is that they're quite a bit quite jumpy do it there aren't a lot of shared notes there and that's fine but a good progression will have that happening less often the movement between chords with shared notes okay so you know just something for you to bear in mind so now we're kind of at the furthest point out we've got half of our progression we've got chief where do we go next okay well if you go back see again okay but for my money that's kind of getting a little bit and repetitive I kind of think I've been to sea before let's go somewhere else where else can we go what else would you comfortably resolve on - well we know we've already seen that G or quite happily resolved to a minor so we could go there equally G will resolve reasonably well get back down to F okay or to a chord that's like F which is D minor which is a chord I'm going to go to so my next little our block of four bars starting on bar nine is going to start on D minor okay and again I'm going to play around with it and see where I can go and thinking about the toolbox of chords that I've got the diatonic chords of C major I'm going to come up with another four bars and just by playing around so let's say we get to something like this you ok so now we've got a kind of section that's gone or sort of them a minor feel to it which is a nice contrast to the earlier two sets of four bars and you know contrasting things and creating that kind of artistic tension if you like that that contrasts the beginning it brings is a is a really important point in building progressions ok let's just name those chords again so we've got D minor and back up to G again and people are always and you know when you see going to come back and it's at this point that your brain even if you know nothing about music really is really thinking on what we know when are we going to come back to that to that C but oh no not yet we're going to go from the G to the a minor which kind of sounds a little bit like C but we're not there I'm teasing you a little bit because we're going then to a minor again is a little bit like C has the shared notes a minor shares notes with see you know the ng a minor shares the E and the C but we're not back there yet so the thing right maybe now maybe now is the time to go back to C at start of our final four bars starting on bar and what's going to be 13 yeah okay but that's kind of unsatisfying see how that going from the a minor to the C doesn't work quite as well the a minor wants to go somewhere else yeah so let's go from bar 9 again do you you little passing note in the base there and then let's go to Tukey again and then we'll finish with two bars of C it's always a good idea to finish with two bars of the tonic often if you can because that gives you room to put in what we call a turnaround which is a little mini progression based on a dominant or dominant seventh chord to take you comfortably back to the start the progression or you can just end the song there so now we've got our chord progression we can begin to play around with it and to improvise if we're songwriting this is the stage at which we would start to kind of listen out for a little bit of bit of emerging melody or motifs stuff we can take forward to the next stage of the creative process if you like when I do something that's a bit like this you okay and just by playing around this by noodling around with the different inversions and voicings of the causer the different you know the different shapes I was playing on it you can you can begin to hear little bits of melody little bits of idea emerge stuff that if we were songwriting we could start to take forward okay so there we go I'll leave it at that for today what you can do now is you know go to the piano with a bit of you know those really old-fashioned technologies a pencil and a little bit of paper and start playing around and by yourself just a couple of quick plugs as I say if you are really new to kind of chords and harmony do have a look at my book how to really play the piano the stuff you teach you never taught you because an awful lot of it is in there all the kind of basics that you know the basic chord shapes how they're built all in there you know there's also a bunch of stuff on improvisation you know the books really quite dense with useful stuff that can help you develop your piano skills if you're buying right now especially if you're overseas then at the time of making this we're in July 2016 the pound is really really low okay so if you're buying in dollars then you'll get a really great deal on the and on either edition of the book there's a print edition of Mozilla dition and on the digital edition actually were actually running a summer special offer at the moment at least until the end of this month and maybe into August you can pick up the digital edition of how to really play the piano and my other book like cocktail piano book I'm for just seven pounds forty nine which is about ten dollars at a moment okay so so pretty good deal there and just a quick reminder if you haven't seen it already my other my new book seven studies in pot piano is available in a free beta version at the moment if you go to the relevant web address which I can't remember top my head but I'll put it in the video and you can download your free pdf and try that out and that would be cool especially if you could fill in the survey afterwards so I can get on and make a print edition of that later in the year finally if you're supporting me on patreon accom that's amazing thank you ever so much I really appreciate it if you're not do go and check out my profile patreon.com slash bill Hilton you know the more support I get the more time I have for doing this stuff for making tutorials for writing books all the rest of it ok so there we go have a great weekend have tremendous fun at the piano playing around with your chord progressions I hope you have you know a really good time doing this stuff

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 118,988

Keywords: chord progression, songwriting, writing a song, how to write a song, songwriting tips, songwriting process, songwriting tutorial, songwriting lesson, chord progression piano tutorial, chord progression tutorial, chord progression piano, chord sequences piano, chord progression piano theory, composition, piano composition, composing music, composing a song, composing music for beginners, how to compose a song, how to compose music, how to compose a song on piano

Id: lf68y-uRXGQ

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2016