How To Write Chord Progressions - Songwriting Basics [Music Theory- Diatonic Chords]

for a very long time I thought that writing music was one of those things you're either born with or you're not and I was convinced that I was not born with it that I could not write music I mean it was so hard for me to just learn songs much less write them but then I learned about by diatonic chords more specifically I learned how to use my diatonic chords so that's what I want to teach you in this video in this very short video by the end of this you will be able to write chord progressions that sound wonderful that will work that you can give to your band to play and actually start writing verse sections and choruses now this will be fairly limited we're only gonna be working in major keys today but most of the music we hear on a daily basis is in the major key so this is really tackling like almost like 60 to 70% of western music is going to be described just in this video so even if you're already familiar with diatonic chords I still suggest you watch this because I'm going to be putting some very funny restrictions on our playing and that'll actually help us get better sounding progressions easier now at the very end of this video I do want to talk about how can we make things more complicated how can we add in more theory and also how can we get rid of the theory to just kind of let let ourselves write intuitively instead of through these mechanical processes I don't want to waste any time I just like to get right into it by starting to write some chord progressions in our C major scale to do that we need to start on the note C from there we have a formula of whole steps and half steps that will build us any major scale it goes whole whole half whole whole whole half so a whole step is two frets and a half step is one fret and if I do that sequence of half steps and whole steps it gives me my C major scale and it gives me these notes C D see now in music what we do is we give every single one of those notes its own number and we don't just write it as a normal number we write it as a Roman numeral one two three four five six seven after that we give every single one of those notes its own chord so the first note there gets its own chord we give it a major chord all right major chords we'll get an uppercase Roman numeral but the second note we're gonna give it a minor chord and that means we're gonna flip that Roman numeral to be a lowercase Roman numeral so the second note gets a minor chord the third note gets a minor chord the fourth and fifth note both get major chords the sixth note gets a minor chord and the seventh note gets a diminished chord now in this video I'm gonna completely skip the diminished chord I don't even want to talk about diminished in this video that's a really deep topic that goes way past just writing cool poppy chord progressions so for our purposes today we're really only using the six chords of the key of C and we're gonna ignore that seventh chord those six chords are C major D minor E minor F major G major and a minor you can hear those sounds fantastic together but here's where the real magic comes in if I want to write a chord progression in the key of C here are the three simple rules that I want to place on you to write a chord progression number one make sure that we're writing four measures of music I think four is a great place to start I don't want to start with five measures it's kind of hard to write a five measure progression but if we just stick with four we'll be in pretty good shape our next rule is to make sure that we're starting on the one chord today that would be C major we're in the key of C that is my one chord so I have to start on my one chord the last rule is that the very last measure needs to be either my four chord or my five chord that would be either an F chord or a G chord and with those simple rules I can literally just guess at anything and get a great sounding chord progression here's what I mean I'm starting on one pick any note between 1 and 6 I'm gonna pick 3 okay my 3 chord you can see is an E minor so if I'm gonna go from C e I'm gonna go to an E minor let's pick another chord I'll go to 2 is d minor and now I have to do a 4 or 5 at the end and let's try the 4 first f okay so let's play that chord progression again I had C I had a minor I had D minor and then I had F and I think that sounds pretty nice if I give it a strumming pattern now let's take a listen yeah I think that sounds great so what if I did the five chord at the end instead all right so let's do the exact same thing but this time instead of ending on an F chord I'll have a G major at the end instead of an F major okay here's the one three to five dear that sounds a little bit brighter a little bit bolder that's why I want you to use the 4 chord or the 5 chord at the end going from the 4 chord to the 1 chord is called a cadence you can hear going from 4 to 1 kind of gives you the soft landing back to my 1 chord and going from 5 to 1 gives you this really strong landing back to my 1 chord so by putting a 4 chord or a 5 chord at the end of my measure it kind of makes you want to come back to repeat the chord progression on one again so by making sure you starting on 1 and ending on 4 or 5 you'll always be setting up this kind of infinite chord progression loop and literally we can do anything in between those two chords let's try something different I'm starting on C again and this time I'll go to the 6th chord which is a minor I'll go to the 5 chord and then maybe just stay on the 5 chord all right I said I mean there's no rule against doing a chord twice in a row so let's do this again I had one six and five stay on fire again is 110 the six and then the five and then maybe the four all right and I'm literally just guessing numbers out of random at a thin air and the cord I pick between one and six would work out [Music] now to make sure we really got the grasp of this let's just do it all over again really quickly in the key of G I'm gonna start on a G note and I'm gonna build my scale I do a whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and that gives me the notes G a b c d e f sharp and g then I'm just gonna write in my Roman numeral formula underneath the scale and it tells me what chords I'm allowed to play once again that uppercase Roman numeral means I'm allowed to play a G major that lowercase Roman numeral it means I'm allowed to play an a minor for my 2 chord and that a B minor a C major a D major and an E minor and we are going to skip the F sharp diminished just in case you were curious we'd actually have to play it as an F sharp half diminished and it would sound like that and it does actually resolve to the one chord but like I said advanced stuff we'll talk about that in another video I actually already have a video on diminished chords if you'd like to know a little bit more about the theory of just those so let's follow our rules again let's set up four measures we'll start with G we'll make sure that we're ending with either C or D and the only thing that I want to maybe spice up a little bit today is I want to do a split measure I want to take one of these measures and not just do one chord for the whole measure I actually want to divide it in half so we get like a quick change between two different chords ok so let's start on G major and we'll do a full measure one two three four from there let's try going to the four chord three four and then let's go to the two chord and then I'm gonna split that measure with the six board just so just two strums on each one so two strums of an a minor that's my 2 chord two strums of an E minor that's my six chord then I want to end with my five chord one so here's my full progression I'm gonna go one four - six five all right now let's give the strumming pattern [Music] that works pretty good also you don't have to strum these things what if I arpeggiator them or did like a picking pattern through each one so here's my G the C a minor EB all right obviously think about this outside of your guitar what would this sound like on a piano [Music] sounds like music this is the kind of thing that was always elusive to me I never knew how do you just write stuff that sounds good well you do it like this you find out what your key is you write some chords in that key and you make sure that it kind of tails off at the end with a four or five chord to keep the whole thing looping and boom you're sounding musical now if I wanted to do something on top of this like sing or play a guitar solo you can probably guess the notes I would sing or the notes I would play for a guitar solo come from the scale G E major when we were writing and C I would obviously be playing and singing in the C major scale so that's really what it means to play or to write in one key now like I said this is very limiting this is very restricting I'm putting these three rules on you saying you have to start here you have to end on this and that's you don't really want to be writing your own soulful emotional music with these kind of rules in place but I really do think this is a good place to start at least getting something that's musical ultimately in a perfect world you go sit down with your guitar and your emotions just pour out and your your message comes out through your music but you can't count on that that's not something you can rely on and when those moments don't happen when you don't find that inspiration and when things don't just click in place you kind of have to just brute force your way through things and to just write something whether you like it or not just get something out there and then maybe later on that will actually inspire something or maybe that's where the idea starts and you change it and modify it from there but you really have to expect that songwriting isn't going to always be this natural process where you know the the waves come to you and you see the music and it just expresses itself instantly through I mean that does happen and those are magical moments and that's those are probably going to be your best songs when it's effortless but that's like in my for me personally that's like 5% of my songwriting just is that effortless thoughtless process 95% of the other parts of it is just brute forcing my way through things that I think might work and then finding something that kind of works and then later on the ice the idea really strikes and the inspiration strikes and I can just throw away all my mechanics and my rules and I can just do what I'm hearing and do what I really want to do so there's the very basics of it hopefully you get the idea that this is simple stuff I mean you really don't need to know much theory to start writing songs in different keys what I suggest you do is write in every key write a song in eated a write a song in F tomorrow write a song and f-sharp the following day just so you really get an idea of you know what each one of those keys looks like on your guitar what they look like on your piano if you're a piano player if you do EDM or if you're interested in writing music on the computer tried to taking the same stuff and programming in these chords as strings or synthesizers it's very important to practice this stuff by by using it by writing with it I mean it should go without saying that's how you get better at writing music is by writing more music now a lot of my favorite songs go way past this bread and butter diatonic chord only six chord choices a lot of my favorite songs leave the key and they do interesting things that break the rules but a lot of times when you break the rules there's even rules for how you break the rules so the next step for you if you want to take this to the next level is to start exploring secondary dominant chords and those are chords that are outside of the key but they will take you to chords that are in your key and you can also start looking into borrowed chords which are chords that come from the parallel modes of the key that you're in so you would want to know about your modes before you dive into that but that will give you access to way more chords than just the six that I stuck you with today also keep in mind that songs can change keys so you don't have to just write a song in the key of C major and keep it there forever you're allowed to change keys you've got allowed to modulate in the middle of a song so just some ideas of taking this patch that's very very restrictive rules that I've given you here today so I hope you enjoyed this video and more importantly I hope you realize that songwriting is actually something that anyone can do they just have to learn the rules and practice a little bit then once you've learned those rules and practiced you're free to go crazy and put your own spin on things put your own style on things and really make it yours if you like this video please subscribe like all that good stuff and I will plan on seeing you soon

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 2,171,649

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar, writing chords, writing chord progressions, writing songs, songwriting, chord writing, song writing lesson, chord writing lesson, how to write chords, how to write chord progressions, songwriting basics, how to write songs, guitar chord lesson, diatonic lesson, diatonic chords, simple chords, how to write simple songs, writing music on guitar

Id: M8eItITv8QA

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018