How to write Chords and Songs in Minor [Songwriting Basics / Music Theory]

a lot of musicians who start writing songs start writing in major keys and very quickly they run into this problem that major keys can sound a little too happy a little too bland and I mean almost a little bit lame sometimes kind of sounds like campfire music and you know if you're into like metal or rock or EDM that's not really the style you're going for those genres really revolve more around minor keys than major keys so in this video what I want to do is teach you how do you build a minor scale how do you figure out the chords of a minor key how do you actually compose with those chords so I'll give you some cool guidelines as far as you know little guidelines were anything you do it's gonna sound good and then I'll show you some examples of how we can apply this to different genres where you might hear it and then finally at the end I want to give you some a little bit of advanced theory so you could take this concept even further on your own so we're not gonna waste any time we need to learn how to figure out the chords of a minor key and in order to do that we first need to know the formula for building a minor scale okay we're gonna start in e today cuz I like e minor I'm a guitar player so here's what I need to do if I follow this sequence of half steps and whole steps then I will get a minor scale okay you probably want to memorize that if you're gonna be doing a lot of songwriting I'm gonna start on E so E is my root from E I can take one whole step that takes me to have sharp a half step takes me to G a whole step takes me to a another whole step takes me to be half step to C whole step to D and then holes that takes me back to you so those notes are the notes of my E minor scale F sharp G alright now I need to know what chords I'm allowed to play and what you're gonna do is you're gonna plug in this magic Roman numeral formula alright this Roman numeral formula is telling you that each one of these notes gets its own chord alright the uppercase Roman numerals means that those notes are gonna get major chords and those lowercase Roman numerals mean that those notes are gonna get minor chords that little circle that degree sign means that that note is going to get a diminished triad so these are the seven chords that I'm allowed to play in the key of E minor I'm allowed to play E minor I'm going to skip the diminished chord for now we will talk about it later on in the video but I just want to skip it for now I'm also allowed to play G major I'm allowed to play a minor B minor and D and then of course alright now this Roman numeral formula never changes so I really advise that you memorize that because you can figure out the chords of any minor scale if I had built the D minor scale for example I could just plug that Roman numeral formula and it would tell me exactly what chords I'm allowed to play in that key so we've got seven chords I'm only using six for right now but I'm gonna give you these simple little guidelines to help us actually compose with this here's my first trick only use the chords one seven and six alright so my one chord is a minor my seven chord is d and my 6 quart of C just those four chords I could just do that one seven six six that sounds great just as a simple chord progression in mind right let's switch up the order a little bit let's go six one seven one alright so here's my six [Music] so these kind of progressions are which we hear a lot in like well the end of stairway to heaven is just one seven six six it would be like now of course they do it in a different key and they do it in different inversions but it's still just a one seven six you can also hear this kind of thing in all along the watchtower one six so very popular chord progression there's a lot we could do with it for example here it is if I take let's do a one seven six seven and let's put it on a computer with some synthesizers little drumbeat will get kind of this pulsating EDM beat [Music] and here's that same chord progression one seven six seven in E minor but this time I'll slow it down with the strumming pattern kind of give it a Pink Floyd e'en feel [Music] [Music] so I hope you see really there's a million combinations you can do with just one seven and six and they're all gonna sound great so really experiment with different keys experiment with inversions of those chords and try to experiment outside of your instrument you know if your guitar player try doing this on a piano it's very simple to figure out the theory for this on a piano so the next step here is to compose a little poppier and a little bit more upbeat with our minor keys and the way we do that is we actually use all of the major chords that are available to us for example in E minor I'm going to play a G we'll have to play a C and I'm allowed to play the D that's my three my six and my seven so if I write a progression that uses all those major chords just by surrounding myself with those major chords it's gonna really brighten up the whole tonality here it won't sound so you know dark and rockin because I've got this major brightness surrounding them so check it out what if I did one six six that chord progression has been used so many times it's gotten a few different names the most popular name for it is the sensitive female chord progression it's kind of the chord progression that a lot of female artists have used and their debut breakout songs you can hear it in Rihanna's Umbrella you can hear it in Rihanna again in mmm love the way you lie you can also hear it in Joan Osborne what if God was one of us so that one six three seven popular chord progression and it's not really dark so you've got to be a little careful here with this three chord because really a minor and G major are the same key and if you don't understand that that's fine you can start researching modes but long story short if you hang out on the three chord for too long your ear is going to feel like you're in G major so we kind of want to be careful with the three chord it's nice to introduce it's a beautiful sounding chord and it brightens things up but if you hang out there for too long it'll feel like you're in the key of G major right you can feel right now g-major feels like my home or because I've got so much g-major going on so if you want to use that cord that's great but be careful because if you spend too much time there your ear will reset and you'll think oh I'm and the key of g-major not an ax key of E minor so my way of avoiding that and keeping that from happening is to give yourself lots of one cord right if I do like three measures of my one cord and then bring in that other board I've got so much a minor your users kind of brainwashed into believing that is my home as opposed to this being my own right so we really need to know to make things a little bit more interesting here is what the dominant chord is and how it fits into the minor keys long story short if I go to my fifth note and look at that chord it's supposed to be a minor chord but if I make it a major chord instead or if I make it a dominant seventh chord then I'll get a really strong pulling effect back to the one chord take a listen my normal five four in the key of E minor is B minor this is a very sad poor change right it's kind of bland it's dark but it doesn't have a lot of tension to it at all if we make it a major chord though all of a sudden listen we make it a B major you can hear how much tension it draws back to the one chord even more so if I make it a b7 instead of just a B major so here's E minor and then here's B seven a lot of great tension so this court is outside of the key and it's not allowed in the key of E minor but we're gonna use it anyways because it is that important of a court most of our minor songs do include this dominant chord and temporarily were outside of the key of minor and we temporarily go into a key called a harmonic minor so that's something you might want to pursue on your own is understanding what is the harmonic minor scale and how do you use that all you need to know right now though is that this is a chord we have access to and it really pulls us back to the one chord very strongly so let's go back and make a new chord progression let's start on one again and let's go to the six board I like that six a lot let's go to the four chord we haven't use that one yet the a minor and then let's go to the dominant five chord which is our public and that'll take me back to my 1 & 6 so this would be a really good chord progression for like a Latin flavor kind of thing if I give it kind of a faster strumming pattern pretty neat stuff right now that I have my dominant 5 chord I can actually learn one of the most popular minor chord progressions in history which is the Andalusian cadence that's the technical name for it but it's basically just a 1 7 a 6 and then a dominant 5 so you've heard that in like every Latin song you've even heard it in dream lover uses that exact same chord progression very popular here it is in the key of E minor using Barre chords and here's the exact same chord progression just done with a heavy metal style on some electric guitars with some drums put in there [Music] so I want to write one last chord progression here with you and this time I'm gonna make it 8 measures long and I'm gonna use all those chords we talked about the 1 the six the seven I'm gonna use that three chord very sparingly and I will try to put the dominant chord at the end to tie everything together so let's try that so let's do a one chord which is E minor I'm gonna go to my three for just one measure let's go to the four chord let's skip the five and go to the six now back to the one board back in the three four this time I'll skip to the six and now the dominant five board and that'll bring me back tunes of now what I'm gonna do is kind of beef that up with a whole band instrumental its to put some bass underneath there may be some synthesizers and I'll just play a little bit of the E minor scale on top of that a little bit of e pentatonic minor on top of that and you'll hear how good the sounds if you start putting it all together into a musical form instead of just one chord progression [Music] so I think that sounds pretty good right and also try to remember that this isn't just for rock band stuff I mean if you put that into a string quartet you'd have a wonderful sounding you know melody and harmony going throughout that entire piece just because we've got that nice chord progression going now I do want to talk a little bit about the diminished chord because in the last video I ignored it and I don't want to keep ignoring I want to give you a little insight into it I think it's actually easier to use the diminished chord in the minor keys than it is in the major keys so in the key of E minor my diminished chord is my two chord now what you'll have to do there is you'll have to play a half diminished you can't play a full diminished if you want to stay in the key so a minor 7 flat 5 chord an f-sharp minor seven flat five will be our 2 chord and that will resolve pretty well to my one chord you hear that change right there from the two if I get it up here too so I think it works out all right one thing you can do to make it a little bit more tension going is go from the two chord to the dominant five chord and then back to the one chord so in the key of E minor here is my 2 chord F sharp half diminished now let's go to my dominant 5 b7 and then back to 1 that's a nice cadence right there 2 5 1 very classical very bold and you know if you did that on a church organ or something like that you'd have a very medieval kind of flair to it so do experiment with the diminished chord just keep in mind that diminished is a little goofy and I haven't really done any videos on composing with it yet but you should be experimenting with it and playing around with that now if you want to take things a step further this is still kind of limiting you still only have the 7 chords of the key and now I've talked to you about accessing that extra chord that dominant chord so where do you go from here well if you want to do some research on your own look into extended chords you don't have to just play an E minor you could play an E minor 7 right and you don't have to play a C major you could have played a C major 7 there's a lot of different chords you could have played than just these fundamentals but that's past this scope of this video so what I want you to do is research extended chords or harmonized chords and that should give you a little bit of insight as far as how you can spice up just your regular binary chords into something different alright so I hope this video gives you some insight and some cool ideas to composing and really show you how easy it is to really make things that sound like music like I said you might have had that problem if you were writing a major thinking oh this sounds lame well just switch to mitre seriously it's simple play around with your 1 your 6 and your 7 play around with that dominant 5 chord and go nuts just use lots of the 1 chord and that'll keep you in that minor flair start singing notes from minor on top start playing guitar solos from minor on top and very quickly you'll have stuff that sounds like the music that you like listening to so thank you for watching this video if you did enjoy this video I could use your support on my patreon or you could just like and subscribe and that's fine too so I will plan on seeing you in the not so just [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 1,347,930

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, how to play guitar, writing chords, writing chord changes, minor chords, minor chord progressions, write pink floyd, how to sound like pink floyd, how to write music, how to write cool songs, how to write cool chords, songwriting metal, songwriting punk, songwriting tips, songwriting theory, cool songwriting, minor keys, how to compose in minor, how to write in minor, songwriting lesson, writing music

Id: j-j4g0ktPGw

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Dreadnaught_IPA]

Wow tons of great stuff in this video. Thanks for sharing!

[u/jburton590]

Great lesson and channel

[u/psk22]

Great stuff man - thanks for doing these!

[u/ColonelLegit]

Minors are always more fun

[u/Livin_The_High_Life]

That's the best I've seen on this topic. Fast, concise, and easy to follow.

Personally I mostly have done it by ear. I play the major and keep trying each form of other chords I know until it sounds right.