How & why to use MIDI chord packs

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i want to talk to you about midi cord packs you may have been getting targeted advertising for midi chord packs and you may be wondering what their role could or should be in your music creation process well today we're going to discuss exactly that to understand how to use a midi chord pack the first thing you need to know is what a chord progression is this concept goes a little bit deeper than what some of you probably think this is and so we're going to go into that a little bit right now just to understand what it's about and how this is a determining factor for your music composition in a lot of music styles then i'll show you some examples of how to really implement it with the real midi chord pack in practice let's get into it [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog brussels we're an online music school not just a youtube channel if you'd like to support us in these videos we're making we've just started a patreon as well where we're going to be putting the project files for a lot of these videos online okay so chord progressions what is it and why should you care about it as you may remember from your brief adventures into music theory a chord is nothing more or less than just a few notes being played at the same time let's imagine a piano keyboard so if you play a few notes at the same time you are playing a chord chords have a relatively high amount of emotional value inside of them some chords are more happy some chords are more sad some chords are triumphant etc and particularly when we move from one chord to another chord in a song something happens and we get an emotion a quality of feeling happens at that transition moment so what a lot of songs do in order to deliver a particular emotional message is they structure up all of their musical content around a certain chord progression that is a short series of chords that have been chosen for their feelings that then get repeated over and over again in the song and all the instruments that are playing in the song they take into account that chord progression when they play so it's important to remember that a chord progression is not any particular instrument's job there's no such thing really as a chord progression for the piano or for the guitar there's only a chord progression which is an abstract structure which sits behind the music and it informs the notes that all the other instruments are playing at any given moment so that means that any particular chord progression already has an emotion in it and then any production that uses that chord progression is going to also have that emotion and this is why it's often interesting to get it clear in your mind what your chord progression is going to be before you even go into production let me show you this with an example imagine we've got ourselves this chord progression it sounds like this [Music] [Laughter] we'll play it again now that was being played by sine waves the simplest least designed sound that exists right and yet you could feel some kind of emotion listening to that right there's something about those chords that gives you a particular emotion and now we can do a production around these chords to harness that emotional energy and then use the sound design that we want to denote a particular genre like imagine if we constructed an old school house song around this it would sound a little something like this [Music] did you feel how that somehow had the similar emotion to that sine chord progression because it's the magical glue underlying the whole thing let me do the same for a drum and bass sound design palette [Music] that also had the same chord progression underlying it just faster and with a drum and bass beat but the synthesizers anything tonal respected that chord progression a second chord progression over here might sound like this this is a slightly different emotional quality than the previous one okay now let's listen to it in house music [Music] and the same again drum and bass again the same chord progression keeps the same emotion however the overall timbre changes now let's do a more special chord progression one that's even weirder like you can stick to very safe chords but you can also stick to kind of special chords and so let's try one with very special chords like this [Laughter] this is a pretty atypical non-standard chord progression in-house music you feel that descending energy that same vibe from the first one in this production and now for the german base one [Music] so i tried to keep the production concepts the exact same for all three of these examples only changing the chord progression that underlies it and you may or may not be surprised to know that the majority of popular songs that you're familiar with actually use the same chords over and over and over again it's really just the instrumentation played over the top of it the changes that gives the song its character check out this video by the axis of awesome it is a very clear example of how a few simple and effective chords have been used throughout decades to create popular music that you are very familiar with so hopefully by now it's clear that if you are designing music it could be wise to sit down before you start making music to actually figure out what you're going to do harmonically in your song this is the point at which will be very very helpful if you had learned an instrument and understood a little bit of music theory in order to construct something like this yourself either using intuition or by using theory or by using your skills as an instrumentalist however very many people have come into electronic music production not following that traditional path of instrumentalism a lot of people have started with the software and are trying to figure out how to make music into the software and so they need to figure out how to get effective sounding chord progressions into their songs now here's the big question what's your workflow to create one of these chord progressions one workflow for example that's not available to everyone would be to sit down at a piano start jamming and then once you find something that works figure out how to bring that into the dw another might be to go to guitartabs.com find the chords for your favorite song and just copy the chords for your favorite song super valid approach but here is where i see a lot of people getting stuck and the reason i see them getting stuck is because they are over thinking this step yes music theory exists to help you describe and understand what's going on in an efficient piece of music but music should generally come from an emotional place not from a theoretical place unless you're trying to impress people with how technically skilled you are more usually you're trying to touch people's emotions and so you need to figure out which chord progression touches you emotionally and you're not going to get that by applying music theory and starting to click in the piano roll individual notes i mean you might but that's a really indirect and very intellectualized way of going about it a better way would be what i would call shopping for emotions what you might prefer to do is audition a number of chord progressions and figure out which one matches your intention your emotional intention the closest this way you can be thinking with the emotional part of your brain not with the intellectual part of your brain you can just audition a number of different chord progressions say yes this one suits me this one doesn't suit me so much this one doesn't now this one this is the one i fall in love with and you start to use that in your track and this is the point at which midi packs can actually be useful let me show you what you get when you actually open up midi chord pack this one in particular is the one by unison which they were so kind to send me over so let's open it up so first you get a whole bunch of keys or tone centers if it's not clear what these are i refer you back to my video on music theory and have a look at that so there's no particular reason why you would choose one over another here just choose one and commit to it don't ask too many questions okay imagine we go into f all right what are we getting here we're getting triads extended chords borrowed chords and progressions what we really want is we want to get into chord progressions and if you're going to chord progressions imagine that you've got the ones that obey the rules and the ones that break the rules you can kind of see it like that the simpler ones and the more advanced ones let's choose one of the simpler ones for now major or minor okay here we just have to choose the upfront emotion of our song do we want our song to feel more major and uplifting or more sad nostalgic for today let me choose a minor one a lot of electronic music is formulated in minor so here we go we've got 12 chord progressions that all are going to work pretty well we can drag them in here and so what i would recommend doing is i would recommend on your midi channel putting the simplest sound possible you don't want sound design to be distracting you from what we're about to do what we're thinking about here is the quality of the chords the feeling of the chords as we move from one chord into another because that's the magic of a chord progression right it's the feeling when you go from one chord into another sound design is a completely different domain that we'll move into afterwards so in ableton my go to is under instruments operator because its default is just a sine wave and i know exactly it's going to sound very simple like this so there we go that was a chord progression let me try a different one that feels like a very different song very beautiful as well in its own right but maybe maybe i prefer this one also very valid maybe i prefer this one you see how i'm shopping for emotions here i'm just placing them in there see how i feel and move on to the next one if i had to construct all of these from my mind using music theory clicking in the piano roll i would not be able to choose fast enough i would not get anything done and as a point of contrast let me show some of the advanced progressions as well here's an advanced progression [Music] you see how that has a much more sort of nuanced palette of color in a way so let me try some more it's very beautiful very jazzy some are very long as well not all of them are four chords let's go here [Laughter] very beautiful but let me commit to one of the chords and i'll go for one of the simpler ones here let me commit to this one for instance now here i want you to pause you as an artist have a few very important decisions to make here don't just use this as is straight out of the box critical decisions that you have to make are how many chords are going to be in your chord progression most of these examples are four chord chord progressions that's a very pop music approach to music a lot of minimalist music is built up over only two chords or maybe three chords once you go up to four chords feels like a very radio friendly format that's maybe very good and maybe that's what you want but a lot of underground dance music doesn't go for four chords it goes for two or three chords so don't take four chords as a rule you can shave off one of the chords here and only use three of the chords or two of the chords that's fine in this case let's use two again we're changing things and see how they feel okay so imagine we delete this one move this one over and play it twice as long let's see how that feels [Laughter] [Music] okay that felt okay but what if we undid that and instead we deleted the last one and duplicated the third one instead let's see what that's like [Music] okay imagine we prefer this for our song you'll notice we're still using a four bar loop because using multiples of four does tend to be such a common pattern that maybe it's worth sticking to it imagine we like this okay let's consolidate this we select both of these and we do command or control j that's going to consolidate that into one now the next decision we have to make is determine the speed of change a lot of chord progressions like this are presented with one chord change per bar because that's more or less the default it's such a common pattern that so much music does that it makes sense to present chord progressions like that but it's definitely not the only way for instance what we just created was a two bar chord right there and in fact you don't necessarily need your chords to respect the edge of these bars so what can we do for instance we can make this one twice as long we can make this one a little bit longer and this one a little bit shorter and as always we're just gonna hit play on it and feel it [Laughter] [Music] see that already gives us a different emotion it's slightly less standard so imagine we like this and we want to commit to this final chord progression how do we now move into the sound design stage well inside this chord progression you have to think of two different parts there is the root notes that are going here and then there are the chords built up over the root notes over here it's very helpful that they give us the root notes an octave lower because the chords up over top might actually be played in different inversions if you don't know what that is check the music theory video i mentioned earlier so some music composition principles there's many principles that you can learn over the time but two of the very simplest ones might be that the bass usually plays the root note so these three notes that's what the bass will play and then the melody will probably play some combination of these notes so while this bass note is playing the melody will play some combination of these notes while this note is playing the melody will play some combination of these notes and while this note is playing in the bass the melody will be playing some combination of these notes this is by no means a hard rule but it's a really solid starting point for your composition so to make the simplest quick composition based on this what we would do is we would make two midi tracks one we would call the bass and what we would call the lead and we can disable the midi track with the chord progression because if you've understood what i've just said you'll understand that no instrument has to play the chord progression as is the chord progression is an invisible glue that binds the composition of our track together right okay so you copy over the clip onto both of these instrument lanes and for the base you deactivate all the high notes and for the lead you can if you want this activate these three on the lead what i suggest that we do is that we put an arpeggiator on there so it's going to arpeggio over these notes and for the bass we're going to just find some nice long sustained bass sound in fact let me just copy over the bass sound that i had on this drum and bass production so i click here hold down shift so everything gets selected and i just copy it over if you want access to these exact sounds to patreon you'll download the file there so let's listen to that [Music] cool now let's add the lead and so the lead will be an arpeggiator and then some kind of short melodic sound let's go into instruments wave table find ourselves some kind of lead like for instance this basic wind lead and so it's going to sound a bit like [Music] this [Laughter] and because of this slightly unexpected chord change there i think we also need some drums so let me copy over the drum and bass drums because i think we're at a very high speed here so let's just copy everything together group it call this example listen to it all together [Music] [Music] and you see how that suddenly has the emotion of the chord progression that we made that feeling that you got when the chords changed from one chord to the next that's the final deliverable feeling that we delivered to our audience in this entire production so getting that clear in our mind up front was the key to making our songs emotionally impactful so in conclusion should you get yourself some midi chord packs so ask yourself this question when you get into production do you have a strategy do you have a plan for how to make your songs harmony work there are many strategies to get to a chord progression like the one we engineered here but as far as i can tell all the efficient strategies rely somehow on auditioning different emotions until you figure out the emotion that sticks and so that means you need to put yourself in the position that you can shop for emotions for some people that means playing an instrument for some people that means listening to other songs and taking the chord progressions from those songs but for many people that means using a midi chord pack so they can browse different chord progressions see how they make them feel emotionally then adjust them to their song and use them to construct various types of instrumentation around so if you find yourself staring at the piano roll in your diw slightly petrified by the infinite number of possibilities on there then maybe a midi chord back is exactly the right thing to start composing emotionally impactful music without over intellectualizing everything by trying to start from music theory to construct this stuff from music theory i hope this has been helpful in clarifying a topic that can be confusing to quite a few beginners put the stuff to good use by making music that touches you emotionally don't worry about music theory too much intellectually until next time stay safe be good to one another keep producing and bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 18,178

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Id: Lyc8t4_4RK0

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021