Songs that use the Creep chord progression

this video is sponsored by Melody this is the creep chord progression the chord progression used in the song Creep by Radiohead Just a four chord Loop that repeats throughout the entire duration of that song but despite being a four chord Loop the four chords using it are quite a distinctive set of chords that we don't see used together in many different songs we start on the tonic chord which in the original key is G major then we move up to the major version of the three chord which is B major then we got a semitone up to the four chord which is C and then we go from the major version of the four chord to the minor version of the IV chord c minor and then that goes back to where we started to continue the loop now the other thing that Radiohead do is they throw in these little suspended fourths like that just adding a little bit more flavor to the chord progression before foreign [Music] [Music] so later in this video we'll look at why this chord progression works and what makes it so distinctive but before that I wanted to take a look at the few examples of other songs that use this chord progression the earliest example of this chord progression I could find is the song that's when your heartaches begin originally recorded by Shep fields in 1937 but later made more famous by recordings by Elvis and The Ink Spots [Music] of friends foreign chord progression is Space Oddity by David Bowie but why I say almost is although we do have the same distinctive order of one three four minor four we don't have the exact same harmonic Rhythm as we do in Creep by which I mean the amount of time we spend on each chord is slightly different [Music] you freely made the gray foreign [Music] but I'm also fairly sure that it's Bowie's use of this creep progression here in Space Oddity that influenced its use in goodbye moonmen from Rick and Morty [Applause] [Music] now unlike most four chord Loops I really couldn't find that many examples of songs that use this progression I really had to scrape the barrel for it here's a selection of the more noteworthy examples of songs that used as creep chord progression why don't you close the door and shut the window you're not going anywhere [Music] and this [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] of course two songs that infamously use the same chord progressions creep that we haven't mentioned yet are the song that allegedly plagiarized creep get free by Lana Del Rey and the song that Radiohead themselves were sued for plagiarizing the air that I breathed made famous by The Hollies let's start by looking at the air that I breathe here the air that I breathe uses the same sequence of chords as creep however the harmonic rhythm is different here we're spending less time on the four and minor four chords than Radiohead do in creep [Music] [Music] now as I mentioned Radiohead were sued by the Publishers of the ever I breathe on behalf of the songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood who originally wrote and performed the song and as a consequence Hammond and Hazelwood are now listed as songwriters on creep and receive a cut of the royalties it should be noted though that this lawsuit wasn't won just because creep used the same chord progression as the air that I breathe a common chord progression isn't generally considered grounds for a plagiarism lawsuit no it's because creep uses a similar Melody to the air that I breathe their Radiohead were successfully sued The Melody of a song is generally considered the main distinguishing and unique element and thus if two songs have a very similar Melody it could be grounds for a plagiarism lawsuit but also it's not a coincidence that both the melody and the chords of creep are similar to the air that I breathe because the melody of a song is intrinsically tied to the Core boards that it was written on top of the melody and chords are written to work together the chords are meant to support the notes in the melody so particularly when using a fairly distinct chord progression like this one it's quite likely that songwriters will arrive at similar Melodies when writing songs with it which leads us on to Lana Del Rey get free by Lana Del Rey also uses the same chord progression as creep and this time it even uses it with the exact same harmonic Rhythm and furthermore get free also has quite a similar Melody to creep this is my commitment [Music] who never creepy [Music] what the hell am I doing here I don't belong here this likeness between the two songs didn't go unnoticed by radiohead's publisher and in 2018 they did attempt to sue Lana Del Rey for plagiarism however to date no lawsuit seems to have actually reached a court the songwriters of creep haven't been publicly added to their songwriting credits of London race song and there's been no recent public statement about what's going on in this case so it seems like the lawsuit might have been dropped Melody is an app that improves your ability to sing and improvise in different scales and modes the app listens to you as you sing or play and shows you in real time where you are in the scale [Music] one two three four this is not only a great way to improve the accuracy of your pitch when singing but it can also help you get intimately familiar with the sound and character of different modes and scales spending time exploring scales will improve your confidence when improvising and writing in that scale and it will also help you know by ear which scale degree that you're on which is a really useful skill Beyond just staying in one scale you can also input your own chord progression and the app will suggest various scales that you could use over those chords you can try out Melody with a seven day free trial use the links in the description to find out more so that's some of the other songs that use this distinctive creep chord progression but now let's take a closer look at what makes this chord progression so interesting as I said before we just start on the tonic chord which is a very common thing for chord progressions to do just firmly establish our home base then we get the first interesting chord we move to the major version of the three chord so B major in the key of G major now that is a chromatic chord it doesn't belong diatonically in the key of G major usually you'd have a B minor chord so you'd be on G and home base and use move to be minor but instead in creep we move to B major now we can consider the role of this B major chord here through two different lenses either a chromatic mediant or a secondary dominant now in a moment we'll look at what a chromatic median is but personally I think the better description of what's going on here is a secondary dominant so a secondary dominant is when you have a dominant chord of a different chord in the key so the regular dominant chord is the five chord so in the key of G major the dominant chord is D preferably D dominant seven and the job of that dominant chord is home to the one chord the G chord so a secondary dominant is the fifth chord of one of the other chords in the key so conventionally if we're in the key of G major and we went to B like we do in creep we then go to E minor because B major is the dominant chord of E minor so it's a secondary dominant taking us to this new location but that's not what happens in creep instead in creep the B chord goes up to C instead but that doesn't mean that this B isn't a secondary dominant because dominant chords don't always have to resolve back to their relative tonic chord they could go somewhere else in what's called a deceptive Cadence so what's going on here is the Cadence is instead resolving onto a different chord sort of deceiving our expectation [Music] so that's why I think it's a secondary dominance it's still functioning like a secondary dominant moving us to somewhere else functionally in the key but it's just sort of Faking out by not going to the more predictable E minor and instead going to the c major which is two out of three of the same notes as E minor so it kind of makes sense that both of those would work now I mentioned before that we could also analyze this change from G major to B major as what's called a chromatic mediant which is put shortly two chords that are a third apart which are both the same type of chord so these are both major chords and they are a major third apart which is a chromatic mediant relationship now the reason I don't think this is a good example of a chromatic mediant is chromatic medians don't usually then feel like they're part of a wider functional progression like this one does it feels like the B takes us takes us to the next chord and we kind of Loop Round in this quite functional Loop normally I think at least a chromatic median relationship would more involve just going back and forth from the G and B like that but if you want to learn more about what a chromatic mediant is you should check out my recent video about them which ironically got taken down off YouTube with a copyright strike from radiohead's record labels so if you've got a moment I would actually really appreciate you watching that video because the view count is very low because it's a re-uploaded version so to recap we start on the tonic chord we go to our secondary dominant chord which is the B major chord which guides us up to the C chord which is the fourth chord of the key and then we get that lovely minor version of the four chord which takes us back to the beginning now the minor version of the four chord here is acting in what we could call a minor plaguel cadence a regular plague or Cadence would be the movement of the chord four C going back to the tonic chord one a minor plague or Cadence then is when the IV chord has been turned into a minor chord and then we go to one and has this very sort of nostalgic sounding movement almost quite Bittersweet and melanconic but it's very warm and and fuzzy sort of Corp question there one of the things that makes this movement from the IV chord to the minor four chord to the one chord move so satisfyingly is the voice leading if we look at the different notes in the chord here's our c chord c e and G then we go to the minor chord so only one note is changing the middle note E flat and then if we voice it right we go to the G chord and that E flat has gone down onto D and the C is going down to B so these chords glue together in this very satisfying motion [Music] something you might have noticed is when I'm playing the create chord progression sometimes I'm referring to this note here as D sharp but other times I'm referring to it as E flat the same note but two different names so you might already be familiar with the fact that black notes on the piano can have these two different names a sharp name and a flat name but you might not know why why would choose one over the other and creep is actually a great example of why the context in which we hear and play a note can change which name we should use so when we're on the B major chord it's D sharp now the reason for this is when we're dealing with Triad chords so major minor diminished or augmented chords we should follow a rule where we get one letter of the alphabet B then we skip the next letter of the alphabet so there'll be no version of C in this chord no C natural no C sharp then we have to have the next letter so we need to have some form of d we're going to have D sharp then we skip another letter so we're not going to have any type of e and then we have the next letter we said we have an F in this instance an F sharp so that's the pattern we use a letter skip a letter use the letter skip a letter use a letter which means when we get to the C minor chord this time we're going to use C skip D so we can't call this D sharp because we're skipping d we're going to have e so we're going to call this E flat then we skip F and get g at the top use a letter skip a letter use the letter skip a letter use a letter that's the reason why we'd sometimes call it flat or Sharp now why are we imposing that rule well there's a few different reasons but one of the main benefits to this is when you write these chords on notation if you write a Triad spelling it the way we just spelled it now by playing a letter of the alphabet skipping a letter playing letter Etc you'll wind up always with this neat stack of notes like a traffic light and the advantage to that is when someone looks at that when they read that notation they instantly know that that is a Triad chord which makes it so much easier to read it if sometimes when you encountered that chord it was spelled differently with a D sharp instead of an E flat it would make it look like it's a different type of chord in this instance it would make it look like some sort of sas2 chord but it's not that it's a Triad so although these rules at first can seem a bit sort of trivial they do make sense in the long run it makes it easier to understand and play 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Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 2,227,820

Keywords: creep, chords, songs, radiohead, lana del rey, hollies, bowie, other songs, examples, secondary dominant, music theory, analysis, explained, chromatic mediant

Id: NyiEMdbfjG8

Length: 18min 0sec (1080 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023