Okay, so you’ve got a great bass line, but now, how do you write a great chord progression
on top? That’s what you’ll learn in this lesson. But first… tea!
Hello revolutionary music makers, I’m Kate Harmony, this is Ray Harmony, and welcome
to Hack Music Theory, where we help you make great music that stands out. If you’re new
to our channel, please help yourself to our free book “12 Music Theory Hacks to Learn
Scales & Chords”, which you can download from our website. Alright, it’s time to
open your DAW to hack music theory.
Over the last couple of lessons we’ve showed you the workflow needed to overcome that blank
screen and get a new song started in minutes, so if you missed those, check ‘em out. Right,
now you’re at the point where you have a solid section with bass and drums, but it’s
not finished yet. You still need to add that vital musical ingredient: Chords. So, follow
these 3 steps to add a chord progression:
STEP 1. ROOTS
Just a quick heads up if you missed last week’s lesson, our bass line here is in the key of
G minor, with a few chromatic notes. Right, so start by copying and pasting your bass
line into your chords track, then muting it. That’s just there for reference. Now, the
first thing you need to do is decide what chords you wanna build above what notes. And
the obvious thing to do is to approach each note in your bass line (excluding chromatic
notes) as the root note of a chord, for example, G would be the root note of Gm. And this approach
is great for most notes, but try switch it up on at least one note, which is what we
did here at the end, where we decided to build Dm above A in the bass. In other words, we
approached that A as the 5 of the chord (D F A). So here are the root notes for the chords
we chose. For every longer note in your bass line, you usually wanna think of it as the
1 or 5 of a chord, cos those are the most stable notes. But then on the other hand,
you usually wanna ignore all those quicker notes that you added to your bass line in
step 3 of last week’s lesson. Those are what we call non-harmonic notes, they’re
not part of the harmony, they’re just there to make it a better melody.
STEP 2. RHYTHM
Right, so now you need to decide where your chords are going to change. This is known
as harmonic rhythm, in other words, the rhythm of the chords. And we created an interesting
harmonic rhythm by placing some of our chord changes on off-beats. This step is sadly left
out by most songwriters and producers these days, and as a result, most chord progressions
have a super boring harmonic rhythm, like changing on the predictable beat 1 or beat
3. Remember, no matter how great the chords are in a progression, it’ll end up getting
boring if the harmonic rhythm is too predictable. And finally, once you’ve decided on your
harmonic rhythm, simply fill in the triads.
STEP 3. FLOW
Now, while that’s sounding good, it’s definitely not sounding great, yet! And that’s
why this next step is such a game-changer, and that is to smooth out your chord changes,
so you don’t get those disjointed jumps from one chord to the next, like we have now.
There are two ways to do this, depending on whether you have a common note, like between
Fmaj and Cm (as both chords have the note C), or, if you don’t have a common note,
like between Gm and Fmaj. We’ve made two lessons specifically on how to use both of
these methods, so check them out at the links below. And once you’ve done that, you’ll
not only have chords that all flow beautifully into each other, but you’ll also have added
a melodic element to your progression, which you’ll hear in the playthrough coming up.
Adding a melodic element to chord progressions is sadly another step that most songwriters
and producers don’t do nowadays, so simply by applying this step to your chord progressions,
your music will easily stand out!
So, now that you’ve got one section down, how do you write the other sections? Then,
how do you transition between them (especially when they’re in different keys)? And then,
how do you structure and arrange your song? These are issues many songwriters and producers
struggle with, and that’s exactly why we made our online apprenticeship. This video
course guides you through every step of the music making process, from blank screen to
finished song. So, if you wanna learn our secret method for writing (and finishing!)
great songs, sign up now at HackMusicTheory.com
Alright, now let’s have a listen to our finished section. Thanks for watching (or
listening, if you’re on the podcast), and we’ll see you next week!