Today i'm going to show you seven chord tricks which will make your music WAY
more interesting – regardless of the genre that you produce! Now that's SUPER important because
chords are one of the things that conveys most feeling and emotion in songs – and if people
like your songs (they're feeling something) – they listen to it over and over again,
which is going to build your authority in Spotify, Apple Music and Soundcloud,
and grow your following faster than ever before! It doesn't matter if you don't have a midi
keyboard... I'm just using the laptop today and the piano roll editor, so without further ado,
let's hop into the DAW and get it done! I'm using Ableton Live 11 but these techniques
will work in any DAW including fl studio and logic and the first trick is to use the base
notes of the chords as the bass for your track so this is the chord progression we're working with
just simple triads and a really quick tip if you are using ableton live
then you've got the scale button here and you can then press the scale button in ableton
and it's only going to show the notes from within that scale so that's a really quick tip on how to
make chords easily you just kind of skip a note each time and there you can see we've got our
triads anyway we're going to grab the bass notes of each of these chords like that copy them and
then just paste them into a midi clip in the bass sequence but the chances are these bass notes are
going to be a bit high so we're going to select them all and notch them down a couple of octaves
so that's the first trick really quick the next chord trick i'm going to show you is to
use seventh chords and sus chords and don't worry if that sounds a bit complex because i'm going to
show you really quickly so we've got our normal chords here and let's have a quick look at the
chord structure so if we press scale you can see this is the first note of the chord this
is the second note and this is the third note but if you look at the notes in the scale you can see
that this note here is on the third interval in the scale and this is on the fifth so this is the
root the third and the fifth and adding a seventh is just as simple as counting up to the seventh
interval in that scale so now we have a seventh chord now this doesn't work on every single chord
some of them sound a bit weird and if it sounds a bit weird just
not it up one more interval or down one interval and it's gonna sound good either way
let's put a seventh here
seventh is going to sound a bit weird so we'll notch it down there
actually we're not [ __ ] up there for a change
sounds a bit weird there so we'll notch it up and now it sounds like this
much more interesting right now suspended four or suspended two that's usually referred to as
sus4 or sus2 chords is simply where you move the middle note of that normal chord
either up one interval or down one interval so let's get rid of these seventh chords just
to make things less complex and here we are going to move this third chord up one interval and that
would be a sus4 chord because it's on the fourth interval of that chord one two three four and then
let's move it back to a normal board afterwards and that sounds like this it's kind of epic
in fact let's do it on this one because it's easier to hear because it's a longer chord
and a sus 2 chord is simply where you move that middle note down one interval
i don't really like it on the first one so much so i'll take that one out cool tip number three
is using chord inversions and all that means is changing the order of the notes in the chord so if
we see this note up here it's kind of an outlier it's quite far out of the range of everything else
and chords generally sound a bit nicer and a bit cohesive if they're in a smaller range
within the keyboard so this one here i can just hold shift notch it down an octave
and we can see it's much closer to the other notes now if we add some seventh chords and then
invert those we can make things really interesting so that's the seventh chord
as is that so let's notch that one down and this one down
we could leave that one up there actually and now all these notes are kind of close to each other
so now you're getting really interesting let me know if you're enjoying this and
if you aren't going to use these core techniques in your music let me know in the comments below
okay core tip number four this is where we are going to use an arpeggiator to play those chords
so if we duplicate this chord track and we are going to choose a different instrument
let's just call that art let's put serum on there and we're going to select another sound
from the edm tips creative toolkit which you can download below this video now let's put
an arpeggiator in front of that instrument and we can double up that rate and now we have this
and with the base and everything else
sounding pretty cool now don't forget you can also download my free chord bible below this video as
well and then tip number five is using syncopated rhythms to make those chords more interesting as
well so once again we're going to duplicate that chord track we'll call this stabs and we're going
to choose a different sound we'll just use a simple piano so if we go into our chords and
then just make them play on every beat like this so one two three four and now we're going to cut
off a quarter of each of these notes by dragging the other ones over them like this there's one
drag it across drag it across and we can we've got space to add one more as well
and we'll add that on the beat and now you've got this really interesting syncopated rhythm
and let's add that rhythm to the third chord as well remembering about the sus4
chord that we created as well so all together it sounds like this
which i think sounds pretty cool okay cool trick number six is spreading those chords over
different instruments this is a bit of a professor tip i picked up from axwell and it's a great way
to use more instruments without cluttering up your frequency space too much so i'm going to duplicate
the main chords again i'm going to just call this chords 2 and we're going to choose a different
instrument for chords 2. again into the creative toolkit so now we have two instruments for these
main chords and all we're going to do is spread those notes of the chords across two instruments
so for this instrument here we could use the top two notes of the chord
and then for this other instrument that's above it we can just use the bottom two notes of that chord
so now we have this effect let's do that for the other chords really quickly
and all together we have this
the last trick number seven is using automation to add movement and interest
to those chords throughout the track so let's duplicate those chords that we've created and
we're going to group them together so we can easily apply some automation let's put a filter
over them and we're going to use a low pass filter because it's a very common technique
sounds really cool and really easy to do so let's start off with the filter down
and then open it up over the course of the track like so put some automation in
and of course you can take out certain layers when you want as well so we might want to take out
these big high cords for the break or we might want to bring them in for the break actually
so there you have it guys those are my top seven chord tricks try them in your own music
let me know how you get on in the comments below and don't forget to download my free
chord bible below this video until next time thanks for watching cheers and happy producing
you