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 it’s your
first time here, please help yourself to our free book “12 Music Theory Hacks to Learn
Scales & Chords”, which you can download from our website: HackMusicTheory.com.
Also, if you download our free book now, you’ll get the multitrack MIDI file from this lesson
in an upcoming weekly newsletter, and that file includes the lead melody, backing melody,
chords, bass and drums. Now, just before we jump into the lesson, we wanna thank you sincerely
for all of your comments on last week’s episode about Hack Music Theory 2020, we read
every single comment, and we’re super grateful to you! And if you haven’t had your say
yet, then please check out last week’s episode and let us know your thoughts. Alright, it’s
time to open your DAW to hack music theory. But first… tea!
Norwegian band Leprous just released their new album “Pitfalls”, and it’s truly
epic! One of the most epic moments is the chorus in their song “Alleviate”, which
we’ll hack over the next two lessons: chords this week, then melody next week.
Alright, now you’re gonna learn how to make your own epic chord progression, like Leprous.
And for the example in this lesson, we’ll be using our version that we made earlier.
So, start by setting up eight bars of 4/4, with your grid set to 1/4 notes, and your
tempo set to 116 BPM. Leprous use D natural minor for their chorus, and the natural minor
scale is a common choice for epic music, so we’ll use it too.
STEP 1. COMMON NOTES
A common note is a note that’s the same between two chords. For example, Dm and Fmaj
both contain the notes F and A, so F and A are common notes between those two chords.
And common notes are an essential part of epic music, cos having a note or two stay
the same when your chord changes, creates a super strong link between those chords that
adds power to your progression. So, when you’re choosing what chords to use from the key of
D minor, be sure to choose chords with common notes. For our progression, we chose: Dm → Fmaj
→ B♭maj → Csus4. And the reason for Csus4, is because Cmaj doesn’t have a common
note with the B♭maj before it or the Dm after it, so we changed the Cmaj to Csus4,
which gives us the common note F.
STEP 2. INVERSIONS
Now that you’ve chosen your chords, it’s time to use inversions to get the common notes
in the same place within your chords as they change. And by the way, an inversion is simply
when you change the order of the notes in a chord. For example, we inverted Fmaj to
be CFA, instead of FAC. And we did that to get those common notes (F and A) in the same
place as they are in Dm. So now F is in the middle of both chords, and A is on top of
both chords, which makes this chord change super strong, and therefore epic!
STEP 3. RHYTHM
When it comes to how long you spend on each chord (known as harmonic rhythm), keep it
simple, as your chord progression is just the foundation upon which you’ll write an
epic melody. So if get too fancy with your harmonic rhythm, your chords will actually
draw attention away from your melody. And epic music is all about the melody, which
we’ll cover next week. Now, Leprous plays each chord for one bar, so we’ve done the
same.
STEP 4. VARIATION
This is optional, but if you create a little variation in your progression, it’ll inject
some freshness. We did this by resolving Csus4 to Cmaj every second time, but then we go
straight back to Csus4, as that 4 (F) is the common note that links to the next chord,
Dm.
Alright, now let’s have a listen to our epic chord progression. Just before the playthrough
though, remember, if you download our free book now, you’ll be added to our mailing
list and we’ll send you the MIDI file of this example for free on November 21st. Thanks
for watching (or listening, if you’re on the podcast), and we’ll see you next week
when you’ll learn how to write an epic melody!