hey, welcome to 12tone!
check this out: (bang) sounds pretty cool, right?
it's got a lot of motion, and plenty of weird-looking chords that seem like they'd make it really
hard to analyze.
now what would you say if I told you that, from a theoretical perspective, it's actually
just two chords?
it's basically just Eb major to Bb7 and back again.
so why does it sound like so much more?
well, let's step back for a second and talk about line cliches.
we've looked at these before in a couple different song analyses, but I figured it was time they
got their own video, so let's do this.
line cliches are a technique for creating a sense of harmonic motion without actually
changing the harmony, at least not very much.
they're a pretty simple idea: you take a chord, like this Eb major, then you pick one note
in that chord and start to drift it up or down a half step at a time.
for instance, if we picked Bb, the 5th degree of the chord, it'd move up to B, C, Db, and
so on, all while the other chord tones stayed the same.
if we instead picked Eb, the root, we'd take it down to D, Db, and C. we could also start
on G, the third degree of the chord, but since it's between the other two it's hard to decide
which direction it should go, and since the third degree plays such an important role
in defining how that chord sounds, we tend not to base line cliches off it.
it loses too much of the chord's identity, which defeats the purpose.
the most common line cliches, though, are usually based on minor chords, so if we take
Eb minor and do the same things, we get this (bang) and this.
(bang) these again create a sort of mixed sensation where the harmony feels like it's
moving forward, but it also feels like it's sitting still.
as a brief side-note, moving a half-step at a time like this is called chromatic motion.
that term will come up again later, but first, what are these actually useful for?
well, the big thing is to make chords last longer.
often, the sense of motion in a piece of music is driven by changing chords, and line cliches
give you a way to do that without actually changing the underlying harmony.
you're cycling through a lot of different versions of the same chord instead of going
to new ones.
this means you can write whole, long sections out of only a couple actual chords, like we
talked about in the Hey Bulldog video, where the entire chorus is actually just B minor
and E minor, but they still manage to create this long sense of rising tension thanks to
line cliches.
but there's another benefit to playing chords slowly, which we talked about a couple weeks
ago in our four-chord loops video: if you play each chord for long enough, you break
down the harmonic structure of the piece and allow yourself the freedom to experiment more
without being bound to something like a key center.
line cliches are like the ultimate slow-playing technique: you can make a single chord last
for like 10 seconds, or even longer, without feeling like you've just stopped moving.
one of my favorite ways to exploit this comes from one of the major line cliches we saw
earlier: (bang) this pattern ends on a dominant 7th chord, and as we've discussed elsewhere,
dominant 7th chords really want to resolve.
they have a strong, directional pull toward any chord whose root is a perfect 5th down,
so we can take this Eb7 and resolve it to Ab major, at which point we can turn around
and start another line cliche: (bang) this time ending on Ab7, which again wants to resolve,
this time to Db, where we can start another line cliche, and we can continue through this
cycle indefinitely, moving through every possible key without ever really feeling lost.
but let's go back to that thing from the beginning.
(bang) this is called an Omnibus progression, and it's the same basic idea, except this
time we have two lines moving away from each other.
we can ignore the Eb chords at the beginning and end: they're not important right now.
what we're interested in is the five chords in the middle, starting with the Bb7.
the notes are arranged such that D is the lowest, then F, Ab, and finally Bb on top.
those middle two notes are going to stay perfectly still: every single one of these chords has
an F and an Ab in it.
meanwhile, the D in the bass and the Bb on top are going to switch places: the D walks
down to a low Bb while the Bb goes up to a high D. if we just follow those two lines
we get this: (bang) which almost looks like the notes are running away from each other.
once they swap places, we have our Bb7 again, and since it still wants to resolve to Eb,
we can break the chromatic motion and go back to our I chord, making this just an elaborately
decorated dominant resolution.
but we don't have to stop there.
we can keep going as long as we want, even going through the entire octave and ending
back where we started: (bang) you may notice, though, that this ending feels less like a
resolution than it did before.
I have a couple theories on that point.
the first is simply a matter of voicings: our moving lines have gotten so far away from
the inner voices that the entire thing starts to feel somewhat hollow, weakening the overall
harmonic cohesion.
my second theory is that we've just been sitting in this complex, chromatic weirdness for longer,
so our ears aren't expecting a sudden return to standard functional harmony.
I'm not really sure which of those factors is to blame, although I suspect it's a mix
of both.
to avoid this extreme stretching, though, we can also spread the rising line out between
our voices.
the bass should still do the entire descending part, or it loses that omnibus feel, but we
could, say, do something like this (bang) where there's always one voice moving up,
but we switch around which one it is in order to create a more coherent harmony, and when
we get to the end, we still have a pretty strong resolution.
it's not quite as striking as the version where one line does the whole thing, but it's
not as confusing either, so that's nice.
plus, this one has a bunch of dominant 7th chords along the way, and you can stop at
any of them you want, giving you a nice handy tool for smoothly switching keys.
anyway, that's basically it, but before we go, I did want to mention that the academic
talk I did a while back is online now!
actually it's been online for a while but I forgot to actually mention it in a video.
I made it unlisted 'cause I wasn't sure how many people would care, but there's a link
in the description if you want to check it out!
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