3 Chord Progression Hacks

Most Music can be analysed in terms of the Major Scale. The Major Scale is made of 7 notes from the 12 available notes in Western Music. If we took the Chromatic Scale (the 12 available notes) and kept certain notes we’d have the tone/semi-tone formula for the Major Scale which is: Tone, Tone, Semi-Tone, Tone, Tone, Tone, Semi-Tone. If we started on C for example, we’d get the following notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, B and back to C again for the next octave.

We can stack any of these notes to create a chord. Generally, however, for most common types of Chord such as Major, Minor etc, we take a note (eg, C) skip the next note, and grab the 3^rd note, in this case E, skip the next note after that and grab the 5^th note available which is G. This spells C, E, G which is a C Major Triad. If we take this formula starting of each note we end up with the following chords: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and B diminished. I call this the “Take one and skip one” concept, which gives us our usual Diatonic Harmony (Diatonic simply meaning, chords in a key) We can add 7ths and 9ths to each chord by continuing the “Take one/Skip One” idea, so for C Major (C, E and G) we can add B and that makes C Major into C Major 7^th.

Please know that this is a very quick whistle stop tour of Diatonic Harmony and Chord Formulas, but once understood it will give you the foundations of Harmony that helps when mapping out, learning and understanding Music.

Each chord from the major scale can be numbered, we can suggest chord progressions by saying it’s a “1 4 5” progression, a classic progression, in the key of C this would be a progression consisting of C Major, F Major and G Major. You can create many combinations of progression, they will come up all over the place, so keep your ears, eyes and brain out to help quickly recognise them. It really helps with memorising, learning and creating music.

There’s a lot that can be done with simple diatonic progressions, so experiment. You can change keys between chord progressions, you can go back and forth between different combinations, add 7ths, 9ths and 11ths etc, experiment with suspended harmony (sus2 and sus4 chords diatonic to the key) and even experiment with inversions of chords within diatonic harmony to get more out of the simple system.

Once you have a handle on Diatonic Harmony, we can start using the basic ‘backbone’ of diatonic harmony to then experiment with changing certain chord qualities within the key to help shift or pivot into other keys either for transitions or temporarily within a progression. Of course, nothing beats your ear and what feels good, but there are many simple tricks that can be done transform a basic progression.

Chord Quality Change: We could take a 145 in C: C Major, F Major and G Major. On the repeat we could change C from Major to Minor. We could even experiment with the extensions, this sometimes can lead to other interesting options: The Cm could be treated as a 2, 3 or 6 chord in another diatonic key for example we could start out like this:

C F G

Then on the repeat, go to Cm

C F G Cm

We could treat Cm as the 6 chord of Eb Major, I might for fun just take the 4 and 5 from Eb Major now to complete the progression:

C F G Cm, Ab, Bb.

This could be looped, see if you can come up with your own variations.

Another cool trick is to transition to a chord which its root note isn’t in the original key that started out.

C to Eb Major for example.

These kinds of progressions I’ve heard called Chromatic Mediants, is something a lot of composers do in soundtracks. There are lots of variations of this. What you do with it, well that’s up to you!

Once we’ve experimented with Diatonic Harmony and Swapping out a few chords. We should begin to have a fairly wide view on how chords can be stuck together to create interesting progressions. However, once you know this, I feel that one of the most effective and intuitive ways to create a progression is start with a simple single note melody, and then build the harmony around that. Composers and Songwriters have done this as long as music has existed. One of my personal modern favourite writers that does this is Nick Johnston who builds his instrumental compositions around very emotive, simple melodies with epic arrangements and harmony.

Sometimes the chord progression that results from starting from a Melody is very simple, sometimes it can take interesting twists and turns, sometimes a basic melody can constantly be re-contextualised throughout a piece of music several times.

A simple way to start this experiment is take a 3 note melody and see if you can find a bass movement for it, then see if you can ‘fill’ in the notes between the top note of the melody and the lowest note in the bass. Use the ‘tools’ of your understanding Diatonic, Non Diatonic Harmony and Chord progressions you know and love. Follow your heart hear though, search for what sounds best for you. You’ll create voicings and melodies within the chords themselves that you might not have thought of by simply focusing on building a chord progression from block chords.