How to Add Interest to Your Chord Progression
Twice a month we revisit some of our reader favorite posts from throughout the history of Audiotuts+. This tutorial was first published in August 2008.
Sometimes we spend hours, days, even months, struggling to find the perfect chord progression to suit the lyrics we’ve written. And then we find it, only to get bored sick of the same chords being repeated over, and over, and over again.
If you listen to some of the great songwriters, you’ll notice that the chorus progressions, if not all progressions in the song, are constantly being varied in both subtle and obvious ways. This tutorial will take you through a bunch of ways to vary up your chord progressions to retain not only your own interest, but your listeners’ interest as well.
Note: this tutorial contains embedded audio that will not display in a feed reader. Click back to the site to read the tutorial with audio or download the Play Pack at the end of the tut.
Step 1
The first thing to do is get an initial chorus chord progression going. I’ve whipped something up here; nothing too fancy, just a few simple chords, but enough for the purposes of this tutorial. I added some bass and drums just so you don’t fall asleep listening!
This is a standard C – F – C – G progression.
Main Progression
Step 2
Try an inversion on a repeating chord. In this progression, C major is played twice, so we use a 1st inversion by switching the order of the notes played from C – E – G to E – G – C. You can hear the added interest in the clip below.
1st Inversion
Step 3
Adding a 7th to one of the chords can add interest. Frequently, musicians add a seventh to the final chord in the progression so that the transition back to the root chord is smoother. In this example, however, I added a 7th to the second chord, the F.
Add a 7th
Step 4
You can extend the chords beyond the intervals within the octave in order to add some higher pitches to the mix. Those intervals that sound terrible when played as a harmony, like the root note and the second, can often sound good when the minor second is lifted by an octave.
I’ve added some ninths; pay attention to the difference between the first C maj chord and the second. Because the second is a 1st inversion, the extension isn’t so far away from the rest of the chord and sits in better. There’s also an extended note in the F maj.
Extending Chords
Step 5
Altering the bass note can add some interest. When you’re using keys, it can be the bass note of the chord on the piano itself along with the bass guitar, though in guitar-driven music it tends to be just the bass guitar.
In this example I’m going to use both. You can hear it on the G maj at the end of the progression where I’ve used the major 3rd, a B, as the bass note.
Shift Bass Note
Step 6
Use a pad to fill out the progression, in this case, strings, since this allows you to build on the notes in the chord progression without adding even more to the piano, which is getting crowded. The root notes of the piano chords are really only used in the bassy bottom notes of the triads, so we can counter-act this emphasis this by using thirds on bottom and the root on top in the strings to fill out the higher frequencies.
However, because the second C maj is an inversion, the root note is actually on top, so I’ve used the root note on bottom with a third on top in the violin arrangement.
When I say “bottom” I’m talking about duplicates around C3 and C4 and the “top” is around C5, so we’re really focusing on the higher pitches that have largely been neglected until now.
Pad the Top End
Step 7
A fairly common method of shaking up a repetitive chord progression is to throw in a suspended chord. A suspended chord is one where the third has been lowered to a major second, or pushed up to a perfect fourth.
In our example, I’ve suspended the thirds in our G chord to become perfect fourths.
Suspend a Chord
Step 8
What I hope you’ve noticed is that the example file is now sounding pretty busy and over-the-top. The trick to making a chord progression interesting is to use a couple of these tricks here and there and changing them up each time the progression repeats. If you make the same adjustments the whole way through the progression each time it plays, not only does it sound terribly busy, it’s just as boring because these tricks work by creating variations.
Always remember that these tricks are to be used only to add interest, not to become the foundation of the chord progression.
I’ll leave you with the before and after: our plain, vanilla progression that we started with, followed by the combination of our modifications.
Before and After
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By Joel Falconer
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Simple but effective; it can prove useful to keep these in mind, thanks.
Great!
I’d like to see more of this type of tutorials!
And MIDI files in the ZIP would be a great addition.
Awesome! And it loops nicely!
Moar: Passing notes/chords. Each chord doesn’t need to last a bar. Oh, and rythmic patterns are what can really keep things interesting.
Boris: Sounds like a good idea to me – I’ll export some MIDI from Reason next time I do this.
Michael: Good extra tips, thanks mate!
Thanks for breaking the ice on this subject, Joel. A tutorial on some chord combos would be nice. I’m not sure how to say this, but it seems that chords follow trends in today’s music. For instance, Yann Tiersen often uses Bm – D – F#m – A. (Like in “Comptine d’un autre ete: L’apres midi”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAZjufMLZDI&feature=related
Or Max Richter’s Bm – A – D – G. Oh, and regarding this combo in “The nature of daylight” he makes variations on the chord progression in a truly beautiful way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rluU6BGpKw&feature=PlayList&p=72014EE0DEF9CBB0&index=1
Not to mention Pachelbel’s Canon chords that seem to have invaded the music industry.
P.S. the chords are written as in D key. Not sure which key the songs are actually in.
Either way, there are some popular chord progression out there that one could identify as a trend.
Great Tutorial. But I don’t understand step 2. Whats the resulting chord progession here? Hope somebody could help me out
Sascha: inversions change the order the notes of a triad are played in. A regular C maj chord is comprised of a C, E and G, played in that order from lowest to highest note (in terms of pitch). The first inversion would displace the sequence by one note, so it would become E, G and then C on top instead of on the bottom. A second inversion starts with the G and ends on E.
loved it! Definitely would like to see more tuts like this one!
will try this
Needs more Roman numerals. After all, it’s best not to confine ourselves to a specific key when giving examples.
Hi Joel,
I’m new to music theory and an pretty much learning it on my own. Not sure if this question fits here. I was just wondering how ‘scale tone chords’ fit here. As i understand the 1st,4th and 5th chords of a certain scale should be majors and 2,3,6 minors…with the 7th diminished. Is this a rule…for example in your chord progression CFCG..are they all majors? Thanks a lot for your help…sorry if this is too much of a beginner question..but it would really help my understanding.
Hi ali,
If you’re in major scale this is the “rule” for making the scale tone chords.
In the example progression they’re all majors, and if you put a minor it would be identified, like Fm (but this one would not come from the major scale of C).
Hope it helps…
Great Tut..Love to see more
On G sus you should change the note B on the bass line: it create a minor 9th (B -> C) with the 4th of the G sus chord, to my ears that thing doesn’t sound good at all, specially in this genre of music..
Messy. Are you a composer? If so, stop.
I know that was just a simple example, but the final chord sounded especially awful. I could do better. But I can’t be arsed because nothing good ever comes out of my attempts at composition. A I-IV-I-V progression though….you can do better, surely.
Very nice. As a newbie – all this talk about majors and minors was a bit out of my depth but I got the gist of what you were saying. It’s amazing how music is so repetitive isn’t it? And yet – we still need to twiddle and tweak to stop the repetitiveness becoming boring. It’s a like a conundrum. We got to be repetitive, but not boringly so.
it would be very nice to see the next tutorial is about the modulations. I mean how to change CFG loop to another interesting loop swiftly.
Hope to see it soon.
Nice work, thanks
The end result is an over-spiced dish. Sorry, but it’s true. Little was said about voice leading. It’s great to have interesting chords, but one must think horizontally at the same time.
Also, what about showing notation of the chords? A tutorial on harmony really ought to be notated, and roman numeral analysis should be given as well.
I would like to add the use of borrowed chords to this already awesome list. For example, you can use an Fminor chord instead of the Fmajor.
Excellent tutorial. Brings back some of the foundations I’ve learned so many years ago.
a few points:
1) I wish they had something to let me know if someone replies back to my post (an email maybe)?
2) Any way you can add the notes of the chords (maybe a piano roll) or midi files? This way I visually get to see what you mean when you inverse or suspend a chord.
Otherwise, this is excellent, we need more tutorials like this
Keep up the great work.
Viren
Sorry, but i think that harmonisation sounds rather odd.
Violins don’t fit and overwhelm me.
Wouldn’t extending the chord past the octave and changing the chord to Sus 4 or 2 be doing similar things?
Plus a 5 voice chord would sound a little busy right? I’m not into Jazz.
Dean.