Tag: music theory
Link: How to Add Interest to Your Chord Progressions
by Jason Hannah on Feb.17, 2010, under Link
I was surfing the internet recently and came across a good webpage describing how to use chord substitutions to spice up a boring chord progression.
I feel like I have a decent grasp on basic musical theory (something I’ll share for the newer songwriters among us one of these days), but I’ll admit that once you get past basic major and minor chords, and maybe a handful of sevenths and what-not, I become pretty useless.
This article does a good job at explaining when you can use certain types of chords to make your progressions sound more full and interesting.
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.
The article is written as an 8-step tutorial complete with audio examples.
Take a chord progression that you’ve had laying around for a while (or write a simple new one) and test out the methods in the article. Maybe you’ll come up with something you like!
Read the entire article HERE
-
Welcome To Creative-Music.org
Welcome! This blog is not really intended to give you step by step instructions on how to do some kind of creative music project (since it seems like that maybe defeats the purpose of wanting to be creative!) Instead, I hope to inspire you with ideas, examples, and exercises meant to get you thinking more creatively about how you write or perform your music.
AND IF YOU'RE NOT A MUSICIAN...
You still might appreciate some of the things we'll be talking about. The ideas are going to focus on music because I love music, but if you're creative enough, you can apply a lot of the basics to whatever art you may be into. So stick around!You can also subscribe by email by filling the field below:
Our Features
Try Out Some New Music
