Writing a Chord Progression
Lesson 2 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Writing a Chord Progression
Lesson 2 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Lesson Info
2. Writing a Chord Progression
Lessons
Introduction and What you're going to Learn
00:20 2Writing a Chord Progression
11:37 3Writing a Bass Part
10:19 4Building a Drum Beat
08:57 5Writing a Melody
17:15 6Arrangement - Part 1
14:23 7Arrangement - Part 2
19:06 8Vocal Demo Melodies
04:31Lesson Info
Writing a Chord Progression
Hello and welcome to this video where we're going to be looking at creating a song from scratch. So when you're writing a song, there's loads of different ways you can start, you can start with a chord progression. You can start with a melody, you can start with a drum beat or you can start with a bass line. I'm going to show you in this lecture, how you can start writing a song from a chord progression. So chord progression is basically just a series of chords that go together and they can be looped round and round. The good thing about starting with a chord progression is you can quickly find the notes for the melodies and for other parts of the song by just looking at the chords a lot of the time when you change a chord progression or you change a chord, the melody will also change with it. So the notes will fit in the next chord. There are loads of different core progressions. But in modern music or popular music, often people do seem to use the same core progressions. You can't co...
pyright a core progression as well as long as the song sounds different. You can use popular core progressions. So I've actually just googled popular core progressions and these are the ones that have come up. So here we have 1615. So when you see the Roman numerals like this, this is just the way people write chord progressions. So maybe just think of a Roman numeral clock. But if you're playing in C major, which we're actually going to write this song in. It's basically just the white notes. It's really easy to play along with in C major. So this will be CFC and G and then we have another core progression below which is 1564. So in C major, if you cancel the notes, 1564, and then we have the other one which is 1625, I'm just playing the notes at the moment. We'll actually need to work out how to play these chords. You'll notice we have these uppercase Roman numerals and these lowercase Roman numerals. So the uppercase Roman numeral means a major chord and a lowercase Roman numeral like this means a minor chord. So I'm just going to quickly tell you how to work out a major chord and then a minor chord. And then we're actually going to write out some of these different chord progressions and use them for a song. So in this digital audio workstation, we can open up a piano roll editor and in all popular digital audio workstations, you will have a piano roll editor as well where you can actually write in the midi information. So let's actually have a look at the difference between a major chord and a minor chord. So let's start on the note C. So if you look on the keyboard here, it's actually labeled C and you'll notice we have two of these black notes and then three of these black notes and C is just the white note that's to the left of the two black notes, which is here. OK. So for ac chord, a major or a minor chord, it will have ac and then a major and a minor chord will both have the fifth of the notes. So all we need to do is count up five notes and in this scale C major is just the white notes. So 12345, which is this one here. A G every major and minor chord has free notes, which is also known as a triad. And the difference between a major and a minor chord is this third note here. So let's actually play in the third. For a major chord. We have a little pattern to work this out. We can just count up five notes including the first note to find the third. So 12345. So this one here, which is an e remember all the notes in C major are white. So this here is the third and then to change it to a minor chord, all we need to do is just flatten it one step and that makes it a minor chord. You can probably hear it sounds quite moody. And if we sharpen this again, back to a major chord, you can probably hear sounds a bit happier. So a simple way to actually notice the difference between a major chord and a minor chord is a minor chord. Sounds a bit more sad and a major chord sounds happier. So for this, we're going to be using ac major chord. So you can see here, we have ac, so remember five notes, count up 12345. So this one here, this means ac major. And for a minor, we just count up four notes as well. So 1234, this will be a minor or just a major chord with a third flattened. OK. So that's how we can quickly work out the difference between a major and a minor. So let's have a look at this second core progression here. 1564. So now let's actually type in this next one which is a five. So it's a capital V like this or a G in this case in C major. So this means a G major chord. So let's go down here to a G you can see here this is AJ CD efg, just all the white notes count up OK. So here is the G let's just zoom in. OK. And remember this is a major chord. We used that pattern we used before. Can top five including the first note 12345. That is the major third because we're in C major. Like I said, just the white notes, we know it's in key which means the notes fit in the scale because it's a white note. So let's just type it in this B now. And also remember a major and a minor chord both use the same fifth notes because a triad, like I said before is the root, the third and the fifth. So let's just count up five from this G 12345. It's this note here, which is ad so here we have two chords. We have the C major and now the G major, let's just hear these both back. OK. Great. Now we're going to have a look at the next chord, which is the small one here, which is a six also in this key, it's going to be an, a minor. So remember there's a difference between a major and a minor chord. This will give a different kind of sound. If you're just using major chords all of the time, it's not going to sound as interesting as if you use some other types of chords such as a minor chord. So remember we can count up in the scale CD efg a, so let's use this note here. A OK. And now let's add the fifth because in a major and a minor chord, they both have the same fifth. So let's just count at five, these white notes, 12345, this note here, which is an E. So let's now add the third. Let's count up 512345. Here's this, this note here, which isn't a white note. This is actually the major note. So remember we need to drop it down a step. Now it's minor. So we can either add the third like that, which is a major third, then drop it down a half step or just one note on the keyboard. And this will make it a minor chord or we can just count at four notes including the 1st 11234. That's the minor. If we count at 512345, that's major. But this, this note here, this is not in the scale we're in C major, which is just the white notes. So it needs to be this note here, which is ac which makes it a, a minor. OK. We've got one more chord to go in this core progression. And this is an f. So remember from before, let's count up until we find an F CD EF OK. So let's add that note in. You can tell instantly that wasn't the right note you can hear. Doesn't quite sound right? It doesn't sound like the other chords. That's because that was an F sharp. You can see here it's the black note. So be careful when you're typing in notes, make sure you use the right notes for your scale. So here we have F and then this is an F major chord. So let's put the fifth in first because the fifth is the same for the major and the minor, all we need to do is count up five notes in the scale. So 12345, here we have ac we actually used the C before, but we can play it again. It's absolutely fine. And then we have the third. Remember this is an F major chord. So let's count up five notes including the 1st 112345 and a again. And here we have the third which is an A. So this is a F major chord. OK? So now we're actually going to play this chord progression back. So I'm just going to loop this. So you've probably heard this chord progression loads of times in popular music. One more thing I'm going to do now is actually add some inversions. You'll notice now when we play it back, it sounds a bit clunky. It jumps to one chord to another. It doesn't sound very smooth. So what we can do is actually just change the octaves of some of these chords. So on the piano keyboard, for example, the note C there's ac, here, there's ac octave above another c, another octave above and so on and so forth. So we have the same notes but in different octaves which are just 12 notes above or also known as an octave. So what we can do is just chain some of these notes around, move them up and down the octaves. So they sound a bit smoother because here you can see there's this big jump between the C and this G. If we move this G up here, it'll sound a lot smoother and it's actually the same note as before. So we won't get that big jump. So I'm just going to change some of these octaves around. So it sounds a bit smoother. When we add the baseline later on, it will still sound like the cord at the moment. We're changing something called the root note. But when we add the base later on this will reaffirm the root note as well. And the chords will sound absolutely great. But for now, let's just change these octaves around so that the same note just different octaves. So they don't sound as jumpy. So I'm actually going to put this go and Octa OK, going along, I might even put this a open octave. And then here this note definitely needs to go up an octave. So this f maybe I could even put this a productive if wanted to. Now you can see, it just looks a lot smoother and let's play this back and it shouldn't sound as jumpy. OK. That sounds a lot better. And when we add the baseline next, we're gonna have a nice core progression with a solid base part. OK. So that's how you can start writing a song with a chord progression. I do recommend actually going through these other chord progressions as well. I'm just using this one as an example, but I do recommend going into your digital audio workstation and working out the chords for this one which is 1645 and 1625 and an easy one up here, which is just major chords, which is 1415. I hope you find this lecture useful in the next lecture we're going to look at adding a bass part to this song. Thank you for watching.
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