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Lesson 1

LESSON 7: Choosing the Right Chord

PROGRESSIONS, NOT SUCCESSIONS

Making a chord progression work means understanding the term progression. For struggling writers, the problem is that the series of chords that might be better described as chord successions: the chords just don't seem to relate with each other too well.

For chords to work, you need to more fully understand how one chord likes to move to another. And you need to know what chords will naturally exist in a given particular key. This is a bit involved to describe here in great detail; the best plan right now is to get a copy of "The Essential Secrets of Songwriting" and go right to Chapter 4 - Harmony.

The short version of the chord story is that if you know what key your song is in, write the scale for that key, and then build chords. For example, if your song is in A major, write an A major scale, then write chords above each note of the scale. If you do that, you will get the following chords:

I- A major (the "tonic" chord)
ii- B minor
iii- C# minor
IV- D major (the "subdominant" chord)
V- E major (the "dominant" chord)
vi- F# minor
vii- G# diminished.

WHAT TO DO WITH THOSE CHORDS

Those are the chords that naturally occur in the key of A major, and you would do well to stick to them as  your most common chords. In fact, most songs will work quite nicely by using primarily the I, IV and V chords. Those chords are known as the tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords, respectively.

Here are some chords from major keys, with common substitutions that can add variety to your music:

BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU SUBSTITUTE

Substituting one chord for another can be a bit unpredictable, so you'll want to make sure that it works for you. And substituting chords also strongly impacts on the form of the song, so you'll want to be sure that you make any chord substitution happen at structurally strong places in your song.

Here is an example of chords and some substitutions (Example in A major):


(I IV V I) A - D - E - A.
Substituting the final I-chord with vi gives: A D E F#m
Substituting the D chord with a ii-chord gives: A Bm E A
Both substitutions: A Bm E F#m

Looking for some chord progressions? "Essential Chord Progressions" gives you hundreds of them!

ACTIVITIES for CHORD SUBSTITUTIONS

1. Take the following chords and make substitutions as indicated in the table above. For each progression substitute one or more chords, and make note of your changes. (For chords with a slash, the letter name before the slash is the chord name; the letter name after the slash is a bass note):

    * A D F#m Bm E A
    * A F#m Bm A/C# D  E A
    * F#m D A Bm E A
    * E7 A D A/C# Bm E7 A
    * A E D A/C# Bm F#m E A

2. Take a song that you've written and go through the chord progression. Try substituting chords one for another, and make note of the effect on your song.

3. Write a short melody of two or four bars. Now harmonize it in as many ways as you can. Some choices won't work as well as others. Make note of all progressions that you find, and rate them from 1 (poorest) to 10 (best).
 
...on to Lesson 8 - MIXING STRONG AND FRAGILE PROGRESSIONS

Proceed to Lesson 8 - MIXING STRONG AND FRAGILE PROGRESSIONS

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