When I’m composing music, a lot of times, my chord progressions tend to become repetitive and flat once the track is rolling. I spend quite some time finding ways to improve my harmonization by using more advanced techniques, which I’m showing you in this blog post.
While variations in harmony, texture, and melody significantly impact creating an exciting track, advanced techniques like chord Substitution, passing chords, extensions, drones, implied chords or simply more extended chord progressions are a killing method to step up the game. Basically, we can add or reduce the number of notes inside each chord or rearrange them in a diffrent fashion.
As always, I will not drown you in music theory on this site. I try to make the description as clear and helpful as possible. Should you be looking for a more general approach to finding an interesting chord progression, I suggest my previous blog post: Writing unique Chord Progressions without Music Theory – where I show you how to form your own unique progressions without any music theory at all. But for now, let’s start rolling.
1. Longer Chord Progressions
This might sound obvious at first glance, but it actually describes the problem and the solution as simply as possible. Repetitive structures in music need to be avoided if possible; the same goes for chord progressions. When you are repeating the same 4-bar progression over and over, it requires a lot more rework to bring in variation. Extending the chord progression over 8 bars gives more room for complex and more diverse structures in your harmony and melody section as well.
The 8-bar progression has a second benefit: Once your track hits the first climax, for example, and you need a new fresh idea, you can chop the progression in half and use it as the base for your following phrase. Due to the heritage of the progression, it is easy to reconnect with the first part later on again.
2. Passing chords
A passing chord is an easy way to upgrade an already existing sketch by adding a short chord at a specific point in your progression. The usual 4-bar progression is a subconscious expected pattern. Breaking this expectation here and there gives your music a better drive and opens the door to changes in melodies as well.
Basic 4-bar Chord Progression:
Added Passing Chord:
The 3rd chord of the progression usually gets cut in half, where the second half is filled with the passing chord. This gives harmony an additional point of interest. Be aware that the passing chord should fit the chord combination, as it should blend in properly. You can use the TABLE OF CHORDS for this if you struggle to find a good combination.
A more in-depth tutorial on how to use the Table of Chords, as well as how to write unique chord progressions, is found in my previous blog post here:
3. Implied chords
An implied chord is nothing else than a chord lacking a few notes. This means you leave out some notes on purpose when harmonizing the track. Usually, the melody and the bass line remain, while the 5th and 3rds disappear in harmony.
This is a common technique in songwriting, where a break between chorus and verse is searched. The same principle can be used for a break between the climax and the next phrase to distinguish them more effectively.
4. Voice Leading
I already wrote an entire blog post for this technique, as it is not only an effective tool to bring your harmony together, it is more of a basic composing method to blend the chords together.
Basically, the main focus of voice leading is to have a smooth transition between two chords. The gap between the two following notes should be as small as possible. Inversions and octavations are the primary methods used here, to achieve a harmonious structure.
Here I showed you the whole process by reproducing the Inception Theme from the basic chords to the final arrangement: The basis for every good orchestration – Chord Voicing explained by the example of Inception
5. Drones
A Drone is a single note stretched out over an entire chord progression. Usually, it is the root note of the first chord. Just be aware, to choose chords for your progression which allow the drone to blend in. Especially modern Trailer scores heavily implement drones in various ways. Today’s hybrid orchestrations rely on long streched-out synth, where pitch changes aren’t always an option. Drones not only form a solid bass, but they also perform extremely well as tension makers, once they slowly rise and rise till the climax.
Here I added an inconspicuous brass drone, covering the whole chord progression. The Drone gets octavated in the later state to stand out more and increase tension.
6. Chord Extensions
A common extension of chors is the addition of the 7th in the so-called dominant 7th chord. Basically, it extends the chord structure to implement more than 3 diffrent notes. While the 7th is a common choice, other extensions are used a lot in Blues and Jazz music. These are 9th, 11th and 13th. This gives the chord the typical jazz mood.
The construction of those chords requires a deeper understanding of scales and can be intimidating at first glance. If you want me to cover this topic, please let me know in the survey
Meanwhile, I can link you to this fantastic article, where the topic gets covered very well: How to Build Chord Extensions and Alterations (jazzstandards.com)
7. Chord Substitution
While in the previous methods we only changed single notes, now we are changing an entire chord. Substitutions are an effective way to spice up the harmony as you can change the mood and the direction of a repeating cluster. Common swap-outs implement the parallel minor or major chords, where a C Major for example gets swapped out to a C Minor.
A more complex solution is provided by the circle of fifth, which gives you a hint on which chords can be substituted for a harmonic result.
In this example, I want to swap out the D Major chord.
If I move towards the center, I see the b minor (relative minor of D major). I can also move one step to the right, to see the chord based on the third of my initial D major chord.