Chord Progressions are the main structure we use to create music in all its forms. From Pop to Rock and from Classic to Jazz, every musical arrangement has a chord progression as its foundation. The chords give a particular atmosphere, specify the harmonies and transform a simple melody into a rich piece of music.
The easiest way to write a chord progression is to follow up four chords with at least one shared note between each transition. This method allows you to create warm-sounding progressions instantly without the need to know anything about music theory. I made a table of chords where you can see all the possible combinations, starting from a chord of your choice, so you can write your own unique chord progressions that evolve into a natural resolving harmony.
- 1. The Table of chords
- 2. How to from a Chord Progression
- 3. How to use the Table of Chords
- 4. The Musical Principle Behind this Method
- 5. Muscle Memory is no longer an issue
- 6. Finding Chords for Melodies
1. The Table of Chords
In the following (shortened) table, you can find the most used types of chords for each note on the keyboard. This allows you to select a chord of your choice and see all the notes it contains. For the following chord, we choose another one that has at least one shared note.
A simplified version of the Table (For the full table and its High-Res Download, visit chapter 3)
2. How to Form a Chord Progression
Nearly any chord progression is formed by four chords. The number “4” is very prominent in music and can be found in nearly any structural pattern; from the number of bars, rhythmic notations, melodic structures to chord progressions. Therefore I recommend sticking with a four-chord chord progression.
Chord N°1
You can choose any chord on the table you like for your first chord, but minor and major chords perform best. Once you pick a chord, you can see all the notes it contains.
Chord N°2
For your second chord, you can choose any chord that contains at least one shared note. This doesn’t need to be a specific note. Try out a few chords, and you can feel the ambient at which they try to pull you. Minor chords tend to give a dramatic, melancholic atmosphere, major chords a more joyful tone. In contrast, dominant 7th and diminished chords create unique high dramatic, or surprising variants that should be placed with caution as an additional key point in your score.
Chord N°3
For the third chord, we do the same again. At this position, we can use three diffrent structures as a guideline.
- Repeat: Repeating the first chord at this point is a typical structure in cinematic music
- Additional Chords: The third and fourth positions in the chord progression are often covered by additional chords like dominant 7th or diminished chords.
- Stay with the method and form your own chord.
As already said, this is just a guideline and by far no rule. Dare to experiment!
Chord N°4
It’s a good idea to look for a chord that contains a note from the third and the first chord for the fourth position, as we need to close the loop. This gives us two notes we need to contain in this chord.
The loop doesn’t need to close on force, I myself don’t do this that often. But it depends a lot on how the music develops after this section. Just make sure it doesn’t clash when repeating the four-chord structure.
For this position, additional chords, as seen above in the third position, can work well and create an enormous tension to resolve once the progression starts over again.
Example:
In this example, I followed the principle of the method shown previously. At any transition, at least one shared note spans over the chords and provides us with a warm and natural-sounding result.
It could be interesting to change the fourth chord to a chord also containing D. Changing to allow you to use a drone in D throughout the entire motif. This is a common technique in the modern hybrid orchestra, so the digital pads and SFX can be hold on for a long time without clashing with the score.
Transposed into the DAW, this chord progression is easy to understand. The notes spanning over two chords are held as long as possible for a nice legato effect.
When rearranged, we automatically generate the harmony for the motif; writing a melody becomes easy as we simply have to follow the notes in the chord.
I usually write harmony and melody simultaneously, where I play the chords with my left hand on the piano and improvise the melody with the right hand. Once you gain some security on the piano, this becomes a quick and easy scoring tool.
Now, let’s have a listen to the result:
3. The Full Table and How to Read it
By looking at the table you might be overwhelmed by the number of boxes and letters displayed; but once again, I tried to make it as easy as possible. Here you can find a short description of how to read the table:
Piano roll: The piano roll should be familiar to you, it gives you a quick visual help to locate the note you are looking for. The piano roll contains the note’s name written in b and in #.
Box: The box contains all the notes the chord is built of in its root position. Notice that the dominant 7th chord is built by 4 notes due to its nature, while the rest is built from 3 notes.
Half steps are depicted with #. As you may know, some notes can be written in b or in #. I don’t want to dive deeper into this, but on the piano roll, you can see the alternate name if you want your notes in b.
Name: In front of the box you find the symbolic notation for the chord, should you need it.
Horizontal Order: All boxes in the horizontal lines contain the same shared note as seen on the piano roll.
Vertical sectors: The table is vertically divided into major, minor, diminished, and dominant seventh chords. Each section contains three columns. The first column shows the chord where the chosen note forms the root, in the second column the third, and in the third column the fifth. This helps you to find all major chords containing the chosen note really fast.
4. The Musical Principle Behind this Method
As you may know, chords usually don’t get used in their root position very often. To have a nice transition between two notes, we try to make the smallest steps between the individual pitches as possible. The best result we can have is by having a single note being streched out over two chords.
With this method, we automatically create such progressions. That’s why progressions are written in this way sound so warm and full by evolving and resolving in such a natural way.
To have this natural-sounding harmony, you need to work on the proper harmonization by adding inversions and rearranging the chords. I highly recommend my article about Chord-Voicing, where I show you in-depth how to transform the simple chord progression into a full orchestration by the example of Hans Zimmer’s “Inception”.
5. Muscle Memory is no longer an issue
If you are already composing for a bit, you surely came across the muscle memory problem. This means, that your fingers are used to press certain chords over and over and even if you don’t want to, you play the same chords again and again.
By working with the table of chords, you can reduce the impact of muscle memory by adding new chords into your collection or starting with chords you didn’t use most of the time. This not only gives you a fresh starting point but also broadens your musical horizon.
6. Finding Chords for Melodies
I use the table of chords not only when I am writing chord progressions, but also when I try to find the chords for a melody I have written. I have written a theme for a “Mafia” inspired track, but it was way to complex to harmonize for my standard at that time. There were tons of diffrent notes in it and I couldn’t find a simple solution for harmonizing them.
Every part of the melody usually lands on a specific note on the piano. With the table of chords now I can go through every chord that contained that note and could try out very quickly all the possible variations without actually thinking about complex structures in my head.
I can highly recommend trying out the table of chords when you find yourself in front of a similar problem.
Great content! Keep up the good work!