From a 3-Chord Song to Something More Complex

Whether simple or complex, a chord progression represents a musical journey that starts at home (the tonic chord), moves away (some other chord), then returns home. This little journey happens many times throughout a song, and the various landmarks you visit during the journey are represented by the different chords you choose. One way or another, whether your progressions are made up of complicated harmonic relationships, or are just basic 3-chord ones, there needs to be an underlying structure, something that helps the listener make sense of it all.

You can think of a 3-chord song as having harmonies that work like a 3-legged stool. Pretty much any song can be harmonized with three chords representing three vital categories or functions: the tonic function (represented by the I-chord), the predominant function (i.e., any chord that wants to resolve to the dominant chord, represented most often by the IV-chord or ii-chord), and the dominant function (represented by the V-chord, but also the iii-chord and the vii-chord).

Three-chord songs, like standard blues, for example, are predictable, and are meant to be that way. But if you’re looking to take listeners further afield, the basic theory behind the three chord functions (dominant, predominant, tonic) shouldn’t automatically get tossed.

You can create a more complex set of chord changes if you keep in mind that all journeys whether simple or complex, need to make some sense even if that logic is not immediately obvious. Songs whose complex harmonies can theoretically be reduced to a 3-chord format will succeed in taking listeners on a really interesting journey. [Cont’d below..]

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“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 e-book bundle includes e-books that will help you make sense of chord progressions (“How to Harmonize a Melody”), as well as e-books that offer hundreds of chord progressions, in addition to “Chord Progression Formulas”, which allows you to create dozens of progressions within minutes! Learn more..

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“Because”, from The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album, offers an example of an interesting musical journey that starts solidly in the key of C# minor, moving via a pivot chord briefly into the key of D major. A pivot chord is one that can be seen to be in two keys: the original song key, and the new key to which it’s moving.

That relationship between the keys of C# minor and D major is achieved by largely maintaining that “3-legged stool” of tonic, predominant and dominant.

C#m                                     D#dim  G#7
Be-cause the world is round, it turns me on_________;

   A         C#m      A9   A13  D  Ddim
Be-cause the world is round___. Ah_____.

The C#m chord is the tonic chord. D#dim is a predominant chord that wants to move to the dominant: G#7. The A major chord is a VI-chord in the original key, but re-interpreted as a dominant chord of D a couple of chords later (made richer in harmonic texture as an A9.) This dominant moves to a temporary new tonic: D.

(By the way, that modulation back to C# minor happens by way of a common-tone modulation. The G# note of the D dim is the common tone between Ddim and C# minor.)

So how can you make your own song more harmonically complex?

1. Harmonize your melody with the simplest 3-chord structure possible.
2. Look for opportunities to replace some (not all) of the chords with substitutions that represent the same chord function. (i.e., replace I-chords with vi-chords, replace IV-chords with ii-chords, etc.)
3. Look for opportunities to extend the harmonies between two adjacent chords with another little harmonic journey. For example, if part of your melody is harmonized with a I-chord followed by a IV-chord, try to see if you can extend that part of the journey into something like: I-bVII-IV, or I-bIII-IV.

The point is that by keeping the basic three chord functions as identifiable moments in your song, you can take interesting journeys between those predictable moments. The benefit is that you wind up with something that sounds more complex, but you profit from the sturdiness of the tonic-predominant-dominant foundation.

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Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website
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