Here’s a great way to create a strong partnership between verse and chorus progressions.
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One of the tricky parts of creating chord progressions for your song is to make the verse and chorus progressions sound connected. One interesting way to do that is to do the following:
- Choose a key for your song, and then find the seven chords that work naturally in that key. If you don’t know how to do this step, read the first part of this article.
- Start on a chord other than the tonic, and preferably use a minor chord. So if your chosen key is G major, you might choose Am.
- Create a 3-chord progression using the chords of G major that makes Am sound like a tonal centre. For example, this would work nicely: Am Em D. This will serve as the main part of your verse. Feel free to add chords afterward if you like, but consider those 3 chords to be the important ones.
- Now to create a chorus progression: Think of G as now being the tonal centre. Create a 3-chord progression that uses the same root movement as your verse progression. Since your verse started on Am, moved down 4 notes to get to Em, then down one more to get to D, your chorus progression will start on G, move down 4 notes, giving you D, and then down one more, giving you C.
So following that procedure, you’ll wind up with this:
VERSE: Am Em D….
CHORUS: G D C….
The audience hears (on a subconscious level) that the verse and chorus progressions sound linked – like partners. They may not be sure why, because their musical abilities won’t be at a level that they can hear that you’ve paralleled the root movement of the verse progression in the chorus.
The other nice quality of those progressions is the fact that the verse progression makes minor sound important, switching to major in the chorus. Try experimenting with this by reversing the idea, using major in the chorus and minor in the verse. It’s trickier to get that to work, but worth trying.
This exercise is a nice reminder that it’s often a good idea to try to enhance a relationship between verse and chorus. That idea can extend beyond chord progressions. For example, you can try upward moving melodies in the verse, switching to downward-moving ones in the chorus.
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