Exploring New Key Areas in a Song Bridge

If you’re including a bridge in your song, it’s a great spot to move the focus away from the original key into other key areas. Sometimes that means changing key entirely, but in fact that doesn’t often happen. What rather happens is that the focus changes from the original tonic chord to a different chord.

Here’s what I mean. We usually determine the key of the song by what happens in the chorus. If, for example, your song chorus uses the following progression: F  G  C  Dm  F  G  C, we can be fairly certain that the key is C major. That’s because C major is the only key that easily uses those chords.

Now, for the bridge, it’s often nice to move away from a major key sound and explore the possibilities of minor. The easiest way to do that is to simply focus on the minor chords that we find in C major.

When you look at the seven chords that naturally occur in C major, we get the following:

C Dm Em F G Am Bdim

As you can see, three of those chords are minor chords. So for a bridge, it gives a song a refreshing new sound to focus on those minor chords. You’ll want to do that for the first half of the bridge, and then find a way back to focusing on major in the second half, so that it attaches seamlessly back to the chorus.

The most common choice, if your song is in C major, is to focus on Am. But really, any of the minor chords will work.

Here’s a short list of chord progressions that might fit the bill. You’ll notice that the first half of each progression focuses on minor, and the second half moves the music back to C major. A couple of things to note: for “slash chords” (inversions), the letter name to the left of the slash is the chord, and the letter name to the right is the bass note. Also note that just because you’re focusing on minor doesn’t mean you can’t use some major chords as well.

I’ve included Roman numerals to help you transpose them to whatever key your song is in. To start, try experimenting with playing each chord for two beats:

Am  Em  F  Em  Am  Em  F  Em | Am  G/B  C  F  Dm  F  G
vi  iii IV iii vi  iii IV iii  vi  V6   I  IV ii  IV V

Am  G  Am  G  F  G  Am  Dm  | Am  G  Am  Dm  C/E  F  D7   G
vi  V  vi  V  IV V  vi  ii    vi  V  vi  ii  I6  IV  V7/V V

Dm  Am  Em  F  Dm  C  Dm____ | F  G  Am  F  Gsus4____ G
ii  vi  iii IV ii  I  ii____   IV V  vi  IV Vsus4____ V

Dm  C  F  C/E  Dm  Am  Dm  C  | F  Dm  C/E  F  Am  Bb   F  G
ii  I  IV I6   ii  vi  ii  I    IV ii  I6   IV  vi bVII IV  V

Em  Am  Em  F  C  F  Em  Am  | G  Am  Em  F  C  F  Am  G
iii vi  iii IV I  IV iii vi    V  vi  iii IV I  IV vi  V

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Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter.