How do you know that the chords you’re experimenting with are going to be the best choice for the song you’re working on? We know that certain chords — it’s probably more accurate to say certain chord combinations — create specific moods and support certain attitudes in a listener. So getting the right chord combinations is a vital part of any song’s success.
Those chord choices are influenced by many different factors, the four most important being:
- Genre.
- Melodic shape (assuming the melody was written first).
- Tempo.
- Personal style and taste.
Let’s look at those four factors individually.
How Genre Affects Chord Choice
The chords you choose for a jazz ballad will differ from ballads in other genres, mainly with regard to the use of chord extensions. An extension is anything you might add to a basic 3-note chord beyond the basic 7th. So while in some genres, a basic V7-I is common, you might opt for V13-I for a sound closer to what’s common in jazz.
V7-I (G7-C)
V13-I (G13-C)
This idea that jazz uses more chord extensions than other genres can be a tremendously valuable tool for you, because it allows you to slide more toward a jazz sound than what you’d normally be writing. It can give your music an innovative quality, and can also build a larger audience base.
Each genre has its own “kind” of chord that audiences expect, and so the best thing is daily listening. It’s impossible to experiment and stray pleasantly from expectations if you don’t know what your target audience is expecting in the first place.
How Melodic Shape Affects Chord Choice
This one has an obvious part: the chords you choose will be determined by the melody that it’s supporting. But there’s more to it than that, and songwriters can and should spend a lot of time experimenting with many different chords that can potentially harmonize a melody.
“How to Harmonize a Melody” shows you, step by step, how to choose the chords that will work with your melody, how to substitute chords, and how to make more complex progressions work for you. Buy it separately, or as part of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle.
One of the main ways you can successfully experiment with chords is to play around with how often a chord changes. Let’s say you’ve got a melody like this:
Melody Without Chords:
The same melody, harmonized with a chord every two beats:
And now you’ll pick up a different kind of musical energy if you choose to change chords every beat:
It’s hard to put into words what the specific differences are between changing chords every beat, or holding on for two. But that is part of what songwriting is all about: coming up with musical choices, and then partnering those choices with other factors — lyrics, melody, key, etc. — to come up with something that really clicks.
How Tempo Affects Chord Choice
In general, the faster your music is, the less frequently you’ll feel comfortable changing chords. That’s not an issue of playing ability; it has more to do with the frantic sound that comes from fast chord changes. Each time you change a chord, you pull the listener in a slightly different direction. Changing frequently at a fast tempo can inject an unintentionally panicky sound to your song.
To hear what I mean, here’s what the progression above, with chords changing on every beat, sounds like with a faster tempo:
There are certain genres that call for a more energetic “frantic” kind of sound, and so this is only undesirable if you don’t want it. If you want to pump up the energy of your music, changing chords more often may be one way to do it.
How Personal Style and Taste Affect Chord Choice
This is the one area where you can stand out from everyone else. Chords affect the subtext of your music. By subtext, we mean the deeper, underlying meaning of your music, your melodies, your lyrics, and how they all influence one another.
Chords can play an important role in how an audience “hears” your song. One small change in chord choice can make a big change in mood.
Here’s a standard I-IV-V-I progression, and you can hear how simply changing the IV to a ii-chord makes a big change in the mood:
I-IV-V-I (C-F-G-C)
I-ii-V-I (C-Dm-G-C)
All of this can be seen as a longwinded way of saying, “Be sure to experiment with chords before making a final decision.” And of course, while that’s true, the main point is this: chords do not operate in isolation from other musical elements within a song.
Any one progression may sound like it’s not working well for you, but in fact, the chords may be just fine; it could be the tempo that needs to be adjusted, or perhaps the kind of chord extension you’re using at any one time.
So experimenting with chords can and should mean experimenting with the many other factors that change the way we hear them.
Written by Gary Ewer. Follow Gary on Twitter
Chapter 4 of “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” gives you the basics of how chord progressions work – how to create a strong one, a fragile one, or anything in between. Right now, get a copy of “Creative Chord Progressions” FREE with your purchase of the 10-eBook Bundle.