Chords, ancient history, and happy accidents
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Old skool, Songwriting on November 14th, 2007
I’m thinking about doing a video at the keyboard, showing some early chord progressions I wrote, and how I came up with them. One of the many tag lines for this blog was “I hear chord progressions”, kind of a play on “I see dead people” — which I assume everyone got, but who knows. I’ve always been a chord fanatic, though, more so than a melody fanatic or lyric fanatic; I had to develop those abilities later. But taking chords to the next level has always been my passion — getting them to go into unexpected places and still come out sounding cohesive. This isn’t an intellectual fascination; it’s a fascination with the sound and the effect. (When anyone boasts about how few chords they use or know, as if knowing more chords somehow over-intellectualizes the music and takes away from its immediacy, I have to take a deep breath and bite my tongue.)
The problem with this obsession of mine, is that in order to play along with most of my progressions, you have to actually know them; they don’t generally lend themselves to jamming away in one key or mode. Where music “happens” for me, though, where it has the most intense emotional impact, is the point where it changes, and particularly where it changes most drastically, meaning the very point where you have to change the mode to still be following it. Not the chord itself, but how it relates to the one before it, and the one after it, and finally to the overall key.
Because I familiarized myself with all this in a direct, unsupervised way, creating instant neurological links between the sound, the feeling, and the chords, taking actual music theory classes was more like an afterthought — icing on the cake. I don’t usually think in a methodical way when I write a progression; I follow my ear. But, having done so, I can then analyze it after the fact. Words like “interval”, “chord”, “triad”, “mode”, and “modulate” were not even in my vocabulary; I was just doing it. And I would like to see education reverse itself, to where you know and learn the thing on an immediate level first, and then learn the words for it; because as it is now, these words create an extra synaptic hoop for most students’ brains to jump through.
But, education or no education, it seems the “immediate level” thing is probably just either going to happen or not happen for a person. If they’re interested, they’ll go further down the rabbit hole. If not, they’ll take what they like and move on. In my case, that rabbit hole has been my personal universe for 20 years.
Insomnic Hallucinations (rough mix still available on the sidebar) was the first progression I ever wrote that a.) went well outside its own key, b.) actually followed my ear, and c.) really stuck with me over time. It’s an eight bar progression over a simple, slow 4/4 beat, one chord per bar. I never really wrote one definitive set of lyrics for it, or one end-all-be-all melody for it either. I just like the progression, and I keep going back to finding new ways to sneak it in, like a running gag or an easter egg.
Here’s how I would write it as chord names:
Cm(add 6) | Abmaj7 | Em | Bm | D#m | F#m | F(add#4) | G, G+
Here’s how I would play them on a keyboard, in simplest form:
C Eb G A
Ab C Eb G
B E G
B D F#
D# F# A#
C# F# A
C F A B
D G B, then Eb G B
The first three bars were initially just me trying something out. They started as Cm, Fm, Em. I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same (the song, not the album), and my still-naïve ear heard the chords under “anything I wanted to know/any place I needed…” as though it might be a minor chord (but not the one whose key it was in) dropping a half step to another minor chord. Of course, it’s not… not even close. But anyway, that’s what I tried, being in Cm and going from the Fm to the Em, and since I was now mentally hearing the Em as “the new iv chord”, going to Bm from there made it feel like it was “landing” on the new tonic.
So what I had so far (Cm, Fm, Em, Bm) was okay, but I think if it had stayed like this I wouldn’t have had such a life-long love affair with it. I did manage to write another four chords after this to bring it around full circle (D#m, F#m, F, G). I was particularly proud of the D#m chord, because even though it had no proper relationship to any of the chords before it, it was exactly what I heard in my head. The F#m was less daring, because I’d already played with taking a minor chord up a minor third (I thought of it as a sort of “horror film soundtrack” technique at the time). The F and G were just obvious, simplistic, almost cop-out ways of saying, here we go, back to C.
I have no idea how I decided to change the Fm chord to an Abmaj7 chord. But that made all the difference in the world. My inept attempt to recreate the Song Remains The Same vibe took on its own new identity, and ever since then, the Abmaj7 to Em part has sounded beautifully ominous to me. Also the thing of augmenting the G chord at the end to “pull” it towards the C minor was a good choice.
But two things that happened to this progression were purely happy accidents. When I was playing the first bar (C minor), and also the second-to-last bar (F), my poor keyboard technique occasionally would lead to me hitting the next note over. In the case of the C minor, it was an added A, which I think is a very spooky (in a good way) note to add. I said “add 6″ when I named the chord above, but I just want to make sure you realize I don’t mean Ab, the “natural” sixth degree, because that’s a different animal, which happens to show up soon enough anyway, as the root of the next chord. In the case of the F chord (played as C F A), my keyboard klutzery added a very mysterious and alluring B (I now know this is a “lydian” sound, used often by David Gilmour on songs like Mihalis and Terminal Frost), that made it more “dream-like” and helped pull it towards the G chord.
The thing is, my brain is hard-wired to immediately like these happy accidents. It also doesn’t think all accidents are happy. In fact, it’s very selective about which accidents it likes. But the question is, what is the purpose or usefulness to society that a sound might grab my ear right away, while to other people it might take several hearings before they internalize it?
Anyway, all these words (and chord names) get in the way, and I’m sure I would skim some of this post myself if it wasn’t my own… so maybe a video version is still a good idea. Something to take home from this, though: failing to copy something correctly can be a great source of originality. So try to play something you don’t know… and see what does come out.
