chord progressions

[peter_traj]

thanks again guys.im soory i cant offer any thing now but maybe when i get some experrience i can share something.my next question. i was reading a peice of music that i have not listened to. the peice was in the key of Gmajor.the chord progresion was mainly triads and 7th chords from the Gmajor scale but it also used chords from the Gminor scale. i didnt think it would sound good if you mixed chords from a different key or is this like a passing chord simmilar to using an occasional chromatic when improvising?if so would you only mix chords from major and minor with the same root note,(eg) C and C minor or can you use chords from any other key to add variety or create a tension in the progression. i hope this makes sense! i look forward to your reply
peter

[Zatz]

Hello Peter_traj!

My knowledge in music theory sux to the extent that I haven't been brave enough to go on and post a reply until now. Please never mind nor read and God forbid apply whatever I'm going to tell you :)

Well... back to work then. As we are talking about G major, let's have a better look at the basic building blocks of this scale. Namely they are:

* Root - G major
* Subdominant - C major
* Dominant - D major

It's a common thing in rock to play minor and major mixed scale whole lot due to overusing pentatonic scales where you play mostly power chords (without third - see pentatonic post) which may pretty well stand for either major or minor chords - depends on what third you choose to fill in the gap. This is called "borrowing" chords from the other scales. When we use such kind of "alien" chords we deviate to the tonality that supports the appearance of these chords and hence we "pay visit" to this tonality and can stay there for a while and then go back to where we started from. So given G major you would mostly borrow chords from these tonalities (remember we agreed they are superior ones :) ?):

* G minor
* C minor
* D minor

That doesn't mean you have no right to use all the variety of another chords but explains the most straight-forward approach as I personally understand and use it.


Ultra mega best regards,
Zatz

[Zatz]

Just thought it'd be ok if I posted at least one example to prove what I have said.
As for me I think that the most successful and natural deviation is diving into minor subdominant tonality if we play in major and vice versa. In G major it would be C minor. Let's consider the progression:

G -> C -> D7 -> G -> G7 -> [Cm -> Fm] -> F#mb5/7 -> G

The chords in brackets are "borrowed" ones because the are taken from minor subdominant tonality.

Hope this makes sense.

Zatz

[Guni]

Lemme just add my 2 cents here:

The technical term for borrowing chords is 'Modal Interchange' and it basically means to borrow chords from related modes and tonalities, ie C major, C natural minor, C harmonic minor, etc ...

I'm just thinking of the tune 'Hotel California' by the Eagles which uses some nice modal interchange techniques.

The verse goes like this:

Bm F#7 A E G D Em F#7

Bm is our tonal center.

Bm = Im (B natural minor)
F#7 = V7 (B harmonic minor)
A = bVII (B natural minor)
E = IV (B melodic minor)
G = bVI (B natural minor)
D = bIII (B natural minor)
Em = IV (natural minor)
F#7 = V7 (B harmonic minor)


Interesting is the half step move from the F#7 into the chorus which goes then like

G D Em F#7

which are again chords out of our Bm pot.

Guni

[Zatz]

Guni,

Yea - it's a great example. thanx.
All the minors mixed and F#7 -> G... sounds really prepared and waited for.
I should read your "Chord Scales" atricle once more. I feel I have come to understand the theory behind it but still feel I have problems with applying my knowledge - I wish I could capture the scale flavour on the fly to figure out the chords immediately. Gotta train whole lot more.

Warm regards,
Andrew

[szulc]

There are many choices when writing a chord progression.

You could write chord Progression like jazz turnaround where the key changes constantly, so you could have a series of dominant 7th chords in a cycle 4 progression, if these chords occurred on every quarter note, you would pass through 4 keys in one measure, this is the extreme situatiion. This can be played beautifully just as a piece with only 1 chord through a series of measures can be played beautifully.
Traditional music theory gives us several ways of using chords to be used as piviots into new keys, or as secondary dominants where we create artificial tension by 'visiting' other keys. This happens when we take a given progression in one key and precede some of the chords by a dom7 down a fourth (or up a fifth), alternately you can use a dim 7 down 1/2 step.

Some music has no tertiary (built on thirds) chords at all, in jazz and modern music there is a strong preference to use quartal harmony built on stacked 4ths. This is an unmistakable sound, but foreign to most people. It is interesting to note that if you build stacks of 5ths the chords are just open inversions of the quartal chords, the same holds true for building stacks of 6ths being open inverted 3rd stacks.

Tone row music may not use chords at all in the traditional sense.

[Guni]

Originally posted by szulc
Tone row music may not use chords at all in the traditional sense.

Hi szulc,

With tone row music you mean 12 tone music? This is a very interesting concept. I am just curious how you would go about writing a song with this....

Guni

[szulc]

In 12-note mus., the order in which the composer decides to arrange the 12 notes within the octave, this order acting as the basis for the comp. (almost like a motto-theme). Strictly no note should be repeated before the row comes to an end, but the rhythm in which they are presented may be. Also, any note in the row may appear an octave higher or lower than it did originally and the whole row can be used at any higher or lower level. Legal operations:
Inversion
Transposition
Retrogresstion

Music constructed according to the principle, enunciated by Hauer and Schönberg independently in the early 1920s, of 12-note composition. According to the Schönbergian principle, the 12 notes of the equal-tempered scale are arranged in a particular order, forming a series or row that serves as the basis of the composition. In Schönberg's 'Method of Composing with Twelve Notes Which are Related Only to One Another', the note-row may be used in its original form, or inverted, or retrograde, or retrograde inverted; in each of these forms it may be transposed to any pitch (each note-row may thus have 48 possible forms). All the music of the composition is constructed from this basic material; any note may be repeated, but the order must be maintained. Octave transpositions are permitted. Notes may occur in any voice and may be used chordally as well as melodically.
Later developments of 12-note theory introduced the idea of using six-, four- or three-note segments of a row as compositional elements. As originally designed by Schönberg, the method was intended to preclude tonality, though later composers, notably Berg, found ways of using the technique in a tonal context - as indeed did Schönberg himself.