They say if you could break your life down into small enough chunks, it would be made of steps. I say let’s do this for songs.
Let’s say you made a deal with the muses and they gave you a chord. What do you do next? Do you repeat the same chord (and for how long)? Or do you change it? And what for?
It’s a tough choice. What do you do when you win the lottery? Do you buy a beach or a bookshop? A boat or a bakery? There will always be the road you took and the road not taken.
At least with songs, the stakes are lower. You can always go back and change something. Or start a new song. Or sing an old tune in a new voice.
Today, I propose to stop worrying about the song for a second and just consider the next chord. Turn on the microscope and look at things on a micro-level.
Let’s say you got G major. What could the next chord be?
1. Slide effects
If you’re playing the guitar, you could just slide the chord shape up or down the fretboard. Kurt Cobain seemed to be doing this a lot and look at all the good songs that came out of it.
One fret – a half step – up would give you
- Ab major.
Two frets – a whole step – up would give you
- A major.
If you’re the playing the piano, you could move the hand grip up or down the keyboard in the same way. One black key (a half step) down would give you
- F# major (or simply F#).
and one white key (a whole step) up would give you
- A minor (or Am).
Now you can go back and forth between your two chords and be happy. Or you can wonder: what further chords do the first two suggest? What is this road you’ve stumbled upon? What does it all mean?
2. Playing in key
Beyond blindly sliding chord shapes up and down, you could think about all this in terms of playing in key. That generally means using only chords made up of the notes of a single scale.
If you know your key, you’re immediately on safer ground. But you’re also on a wide, well-trodden path where many have walked before you. Fine-tuning the balance between familiarity and originality will be your job later on.
For now, let’s see what key G major could be in.
If G major is the tonic or I chord, then we are in the key of G major, based on the G major scale G A B C D E F#, and the chords to choose from are G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em and F#dim. For example,
- G Em D G or
- G C G Em.
G major can also be the V chord (dominant) in the key of C major in which the other chords are Am, Bdim, C, Dm, Em and F. For example,
- G Dm G C or
- G F G C.
G is also the IV chord (subdominant) in the key of D major in which the next chord can be A, Bm, C#dim, D, Em and F#m. For example,
- G F#m Em D or
- G D G F#m.
G major is also present in the relative minor keys of the above three major keys, which give you the choice of chords but a different tonic chord (tonal center).
G is the bIII (flat three) chord in the key of E minor (relative minor of G major), so you can have something like
- G F#dim Em Am or
- G Bm Am Em.
G is the bVII (flat seven) chord in A minor (relative of C major), so you could have
- G Bdim F G Am or
- G Dm Em Am. (this is actually the same second chord as in example 7 above, but it’s too late to change the numbering below, so I’m changing the title.)
G is also the bVI (flat six) chord in Bm (relative of D major), so you could have
- G A Bm Bm (as seen in point 1 above) or even
- G F# Bm Bm (as seen in point 1)
if we substitute F# for F#m (a V for a v chord) for a brighter resolution.
In fact, the last trick (substituting a V for a v chord) means that G can also be used in the key of C minor (and its relative major – Eb major) and the next chord could be Ab, Bb, Cm, Ddim, Eb or Fm, as in
- G Ab G Fm Cm or G Ab Bb Cm (again seen in point 1)!
3. Playing with keys
To take this to the next level (of originality), you can employ yet another trick – borrow a chord from a parallel key (also known as modal substitution).
The parallel key of G major is G minor (and its relative Bb major), which means that the chord after G can also be Gm, Adim, Bb, Cm, Dm, Eb and F! For example,
- G Gm D D Cm Eb G G or
- G Bb C D
The parallel of C major is C minor, which we just saw above.
The parallel of D major is D minor (and its relative F major), which gives us Gm, Am, Bb, C, Dm, Edim and F as candidates for the next chord.
As you can see, the difference here, compared to G minor above, are Am and Edim, but Am is already in G major, so we could try
- G Edim D G for example.
By the same token, we could explore the parallel major keys of E minor, A minor and B minor – E major, A major and B major.
From E major, we could borrow G#m, A, B, C#m, D#dim, E or F#m for the next chord. Something like
- G A D D7 or
- G E Am D
From A major, we could borrow G#dim, A, Bm, C#m, D, E or F#m, as in
- G G#dim Am D or
- G C#m D G
From B major, we can borrow G#m, A#dim, B, C#m, D#m, E, F#, as in
- G F# G C (see point 1 above) or
- G B C D
or even G B C Cm – the Creep progression, in which there are two “foreign” chords which nevertheless work perfectly for reasons mentioned in point 4 below.
Again, it’s a fine balance between the number of chords you borrow and the chords in your supposed key. Once you borrow more than one chord, it’s easy to shift to a different key altogether.
That’s why, instead of “borrowed chords”, you can think of the out-of-key chords you use as “connecting” or “passing” chords, as part of a more general voice-leading approach.
4. Playing with the (notes in the) chord
Each note in a chord moves to a note in the next chord which is more or less close to it.
We talk about voice leading when this movement is largely by half steps or semitones.
If, for example, you go from G to B, as in the last example above, you may observe that the note B remains unchanged in the second chord, while the note G moves down a half step to F# (the 5th of B major) and the note D moves up a half step to D# (the 3rd of B major).
That’s great voice leading right there. You need only keep at it for a few more chords and your progression will sound smooth as silk (or at least as smooth as Creep).
From this perspective, you can use almost any chord to connect two chords in your key, as long as there’s good voice leading.
You can thus play with the notes of you first chord to see where they can go and where that second step might lead to.
Thus B major is not only well connected to G major, but also to C (another chord in the key of G major), because all of its notes move a semitone up to it.
The easiest way to play with the chord is to change just one of its notes (and put that in the melody while playing the chord or at least its root below).
That gives us very popular line clichés like
- G Gmaj7 G7 G6 or
- G G+ Em G+.
In the first case, the line descends chromatically from the root note. It’s a cliché you find in songs like Something, Stairway to Heaven and My Funny Valentine.
In the second case, the the line ascends chromatically from the fifth of the chord to the sixth (which becomes the root of Em) and then goes back down. This cliché is famous thanks to the James Bond Theme.
If you “let go” of the root, you can go
- G G#dim Am or even G G#dim A A#dim (a favourite of mine).
You can also play with the third of the chord, you could have
- G Gsus4 G (though that one usually goes Gsus4 G Gsus4 G) or
- G Gm D (known as the minor plagal cadence)
Next, you can try changing two notes at a time.
Thus, G can become Gdim (3rd and 5th move down):
- G Gdim Ab
or B (example 21 above) or Cm:
- G Cm G Fm
or D7 (a version of example 10 above).
Оf course, not all notes in the chord have to move chromatically. One is usually enough to give you a melody line (or a line cliché) around which to structure the progression.
In example 10 (G to D), the 3rd (B) moves by a whole step to the fifth of the next chord (A). However, G moving to F# is already a good opening gambit, which could continue with the following variations:
- (G D) F Em or (G D) C Am or (G D) Dm G C or (G D) Bb C and so on.
Finally, if you move all three notes of the chord, G could become Ab or F# (if all move in the same direction – the idea in point 1 above), or it could become Cdim:
- G Cdim G Am
or even Ebm:
- G Ebm G Db?
5. Playing with chaos
As you can see from the last example, this game can become unsettling.
There seem to be almost no limits to the chords that can follow a certain chord, but then again, there seem to be no limits to the number of ways in which you can fail.
The limits (and the success) are of course in our head.
As soon as we have more than one chord, we inevitably start looking for stories about what might or might not have gone down before and about what may or may not come next.
And we have to make choices – how far we want to stray from that first chord, how much uncertainty we can tolerate, how much weirdness we think our listeners can tolerate, how long we’re prepared to wander before we come back home, do we want to go home at all…
So after all the “structured” thinking so far, why not try living dangerously, like flirt-with-fire-, court-chaos-, tempt-fate-dangerously?
Play a random second chord and see where you end up, whether you can find firm land again or whether you float to a deserted island:
- G C# … A7 D7 G
- G Eb… C Ab G
- G Bbm… Eb F G
or a longer journey
- G Fm C Bb7 Eb Dbm Ab D7 G
In these examples, you sort of pull the rug from under your own feet with the second chord just to see if you can land on anything else but your bum.
Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t, but that’s OK, because isn’t that the way we learn?
Trip, fall, get up, start over.
The real bummer would be if there was no room for playing around nymore…
6. Da capo al fine
So yeah, go back to the start. What if the muses gave you G minor instead of G? What would come next?
You tell me…
