Another way to put this is that for most pop music, you could often degrade gracefully to three triads of major or minor quality.
But even for something discussed previously on HN-- the Beach Boys "God Only Knows"-- this doesn't work. Wilson really wants a half-diminished seventh chord at the high point of the melody. One could perhaps degrade to a diminished triad in the accompaniment, but he's literally singing the seventh of the chord so it's there regardless. Substituting a major or minor triad there is a qualitative change and sounds suspicious.
If you're making your own instrument you might want to be aware that there's a "suspicious" sound that some types of consistent chord substitutions can have on certain classes of instruments.
For example, a bagpiper can make severe simplifications to the harmony or even change melodic intervals to fit what they have available. Audiences generally accept this because the strictures of the instrument have made that a common practice. (Even if you're unaware of the strictures, you've probably gotten used to hearing the result of the common practice.)
However, if one consistently employs major/minor triad substitutions on the guitar people are eventually going to hear that as a lack of quality. As in the Beach Boys example, this will often happen during key points. The guitarist may get lucky if the singer happens to fill out the missing note of the chord-- e.g., guitarist plays a minor triad and the singer fills out the seventh at the beginning of the chorus of "Last Dance with Mary Jane"-- but eventually the audience will figure out that the guitarist is missing a vital skill.
Anyway, unless your instrument is so novel it doesn't have any associations with extant instruments, make sure you have some kind of "escape hatch" so that skilled performers can play the chords they need. :)
Francis Rossi, of Status Quo fame/notoriety, depending on who you ask, quipped when presented with some award or other - "Wow! Twenty-five years. Three chords. Thank you!"
I love it when people do not take themselves too seriously.
Look, I'm just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts.
But there is one thing I do know:
When composers want to emphasize the chord they're about to play, they will often choose a new chord consisting of notes within a step or half-step of the original. And they will quickly play that new chord as a way to smoothly introduce the chord they wanted to emphasize.
Whether it's Mozart in the retransition of the G minor symphony, Wagner in a transitional phrase of the interminable Götterdämmerung, or a folksy award winning singer-songwriter, that new chord counts as a chord. And that new chord must be added to the sum total number of chords used in the song.
Thank you.
Edit: the Mozart chord is G-G#-B-Eb, as a kind of "neighbor garbage chord" of a dominant seventh in G minor. For Wagner, I can't remember what key it was in, but it's a half-diminished seventh chord with a pedal-tone a minor third below the root. It's function is as a neighbor chord to a dominant seventh built on that same pedal-tone. Not sure about OP's reference but I bet I could find an interesting transient chord in there, too.
Edit2: Oh yeah, the Wagner reference is indeed Wagner, so you can be sure it gets sequenced with at least three iterations in case you missed it the first time.
It's worth noting that the "4 chords of pop" observation reference in TFA (which is about how few chords you need to learn to be able to make songs) is a bit different than the 4-chord cycle progressions discussed in that Axis of Awesome video (which is about specifically using 4-chord-long progressions that repeat in a cycle) — but it is still a fun thing.
If you do enjoy that, be sure to check out Patricia Taxxon's video on the subject, which is a very worthwhile analysis of that idea. It might be my favorite youtube video in the music theory genre.
Three chords and the truth. Usually attributed to Harlan Howard [1], an early country music songwriter. A lot of early country music sticks to just I, IV, and V.
No problem. In country and bluegrass jamming circles, there's definitely a faction that prefers simpler songs with fewer chords (true to Howard's quote), so I was amused to see his words distorted. Thanks for fixing it.
> Axis of Awesome video (which is about specifically using 4-chord-long progressions that repeat in a cycle)
Well yes the Axis of Awesome thesis is a bit disingenuous and the critique at the beginning of Patricia Taxxon's video is justified; just because the chords are the same doesn't mean the songs are the same! And the analogy is quite true that in visual arts all colors can be formed from the three primary colors.
Actually, I'm currently trying to make songs based on this simple 1465 progression, in that order; here are my first two attempts (the titles are a hint ;-)
The interesting thing about the Axis of Awesome four chords is that they are the same four chords that were in the stereotypical 1950s/early 60s pop song (Heart and Soul, Teenager in Love, Up on the Roof) but the order has changed. In the key of C the 50s version was C, A minor, F, G (or sometimes G7 instead), and in the Axis of Awesome / Adele version it's C, G, A minor, F. Of course Axis of Awesome cheats a little bit because they play the 4-chord parts of those 30-odd songs (though in fairness those tend to be the best known parts).
Yes, and this is the crucial difference that make new songs sound "modern". The Beatles were one of the first to use the 1,5,6,4 sequence (Let it be). Since then the 1,6,4,5 sequence has consistently lost ground, while 1,5,6,4 sounds modern. The chords are still the same.
That Mendes song makes all sorts of twists and turns that your brain doesn't expect (want?) it to. Personally I find it deeply uncomfortable to listen to, it might as well be four songs playing at once.
This kind of stuff is fascinating to me, that we can react so differently to music and specifically to various chord progressions.
Of course personal taste is inscrutable in some sense, but could it also be about conditioning? E.g. if you listen a lot to certain types of jazz you might get used to some stranger chord movements.
I have a lot of friends who cant stand Steely Dan progressions for example, though I love them myself.
Here's an example of strange chord movements that I personally like a lot more than the Sergio Mendes song:
After accidentally abandoning my likes/dislikes and disengaging disgust, my experience of music viscerally changed. I can enjoy all music now.
So much of it is conditioning, maybe all of it. There's conditioning around chords, progressions, dissonance, harmony, repetition, subjective ideas of what constitutes music, and so much more.
The only way to prove it isn't mere conditioning is to remove the conditioning and then evaluate.
Here's instructions for the practice I adopted. Note: how it's executed makes a difference. The initial acknowledgment of opposites (this will make more sense after reading the instructions) needs to be done compassionately, and not dismissively. There may need to be more steps at the beginning to, otherwise it's a little gaslighty. It worked great internally as is, and I think it may have trained callousness in me in the long-term when applied in relationships with other people.
So I did it by choosing to abandon all judgment and then reframing perspectives I heard using the words "like" and "dislike." The reframing always had in it "I can learn to enjoy everything."
I do think conditioning must be a big part of it. I hadn’t ever listened to this song since getting a little familiar with music theory but it was certainly on the types of playlists my parents listened to when I was a kid. Listening to it now, I can see what’s unusual about it but it never would have occurred to me to consider it hard to listen to. Repetition legitimizing and all that. My parents weren’t jazz listeners so it took work for me to appreciate it as an adult, and now I can’t help but wonder if the better path for my kids is to get them used to it early or to let them have that same “whoa” experience later. (Only partially serious; of course they should be exposed to it. :D)
You could give them access to instruments and let them make their own "whoa" moments. Also, Sun Ra's music exists well beyond most jazz, especially mainstream jazz, as he tried to create jazz that's not catering to white tastes.
For me a big part of what makes this song great is that it sounds so innocuous. It’s a nice, catchy, easy-listening pop ballad. As Rick says incredulously at several points “this was a number one song!”
For me, the difference between that Steely Dan song and the Mendes song is like the difference between a seemingly-inscrutable really thick scottish accent and an ESL speaker trying to affect a native accent and kind of flowing between several different accents.
However uncomfortable the Steely Dan song might be, it has a nice consistent construction to it, and, once you get into the groove, it becomes straightforward. Almost all music I listen to that I'd call complex, from classical to prog metal to jazz, can be described like that too.
The Mendes song, however, sounds disjointed to me. It sounds built out of all sorts of fairly standard bits and pieces, but thrown around completely haphazardly.
Wow, I have completely the opposite reaction! I’m not saying you’re wrong, of course; it’s just fascinating how reactions differ.
To me, the jazzy changes in the Steely Dan song are very in-your-face -- the song is built around them. It’s pleasant enough but feels very random and meandering to me.
The Mendes song, as you say, is “built out of standard bits” -- it feels like a “proper” soul ballad. For me the unusual changes work because they’re used a bit more sparingly, and each one comes as a little jolt, either to elevate the emotion (in the conventional “go up one key at the end of the song” way) or alternatively to ease off the pedal a bit for a change in lyrical tone. It’s like the whole song consists of final choruses and bridges, which are often the best bits of a good song. :)
Hmm, I disagree. That Shostakovitch piece (nice one, thanks for the link, btw!) feels to me more like trickery and misdirection. It builds up your comfort then throws you off, and it gets more and more off-kilter the longer you go. It's very deliberate and purposeful about where it's going.
Again, it may not look like it, but if you analyze the chords and their substitutions, that's what you get. The genius of jazz is to make everything look more complicated than what it really is.
While I also agree with the sentiment, I do think it's a little bit like saying "90% of all programming is flow control and assignments"--it hinges on wide definitions that can be contextually helpful, harmful, or both. Resolving to those chords from tones that are outside of the key? Tritone substitutions? Modulations that change what chords exactly ii, V, and i are? &c.
I think it also depends on what jazz is actually being discussed -- it applies well to most jazz standards, but a lot of modern jazz and jazz-adjacent (or perhaps just what I'm familiar with) seems to gravitate heavily towards nonfunctional harmony.
Ha, I don't think I've ever heard that song before and I love it. Usually increasing the complexity of music makes it less comprehensible. I really respect those rare songs that are technically impressive to musicians while also being comprehensible (and sometimes downright catchy) to "normal" people. And I think Never Gonna Let You Go nails it. But of course, it is totally subjective.
And they called it "easy listening", haha. But it's really typical of lounge to do lots of weird complex things and still make it sound like it's no big deal. I believe Girl from Ipanema has a couple of YouTube videos about its weirdness as well.
Rick Beat is trying to deceive you. If you really believe that this Sergio Mendes song is complicated, you need to listen to some older pop songs. For example, Stevie Wonder is a good composer to start.
Yes and no —- it’s definitely pretty far out there for a mainstream 80s pop song, and a bit more fiddly at first glance than your average Stevie Wonder song.
I think the trick is that it’s bossa nova, which tends to have a lot of those semitone shifts that Rick highlights. The Girl from Ipanema is the classic example.
I love that they seem so complex when you look at the individual chord movements, and yet the melody flows very naturally (to my ears, anyway!)
The effect in Never Gonna Let You Go feels a bit like the dramatic key change you often get right at the end of those 80s ballads, but smoothly integrated throughout the whole song. I can well imagine some hate that, but I love it!
Not that anyone cares, but noticing that this song is a cover rather than a Sergio Mendes original, I was curious whether the earlier recordings had the same tricky structure or if Mendes (being a Bossa Nova guy, among other things) added them in.
And they do! The Dionne Warwick and Stevie Woods versions have the same chords (and nearly the same arrangement); so it comes from the original songwriters (Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann), although it’s a perfect fit for Mendes’ style.
That reassures me that the chord structure is really integral to the song (as I’d like to believe) and not just tacked on afterwards to make it sound cooler.
I find it hilarious that he concludes the Sergio Mendes recording is "the most complex pop song ever" rather than the obvious takeaway that when a song is simple enough, most of the specific notes being played aren't important. You could easily rearrange the song to be easier to play on guitar without losing "the song" (unless you're a music theorist and the ornamentation is "the song")
I don’t think that’s the obvious takeaway. The specific chord voicings are complicated, sure, but the complexity he’s talking about are the key changes and unexpected tonal choices. You can’t remove those without fundamentally changing the feeling of the song.
When I was learning the guitar, I frequently would skip passing chords and simplify voicings I didn’t know how to play. As a result, my covers were pretty boring and lacking the impact of the originals. That’s fine for beginners, but a pro musician is going to take pride in either faithfully recreating a cover or intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it, not just skipping over stuff that’s hard.
How complex is a song that can be played on entirely different instruments without re-interpretation?
When I think of complexity I think of unreconcilable elements that force the transposer to make tough decisions ("intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it").
I don’t really understand that idea of complexity, but Rick Beato is addressing this song from a music theory perspective, and I think this song would meet anyone’s definition of complex when it comes to theory.
There's no one 'music theory perspective'. Why not analyze it on more axes?
- Rhythmic patterns and variation
- Interplay between instruments
- Instrumentation and arrangement
- Structure
- Vocal style
- Lyrics
- Recording and mixing
By these metrics (and the ears of 99% of its listeners) it's a more or less generic 80s adult contemporary song. Yes it has a weird chord progression. Would it be more complex if it couldn't be boiled down to a series of chords?
By these metrics (and the ears of 99% of its listeners) it's a more or less generic 80s adult contemporary song.
That’s what the word “pop” is being used for in “the most complex pop song ever”. Rick Beato is giving an example of a literally popular song, one that somebody suggested they perform an impromptu concert because it was in the charts at the time, and which sounds totally mainstream, and yet has a very unusual chord progression.
And I think “music theory” in this context is basically jazz theory, where a song is boiled down to what you’d see in the Real Book - melody line, chords, and a description of the tempo and groove. Unless you’re doing big band, instrumentation is one of the standard small combos, or just whatever musicians you have to hand. Which again is reasonable in the context of “here’s a song we tried to busk in a scratch group, and it turned out to be crazily complicated”.
I agree it's a good anecdote. It clearly still resonates with professional instrumentalists. But popular music has progressed so much since then that 'jazz theory' is unequip to grasp the complexities of modern recorded music. Beato in the video says modern pop music is getting simpler, but he's just using the wrong tools.
I guess he really means "less complex harmonically". You're definitely right that a lot of modern music has features that would be unimaginable or impossible to achieve 40 years ago when this song was written, both through new tech and stylistic innovations. But I think his view is still very defensible if you focus on pop songs, singable vocal-led pieces that you might attempt in karaoke.
There was a long period where jazz influences were very big in popular music -- jazz itself was actually popular! -- so there were a lot of very harmonically interesting pop songs. I agree with him that that seems generally less true nowadays (thinking of big mainstream singer-songwriters like Adele and Ed Sheeran). But I'd be interested to hear of good counterexamples.
> While it's almost always I, IV, V, and vi, we have both II/ii and III/iii, differing on whether the third is major or minor.
This might be a bit confusing as written, because the slash "/" is normally used in roman numerals to indicate secondary chords. For example, the II chord may be written as V/V. (V/V is always II, but not the other way around... the "/" notation indicates that the chord is functioning as a secondary chord, which is something you figure out from context.)
The terminology "open chords" is also a bit unusual. The term "open chords" usually refers to chords that use open strings (strings that are not fingered). Chords without a third are often called "power chords". You can do your entire song with power chords if you're playing rock music.
I'd also add that what chords you get as the three/four chords you need depends so heavily on genre. If you were playing blues, you might pick I7, IV7, and V7 for your first three, and then maybe bVII7 as the fourth. If you were playing jazz, you might pick something like I69, ii9, IVmaj7, V7.
In general, the conflation of "chords" and "harmony" can be just little sticky, because one implies something the instrument is doing, and the other what the composer/band/piece does. An instrument might be making lots of chord changes, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is any overall harmonic motion happening.
Sure in rock'n'roll the guitar player isn't hitting the third a lot, but the singer almost certainly is!
Also, if you are playing modern jazz, you are not really doing functional harmony like this analysis assumes except at a very macro level. Chord changes there are about color more often, only punctuating with a true harmonic change. This can be true even if they are moving from, say, an I9 to IV9. That seems like a "change", but its really just elaborating on the I.
I seem to remember "open chords" in my brief counterpoint studies, but can't find anything to back that up now. But in counterpoint you could talk about the openness of certain "harmonies" in terms of their compatibility to any number of changes. Something with a lot of doubled roots and fifths are less open to changing, if you are following the "rules".
I'm not going deep into Jazz, but if I'm playing a song with something like I vi ii V, then I'm going to likely color those chords with the 7th (at the minimum) and likely additional extensions.
I picked something like I69 not because it has function different from I, but because a 6/9 chord is a common choice for a Jazz musician to play as a I chord. Or, at least, it's one of my first picks. And if you're playing I9 -> IV9, my question is whether the I IV is just comping on I or whether it's harmonic movement.
And I will say that while there is no requirement to use functional harmony in Jazz, there is a massive repertoire of Jazz that uses functional harmony, or at least uses harmony where you can get insight by analyzing it functionally. For example, I might analyze something as "bV7/V I" in a jazz song and that is both very functional and very jazzy, and in a classical piece I might see "N6 V7 I" and while N6 and bV7/V are similar chords, using the chord with dominant function is, stylistically, a jazz idiom.
> In general, the conflation of "chords" and "harmony" can be just little sticky, because one implies something the instrument is doing, and the other what the composer/band does.
Maybe not directly related or as confusing, but also worth noting here I think is that you can play three notes sequentially and still call it a chord. It would be a "broken chord". And you can play just two notes simultaneously as a "harmonic interval".
> This might be a bit confusing as written, because the slash "/" is normally used in roman numerals to indicate secondary chords.
Sorry, that's not something I'd seen. Edited the post to switch to "or".
> The terminology "open chords" is also a bit unusual. The term "open chords" usually refers to chords that use open strings (strings that are not fingered).
Looking some, you're totally right. I'm confused where I picked up the idea that these were called "open"? I think I've seen them written like "G<sub>open</sub>" to indicate that you don't play a 3rd? Calling them "power chords" in a non-rock context sounds off to me, though. Edited the post to call them chords without thirds.
Every guitar player calls them powerchords. I've never heard of another term. Unless OP is referring to double stops. But, those are more of an embellishment, and usually never played on the low E or A string.
It almost always refers to a perfect fifth, optionally with the octave on top. It's a very easy thing to play with two or three fingers, either on guitar or keyboard.
> Calling them "power chords" in a non-rock context sounds off to me, though.
Lots of powerchords in pop too. "powerchord", to me at least, implies that there is a distortion effect somewhere in the signal chain. Powerchords on their own sounds really weak.
Completely tangential to the actual content of this blog, I really (really really really) appreciate the look. Simple dark text on light background. Obvious hyperlinks. Charts and tables that tell the story without distracting. Effective minimalism.
Interesting, I really disagree. I do agree the page is refreshing compared to a lot of the internet these days, just because it has no ads and no glitchy, laggy SPA animations or slow loading times.
But it's pretty extreme to pretend that none of basic design practices adopted over the past 30 years have any merit whatsoever. This design is not good. The black text on white is too much contrast. The default browser text of Times New Roman is less readable than more modern sans serif fonts (this is arguably a problem with Chrome's default value though, not just this site). The graph titles are not text but rendered into the images, and the images have no alt text to help with accessibility. The double solid border on cell boundaries in the tables looks crazy and does distract from the content. The page content is much narrower than it should be on desktop, it could use an adaptive width. There is no dark mode to make the page easier on your eyes in low light.
The design here on HN is a much better example to strive for, it has a similar minimalist aesthetic but addresses most of these issues.
I wish more of the internet behaved like this, but I do not need it to look like this.
This statement intrigued me. Without getting into what is fashion and progress (because I am NOT a designer), I was curious what is "too much" contrast. There's lots of literature out there about applying too much contrast in image/photo elements. But here, we're talking about text, and this honestly piqued my interest. Too little is usually pretty obvious. But what is too much? I don't honestly know.
There is a minimum contrast specified for a reason, because more contrast is better to read.
Modern designers argue that high contrast is "harder on the eyes" and they seem to prefer solid colored boxes. It is a real pitty, infested the web with sites that are basically gray on gray. Great, the text is now out of the way for the beautiful design and the eyes can relax from all the reading. Except when you actually want to read it.
No really, low contrast text is a real strain and these "too much contrast" arguments are too blame that it still happens.
Higher contrast means a lower overall screen brightness is still comfortably readable. I think many people just don't think to turn down the display brightness and think that the content on the display is causing the issue.
Huh, it doesn't work for me with MacOS system settings set to Dark Mode, even though that does usually work in the browser for sites like google that support dark mode.
I think browsers started dropping the ability to use system colors a few years ago. Presumably because some web sites make assumptions about colors and become unusable (like white text on white background). But not this site!
Agree I'd hate for the internet to look like a corporate Google Doc. An interactive New York Times article is very pleasing to read (minus all the ads)
Trouble with this sort of thing is the subjectivity of 'what chord is this?', taking into account inversions and the like. CMaj7 has C / E / G / B? Who says this isn't Emin6 with the 6th in the bass? It'll depend on the way it's heard and its context within the song, but many approaches can impact this sort of thing.
EDIT: I wrote this without carefully reading the article (oops!). Author does a great job with the "adjustments"...I suspect adjusting to relative minor covers a huge amount of these issues, and the author throws in mixolydian for good measure! There will always be edge cases, secondary dominants, modulations, blah blah blah, but I suspect adjusting to include relative minors handles the vast majority of popular music.
Similarly, I remember McCartney saying he started to realize there was some musical control you could have in a song, not just having to play "root of the chord" bass notes.
"Yeah, as time went on, definitely bass, I started to think, Wow, you know? Once I realized that you didn’t have to just play the root notes. If it was C, F, G, then it was normally C, F, G that I played. But I started to realize that you could be pulling on that G, or just staying on the C when it went into F. And then I took it beyond that..... Once you realized the control you had over the band, as we talked about earlier, you were in control. They can’t go anywhere, man. Ha! Power!"
100%. Every Little Thing She Does by the Police has only two chords in the verses but Stings choice of bass notes make it sound like 8+, root notes be damned.
Playing rootless triads really brings this home. It allows jazz guitar players to have greater better mobility by offloading the bass to the bassist, but if you play a rootless ii-V-I exclusively on the guitar, the chords loose all their color/character.
Great video here talking about the name of one chord in the intro to Stairway To Heaven. Three different youtubers chime in to discuss it. Really shows how much nuance there can be and how ambiguous the naming can be. There was no real consensus. One of the suggestions was "a minor major nine" and another was "e seven flat thirteen over g sharp".
"The name is there to express a feeling. If you don't know any context it can be hard to put a definitive label on a chord." - Paul Davids
That and sometimes chords/notes could be labeled either flat or sharp. I thought that was really an annoying ambiguity until it suddenly made a whole lot more sense--there are 7 letters for a reason; in a given key, we generally want to use all 7 letters to describe the scale tones, instead of repeating one. I think the same goes here, knowing what key the song is in tends to suggest certain chord spellings over others.
I think the difference here is how it functions in the music. Does the chord function as a CMaj7 in relation to the rest of the song, or does it function as an Emin6?
One thing I've realised is the difference between great songwriters, versus great "players".
Flicking through my songbook, so many great songs are just a few basic chords. Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah - C, Am, F, G, E. Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane - Em, A, D, G. Hound Dog is just A, D, E.
Blitzkrieg Bop is just a few power chords the whole song. One of the first songs I learnt but heaps of fun to play!
I have way more admiration for good songwriters. I love Cat Power, and many of her songs are pretty simple & sparse. Leonard Cohen wasn't known for being a guitar virtuoso, and neither was Neil Young. But I'd take them any day over, say, John Mayer. I'm sorry John Mayer fans, but just because Neon is difficult to play, does not make it a good song.
As I practice and get better at guitar I try to take inspiration from great songwriters rather than great players.
It's amazing how much Kris Kristofferson or Townes Van Zandt get out of simple chord structures. Of course, they mix it up with a few hammer-ons and intermediate open strumming when performing but still, the beauty they discovered and that you can reproduce at home with really basic skills is incredible to me.
Beatles songs are great for this. If you play something like across the universe or dig a pony, these are simple enough chords. But you can actually very easily add all the little filler notes they do on the albums just from a few little riffs within those chords. You can even add your own and after a while you can start realizing you can do these little rips in all sorts of songs, touching pieces of the scale you are forming a chord on.
In some ways the simple chord structure acts as scaffolding for the rest of the musicians to fill in with their own flavor. I really like listening to Jerry Garcia, I think he is the best guitar player there ever was so far. In a solo its like he lands every note your brain expects to hear next and just floats up and down the neck fast and slow. He was trained as a banjo player so it shows in his fingerwork. In the song "Deal," (1) the chorus chords are very simple - A G D, but Jerry is able to use his knowledge of scales to riff on these notes multiple different ways, and its almost like his guitar is singing its own lyrics.
This feels like a stone's throw from Schenkerian analysis (1) where in practice, lots of harmonies devolve to a simple foundational structure. Even the tough stuff to reason about like the example at the bottom of the page, Gee, Officer Krupke which is tricky because of the jazz/ragtime influence on the chromaticism of the harmony and melody basically reduces down to leading tone resolution and local key changes (V-I resolutions). It's setting up the zingers like "naturally we're punks" (V-I), "deep down inside of us there is good" (V-I) coming from chromatic turnarounds.
I recently figured out the chords to "Sk8er Boi" by Avril Lavigne. It would be all over the place in the analysis in this article, but it's because the chorus is in a different key, and the out of key chord in the verse is actually borrowed from the chorus. It's surprising clever for what I assumed was an easy pop punk song. There was even some word painting with the line "She needed to come back down to earth" coming right before the key drop going into the verse.
Blah.. it’s a bit like “What words you need to write a book”
It’s about how you combine them in a sequence, how you arrange the instruments, how you voice the chords and do voice leading, and how you combine them with the melody and rhythm
Sure, except most people aren't writing books, they're doing readings of existing books. So the question is "how many words can they pronounce?" You can be a great poet, but if you want to do a reading of Annabelle Lee, you need to know how to pronounce "sepulcher."
This is super interesting, especially his work on those foot pedals. I like to make music but only just know a tiny bit about playing. Maybe having foot pedals would help. I also created a random chord generator that you can run in your browser to get ideas for chord progressions.
That was pretty fun. I wonder if making it so you can play the chords using the keyboard would work? Also, I changed it to Dm and the chord selection was, odd.
Still, I liked it. I compose a lot of songs in Dm but do get stuck in the same old chords.
Maybe I could resurrect this old thing and improve it a bit. I imagine keyboard wouldn’t be too hard to add. I’ll have to take a look at the chords I put in the Dm option too, I don’t remember.
> "By creating this system of cyclical patterns, Coltrane changed the language of jazz and broke the mold of ordinary jazz harmonic progressions in jazz history. (Wernick 23). The use of “Coltrane changes” is still used by jazz composers today, and has become one of the most influential jazz compositional techniques of the last half-century."
He ignores songs with key changes in this analysis but he also does a lot of simplifications. If we simplify this song it's mostly just a ii-V-I across 3 different keys. It is the most common chord progression in jazz music.
"In this video, I describe a common problem with the way guitarists cover popular songs by using open chords far too regularly. The trouble with open chords is that they often ignore important melodic and harmonic features. Hence, zombie chords. So dull they sound dead. It's spooooooooky!"
> While it's almost always I, IV, V, and vi, we have both II or ii, and III or iii, differing on whether the third is major or minor. One way to handle this is just to drop the third from all the chords and play them open
Note that what jefftk calls "open chords" are more commonly called "power chords" (or "indeterminate" or "no3" or "5" chords). This is a distinct concept from the open/"zombie" chords that that youtube video is about. (But if you did use only power chords when covering songs, they would also usually sound quite dull!)
I was going to link that exact video. That video does a good job of explaining the problem with simplifying more complicated chords. Yes, you can get rid of the "extra" bits and the song is still recognizable. But those extra elements are what give a song character, and simplifying it down to just a handful of chords causes a song to sound bland and generic.
It explains the problem, but doesn’t really offer any solutions for those of us stuck on ‘campfire chords.’ Any suggestions for videos that do offer solutions?
I started playing guitar in middle school and I hated learning complex chords so I'd do what this video suggested and just play the stripped down/simplified version of the chord.
But it's not just about open chords. If you strip down a Bm7b5 to a Bm and play the Bm on the second fret it still has half of the character of the Bm7b5 chord.
Only recently did I start gaining the patience to learn every suggested chord and it makes a tremendous difference.
That said, I prefer piano for accompanying because the piano's tone is somehow more forgiving with basic chords than guitar is.
Yeah, for instance, it's much easier to melodically space out or articulate the notes in a chord on a piano so they don't clunk all together like the strum of a guitar without ever crossing into arpeggio. That can make for beautiful open melodic chord playing when you're jamming out or noodling around without ever breaking the rhythm.
IMO: It's much better to understand how to construct chords and then play music and memorize them by trying to play both the melody and some kind of accompaniment. You end up getting stuck in situations where you need to rearrange the chord or learn a new one and you can build them up that way without drilling.
I do know the basics of chord construction but it's still way easier to think through it on a piano because keys are all linear whereas with guitar strings you have to translate across strings with varying relationships. Not saying it's impossible it just takes more work to internalize that on guitar than piano. And I'm not there on guitar.
I'm right there with you - I have lots of experience playing songs on piano with just lyrics + chords, and I use all kinds of inverted chords without even thinking about it. "Reading" the keyboard is much easier than reading the fretboard.
One other thing that makes it harder on guitar is that the chords that are easy to play are often various inversions, so your "A" chord might actually be a first or second inversion. I'm still just learning movable shapes on the guitar, and getting the fingerings right is tricky as things grow and shrink moving up and down the fretboard, something that also isn't a problem with keyboards.
Check out the chord Melody guitar course at improviseforreal.com
It Will make these relations very clear and help your playing a lot. Source: happy customer myself
Tangentially related, but the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has twelve pieces of different styles and progressions on a melody of only five notes. Dan Bruno did a very nice analysis of the music theory behind the composition of the tunes in the game: https://danbruno.net/writing/ocarina/
Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the "4 Chords" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2].
Looks about right, but I'll still be keeping my 13(#11) chords.
[EDIT: Meant as a joke, but it was not a good joke, as the author explicitly addressed upper extensions and their irrelevance to the point of the article.]
>they are each three major chords using the first, fourth, and fifth notes of the major scale
I have no idea what any of this means (what is a chord? what is a major chord? what is a note? what is a first/fourth/fifth note? is there a 65th note? what is a scale? what is a major scale? what does it mean that a note is of a scale? what does it mean that a chord uses a note? is there a difference between a chord using a note of a scale and not of a scale?), but it implies to me that music is as complex a subject as physics.
A note is something that gives the impression of being a single pitch (frequency). For example, what you get when you play a single key on the piano, or pluck a string on a stringed instrument. Many instruments can only play one note at a time: trumpet, flute, saxophone.
The standard notes used in Western music and discussed in this piece differ in pitch by a factor of the 12th root of 2 (~1.06x). This means that if you go up twelve notes (which we call "half steps", confusingly) your pitch doubles. Two notes that differ by a factor of two are said to be an "octave" apart, and sound almost like the same note.
A scale is a series of notes, and a "major scale" is a specific series where you go up by two notes, two notes, one note, two notes, two notes, two notes, and then one note. This gives you seven different notes in your octave. We can call these notes the "first", "second", etc notes of the major scale. We typically don't talk about "65th" notes because they would be way too high.
A chord is multiple notes played at the same time. The chords I am talking about this post are "triads", which means they are three simultaneous notes
A major chord is notes one, three, and five of a major scale. A minor chord is the same, but the middle chord (three) is moved down one note ("flat" or "minor").
Wow. I thought about answering and decided it was too much to cover. Well done, teacher! They say your ability to explain to a beginner without misleading is a good measure of how well you understand a thing.
Thanks. That helps somewhat, though it is still crazy complex. But, why is the major scale 2212221? Is there a 1212122 scale (end every other possible combination)?
> Is there a 1212122 scale (end every other possible combination)?
The steps have to add up to 12 to end up on the same octave. I'm not sure about every possible combination but there are other scales called "modes" which are rotations of that pattern (which can be derived from the white keys on the piano, just starting one of the 7 different notes; whether something is a 2 or a 1 depends on whether there is a black key between the white keys). The different scales derived from that are:
2 2 1 2 2 2 1
2 1 2 2 2 1 2
1 2 2 2 1 2 2
2 2 2 1 2 2 1
2 2 1 2 2 1 2
2 1 2 2 1 2 2
1 2 2 1 2 2 2
The first pattern is a typical Major (associated with happy songs) scale. The sixth one is a standard Minor scale (associated with less happy songs). The third one is called Phrygian and has a dark/exotic feel that works well in metal ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DzGlzdbkDI )
A 1212122 scale doesn't add to 12, and so would not work very well. When you play through a scale, low to high, you generally want to end up back where you started but up an octave.
The main other combinations you see are the same 2212221 pattern, but starting on a different note. For example, if you start on the sixth note, this permutes to 2122122 which we call the (natural) minor scale. We call each of these permutations a "mode".
Technically any sequence of notes within the octave is a scale, including the chromatic scale (111111111111). The French composer Olivier Messiaen did some investigation into how many scales can be built, I think the number is a bit over 800. Of course most scales sound weird to unaccostumed ears.
I'll try to explain why we choose those 7 notes out of 12. Note, that this is just my opinion and not a scientific and proven research.
According to observations by ancient Greeks, the sounds whose frequency have simple ratios of small natural numbers like 2/3 or 4/3 or 5/4 sound harmonically and pleasing together. Except for number 7 (I don't know why). So, if we take several such sounds we expect to get a nice sounding chord.
For example, in a C major chord (C + E + G) the frequencies ratio of E to C is 5/4, ratio of G to C is 3/2 and ratio of G to E is 6/5. So, if we denote frequency of C as 4f, then the frequencies of C, E, G are 4f, 5f and 6f. Those are indeed ratios of small numbers and notes in C major chord are considered in harmony with each other.
By the way, if we invert the chord as G, C, E we get ratios of 3f, 4f and 5f. These are the smallest numbers that we can use to build a 3-note chord. Does it mean that inverted C chord is the most perfect and sounds most harmonical? As a person without an ear for music I don't understand.
Because of this ancient people made scales that consisted of notes with good ratios. For example, if we take first 6 notes of a major scale (C, D, E, F, G, A), the frequencies would be f, 9/8f, 5/4f, 4/3f, 3/2f, 5/3f. Except for D, all of these are small numbers and if ancient Greeks were right, the song made from them should sound harmonical. D also has good ratios with some notes like G (D/G ratio is 3/4).
But this scale has a disadvantage, that one cannot easily raise or lower the pitch. Different people have different voice ranges, but if you have an instrument with these notes, you cannot change the key and transpose the melody. For example, if you had a sequence of C, D, F then you cannot pick higher or lower notes with same ratios.
That's why people invented an equally tempered scale. It turned out that if you divide an octave into 12 equally spaced notes, then 7 of them are pretty close to a traditional major scale. That's why it is 2212221 and not something else. With equally tempered scale one can transpose a song up or down easily, keeping the same ratios between notes.
By the way, note B seems to use different pitches in different scales. There is a space between frequencies of A and C, so there is a place for a note, but there is no simple ratio one could use for B and different scales used different pitches for the note.
You can read more about pitch ratios here [1].
While major chord sounds "most" harmonical, but there are only 3 major chords in a major scale, and the music tends to be boring if it uses only perfect ratios. I guess that's why musicians started to use more and more "imperfect" chords over time. For example, in a minor chord like A, C, E ratios are 10f:12f:15f. And indeed a minor chord sounds like a wrong version of a major chord. If we take a chord with 7th, the ratios get even worse, and some musicians use chords with notes that do not belong to a normal chord, or even do not belong to the key.
By the way, non-harmonical notes are ones that differ only by a half tone - for example, E and F (ratio is 16:15) or three tones (ratio is 36:25).
Music theory can get pretty wild, yeah. The main difference to me when comparing it to (for example) physics theory is that it's usually an aesthetic pursuit. As in, studying physics has the end goal of understanding how the universe works, but theorizing about music involves the aesthetic value of the sound -- why and how something "works" (or doesn't), what feelings or emotions are evoked by certain types of sound, and how to apply this to composing new music, or understanding existing music.
One site I use occasionally for helping come up with chord progressions is hook theory's chord trends [1]. It has an interactive graph that shows you how common it is for a specific chord to come next when you choose a starting chord. It's very helpful in looking at a few options out there, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time.
Its amazing how sparse a representation of a song can be recognizable (and enjoyable!) The mapping of musical meaning is due for a new look; the way we talk and write about sound needs to be rationalized before we can progress further in understanding why and how it works.
I don't know. After watching a lot of Adam Neely videos on YouTube, I get the impression that music theory has an incredibly rich language to describe music and does have a good understanding of why certain songs sound good, why certain arrangements sound better than others, especially regarding specific emotional cues they are trying to convey. That's one of the things I love about his videos, he does an excellent job of translating that language to a lay audience. But as with anything, full mastery of the field takes significant, prolonged effort, not in any small part due to competition driving the bar ever higher and higher.
Most of Neely's stuff is just wrong or misleading. I once tried to watch his video about why minor chords sound "sad" and major chords sound "happy" and it was just laughable how unsupported his claims were.
I have never heard such a complaint about his videos. Most? There are enough musicians in the world, on YouTube, and in my family that they would have called it out. I call shenanigans and say it is you, sir, who are wrong or misleading
Most musicians are ignorant of the deeper music theory - even jazz musicians like Neely, except on a standard level (which any jazz musician does). You need a trained composer and/or musicologist for that. Neely himself is not some music theory guru, he is a Berklee alumni who plays jazz, those are a dime a dozen.
That's a bit harsh. He's the one engaging an audience on more than one front performing as both a musician and successful YouTuber which the others aren't, and doing us a service as such exposing us to stuff we'll otherwise not ever encounter. He's publicly learning, including sharing his mistakes and entertaining and tries to keep 'fun' as part of journey. You may consider him a dime a dozen, but he's very far away from where I am, and therefore valueable to someone like me.
At some point claiming the person at the top of the ivory tower is the only one that knows the worth of something is useless if you can't get them to communicate with you.
Like anything you can really deep dive and get lost in you can end up lonely places that outsiders can't fathom. I found it quite poignant in Steven Levy's 'Hackers' book where Lee Felenstein remarks on all the focus on computer progress "You're doing all that the the computer? What are you doing for the people?"
You can still participate and get a value and joy out of something whilst being ignorant of its formations and there's nothing wrong with that. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Thinking about this in terms of the circle of fifths, there's a lot of representation of the keys that are from 12 o'clock to 3 o'clock, keys C, G, D, A, respectively. I think if you looked at jazz standards from the Real Books, you'd see a different histogram, stressing the keys Eb, Bb, F, C.
A lot of Western music centers around a tonal center, and then rocks back and fourth on the circle of fifths between IV and V. A lot of pop tunes these days add the vi, further to the right on circle of fifths.
In contrast, jazz music tends the move down in fourths a lot, so you see ii-V7-I all over the place, a lot of vi-ii-V7-I, and a sometimes a iii-vi-ii-V7-I. All of these progressions just start some place on the circle of fifths, and then go counter-clockwise until they reach the intended tonal center.
What this data shows is G Major truly is the "people's key." For those not familiar with music a 12 bar blues uses 3 chords: the so-called I, IV, and V chords (the first, fourth, and fifth chords in the key). In the key of G that would be G (I), C (IV), and D (V). Look at the most popular chords.
Instead of analyzing by chords I would have analyzed by key - what keys do you need? Convention says G Major is the "people's key" and so it makes sense to learn since so many songs use it. The key of A minor is pretty popular, and so is it's relative C major. Throw in E minor (which is G major's relative minor!) and with those 4 keys you can play the bulk of all rock and popular music written over the past 50 years!
Side note, from a usability perspective: G major is arguably the easiest key to play on a guitar, which is used heavily by both popular music and songwriters. The I/IV/V maps to G, C, D, which are all easy open chords to finger, plus Em is also simple (two fingers).
(Many of the other options include either B major or F major in the I/IV/V, and those are considerably more difficult to play)
Yeah agreed, G and E make the most sense for guitar for those reasons. Although equal temperament makes all scales sound the same in theory, there are often practical concerns. For example, EDM is very often in D#, E, F, F#, or G minor. There's a good reason for this: sub bass frequencies hit hardest around F. G#, A, A#, B and C sound too high, and anything lower than D# you risk playing on club speakers that can't produce the frequency well.
The key of G (G,C,D) is really easy to play on guitar and so is the key of C (C,F,G). A lot of beginning guitarists struggle with an F if you play it as a barre chord on the first fret of the low E string. My favorite option for playing an F is to play an FMaj7 using just the D (3), G (2), B (1) and e (open) strings which is an open chord. If you ask me to play an F chord that's what I'm going to play. I've also heard it referred to as the "rock 'n roll" F.
D major and A major are the other ubiquitous beginner-friendly keys for guitar. I distinctly remember a few months into getting my first guitar concluding that G major was so much better because Em is so much easier to play than Bm or F#m. :)
I've never heard it called "people's key" but a lot of rock and popular music written in the past 50 years was written on guitar where these keys are the easiest to play. I imagine Am/C are easiest on a piano but I am not a very good piano player to begin with.
The reason I approached this by chords instead of keys, is that I'm building an electronic instrument. [1] I can set it to play in any key before starting a song, but I'm trying to figure out how I should trigger chords (and what chords I will want to trigger) in the moment.
Slightly related is the question "How many different notes do you need in the bass to harmonise any melody?", and the answer was provided by Obrecht in the final section of his Missa Malheur me bat[1] dating from around 1497. The original tune is here[2]. While the section was probably written partly as a joke, it's interesting how you really only need the 1st and 5th scale degrees to cover the majority of the song tune.
You see this in the design of the typical diatonic harmonica. That's why it's such a versatile instrument, despite its limitations (e.g. missing accidentals within its key, only able to play blow or draw notes within a given chord).
Interesting quantitative take studying chord distribution. The basic takeaway seems to be that if you re-phrase a song into a different key you can play a lot with just a few chords (I IV V), and even more with a few others.
While I would agree that you'll be okay playing any major scale in C major (or whatever other major key choose to learn), playing a song in a minor scale on a major scale just doesn't sound quite right. So, I'd double all of the numbers on their final table to account for learning a full set of major and minor chords.
If you know I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi in C then you'll be able to play tunes in A natural minor. Add III to cover A harmonic minor, and II to cover A melodic minor
In real life though the key usually depends on the singer's vocal range, so you won't really get away with learning just one key
In A harmonic minor the III is already a C, you can make it augmented but that is not very common. You generally change the v to a V and keep the VII diminished in both cases where as it is major in the natural minor.
He was saying that the III of C major is the V of A minor, and so if you are planning to play in A minor using a set of chords pulled from C major, you may want to add a III alongside the iii.
Yes, that's a good point in the case of six keys (I think my point holds for just learning three), but it is not the one made that the article seemed to make.
This is only partially true. The chords in A natural minor will be the same but it's much more common to hear a dominant fifth using the harmonic minor so you would change the Em to E especially in classical and jazz music.
nit: jazz is the melodic minor (raised 6th as well). Such a beautiful sound; and the modes allow you to get the altered scale (7th mode of melodic minor) which sounds good(?) over the dominant
As somebody without musical knowledge beyond the first chords you might learn for pop guitar, after reading this article I still have no idea which chords I need.
If you're learning the instrument, you'll generally learn them as you progress, starting with beginner material that may have only one or two chords. At some point you will know "many" chords and be possessed to learn more, and may eventually pursue "every" chord.
Any physically realizable fingering on the guitar is a chord. Whether it's useful is another matter. Different permutations of the same notes, in different ranges, is a way to add things like motion and emphasis in the music.
Another way of looking at it is how many chords are you likely to encounter if you get into something like a band or jam session situation, where you're expected to hear a chord and play it. That depends on the musical style, and where the music came from. For instance, tunes that were composed for other instruments might have their own chordal language that results in the same chords cropping up unexpectedly in guitar music.
A lot of folk music has its own "logic" for lack of a better term, based on the mechanics of the instrument.
Thanks for taking the time to help elaborate. When I opened the article I was (naively?) kind of hoping to find a list of chords that would have me covered for most situations, but was unable to determine from the Roman numeric jargon being used if that was so.
There's also a huge pile of chord charts published online for the jazz standards and the Great American Songbook, that would be interesting to analyze.
Can't resist mentioning that old joke : "A pop guitarist plays five chords for ten thousand people, a jazz guitarist plays ten thousand chords for five people"
I've kind of lost touch. My "fake books" were all hand written and photocopied.
Even the better players were becoming so dependent on them, that it was detracting from the music, so I went cold turkey and learned the tunes.
An app called "iRealPro" has chord changes in a strange format, and somebody once created a Python library to decode it.
There was once a book called "pocket changes" with just chord changes, and I think it was converted to text format, but can't find it anywhere online. The changes are an outgrowth of a quirk in the copyright law, where the melody and words can be copyrighted, but not the harmony.
Some of the chord charts are machine readable (available as just plain text), while others are images, but looks like all/almost all of them are available as MIDI as well.
> For example, "Kitchen Girl" needs "A G" for the first half of the tune (confusingly called the "A part")
This is standard notation, especially in American folk music, that sections are labeled A, B and sometimes C. This makes it very convenient when playing with others who're not familiar with the tune (e.g. This is Kitchen Girl, key of A, two A parts, two B parts)
By coincidence, Teenage Engineering is on the front page at the same time as this article. I’ve enjoyed playing and creating music on their pocket operator devices, specifically the PO-20 chip tune one. The sound palette is a bit limited, but the chord opens up a lot of opportunity for creativity, especially with a little bit of music theory to help.
It's interesting the II shows up so frequently once he mostly boiled it down. A lot of old-timey jammers playing the songs he analyzed just don't play any minor chords so that beginners can keep up, so they play the II where it should be ii. I wonder if that's why II and ii is almost the same frequency.
Despite the complex chords, the bulk of the melody is that ultra-simple two-note semitone riff (IIRC Ian MacDonald’s book says it was inspired by hearing a police siren). When John Lennon said someday they’d write a one-note song I always figured this was what he meant -- that I Am The Walrus is a “two-note song”.
Subscribed (not on Discord). Glad to see! I've bounced off music theory but part of me knows that I would learn the hell out it if I tried to implement an engine (and corresponding interface) around it. I know many exist and I'd probably find through even shallow research that it'd be 100x harder than I'm imagining, but I wouldn't know half of what I know if I thought ahead like that :P
But as with reading this article, as an avid music lover I'm afraid to ruin how I feel about some of my favorite compositions.
I wonder how much the chord-space would shrink farther if you took out the bridge/intro where people tend to mix it up. And if you could adjust when the song shifts keys in the chorus and verse. (Although I didn't keep up with all the simplifications so maybe that is already in here).
> Although I didn't keep up with all the simplifications so maybe that is already in here
That one isn't there, because the original motivation of the post was trying to design a chord input system for an instrument. In which case I'm happy telling the instrument in advance "this next song is in Dm" but not changing that on the fly (hands are full)
It would be interesting to break this down by genre. Jazz likes to "borrow" notes to construct chords that aren't diatonic, and metal likes to add the flat II and V almost as a rule.
But even for something discussed previously on HN-- the Beach Boys "God Only Knows"-- this doesn't work. Wilson really wants a half-diminished seventh chord at the high point of the melody. One could perhaps degrade to a diminished triad in the accompaniment, but he's literally singing the seventh of the chord so it's there regardless. Substituting a major or minor triad there is a qualitative change and sounds suspicious.
If you're making your own instrument you might want to be aware that there's a "suspicious" sound that some types of consistent chord substitutions can have on certain classes of instruments.
For example, a bagpiper can make severe simplifications to the harmony or even change melodic intervals to fit what they have available. Audiences generally accept this because the strictures of the instrument have made that a common practice. (Even if you're unaware of the strictures, you've probably gotten used to hearing the result of the common practice.)
However, if one consistently employs major/minor triad substitutions on the guitar people are eventually going to hear that as a lack of quality. As in the Beach Boys example, this will often happen during key points. The guitarist may get lucky if the singer happens to fill out the missing note of the chord-- e.g., guitarist plays a minor triad and the singer fills out the seventh at the beginning of the chorus of "Last Dance with Mary Jane"-- but eventually the audience will figure out that the guitarist is missing a vital skill.
Anyway, unless your instrument is so novel it doesn't have any associations with extant instruments, make sure you have some kind of "escape hatch" so that skilled performers can play the chords they need. :)