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Songwriting - Chromatic Movement

Al Joseph
BeginnerRockTheory 5 lessons16m

This month we're going to talk about one of my most used songwriting devices. Plainly speaking, when writting music I like to take a common chord progression and spice it up a bit. In this video, I explain how you can take an ordinary chord progression and move the bass in half steps to pull new chords from nowhere. Just by using your ears, you can construct chords from bass notes that don't belong to the key. Listen to the video and later we'll talk about functional harmony and how you need it in order to do something this unorthodox...

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5 Lessons

  1. 1 3:07 Lesson · 3m Songwriting - Chromatic Movement Explained This month we're going to talk about one of my most used songwriting devices. Plainly speaking, when writting music I like to take a common chord progression and spice it up a bit. In this video, I explain how... Tab Guitar Pro
  2. 2 3:20 Lesson · 3m Songwriting - Chromatic Movement - Functional Harmony Functional Harmony is simply creating a chord from every note in the key. For instance, you have C major. C-D-E-F-G-A-B. C Major - C-E-G D minor - D-A-F E minor - E-G-B F Major - F-A-C G Major - G-B-D A minor... Tab Guitar Pro
  3. 3 3:15 Lesson · 3m Songwriting - Chromatic Movement - Example 1 In Examples 1-3, we have this base chord progession: Dm - Am - C - G - F ---> Dm However, in this Example 3, we'll play the above progression then move our third chord C Major up a half step and finish the... Tab Guitar Pro
  4. 4 2:24 Lesson · 2m Songwriting - Chromatic Movement - Example 2 In Examples 1-3, we have this base chord progession: Dm - Am - C - G - F ---> Dm However, in this Example 3, we'll play the above progression then move our third chord C Major up a half step and finish the... Tab Guitar Pro
  5. 5 4:15 Lesson · 4m Songwriting - Chromatic Movement - Example 3 & Wrap Up In Examples 1-3, we have this base chord progession: Dm - Am - C - G - F ---> Dm However, in this Example 3, we'll play the above progression then move our third chord C Major up a half step and finish the... Tab Guitar Pro

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