Today’s post comes from Brian Casel, a songwriter, musician and blogger extraordinaire. Brian Casel writes about songwriting techniques, recording and promotion at servethesong.net. He is currently writing and releasing an EP every month in 2009. Check out his music at briancasel.com.
The key to writing great songs is to keep things fresh and dynamic. You can mix things up by incorporating a variety of sounds, styles, and techniques in your compositions.
When writing on guitar, structuring a great chord progression involves an important set of creative decisions. Each chord conveys a specific emotion. The chord progression signals the direction of the mood and dynamic of the song. Effective chord progressions can tell their own story, even when there are no lyrics layered on top of them. Chords can convey sorrow, excitement, inspiration, triumph or any other unspoken feeling.
The common assumption is to play all available notes in a chord. If you fingers can cover the ground and the notes work in harmony with one another, then they must fair game. This may be true in some cases, like a wide open chorus section to an arena rock anthem. But other times you may be going for a more nuanced approach.
Try being more selective in the makeup of each chord. Strip the chords of strings that do nothing more than add loudness, and keep only the the notes that are most essential to bring forward the essence of this moment in your composition. Choose the two or three harmonic elements that touch the soul in that unspoken way.
Sometimes the best creative choice in a composition is to take something away, rather than add something. This applies to chord structure, just as it applies to many other aspects of songwriting. I discuss this idea of using negative space in songwriting in this article.
Choose your chord’s building blocks wisely! They can often drastically change the effect of the chord, which in turn changes the mood of the song. Choose the notes that serve the song in the best way possible. Think of a chord progression as several melodies that run in parallel. When played separately, each should work well as an interesting melody on its own. When these melodies are merged in chord form, their harmony enhances their emotional effect.
When writing a fast funky tune, try muting the omitted notes and apply a firm hold on the usable notes. Strum over all six strings to combine your sweet combo of chosen notes and the choppiness of muted frets.
If you’re going for a loose and flowing sound that surrounds the listener in a sea of colors, try focusing on pick accuracy and target your chosen notes, letting them ring out with a full and round tone.
Give your chord progressions purpose and clarity by selecting their building blocks wisely and stripping away the clutter. Let those chords breathe!
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This post is tagged Chord Building, Creativity, Songwriting
Really good post. I agree that taking a minimalistic approach is a really good approach. This isn’t just true about guitars, but all instruments. I was in a band once where all the members wanted to be playing on all cylinders all the time, and couldn’t understand that sometimes taking something away can really add something.
Another thing that is useful is having contrast in songs. it’s good to make chords more ‘airy’ sometimes, but you can make that stand out more by having sections of the songs be heavier.
Dynamics dynamics dynamics… something my last drummer just didn’t understand.
You make a very good point, Glenn. Sometimes, a section of nice full chords will really bring out a section that’s stripped down to some key intervals, and even implied tones.
Indeed - it’s all about dynamics. “Heavy” should be a relative term. Mix in some stripped down parts to give the heavy parts that extra punch.
Too many songs on the radio these days are heavy all the way through. Add to that this trend of over-using compression, and you have a completely flat and dead sounding… “hit” rock song.