What chords do you need?

https://www.jefftk.com/p/what-chords-do-you-need

by janvdberg • 4 years ago

318 213 4 years ago

h2odragon2• 4 years ago

Cheech & Chong: "and I only know 4 chords!"

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.

moron4hire2• 4 years ago

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.

TaupeRanger2• 4 years ago

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.

omarhaneef• 4 years ago

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).

np_tedious2• 4 years ago

Or last verse/chorus up-modulation

beardyw2• 4 years ago

A loathsome practice which irritates me unreasonably.

jefftk10• 4 years ago

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)

tjr2• 4 years ago

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.]

np_tedious2• 4 years ago

He was only talking root and major vs minor. No mention of upper extensions of any kind. So V7 is still V, V13b9 is still V

tjr2• 4 years ago

You're correct; I withdraw my remark.

phpisatrash• 4 years ago

Basically, if you know a scale, for example the D major scale you can play anything.

asdffdsa2• 4 years ago

That and the natural minor scale

TaupeRanger2• 4 years ago

Not if the song contains any modulations, secondary dominants, borrowed chords, etc. It's not uncommon.

laGrenouille2• 4 years ago

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.

LtWorf_• 4 years ago

But A minor is the same notes as C major.

The chords in the key of C major will be the same chords in the key of A minor, although their patterns might be different.

tarentel6• 4 years ago

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.

circlefavshape• 4 years ago

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

laGrenouille2• 4 years ago

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.

tarentel6• 4 years ago

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.

adamnemecek2• 4 years ago

I’m working on an IDE for music composition. Chords and music theory will be very much front and and center. Launching next month.

https://ngrid.io

Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG

and0• 4 years ago

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.

adamnemecek2• 4 years ago

That’s the problem, not that many actually exist.

analog313• 4 years ago

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.

tarentel6• 4 years ago

Probably instead of I-IV-V being the most common you would see the ii-V-I chords being the most common.

edelans• 4 years ago

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"

jefftk10• 4 years ago

Are any of these machine readable? As long as I don't have to transcribe them by hand I would enjoy looking at them!

zwegner• 4 years ago

Quite a few jazz tunes have chords here: http://songtrellis.com/changesPage

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.

analog313• 4 years ago

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.

Wish I could be of more help.

codazoda2• 4 years ago

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.

https://chords.joeldare.com

Rodeoclash• 4 years ago

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.

codazoda2• 4 years ago

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.

bambax3• 4 years ago

The obligatory video is of course "Four Chords" by Axis of Awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Rick Beato has kind of the opposite video about "the most complex song ever":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8

The song in question is Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes; plenty of videos exist of it; here's one live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPh3bTglak

drcongo2• 4 years ago

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.

drcongo2• 4 years ago

I'm now watching the Rick Beato video about it and I'm so glad it's not just me whose brain recoils at the chord progressions. Thank you.

hejpadig• 4 years ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnUa6SNJFQ (Video showing the chords more clearly) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIaw-MgNzM (Original song)

default-kramer• 4 years ago

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.

vintermann• 4 years ago

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.

pohl2• 4 years ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-XSTSnqXxo

uhoh-itsmaciek2• 4 years ago

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.

[1]: (PDF) https://countrymusichalloffame.org/content/uploads/2019/05/W...

bambax3• 4 years ago

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 ;-)

Alp 1465 https://open.spotify.com/track/5TxVfIf9JUAhCEL3O5cWXT?si=86c...

Bet 1465 https://open.spotify.com/track/2ghJN1EtQwXAZZj91B5yqs?si=f16...

not2b• 4 years ago

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).

LordDragonfang• 4 years ago

I'm a big fan of the Pachelbel Rant as a sibling to the Axis of Awesome video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fPE1QEE

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

The obligatory video is of course "Four Chords" by Axis of Awesome

The original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s13sASS5F4

tallies4• 4 years ago

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")

pythko2• 4 years ago

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.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Most of the notes do give it that vitality though. Here's a John Mayer example where the simple version "works" but the full version is pure magic

https://youtube.com/shorts/navD83-aLYs

coliveira4• 4 years ago

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.

iainmerrick8• 4 years ago

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!

Sharlin• 4 years ago

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%9...

[2] https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ

calflegal• 4 years ago

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.

alar443• 4 years ago

Bingo. Sting had a quote that was something like "All chords are ambiguous until I decide on a bass note to play."

mgkimsal• 4 years ago

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!"

(source: https://reverb.com/news/interview-paul-mccartney-on-his-life...)

tmountain3• 4 years ago

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.

sampo• 4 years ago

CMaj7 has C / E / G / B? Who says this isn't Emin6 with the 6th in the bass?

The person who wrote it down as CMaj7 and not Emin6/C says.

grafs50• 4 years ago

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?

titzer• 4 years ago

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.

tejohnso2• 4 years ago

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXqNyWehVEQ

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

I'd like to see this thinking applied to John Coltrane's Giant Steps:

https://perfectauthenticcadence.blogspot.com/2016/01/analyzi...

"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."

tarentel6• 4 years ago

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.

sharkbot• 4 years ago

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.

beardyw2• 4 years ago

And a few, like "Gee, Officer Krupke", just use a ton of chords in a way I don't really understand.

Leonard Bernstein seems to have a knack of writing simple sounding songs but with every chord in the book. I noticed the same in Tonight.

duped2• 4 years ago

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.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

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.

klodolph2• 4 years ago

A couple notes

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.

jefftk10• 4 years ago

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.

PrimeDirective• 4 years ago

Calling them "power chords" in a non-rock context sounds off to me, though

Even jazz musicians call them powerchords

progre• 4 years ago

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.

the_fury• 4 years ago

Most people would also understand that there's no 3rd if you call it a G5.

javajosh2• 4 years ago

power chords ... call them chords without thirds.

Not a guitarist, but I always assumed "power chord" referred to lots of doubling up over octaves, not the absence of a third.

rawling• 4 years ago

I'd call that an "open 5th". That might come from a classical pov.

beepbooptheory• 4 years ago

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".

tejohnso2• 4 years ago

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".

klodolph2• 4 years ago

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.

evo_9• 4 years ago

Love this stuff, great read.

Also if you have not seen Hook Theory yet, worth checking out: https://www.hooktheory.com/about

taylodl3• 4 years ago

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!

tarentel6• 4 years ago

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.

drchopchop• 4 years ago

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)

tshaddox• 4 years ago

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. :)

mjr00• 4 years ago

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.

taylodl3• 4 years ago

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.

jefftk10• 4 years ago

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.

[1] demo: https://youtu.be/JWj3QP9wsCU

dehrmann4• 4 years ago

What this data shows is G Major truly is the "people's key."

Unless you have a keyboard in your band. Then it's C.

tmountain3• 4 years ago

Hopefully the keyboardist can manage a single sharp.

iainmerrick8• 4 years ago

And here I always thought it was E! That’s probably more of an amateur hard rock thing -- E is the very easiest and best-sounding chord on a guitar.

irrational2• 4 years ago

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.

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

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.

jefftk10• 4 years ago

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").

psyc• 4 years ago

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.

irrational2• 4 years ago

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)?

InCityDreams2• 4 years ago

Music is easy.

3+3=5.

c to e is a third c1 d2 e3 e to g is a third e1 f2 g3 c to g is a fifth c1 d2 e3 f4 g5.

MikeTaylor• 4 years ago

I wonder what he would make of _I Am The Walrus_, which uses every note-named major chord (A, B, C, D, E, F and G major).

iainmerrick8• 4 years ago

I was thinking about that one too. In case you haven’t seen it, Alan W Pollack’s analysis is great: https://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/iatw.shtm...

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”.

TrueTom• 4 years ago

"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!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEWQNKbXHQk

eatonphil2• 4 years ago

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.

usrn• 4 years ago

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.

BizarroLand• 4 years ago

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.

re• 4 years ago

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!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_chord

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_chord

jefftk10• 4 years ago

I've now edited the post to say "chords without thirds" instead of "open chords", which should reduce this confusion

ARandumGuy• 4 years ago

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.

tchock23• 4 years ago

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?

robbyking• 4 years ago

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.

welfare• 4 years ago

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)

acjohnson55• 4 years ago

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).

travisgriggs2• 4 years ago

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.

I wish more of the internet looked like this.

em3rgent0rdr2• 4 years ago

I prefer it too, and is like the very early internet, which was only missing CSS to set the main text in column with a maximum width.

spicymaki• 4 years ago

Yes good point. It takes me back to when content really mattered.

ryanmcbride• 4 years ago

I make a concerted effort for every personal project I have to be laid out like this, fast loading, searchable, nothing in the way.

And that's why I do it that way. No other reason. Definitely not because I can't do modern design to save my life...

cactus20932• 4 years ago

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.

rhn_mk12• 4 years ago

The dark mode is built into your browser if you set the browser embedded style to dark.

It integrates flawlessly for me.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

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)

travisgriggs2• 4 years ago

The black text on white is too much contrast.

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.

I found the discussion at https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra... pretty interesting.

wintermutestwin• 4 years ago

But that tiny column width is horrible and totally unfriendly to those of us with oldster eyes who magnify every web page with their tiny fonts.

jancsika2• 4 years ago

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. :)

lb1lf• 4 years ago

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.

jancsika2• 4 years ago

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.

mrblampo• 4 years ago

Very well explained!

shampto3• 4 years ago

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.

1. https://www.hooktheory.com/trends

Aidevah• 4 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLyfr_dQTBc&t=293s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrZKnEXKwn0

nawgz• 4 years ago

Just Cmaj7#11, best chord. Just scream while you play it and you're halfway to being a metal band

willismichael2• 4 years ago

The other half is hiring this percussionist: https://youtu.be/TfML1WEWfwk

fallingfrog3• 4 years ago

Interesting how rare the minor iv chord is. Offhand I can think of only 2: Creep by Radiohead and Space Oddity by David Bowie.

willismichael2• 4 years ago

It's also used in Hotel California.

Maybe it doesn't show up much in pop/rock/country, but it's not uncommon in jazz.

GeorgeDewar• 4 years ago

And I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie.

fallingfrog3• 4 years ago

Hmm I don’t hear it, where? I hear:

vi III V II IV I ii III

And the chorus

IV I V vi IV I ii III

MayaFey• 4 years ago

Also In My Life, I Call Your Name, You Won’t See Me, When I’m 64, Across The Universe, If I Fell, Blackbird, and Hello Goodbye

yeah the beatles loved that one

fallingfrog3• 4 years ago

Ha I’m humming each of these to myself, and you’re right!

stevenalowe• 4 years ago

I like fat chords, I cannot lie.

dharma1• 4 years ago

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

CobrastanJorji• 4 years ago

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."

Taywee• 4 years ago

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/

sfteus• 4 years ago

8-Bit Music Theory did a great video on it as well, for those that prefer a video format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SeY_Gss2CY

cjohnson318• 4 years ago

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.

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

I like progressive rock/metal and technical death, so....all of them.

webscalist• 4 years ago

and welcome to atonality

squidsoup• 4 years ago

My mate in the music industry always said you only need “three chords and the right haircut”.

sineroth• 4 years ago

if u wanna get laid 3 is lots

mellosouls2• 4 years ago

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.

analog313• 4 years ago

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.

mellosouls2• 4 years ago

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.

viburnum• 4 years ago

How can more songs have V than I?

jefftk10• 4 years ago

Because of the regularization I'm doing. For example, some are in the relative minor and mostly use iv and V.

tastysandwich• 4 years ago

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.

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

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.

asdff2• 4 years ago

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.

asdff2• 4 years ago

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.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvwY2psxdl0

imchillyb• 4 years ago

I need my USB-C cord.

lousyd• 4 years ago

From the headline, I totally thought they were gonna be talking about keyboard key combos. Ctrl-S and so on.

zwieback• 4 years ago

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.

beagle3• 4 years ago

Tangentially related, but all you need is Pachelbel's Canon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fPE1QEE

(Yes, it's a youtube video, and I hate videos, but this one is worth it)

What chords do you need?

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