Mobile Music Production 2.3 - Advanced Chords

In this video, I am going to introduce you to a couple of new chords and I am also giving you guys some cool techniques for the chord progression.

Major Chord
1 - 3 - 5

Let’s do a quick recap, a major chord starts with a root, then a major third, and then a perfect fifth.

Minor Chord
1 - 3b - 5

A minor chord starts with the root, then a minor third, then a perfect fifth.

Diminished Chord
1 - 3b - 5b

A diminished chord is a root, then a minor third and then a tritone which is (7 semitones up from the root), also you can think of it as stacking two minor thirds on top of each other.

Augmented Chord
1 - 3 - 5#

An augmented chord is a root, and then a major third, and then a minor 6 which is (8 semitones up) another easy way of thinking about the augmented chord is having two major thirds stacked on top of each other.

Another easy way of looking at diminished chord is by creating a minor chord and lowering the 5th by one semitone, and an augmented chord is like a major third where you raise the fifth by one semitone.

We briefly went over diminished chords in our previous chapter, when you notate it you use the minus sign, so if its a D diminished chord it would look like a D- and with an augmented chord you notate it with a plus symbol so D augmented would be D+

When do you hear augmented chords? You definitely won’t be hearing it much on hip hop, trap, and pop, you might hear it sometimes on jazz and RnB, this is a chord you hear on a cartoon when something mysterious is happening. So you won’t come across it often but I just want to explain it to you so that you don’t get confused when you come across these chords.

For diminished chords, you can definitely hear them on a couple of different genres, like trap, RnB and Lo-Fi. For Trap it’s really good if you want to create that dark sound because the tri-tone is really crunchy, you won’t often hear diminished chords being used in a Major key but it works very well with minor keys.

1 - 4 -2 - 1
i - iv - ii- - i

Now I am going to show you a couple of things to make your chord progression really interesting, the techniques that I am going to show you right now are passing chords and harmonic rhythm.

Ok let's start by working in C major, so I am gonna start with 4 chord which is F major chord, then go down to 1 which is a C Major and to 6 which is a A minor and 5 which would be a G major chord.

A passing chord is very similar to a passing note, it's a chord that you use to help you move to another chord, so what I am going to do is listen and find a good place to put our passing chord.

So right now I am going to listen and find a good place to put our passing chord.
I hear passing chords being played in these two places, you have 7 chords in a scale so pick whichever sounds the best.

Let's do try this on a minor scale, I am going to be working with F minor, we are gonna start with i, and move down to a major 6th which is a C# major, and then a minor 4 which is a A# minor and then to a minor 5 which gives us a C minor.

Now I want to talk about harmonic rhythm, this is a really easy concept, harmonic rhythm is just a rhythm of your chord progression, so right now when I play this, you can hear the chords being played in whole notes, 1 2 3 4.

Definitely a little boring but if we implement harmonic rhythm we can come up with something more interesting. One of the most common rhythms is where you have the first chord playing for 3 beats and the second chord playing for 5 beats. Listen and see how it completely changes the bounce.

You can do something else like this where you make the first chord 5 beats long and the second chord for 3 beats. This is also very popular. There are pretty much endless possibilities, one last pattern I will show you this one, we have the first chord playing a whole note and we have two dotted quarter notes, and we have the last chord extending all the way like this.