Once in a while I write a slightly dorky column for WorkshopLive, an online music instruction site. Very cool site, and it was nice to be asked to write for them and share a bit of what I "know." I went back and reread some past entries, and I was tickled by this one, below. It's long and a little technical, but I think it makes a certain amount of sense.
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Songwriting, pt 3.
So, you've invited twenty people over for a meal they'll never forget. You've toiled all day in the kitchen, matched the wine perfectly, set a lovely table. Pre-dinner drinks and free-wheeling banter set the festive mood, and everyone is feeling great as they find their places around the beautiful table. You, the host with the most.
Out from the steaming kitchen comes your culinary masterpiece. You couldn't be more proud. But something is amiss. You look around the table, seeking the approval you so richly deserve, but the looks on your guests' faces betray a big problem. You suppress the impending panic, and keep eating your lovely slightly-burned tuna casserole, washed down with a perfectly horrific Chateau Sacramento River Embankment.
You love it; why don't they? We come now to what is among the most important aspects of songwriting, the chord progression. The loose translation in English is 'the order in which you put the chords,' and unfortunately it also involves a tedious discussion of some music theory, for which I'm profoundly sorry.
To borrow a thought from my minefield of a legal education, the Golden Thread that runs through the history of great songs is the deliberate attention to thoughtful progression. There is a reason why so much popular music sounds so very samey, so very "I want this tuna casserole to change the world because I made it myself and told a lot of people about it." Progression is the key, and it's a lost art. In order to analyze and compose effective, emotionally satisfying progressions, you must have a sold grounding in...dum dum daa aahhh...The Intervals! Major third, flat five, so on. There must be a zillion websites devoted to ear training and interval drills. Try a few; trust me, they get more fun as you go along. Aside, anything other than the traditional Western 12-note chromatic scale is beyond the scope of this particular discussion, and I offer my apologies to any scholars of musics other than Western pop. I'm just a dumb geetar player, after all.
For now, I'd like to impart two huge, sacrosanct, unbreakable rules about progression, and I'll illustrate with an example or two:
1.) Play your instrument, whatever it may be, but never let it play you.
This is a particularly sticky problem for guitar players. In most pop music there are three or four chord shapes you'll end up using a hell of a lot; the E, A, and D shapes are the biggies. Those three coupled with their barre chord versions open up a huge world of possibilities. But frequently the tragically infuriating result is song after song written with, say, an Am, G, F progression for the verse, all played with barre chords in the E formation, over and over and over again. In the hallowed language of intervals, assuming A is your tonic chord, that translates into a 1-7-6, which says, "I don't know what I'm doing, how to play, how to write, but I sure do want to be the second coming of Billy Corgan." Fine for a beginner, not fine for songwriters like you and me. This takes practice, which leads us to rule #2.
2.) Know what has come before.
Don't just listen to the music you love. Study it, shove every note under your microscope, tear it apart and hope you can glue it back together again in your head and heart. Go raid your parents' music collections and look for interesting progressions. There is a reason The Beatles continue to wield huge influence over songwriters today. Same with Mozart. The first movement of 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik', the brilliant and ubiquitous rocker that everybody knows, is not much more complicated than your average Tom Petty song and has many similar directions root-wise. It also has similarities in progression to 'Help' by The Beatles, and where would Oasis be without that song?
Let's dissect a verse from 'Help':
A, C#m, F#m, D-G, A
Now, just think about that fleeting G-chord for a second. It only lasts for half a bar, but it's there for a very good reason. Throughout pop history, coming back up to the tonic chord from the chord representing the 7th scale degree, in this case the G, has almost universally been appreciated as a literate musical statement and a highly effective turnaround; the smart nattily-dressed dude at the bar saying something funny and witty as opposed to the drunk fool yelling obscenities at his own knee, if you will. They could have easily stayed on the D for the whole bar, but nailing that G to the floor displays a highly sophisticated chordal vocabulary and an intuitive knowledge of what will make the listener's loins tingle.
On to the chorus:
Bm, Bm-A, G, G-F#/D, E, A
Again, changing the key for the chorus by going to the Bm, a sharp 2 interval-wise, is another one of those intelligent changes, and one that the listener has no way of anticipating. Now, try playing along to the verse, stopping the song just before the chorus Bm, and see what happens to your ear when you go to a completely different chord. Em sounds cool, as does G. Both suggest a new path to take to get to the next verse. But do you see how D, E major, or F sound like chordal dead ends? You can bet John Lennon tried a bunch of possibilities. What made him a great songwriter is that he took that Bm path for the chorus, and the rest is history. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to play the song transposed a half step down. Consider it a pop quiz.
The 1-7-6 progression which chokes so much popular music is the tuna casserole of chord progressions because it requires absolutely no imagination or creativity. It's completely predictable. It doesn't matter what lyrical or lead-guitarish toppings you put on; it just says, "I don't know anything yet, I don't feel anything yet, my guitar is playing me, but the record label probably digs it." Listen to 'Help', and enjoy some filet mignon with a nice wine sauce, with apologies to my veggie friends.
Next time, more about progression and some thoughts on why Mark Knopfler is great. I'll also introduce my good friend The Relative Minor, among the most exciting progression tools. Meanwhile, I invite you to hear some of my songs at ericfriedmann.com. or myspace.com/ericfriedmann. I'm hoping I practice what I preach.
Eric Friedmann is a San Francisco-based songwriter and frontman of his band Eric Friedmann and the Lucky Rubes. In his spare time from 9-5 he dreams about quitting his job.
Posted by eric at July 7, 2007 11:12 AM