Ableton Forum

Hey everybody!!
I'm a little bit desperate today. Indeed, I try to find chords which are good between them, a combination of chords but I don't know how to do to chords that do well together. Do you have some tips, or some rules to help me in that situation ?
Thanks a lot

Pick a song you like, and copy its chords.

If you are doing chords for something you already wrote, note down he key, then find songs similar to what you are going for, and copy their chords.

Otherwise, you can just look up chords and look up vids of chords on YouTube.

Study some tonal music theory?

Well just try the first one of the scale, then the fourth and the fifth and you have the must common chord progression on pop music (I-IV-V-I), build from there.

Step 1 - find out what a scale is. (Takes about an hour)

Step 2 - slap your fingers randomly on several notes in your chosen scale (Also takes about an hour)

Step 3 - figure out why that works. (Takes about 15 years)

It's a fun process.
You start off as a mountainous musical genius, and then gradually erode into sand.

... Then you will discover microtonal instruments and begin the process again.

http://www.amazon.com/COMPOSE-YOURSELF- ... 1453724958 and read the related chapters

btw. SonicAcademy released a series about it yesterday https://www.sonicacademy.com/courses/ch ... onic-music

Chordbot app !
Its brilliant
jx

How-to

Here's my approach:

1. Start with a simple chord *, with a bass note one or two octaves lower
2. Duplicate it, and move the 2nd chord up and down until the two sound together **
3. If no combinations work, change one of the chords from minor to major or vice versa.
4. Also try moving only the bass note. C-E-G sounds quite different with A as the bass note.
5. Repeat until you have 4/8/16/x bars of chords that sound good together.

6. If it's still rubbish, say fuck it, load a bunch of trap samples from TriSamples, and crank up the BPM and limiter on the master channel, and start a new project. Making music shouldn't be too serious.

* I'm very fond of 7th chords (c-e-g-b or c-d#-g-a# for example).
** Do chord inversions if needed (shift+arrow). Individual notes can be moved in octaves, and it's still the same chord.

What to do with all the failed attempts?

Even after all these years, I'd say only 5-10% of the chord progressions I come up with are good enough for released songs.

However, the process is always very rewarding, and each attempt is one small step closer to something really nice.

Shitty chord progressions are great for fun/weird experiments, which definitely influence later tracks. You can always sample your crappy 4 bar loops and twist them beyond recognition in better tracks.

There is no one method

Different things work for different people. My dad tried teaching me music theory, but I prefered goofing around in Dance eJay. I've never had the patience to learn music theory beyond the basics, I've never looked at the circle of fifths, I can't read notation, and I never think about which scale/mode I'm in.

There are lots of talented people with poor understanding of theory, and I've met lots of theory experts whose tunes were bland rubbish. However, I'm sure a lot of the talented people have a very good understanding of theory, so it's not black and white.

In the end, making music says more than a thousand forum posts.

the only answer to this question is: study music theory and experiment with what you learn.

I'm in the process of learning music theory. I did figure out one easy way to compose chords without knowing theory. This is similar to broccoli's steps

1. Decide on a key. Decide if it's major or minor.
2. Go to midi editor. look up the scale and enter every note of that scale on the same quarter note
3. Enable the option to only see notes that are being used and hide all others. You will now see the notes in your scale
4. Set a 4 bar loop but don't include any of the notes that you entered
5. Draw your first chord. In The first bar enter the first note of your scale as a whole note. Now skip a note and into the next note . again skip a note and enter the next note. This is your first chord
6. Copy this chord to the next bar. You can now just move it up and down until it sounds right. Keep doing this to establish multiple chords
7. Now duplicate the 4 Bar Loop to an 8 bar loop
8. Transpose individual notes in any cords up or down an octave
9. Do this Every day for one year