20 ms·

What chords do you need?

• h2odragon 4y 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.
  • moron4hire 4y 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.
    • TaupeRanger 4y 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.
      • moron4hire 4y ago
        I have never heard such a complaint about his videos. Most? There are enough musicians in the world, on YouTube, and in my family that they would have called it out. I call shenanigans and say it is you, sir, who are wrong or misleading
        • h2odragon 4y ago
          > it is you, sir, who are wrong or misleading Or your opinions just differ. The meaning of music is in the listener. what you hear may not be what others do. even the Brown Note doesn't hit everyone.
        • coldtea 4y ago
          Most musicians are ignorant of the deeper music theory - even jazz musicians like Neely, except on a standard level (which any jazz musician does). You need a trained composer and/or musicologist for that. Neely himself is not some music theory guru, he is a Berklee alumni who plays jazz, those are a dime a dozen.
          • partomniscient 4y ago
            That's a bit harsh. He's the one engaging an audience on more than one front performing as both a musician and successful YouTuber which the others aren't, and doing us a service as such exposing us to stuff we'll otherwise not ever encounter. He's publicly learning, including sharing his mistakes and entertaining and tries to keep 'fun' as part of journey. You may consider him a dime a dozen, but he's very far away from where I am, and therefore valueable to someone like me. At some point claiming the person at the top of the ivory tower is the only one that knows the worth of something is useless if you can't get them to communicate with you. Like anything you can really deep dive and get lost in you can end up lonely places that outsiders can't fathom. I found it quite poignant in Steven Levy's 'Hackers' book where Lee Felenstein remarks on all the focus on computer progress "You're doing all that the the computer? What are you doing for the people?" You can still participate and get a value and joy out of something whilst being ignorant of its formations and there's nothing wrong with that. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
      • rizzaxc 4y ago
        citations needed
• omarhaneef 4y 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_tedious 4y ago
    Or last verse/chorus up-modulation
    • beardyw 4y ago
      A loathsome practice which irritates me unreasonably.
  • jefftk 4y 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)
• tjr 4y 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_tedious 4y 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
    • tjr 4y ago
      You're correct; I withdraw my remark.
• phpisatrash 4y ago
  Basically, if you know a scale, for example the D major scale you can play anything.
  • asdffdsa 4y ago
    That and the natural minor scale
  • TaupeRanger 4y ago
    Not if the song contains any modulations, secondary dominants, borrowed chords, etc. It's not uncommon.
• laGrenouille 4y 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_ 4y 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.
    • tarentel 4y 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.
      • asdffdsa 4y ago
        nit: jazz is the melodic minor (raised 6th as well). Such a beautiful sound; and the modes allow you to get the altered scale (7th mode of melodic minor) which sounds good(?) over the dominant
  • circlefavshape 4y 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
    • laGrenouille 4y ago
• adamnemecek 4y 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 https://ngrid.io Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
  • and0 4y 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.
    • adamnemecek 4y ago
      That’s the problem, not that many actually exist.
• analog31 4y 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.
  • tarentel 4y ago
    Probably instead of I-IV-V being the most common you would see the ii-V-I chords being the most common.
  • edelans 4y 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"
  • jefftk 4y 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 4y ago
      Quite a few jazz tunes have chords here: http://songtrellis.com/changesPage 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.
    • analog31 4y 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.
• codazoda 4y 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 https://chords.joeldare.com
  • Rodeoclash 4y 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.
    • codazoda 4y 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.
• bambax 4y ago
  The obligatory video is of course "Four Chords" by Axis of Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPh3bTglak
  • drcongo 4y 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.
    • drcongo 4y 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 4y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnUa6SNJFQ (Video showing the chords more clearly) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIaw-MgNzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIaw-MgNzM (Original song)
      • hamburglar 4y ago
        I do think conditioning must be a big part of it. I hadn’t ever listened to this song since getting a little familiar with music theory but it was certainly on the types of playlists my parents listened to when I was a kid. Listening to it now, I can see what’s unusual about it but it never would have occurred to me to consider it hard to listen to. Repetition legitimizing and all that. My parents weren’t jazz listeners so it took work for me to appreciate it as an adult, and now I can’t help but wonder if the better path for my kids is to get them used to it early or to let them have that same “whoa” experience later. (Only partially serious; of course they should be exposed to it. :D)
• Sharlin 4y 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%93IV_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%9... [2] https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ
• calflegal 4y 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • alar44 4y ago
    Bingo. Sting had a quote that was something like "All chords are ambiguous until I decide on a bass note to play."
    • mgkimsal 4y 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-as-a-bassist https://reverb.com/news/interview-paul-mccartney-on-his-life...)
      • dehrmann 4y ago
        Regarding the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night," George said > It is F with a G on top (on the 12-string), but you’ll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  I'd like to see this thinking applied to John Coltrane's Giant Steps: https://perfectauthenticcadence.blogspot.com/2016/01/analyzing-famous-chord-progression-in.html 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."
  • tarentel 4y 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 4y 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.
• beardyw 4y 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.
• duped 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis
  • dehrmann 4y 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.
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• klodolph 4y 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.
  • jefftk 4y 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_open" 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.
    • rawling 4y ago
      I'd call that an "open 5th". That might come from a classical pov.
      • jefftk 4y ago
        That makes sense! I'd probably turned "open fifth" into "open chord"
• evo_9 4y ago
  Love this stuff, great read. Also if you have not seen Hook Theory yet, worth checking out: https://www.hooktheory.com/about https://www.hooktheory.com/about
• taylodl 4y 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!
  • tarentel 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• irrational 4y 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 4y 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.
  • jefftk 4y 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").
• MikeTaylor 4y 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).
  • iainmerrick 4y 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.shtml 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 4y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEWQNKbXHQk
  • eatonphil 4y 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 4y 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.
      • eatonphil 4y ago
        I do know the basics of chord construction but it's still way easier to think through it on a piano because keys are all linear whereas with guitar strings you have to translate across strings with varying relationships. Not saying it's impossible it just takes more work to internalize that on guitar than piano. And I'm not there on guitar.
        • QuercusMax 4y ago
          I'm right there with you - I have lots of experience playing songs on piano with just lyrics + chords, and I use all kinds of inverted chords without even thinking about it. "Reading" the keyboard is much easier than reading the fretboard. One other thing that makes it harder on guitar is that the chords that are easy to play are often various inversions, so your "A" chord might actually be a first or second inversion. I'm still just learning movable shapes on the guitar, and getting the fingerings right is tricky as things grow and shrink moving up and down the fretboard, something that also isn't a problem with keyboards.
• robbyking 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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).
• travisgriggs 4y 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.
  • em3rgent0rdr 4y 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 4y ago
    Yes good point. It takes me back to when content really mattered.
    • ryanmcbride 4y 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...
  • cactus2093 4y 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.
• jancsika 4y 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 4y 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.
    • jancsika 4y 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.
• shampto3 4y 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 https://www.hooktheory.com/trends
• Aidevah 4y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLyfr_dQTBc&t=293s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrZKnEXKwn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrZKnEXKwn0
• nawgz 4y ago
  Just Cmaj7#11, best chord. Just scream while you play it and you're halfway to being a metal band
  • willismichael 4y ago
    The other half is hiring this percussionist: https://youtu.be/TfML1WEWfwk https://youtu.be/TfML1WEWfwk
• fallingfrog 4y 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.
  • willismichael 4y 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 4y ago
      And I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie.
    • fallingfrog 4y 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
      • spopejoy 4y ago
        If you interpret vi as the root (my preference for songs in a minor key) then that ii is a minor IV.
  • MayaFey 4y 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
    • fallingfrog 4y ago
      Ha I’m humming each of these to myself, and you’re right!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stevenalowe 4y ago
  I like fat chords, I cannot lie.
• dharma1 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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/ https://danbruno.net/writing/ocarina/
  • sfteus 4y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SeY_Gss2CY
• cjohnson318 4y 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 4y ago
  I like progressive rock/metal and technical death, so....all of them.
• webscalist 4y ago
  and welcome to atonality
• squidsoup 4y ago
  My mate in the music industry always said you only need “three chords and the right haircut”.
• sineroth 4y ago
  if u wanna get laid 3 is lots
• mellosouls 4y 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.
  • analog31 4y 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.
    • mellosouls 4y 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 4y ago
  How can more songs have V than I?
  • jefftk 4y ago
    Because of the regularization I'm doing. For example, some are in the relative minor and mostly use iv and V.
• tastysandwich 4y 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 4y 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.
    • asdff 4y 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.
      • mbg721 4y ago
        If you're on the piano, A Day In The Life is a fun exercise in moving your left hand down a key at a time and seeing what happens.
  • asdff 4y ago
• imchillyb 4y ago
  I need my USB-C cord.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lousyd 4y ago
  From the headline, I totally thought they were gonna be talking about keyboard key combos. Ctrl-S and so on.
• zwieback 4y 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 4y ago
  Tangentially related, but all you need is Pachelbel's Canon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fPE1QEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fPE1QEE (Yes, it's a youtube video, and I hate videos, but this one is worth it)