A couple of weeks ago I read about minor drops and augmented climbs - basically chromatically walking the root of a minor chord backwards until it becomes the 5th of the minor’s relative major (e.g., ACE, G#CE, GCE) …or vice versa for the augmented climb. I guess it’s a bit of a musical cliche but I like the way it sounds, it’s been used in lots of classic recordings, and it’s fairly easy to do. So that started a long systematic exploration of progressions formed by moving the roots or 5ths of I, IV V and ii, iii and vi chords up and down chromatically and adjusting the other notes so as to stay mostly within key and minimize changes to the other notes….and seeing how many of these progressions sounded good.
[br]Anyway, I’ve been having a really enjoyable time doing this. I’m not completely done yet, but here are a few things I learned:
[br]First, I DID find lots of great-sounding progressions. Out of all the progressions I arrived at using my loose methodology, I ended up with somewhere near 100 that I thought sounded good. Of those, some were repeats which I arrived at in different ways, and some were repeats in terms of their relative movements, even though they started on different chords. So overall I think I have approximately 50 unique progressions that I like a lot. Although I tried to stick to diatonic chords (having a chromatically moving note in a progression longer than 2 chords means they won’t all be diatonic), I sometimes relaxed that guideline and saw how out-of-key chords can also sound pretty great (for example, I came across what I think are the intro chords of the James Bond theme progression [Em-Emb6-Em6-Emb6...repeat). To be fair, they’re just short progressions, not songs, so maybe in the context of a song where a key is more firmly established, some of these wouldn’t sound as good as they do in relative isolation.
[br]My approach yielded a lot of diminished chords. I’ve often seen diminished triads referred to as rootless dom7 chords (e.g., an Adim7 [ACEb] triad can be thought of as a rootless F7 [FACEb]) chord, so I went back over my list and tried substituting each diminished chord with each of the 4 dom7 chords that would be formed by adding the missing root. More often than not those substitutions worked quite well, which was really cool to see, but sometimes they didn’t.
[br]I also saw how impactful different voicings could be on whether or not I thought a particular progression worked. Some progressions initially sounded lousy, but when I played one or more of the chords differently (e.g., Am as an open chord vs a barred chord at the 5th fret), they were transformed into something that sounded really nice. I was a bit surprised because in the past, I have mostly found that when a progression sounds good, I could choose any particular voicing of a chord and it would still sound good.just different… Maybe some of it has to do with making the chromatic runs more obvious by using inversions and so on where those notes are all in a row rather than in different octaves. I don’t know. But it was eye opening to see how much of an impact that had.
[br]I also accumulated a ton of time repetitively playing chords and chord transitions (i.e., practicing basic stuff although that was not my goal) over and over and over. So apart from any knowledge-type learning, I’m pretty sure some of my basic skills improved.
[br]Well, if you're still reading this...thanks for your patience, and here's a question. As I wrote above, I found that voicing the chords differently often had a significant impact on how a particular progression sounded. I think, but am not sure, that this often had to do with the top note. To my ear, the top note is kind of a melody note that I hear more than the others. For example, open C with pinky on the 3rd fret of the first string [x32013 bass to treble] is easily distinguishable from a regular open C [x32010] , but I can barely hear the difference between the regular open C and a C with the G played on the 6th string ([332010]. So anyway, I’m wondering if there is a convention for notating the top note. I know that you can communicate the bass note by using slash chord notation but I don’t think I’ve seen anything comparable for the top note.
[br]Thanks,
Dave
