Understanding chords

RA: Resident Advisor

RA's Jono Buchanan scores a perfect beginner's guide.
It might sound like a broad term but the subject producers study as they work on
their tracks and look to make mixes sound better could be called "music technol
ogy." Funnily enough, often it's the second of those two words we tend to focus
on, always looking to improve the technical and technological parts of our produ
ctions with new techniques, plug-ins and tricks. With enough patience and care,
it's possible to reach the summits of our technological goals, with mixes which
burst out of speakers supported by comprehensive control over the tools within o
ur chosen DAW. However, sooner or later, the thing which is likely to hold us ba
ck is that we haven't spent enough time learning and continuing our research int
o the first of those two words: music.
If you build your tracks from loops or preset phrases, studying chords and relat
ionships between notes might not seem so important but, as ever, if your music i
s to be unique, it'll need to rely on more than just musical extracts put togeth
er by someone else. Through this tutorial, we're going to find out that chords,
notes and "music theory" need not be a dry subject but instead one which can bri
ng your tracks on in leaps and bounds. By extending the harmonic possibilities o
f your track, you can open yourself up to a wider range of musical ideas.
Firstly, let's look at notes and how harmony is supported by science and, in fac
t, the very substance of synthesizers themselves. Harmony means "more than one n
ote playing at once," which is exactly what chords are two, three, four or more no
tes playing together. As you'll know, some notes when played together sound musi
cally "right," whereas others can clash or jar as they reach your ear. The reaso
n for this drills into the very fabric of sound and, to understand this, we can
actually look at synthesizer oscillators.

"If your music is to be unique, it'll

need to rely on more than just musical
extracts put together by someone else."

These building blocks of a synth sound usually offer a number of wave-shapes and
these, in turn, are different combinations of fundamental frequencies and harmo
nics. Harmonics are overtones or, if you prefer, extra notes which vibrate and s
ound whenever a fundamental frequency is sounded (on any instrument). The relati
onship between these notes is based on mathematics so if you have a fundamental fr
equency at 100Hz, you'll hear overtones at 200Hz, 300Hz, 400Hz and so on. (For a
more detailed explanation about fundamentals, harmonics and so on, read our Sub
tractive synths explained tutorial.)
So far, we seem to be talking maths but, let's turn this into a more musical exp
lanation. Suppose that note at 100Hz is G (it isn't, but let's not worry about t
hat for now!). The first harmonic comes at 200Hz and as you'll know from the syn
thesis tutorial, every time a frequency doubles, its octave rises, so this will
also be a G. In case you're getting lost, don't worry all this simply means is tha
t if you play a G on any instrument, science dictates that the G, an octave abov
e will also sound, producing "natural" harmony. However, this harmony won't be v
ery interesting play a G on your synth and then play the octave higher and while t
he sound will get louder it won't sound fat or rich yet.
The second harmonic, at 300Hz, would start to make the chord more interesting, a
s this gives us a D. This note is the "fifth," as it represents the fifth note i

n the scale, of which more shortly. The following harmonic also provides a G but
harmonics four, five and six are the interesting ones, as they provide B, D and
F. So, to summarise, every time you play a G, discounting the extra Gs, "scienc
e" dictates that D, B and F will also sound "naturally." Take the F out of this
chord for a moment and you're left with G, B and D, which happens to be the chor
d of G major.
You can hear how these natural harmonics open up in the first audio clip, which
features a resonant low pass filter applied to a sawtooth wave as the filter opens
, check out the obvious overtones which occur naturally. Remember, these aren't
extra notes being added these are simply the harmonics present in that waveform be
ing "included" as the filter opens.
We can now see that major chords don't just make sense "musically" the very fabric
of the way sound is naturally produced means that these chords exist every time
a sound is produced by any musical instrument you can think of. So, let's break
a major chord down and have a look at how it's constructed.
Hold down any key on your keyboard and then count up four semi-tones (count "one
" on the note immediately above the one you're holding rather than that note its
elf). That note is called the third of the scale. Holding down the original and
the third, then count up three more semitones and hold that note down too. That'
s the fifth of the scale. Now hold down any other key and repeat that pattern, a
dding the third and fifth again every time, a major chord will be formed if you ad
d the fourth and seventh semitones above your starting note.
Which chord you're playing is set by the lowest note, so if the first note you p
lay is a C (before you add the fourth and seventh semitones), you're playing C m
ajor. If you started on an F, that'll be F major. You can hear this building her
e as I've played the root note, then "played up" through the semitones, holding
down the fourth and seventh to form a major chord.

Once you've grasped this, switching to minor chords is easy all you need to do is
lower the middle note by one semitone. This time, rather than adding the fourth
and seventh semitones above your base (or "root") note, add the third and sevent
h semitones.

Again, once you've played one minor chord, try out others, simply by holding dow
n a new root note and then counting up semitones to add the third and seventh ab
ove. Now, you can play any major or minor chord known to man.

Notes can clash, and chords can clash too. If you want an example, play a C majo
r chord followed by an A major one.

While the result isn't disastrous, it doesn't sound very natural either. So how
do we know how to put sequences of chords together which make sense? This is whe
re the notion of scales comes in and which notes "between" the major or minor ch
ords you've started experimenting with make sense in any key. Let's take the maj
or scale first, and let's use C major as an example. The full scale is: C, D, E,
F, G, A, B before reaching C at the top again.

Looking at the "gaps" between notes, we can see that from C to D there are two s
emitone steps, from D to E two more, while the gap between E and F is one semito
ne. In the major scale, the full list of gaps is 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2 and then 1 mor
e to get back to the root note of the scale. Again, this works from any starting
point, so once you've practiced playing C major, move to a different note and s
tart again, keeping that number of semitone steps between each note you play. No
w, as well as being able to play major and minor chords, you can play a major sc
ale.

The minor scale works the same way but just with different semitone gaps between
notes. Again starting with C, the full list of notes is: C, D, E flat, F, G, A
flat, B flat before reaching C again. In case you're wondering about "flat" note
s, this should help. This scale means that the relationships between the notes o
f a minor scale are (above your root note) 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2 and then 2 more to g
et back to C, the root again.

Generally, we refer to major scales as sounding "happy," while minor ones are "s
ad" and you can hear that very clearly as you play up and down these scales and
play their chords there's a brightness to major scales compared to the melancholy
of minor ones. However, none of this yet answers why some chords next to each ot
her sound so musically right and others sound wrong and "clashy."
Let's look at the previous example, when I asked you to play C major followed by
A major. C major's notes are C, E and G, while A major's are A, C# (sharp) and
E. Chords tend to work together when there is a common thread which links the tw
o. The more links, the better. There is one note in common between these chords
(the E) but the other two are different.
Try this chord change instead C major to A minor. This progression makes much more
musical sense and there are two reasons for this, the first being that two note
s are now shared C and E exist in both chords.

In that clip, you can see and hear that the C and E continue while the G of the
first chord drops out to be replaced by an A for the second half. Also, look aga
in at the list of notes present in the scale of C major C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C
again. In both the chords of C major and A minor, all of these notes are covered
as the C chord features C, E and G and the A minor chord covers A, C, and E. In
the original chord move C major to A major the second chord features a C#, which do
esn't feature in the scale of C major, and explains why it sounds weird and out
of place.
From this, we can draw some useful musical conclusions and connect some dots. Fi
rstly, decide whether your track is going to be in a major or minor key and then
, which particular key you want it to be in. Hypothetically, let's choose to mak
e a track in C major. Which chords can I use which will make musical sense? Well
, we now know that any chords which use notes directly taken from the C major sc
ale will sound good, which means I can use: C major (C, E and G), D minor (D, F
and A), E minor (E, G and B), F major (F, A and C), G major (G, B and D) and A m
inor (A, C and E).
Of course, music isn't usually made up of chord progressions which simply move u
p, step by step, so I don't have to use these chords in this order. Instead, I c
ould play the most used chord progression in pop music history C major, A minor, F
major, G major and this will work beautifully, with notes overlapping where pos
sible, as before.

If I decide I want my track to be in a minor key (like most dance music), let's
first remind ourselves of our scale: C, D, E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat and then
C again. My chords, using notes from that scale alone would be C minor (C, E fl
at, G), E flat major (E flat, G, B flat), F minor (F, A flat, C), G minor (G, B
flat, D), A flat major (A flat, C, E flat) and B flat major (B flat, D, F). This
time, I've programmed a progression of C minor to A flat major to F minor to B
flat major.
The first time you hear it, it's played as block chords but the second time I've
split the chords up to provide a sequence, simply by chopping the notes into 16
ths and cycling round the three notes of the chord until the next one takes over
.

In the final clip, I've run the two phrases together and added low-pass filter t
reatments to both sounds and a kick drum. You can begin to hear how the fabric o
f the tracks we make are based entirely on chords, whether played in a sustained
, pad-like way, or broken up into sequences.

If all of this is new, it might seem mind-bendingly complicated but there's no d

oubt that if you can unlock these chords and understand the relationships betwee
n them, the musical ideas in your tracks will improve. My advice would be to sta
rt with just playing chords. Look again at the relationship between the major an
d minor chords and the note gaps between them, before experimenting with trying
a few out in sequence and seeing what sounds right.