Hello everybody! Welcome to the Songwriting 101 video series. Today, we will dive into harmony and learn how to write decent chords for your songs. You might even start enjoying it, even though the thought of chord progressions might give you nightmares if you’re a beginner or struggle with chords. This video is for you. On the other hand, if you’ve been to music college for so long that you’ve started turning into a metronome, then this video isn’t for you and you should skip it.
Before we start, I want to remind you that in the previous video, we made lyrics for this song using a chatGPT neural network. Now, we will use chatGPT to make chords for those lyrics. We will use some simple chords just for the sake of this video. You can ask chatGPT to use some complex chords if you wish. It gave us the chord progressions and the explanation for those chord progressions. Those are simple and primitive, so we may try to change them. For example, we may change the tonality from A minor to something less overused, like C minor.
Now, it seems that it used way too complex chords for our song. Let’s try something in the middle, something in between. Now we have three variants of chord progressions. The first one is very simple, the second one is way too complex, and the third one is what’s attractive. Although our sentient AI seems to have a vendetta against the half of our reverse, now we will map chatGPT generated chords with chatGPT generated lyrics. Let’s just see where the change of chord seems natural. I think it will be good to repeat those F major and G7 chords the whole second line, and then we will repeat this chord progression with verse 2 and 3. Voila, the verses are ready!
Let’s move on to the pre-chorus. In the pre-chorus, he wants us to use those chords. Done! And then we move to the chorus. What the devil, I mean, I’m sorry for my sinning. I usually don’t clean my house without Melodyne. We’ve got our text with chord mapping done and ready. Now we have both our lyrics and our chord mapping. But before proceeding into the notes editor to input the chords, we need to talk about one more thing. Minor scales can be divided into natural, harmonic, and melodic. It’s good practice not to limit yourself to just one type of the scale. Some composers use harmonics, some use melodic, and others, including me, prefer using all three of them.
Now, let’s get back to writing music. Our next job will be to put our chords into the DAW’s note editor. First, we need to input our limitations. Our main limitation is the key signature, which is C minor. Our time signature, for the time being, will be 4/4. I would prefer starting with the chords of the chorus. So, the chords of the intro are the chords of the chorus. If that makes any sense. The chords of the chorus are F minor, G7, A flat major, and B flat seven. And then it repeats. So, let’s input those chords into the note editor.
Now, let’s move on to the verse. Once again, it is not entirely correct, but I prefer to separate the song parts from each other with a double bar line. Okay, moving on to the verse. There we have C minor. And well, we’ve missed another constraint, which is the metronome mark. Okay, so for our verse, it looks like this. And well, I don’t find it good sounding. Let’s hear it together. Oh, as a diminished chord. Foreign. I like what’s going on here, but I would prefer the voicing to be different. If we cycle this chord progression, we will see that the bottom note of the fourth bar and the fifth bar are way too far away from each other. In order to fix that, we might need to just move the bottom notes of F minor one octave up. And that fixes our problem. So, the baseline would not be as cut as before. And we would need to change the names of the chords because now it is not F minor, it is F minor from A flat.
So, we have our intro. Now, let’s move on to the pre-chorus. In the pre-chorus, we have A flat, B flat sus2, C minor, D7, and then two picks. I think the pre-chorus should be faster than all the other parts of our song. So, let’s try and make the rhythmic subdivision half instead of whole. Well, let’s have a listen. Good! And let’s use the chords from the intro as the chorus.
Now, let’s have a listen to what our AI assistant has done. Foreign. Foreign. Foreign. Foreign. Crash course! Like I said in the previous video, it’s not Grammy material, but it should help those people who struggle with writing choruses. Thank you and see you in the next video!
