Groove la chord

One thing I've noticed about many of the house tracks that I like (and Kerri's tracks in particular) is that the chord progressions are often the most important parts of them. The rhythm can be very simple, just a kick/clap/hat affair, the bassline can consists of just 2 or 3 notes, the melody can sound like a drunken child wrote it in 3 minutes, lefthanded and blindfolded. But the chords! Oh boy, do the chords need to work.

I would so like to analyse some of my favorite house tracks and their chord progressions, but unfortunately I don't have perfect pitch and none of the chord recognition programs I've tried work that well. Then again, the quality of the chord progression is often a result of many factors, not just the actual notes that are played.

I've divided the chord progression into four separate parts. Now, I'm not a trained musician and if you happen to be one you'll probably have a different view on the subject. When I analyse and try to learn new things, I tend to chop a vast issue into smaller, more manageable bits. Learn those bits and in the end those bits combine into useful, new knowledge. At least in theory.

The four parts of a chord progression, according to me are the following:

1) The notes

If you're a trained musician, this is easy for you. Know your minors and majors, their 7th, 9th and 11th versions and if you want to get adventurous, throw in some diminished, augmented, suspended and other less common chords (I personally don't use those much for house though, even if I probably should to get more varied chord progressions). Play around with the voicings, maybe omit some unnecessary notes and voilà, you have your chord progression right there. Unfortunately, it ain't quite so easy! As the chords are the heart and soul of many house tracks, a very basic progression just won't usually do, like it might do in some other forms of music where the chords are more like something that backs up the melody, instead of being in the spotlight.

If you've made house more than 5 minutes, you probably know this public secret already: Add a 7th to a basic minor or major triad and it'll instantly sound more housey. When you first try it, it's one of those situations where you go "Oh THAT'S how they did it". However, that doesn't mean that basic triads (or even simpler chords, like adding just a fifth to a note) are useless, far from it. When you're composing your chord progression you have to find the right balance between simpler chords and the more advanced ones (if you want to call a 4-note chord advanced that is, jazz players will probably laugh at the mere idea). If the progression is all triads (or fifths) it'll often sound more like a techno track. Adding 7ths (and occasionally 9ths and 11ths) to some of the chords will make the progression housier, deeper and more soulful. If you're a trained musician, this is child's play to you. Many people dabbling with electronic music production are not trained in any way, however. Many aspiring producers learn it the DIY way, though learning by watching Youtube tutorials is common nowadays too. A word of warning though: Every single house tutorial I've seen on Youtube has been extremely basic, to the point of being more or less useless if your goal is to be the next MAW and not just to impress your friends with a loud kick. Feel free to prove me wrong on this one, as I'm always interested in any kind of help I can get.

You probably want to mess with the voicing as well, moving some carefully chosen notes an octave or two up or down. It's a subtle effect which can really add a nice touch to a chord progression. Musically, it's still the same chord but it'll sound and especially feel a  bit different. And since house music is all about the feeling and emotion, it's good practice to try out different voicings to reach the maximum emotional impact. As big chords can often sound, well, big and thus eat away the valuable frequency space , you might also want to omit some notes that aren't necessary. There's no real science to it as far as I am aware of, just trust your ears, your taste and take away notes that don't fulfill an important role. 

Once you understand voicing and note omitting you can (or at least I could) make much simpler progressions that are still interesting to the ear. The mistake I used to make (and still often make to be honest) is to make the chord progression too complex. Too many different chords, too many changes happening too fast. You aren't trying to sound like the next coming of Yngwie Malmsteen (or if you are, you're probably reading the wrong blog!), you want to express strong emotions as simply as you can. Sometimes you can even get away with not even changing the root  note of the chord, your chord progression  could go something like Cmaj7, Cmin7, Cdom7, Cmin (I just made that up without listening, so there's a high chance it's not the greatest progression in the world, it's just an example). In a way, the more you learn, the less you can get away with. Beginners (me included) often make the mistake of cramming their tracks full of ideas. There's so many things that a professional could write an entire album out of those ideas. Don't fall into that trap! Once you understand complexity and know exactly what you're doing, the less is more approach is usually for the best.


2) The sound

Sound conveys emotion. A smooth Rhodes  conveys different emotions than  a distorted analog synth. Since house is all about emotion (instead of showing off technical prowess or playing ability) and it's a fairly minimal form of music, sound choice is of utmost importance. In some forms music there's so much going on that tiny mistakes will go unnoticed. In house not so much. Even if you have to start with some kind of a sound to pick your notes, once you have the notes of your chord progression ready (though not necessarily finished - you can always go back to them if needed), you typically want to focus on the sound of chords next. While it's always of course situation dependent, house classics such as smooth electric pianos, organs, high pitched strings and warm pads are a good starting point. While they've been of course used on countless records already, they're classics for a reason. Rock bands use guitars, basses and drums and nobody complains that they've heard those sounds already. It's just a question of using them correctly and playing the right notes. Trust me, if you make a really good chord progression no one will go "Man, that Rhodes AGAIN", they'll go "Shut up and take my money" instead.

While the exact production details will vary from track to track, some rough guidelines can still be given. You probably want to avoid harsh, abrasive sounds and favor smooth, silky, pleasant sounds instead. Even if you plan on sounding a bit more modern and not just a retro 90's house track, you probably don't want to sound like Skrillex. However, the trick is to find the right balance. While you probably want to use a high quality lowpass filter (especially if you happen to have access to a Mutronics Mutator!) all the time as chord with some lowpass filtering simply sounds very much like house, you don't want to end up with a track that sounds very muffled which is exactly what will happen when you lowpass filter everything. Some high frequency content (besides the hihats) must come through. Finding the right balance can sometimes be very tricky and take quite a long time to get right.  Everything affects everything, so you just have to keep turning the knobs (be it physical or virtual) until it sounds just good to your ears. While you can take short cuts on some productions aspects (such as get yourself a great sounding, preprocessed set of drums instead of moulding your own from raw sounds), there's unfortunately no short cut (unless lifting a huge chunk of a sample from a record counts) for this, there's just too many variables. All you can do is A/B comparison your track with a commercially released track that's sonics you like and work work work to get it somewhere in the ballpark. However, with experience, this process will of course become faster and faster and once you know your tools well enough, you can get something half-decent almost blindfolded. Then again, that's another pit you can fall in. Constantly trying something new to become better and have more tools at your disposal is a sign of an ambitious producer. Combine that ambition with a large repertoire of basic but extremely useful tricks and you might be going somewhere!

3) The performance

Even if you're not playing everything by hand and draw notes with a mouse instead, I'm still calling it a performance because at the end of the day they lead to the same results, ie. the notes you've chosen have certain attributes such as timing, length, velocity and such, which affect how the listeners experience the chord progression. If everything is rigidly quantized with no velocity changes and all the notes share the same length, your track will sound like a techno track that uses house sounds. Don't take me wrong, I love proper techno! It's just a different paradigm, even if house and techno share the same roots and many tracks fall somewhere between the genres.  That relentless, mechanical groove works in techno, but you need to loosen up a bit when you make house. Ideally, you're (or have an access to) a world class jazz piano player who can play anything without much effort. Most, me definitely included, aren't in such a fortunate position. Your arsenal probably consists of a computer, a mouse, some form of monitoring and maybe some kind of a cheap MIDI controller.  To make matters worse, your keyboard rendering of Für Elise wouldn't pass a test made for 5 year olds. I'm like that. I sometimes play stuff by hand but it's definitely not my forte. I wish it was, as creating house-y chord progressions with a mouse can take a very long time. Every note, every note length, every velocity and the timing must be near perfect or it'll sound amateurish. As the amount of variables runs in the millions,  I wasn't kidding when I said it can take a long time. You don't of course have to literally go through millions of variations, with experience you can take educated guesses and get in the ballpark at least somewhat quickly.

While I personally don't mess that much with the timing of the chords and use quite rigid quantization most of the time, it's still something you might want to pay some attention to (and something that I'm planning on paying more attention to in the future). If you play your chords with a keyboard and don't quantize, this will be a natural side product of it and not something you need to intentionally aim for and spend hours on editing the minute details of note placement. If you sequence your chords instead and your sequencer allows the editing of microtiming, you might want to spread the notes of the chord a bit as well as move the whole chord back and forth a bit, to make it sound less robotic.  Working with a modern DAW has it's advantages, as most DAW's have some sort of a humanize function nowadays which does this automatically so you don't have to manually try out a huge amount note positions until it sounds the way you want.

House has it's roots in funk. In funk music everything is a slave to the rhythm, chords included. Besides the timing, one often overlooked aspect of creating a rhythmically exciting track is the length of the notes. Da da da da is not a very exciting, da da da daaa was good enough for Beethoven. As funky as Beethoven was, James Brown was even more demanding. When he was conducting his funk orchestra he made sure everything was funky, including the chords. While you can get away with having even length chords for background pads and strings, your main chord progression is likely to need some close attention. While there might be some science behind the funk, I'm not aware of it. Just experiment with the note lengths until you like the rhythm of it. Now, I know it might sound strange to use the word rhythm when we're talking about chord progression, but that's exactly what's going on. If you want it to be funky, the space between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves. If you just have an ongoing wall of sound the listener will get easily bored as there's nothing to latch onto and to chop the incoming information into smaller pieces, in a way quite similar to reading text with no commas and periods that divide the text in to sentences. While funk and jazz drummers are the masters of small timing variations that create the groove, it's very much possible to create a track with stiff quantization that the ear still perceives as funky. The key is to vary the note lengths to create a rhythm that grooves well by having all-important space between the notes. If you like your notes and like the sound but the progression still doesn't seem to quite work, experiment with note lenghts! It might be just what the doctor ordered.

While many old and classic synths don't even have velocity, being able to edit the velocity of the notes is a very important tool in your arsenal. If all the notes in your chord progression share the same velocity the end result can sound quite robotic and some of the notes of the chord can really stick out in an unpleasant manner. For starters, when  you play a sound across the keyboard with the same velocity, some notes will appear quieter and some louder, depending on the sound you've made or chosen. Velocity is often also mapped to other parameters than just volume, filter cutoff being very common. Because of these issues (or rather, features) editing the velocity of the individual notes of the chord is a often a very smart idea. Typically, particularly when you've spread out the voicing of the chord to span several octaves, you want to lessen the velocity of the higher notes or else they can sound quite really harsh and out of place. It can be one of those things that make or break the chord. You could have the right notes, the right sound and everything, but if the high note sounds really shrill and unpleasant, the whole chord can sound off. That's why I, almost by default, use lower velocity values for the higher notes. It's a small and simple detail, but it's quite often all about the details. There's lots of house producers out there, fighting for their moment of fame. If you ever get there, you better make an impact and be able to present a track that's flawless.

4) The context

 Chords, just like everything else in music,  don't exist in a vacuum. The most important thing to always consider is whether it suits the track or not. If you take the most amazing piano performance in the world and slap a house beat on top of it it'll probably sound quite horrible. Unfortunately, context is not something that can be easily explained in a few words. If you want to learn it, you have to first develope your musical taste buds (by listening to quality house records for a while - say about 10 years), then spent lots of time experimenting on your own, finding your own voice and style, without losing your roots.

Sometimes all the track needs is the same chord repeating over and over again, like in Aril Brikha's famous track Groove La Chord. Sometimes a more complex progression is necessary for the track to work. It all depends. Music is not a sport, there is no simple way to measure what is good and what is not. Some of the best house tracks are quite banal actually. They just shouldn't work, but they still do. They are simple, but they convey an emotion and convey it well. Even if people who don't listen to house often look down upon it because it's so simple and can sound like something that is quite easy to make, in reality it's not easy to make a strong, emotional track with minimal elements.  You need vision, talent, experience and lots of hard work to make a house track that stands out. While many, if not all, house tutorials want to make you believe that it's all about the production techniques and focus on EQ, compression, reverb and all kinds of studio trickery, hardly any tutorials deal with the musical and emotional aspects of making house and when they do they're very basic, usually just show you how to add a 7th and that's about it.

Teaching how to apply chords in real world musical situations, where the amount of variables is very high is very difficult. One could always say something basic about staying in key or using tried and tested chord progressions but then again, there are tons of tracks where everything is just wrong but it still works. Out of key notes, out of tune instruments, rhythms real drummers would be ashamed of playing. Such is house. Right can be wrong, wrong can be right. It's all about the context and applying your taste to create a whole that's larger than the sum of it's parts.

And that's it for now. You could easily write a whole book about chords (and many have), I only touched the surface of the subject. I'm not entirely happy about this post as it's quite long, yet not informative enough. I might make a further revision of it if I ever feel like it.