Copyright © 2008 by Pantomime Music Publications

P.O. Box 31177, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3K 5Y1

All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. This book is protected by Copyright. Permission must be
obtained in writing from Pantomime Music Publications for the use of any original text. (Note that
the chord progressions themselves are not covered by copyright, and can be freely used by
anyone.) Permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any reproduction, storage in a
retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or likewise.

THIS E-BOOK CANNOT BE OFFERED FOR SALE OR FOR FREE FROM ANY SITE OTHER
THAN HTTP://WWW.SECRETSOFSONGWRITING.COM
OR
http://WWW.ESSENTIALCHORDS.COM

It may not be streamed from any site.

THIS IS NOT A FREE E-BOOK.

This book, "More Essential Chord Progressions", is sold only through Pantomime Music
Publications. If you purchased or received it elsewhere, you should be aware that you
are in possession of stolen property; it has been given away illegally and the author
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You are permitted to make a hard copy of this book for your own use. However, you
are not permitted to distribute a copy of this book, whether hard copy,
electronic, or any other format, to any person.

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Table of Contents

Description..........................................................................................................................5

Suggestions..........................................................................................................................6

THE CHORD PROGRESSIONS .........................................................................................8

Minor Key Progressions ....................................................................................9

How Long Does a Chord Progression Have to Be?......................................11

Starting and Ending in a Different Key.........................................................12

Using Suspensions.............................................................................................13

Dominant Chord Progression Formulas .......................................................14

Inverted Pedal Point.........................................................................................16

How to Find the Chords that Belong to a Key..............................................17

Circle of Fifths...................................................................................................19

Chord Planing ...................................................................................................20

3
TABLE OF CONTENTS, CONT'D

THE ARTICLES .................................................................................................................21

What Makes a Good Chord Progression?.....................................................22

Which Should Come First – Chords or Melody? .........................................24

How Innovative Should Chord Progressions Be? ........................................26

The One-Chord Song, and… Make-up?! ......................................................28

Getting Good Songwriting Advice..................................................................30

4
Description

This is a sequel to my first e-book of chord progressions, Essential

Chord Progressions. In that book, I defined some basic chord
terminology, and described some of the fundamental problems
songwriters encounter with regard to the creation of chord
progressions.

In this e-book, I want to elaborate on many aspects of good chord

progressions, including a focus on several categories:

1. More minor chord changes: In “Essential Chord Progressions” I

included a short chapter that focused on chord progressions
from minor keys. In this e-book, I want to offer more of them,
with even more creative ways of centering on minor keys.

2. Progressions that begin and end on different key centres: It’s

sometimes refreshing to hear a progression that starts in a
minor key, then modulates (changes key centre) to focus on a
different note (often a major key). These progressions can be
used to change key, or to circle right back to your original key
choice.

3. A category of progressions I call “mirror progressions”: A mirror

progression is one in which the second part of the progression
mirrors the first part in chord function, with the actual chords
often being somewhat different. A mirror progression is useful
for taking a melody, then repeating that melody note-for-note
while harmonizing it with completely different chords. Like
category 2 above, it’s a refreshing way to present a melody.

4. In addition to the above, a whole array of progressions that I

didn’t cover in the first e-book, “Essential Chord Progressions”:

a. Suspensions

5
 b. Assorted dominant chord formulas
c. Inverted pedal points
d. Circle of fifths progressions
e. Chord planing

5. General chord progression advice: Without a doubt, the vast

majority of correspondence I receive from songwriters concerns
how to deal with chords. So I’ve inserted several small articles
throughout this e-book that answers some of the more
common questions I’ve received:
a. What Makes a Good Chord Progression?
b. Which Should Come First – Chords or Melody?
c. How Innovative Should Chord Progressions Be?
d. The One-Chord Song… and Make-Up?!

Suggestions

1) Keep in mind that the guitar chord voicings suggested are

merely standard guitar-chart offerings. It’s assumed that you’ll
experiment and find voicings that suit your own song.

2) You really need to use your imagination when trying these

progressions. Don’t just try them as written; approach them as
a suggestion for how one chord can move to the next, and try
the following ideas:

6
 a. Remember that chord progressions help set up a
groove, so vamping (repeating) the first two
chords many times before moving on can give you
that.
b. Try different tempos. You’ll notice I haven’t
suggested any particular tempo for any progression in
this book, because they’ll work at any tempo. But each
tempo reveals a different personality, so use that to
your advantage.
c. Vary your articulation. If you’re playing these chords
on guitar, try different strumming or picking techniques;
if you’re playing keyboard, try full chord voicings, but
also try arpeggiation (playing the different chord tones
one at a time).

On a final point, it can’t be stated enough that chord progressions are

simply one point on a very important songwriting triangle: chords,
melody and lyrics. In addition to those important song elements, you
need to be thinking about rhythm, instrumentation, key choice, and
many other vital aspects of good songs.

"The Essential Secrets of Songwriting" is a 204-page e-book that can

get you writing the songs you’ve always wanted to write, and will do it
by showing you how the great songs from the past 50 years work, and
why they’re so successful. If you haven’t read that book, it’s important
to do so. Because chords are only one part of the picture, and as with
everything you do in life, you need the whole picture!

You can read more about "The Essential Secrets of Songwriting" at

http://www.secretsofsongwriting.com.

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The Chord Progressions

8
Minor Key Progressions

9
10
How Long Does a Chord Progression Have to Be?

There is no rule that says that a chord progression needs to have a

certain number of chords. There are even songs out there that use
only one chord. And it’s certainly not rare to have a verse harmony
being comprised of one chord, with the chorus using more. But if your
song is going to limit the number of chords, there needs to be a
definite focus of interest beyond the chords. Here are some tips for
you to consider to make the best use of one or two chord songs:

1) Pump up the energy. Driving that one chord home with a

strong beat really works well. Try listening to Beyoncé’s “Ring
the Alarm” from her “B’day” album. That Am chord keeps
getting punched out to the listener with a really great beat. It’s
the energy that keeps us from looking for more.

2) You can take one chord and present it with a slightly different
sound by using inversions, which means to put a different
chord tone other than the root of the chord in the bass. So if
your one chord is G, try the note B or D as your lowest
sounding note. It changes the sound in subtle ways.

A song with one or two chords only needs to have a lyric and a melody
that steps up and demands more attention from the listener.
Remember, most songs have three important components: melody,
lyric and harmonies. If you purposely limit the harmonic changes of
your song, your melody and lyric need to take up the slack. And don’t
forget the basic beat and energy!

[Read the final article in this e-book, “The One-Chord Song,

and… Make-up?!” for more information about this topic.]

11
Starting and Ending in a Different Key

12
Using Suspensions

13
Dominant Chord Progression Formulas

14
15
Inverted Pedal Point

16
How to Find the Chords that Belong to a Key

For a lot of songwriters, finding the chords that fit with a given key
causes a mass of confusion. There are so many possibilities, it seems;
which ones to use?

To be in a key means that the melody you've written, and the

accompanying chords, all point to one certain note as being musically
more important than the others. This note is called the tonic note. And
it stands to reason that if you just throw any old chord in your
progression, the tonic note can become obscured. It can feel like
taking a walk, where every footstep goes in a random direction. You
need to get things going more or less in one direction.

How we do that is probably simpler than you think. Here’s the process,
using A major as a sample key.

The A-major scale is: A B C# D E F# G# A (A major uses 3 sharps, a

C#, an F# and a G#).
Build a triad above each note of that scale. A triad is a 3-note chord
comprised of stacked 3rds. For example, a triad built on A would be
A C# E. A triad built on B would be B D F#, and so on.
Continue building triads above each note.

You’ve now got the seven chords that belong to the key of A major.
They are:

A Bm C#m D E F#m G#dim

Does that mean that we can’t use other chords if our song is in A
major? Of course not. That’s what makes music so interesting. These
seven chords (and in particular, the A D and E chords) will be the ones
you use the most. But music would be boring if we didn’t venture a
little further afield.

17
Try some of these progressions, which feature chords other than the
ones that come directly from A major. To start with, try two beats for
each chord:

18
Circle of Fifths

19
Chord Planing

20
The Articles

21
What Makes a Good Chord Progression?

A good chord progression is like a piece of land that you're planning to

build your house on. If the land is too bumpy, placing your house is
going to be a problem. If it's too flat, there won't be enough there to
grab a person's interest.

More importantly, good land is all about the house that eventually will
sit on it. A great piece of land can make your house look even better
than it is. And eventually, when you try to sell your house, you're going
to have problems if the land is unmowed, untidy, or otherwise messy.
So land has a very important responsibility to make your house a
sellable item.

In a similar way, chord changes have

an important responsibility to make
your songs sellable. If your changes
sound confusing, like one or more of
your chords don't really fit, you're
encountering what I like to call
chord muddle, and it can take your
song from being sellable to being
amateurish and uninteresting.

If you learn only one thing about chords, you need to know this: All
progressions fit into one of two categories: strong or fragile. (You can
read all about this in Chapter 4 of “The Essential Secrets of
Songwriting”).

The first and most important principle of harmony is: Two chords
that have a note in common will form a strong progression.
And if that second chord is four notes higher (or five notes
lower) than the first chord, the progression is even stronger.
So G7 - C is a very strong progression. There are other strong
progressions within C major, and the strongest are the ones that

22
reinforce C as the key.

Dm7 - Em7 fits into the fragile category. Fragile does not mean
undesirable or weak in the aesthetic sense. Your song needs fragile
progressions if you really want your song to be interesting. Where do
we use fragile progressions? The verse of your song will usually
tolerate more fragile progressions than the chorus. The chorus of your
song will usually require more strong progressions.

Learning how to get chords to help and not hurt your songs is crucial
to being a good songwriter. Always let your ears have the final say. If
it sounds good, and if it makes your song better, that takes
precedence over whatever theory has to say.

23
Which Should Come First – Chords or Melody?

It's probably true that more songwriters come up with a chord

progression, in whole or in part, before they come up with the melody
that goes along with it. These "chords first" people would probably say
that they find it hard or impossible to come up with a good melody
unless they're hearing the chords underneath. But is that the best way
to write a song?

In my experience, coming up with the chord progression first has

some pros and some cons:

Pros:
• By vamping away on those chords, it
becomes a little easier to imagine
a hook for your song.
• Ensures that the underlying
"bed" that's formed by a chord
progression works.
• Isolates the progression so that
you can develop it into
something that really works.

Cons:
• The intro of a chords-first song is often related to the chord
pattern, which can be boring.
• The melody may lack an interesting contour or any interesting
features if you're not careful.
• Chords-first songs often have melodies that use lots of chordal
leaps, and not so much stepwise motion, making the melody
harder to remember.

But the simple solution to any of the cons listed above is... don't let
them happen. There's nothing wrong with taking a good progression
and then creating a melody that works with it. It's like a landscaper

24
finding a good piece of land, and then designing a house that really
makes it work. But you've got to make sure that your intro is
interesting: find elements of your melody to make the intro really
work.

Also, make sure that your melody uses lots of stepwise (or scale)
passages. The melody will be easier for the listener to remember.

In short, once you've come up with a good chord progression, it's time
to move on to other important aspects of the song. Spend time with
your melody and lyrics and really get them working.

So the real answer to whether the chords or the melody should come
first is... either can work, as long as no one aspect of the song is
neglected.

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How Innovative Should Chord
Progressions Be?

One of the biggest “newbie” errors regarding

chord progressions is the impression that
there is a new progression out there that
hasn’t been tried yet. If you’re searching for
the elusive “Loch Ness Monster” of chord
progressions, you can stop searching now; all chords have
probably been tried.

Chord progressions are not protected by copyright. Why? Because

every progression you can think of has been tried so many times that
every songwriter would otherwise be spending a year in jail for
plagiarism.

A progression is good when it supports the melody and lyric.

Innovation is actually far down on the list of important aspects of a
good progression.

How’s this for a ho-hum boring progression:

F C C F Bb F C F

But it served as the underlying progression for one of the best-selling

songs of all-time, “Hey Jude.” It’s so good not because it’s innovative,
but because it supports the great melody, which is the perfect melody
for the lyric. Innovation is good, but too much would just be
distracting.

So a successful song is a blend of new ideas (innovation) and tried

& true techniques (tradition). This blend of innovation and
tradition is a tricky balance to get right. If your song is too innovative,
you risk leaving the listener feeling confused, and boredom can set in.

26
The paradox is that if your song is too traditional - too much like other
songs - the same thing happens: your audience gets bored.

Your song, to really pull in an audience, needs to use enough

traditional elements that the listener feels comfortable, but also needs
to be innovative enough that they don't feel that they've heard it all
before.

In general, be careful of the following:

1) Chords don't require a lot of innovation; they serve as a
foundation upon which you build your song. But the mind can
turn off if your chords are those basic I - IV -V chords over and
over again.
2) Lyrics need to be "real". Unless your song is a setting of
poetry, use real words that you'd use everyday.
3) Melodies need some contour. A chorus melody will
generally be placed higher in the singer's voice than a verse
melody, and in both cases, need a high point. Give it some
shape. Also, don't let your melody simply be an outlining of the
chords you're using. It will sound stilted and unexpressive.

Another piece of advice: an innovative element in your song will be

more readily accepted by the listener if other elements are less
innovative. Leonard Cohen's songs work so well because while the
lyrics are deep and poetry-based, the chords and melodies are more
easily accessible.

27
The One-Chord Song, and… Make-up?!

Perhaps it’s just the way my mind works, but I’m always looking for
analogies to describe why something works in a certain way. Analogies
allow us to describe what might be a complex issue by focusing on
something simple. As you noticed above in “What
Makes a Good Chord Progression”, I often use
landscape as a way of describing how chords can make
a song great. Just like a piece of land upon which you
build a house must be beautiful without being too
bumpy, swampy, or otherwise complicated, a chord
progression needs to be able to serve the needs of the
rest of the song (particularly the melody and lyrics)
without drawing undue attention to itself. A bad piece
of land can make building a house problematic, just as
a bad chord progression can make writing a melody a
losing battle.

But that analogy doesn’t adequately explain why a

one-chord song can work, and why it can actually
be desirable in certain musical situations. No, I think the better analogy
in this case is: make-up.

I can’t claim to know a lot about the application of make-up. But I

know what I like to see, and I know what I hate. And for me, the
problem with make-up is when it’s too much. A touch of make-up
makes the face come alive, makes it look healthy, and makes all of the
facial features more attractive. And ideally, this can happen without the
admirer actually being aware of the presence of make-up at all.

That analogy aptly describes the charm of the one-chord song. There
are some great one-chord songs out there that have been top-of-the-
billboard winners, and the interesting thing is that until you really think
about it, you may not have known that those songs were in fact one-
chord songs.

28
"American Woman" is basically a one-chord song. There are others,
too: "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," by Bob Dylan, and "Within You
Without You" by the Beatles.

Some songs use two chords, like "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2, but it
essentially comes across as a one-chord song.

So what's the charm of the one-chord song? Like the judiciously light
application of make-up, it's the ultimate in chordal minimalism. I often
say that you want your chord progression to be simple to stay out of
the way of a more interesting lyric, and the one-chord song is the
ultimate in staying out of the way. But the one-chord song can do even
more than that.

That one chord, if played to a specific repeating rhythmic motif, can

either create or enhance a mesmerizing effect, or can serve to
strengthen the emotional impact of a lyric. In "American Woman," it
amplifies the sense of emotional antagonism displayed by the lyric. In
"Within You Without You," it magnifies the lulling hypnotic effect of the
sitar and drum.

My own preference, actually, is for the two-chord song for creating

these effects. With two chords, you've got more opportunity to modify
and play with a melody. And the two-chord song can avoid the stark
inflexibility that's a danger with one-chord songs.

Try experimenting with a one-chord song. You may find that it will add
a sense of profundity that you've been looking for.

29
Getting Good Songwriting Advice

Remember to keep checking "The Essential Secrets of Songwriting"

website daily. You’ll find articles and advice that will help you with your
songwriting projects. You can also write your own comments online.
Just visit http://www.secretsofsongwriting.com

And please note that I am very happy to help as you work out your
songwriting ideas. If you’d like to discuss any aspect of how to write a
good song, please feel free to write me directly. My email address is:
gary@pantomimemusic.com

All the best!

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