by Mark Simos
Almost every chord is known to someone (especially when you teach at Berklee!). The important thing is that the resulting shape should be unknown to you: a chordal sound you haven’t played before, certainly one you haven’t used in a song—ideally, a sound not immediately familiar to you. The chord should also not immediately remind you of an already written song. Stealing cool chord “snippets” from existing songs is a different exercise! If the seed does remind you so strongly of a song that it locks down your way of hearing it, “catch and release,” and try again.
The point is not to play complex chords with lots of different tones, or fiendishly difficult chords involving awkward stretches. The emphasis is on the sound. On guitar, the chord should involve at least two, no more than four fretted notes; at least one open string, but not necessarily all strings; overall, a four- to six-note chord. Open and fretted strings can be interspersed. On piano, try two to three notes with each hand.
Don’t be put off by a sound that elicits a comical reaction. Often this exercise yields music reminiscent of cartoon or horror film music. Humor is a natural response to unfamiliar juxtapositions. What first strikes us as funny can eventually become material we use more seriously, once the initial shock of surprise wears off.
The chordal sound you stumble on can be ugly (though deliberately trying for as ugly a sound as possible is yet another exercise… “Ugly Chords and Learning to Love Them…”!). Or it can just be cool, weird, harmonically ambiguous, evocative. You might need to try several times until you hit something intriguing.
This exercise takes practice. Happily, you can practice it no matter what your current level of technical skill on the instrument. In fact, beginners have an advantage over more experienced players, if they can overcome inhibitions and fear, and manage the physical challenges. Their hands are less likely to grab automatically for known chords, because they know fewer chords! More experienced players may need to use additional “disorienting” techniques: e.g., put your guitar in an unfamiliar tuning, or turn it around and play left-handed.
The Jackson Pollock technique also doesn’t rely on a particular level of harmonic knowledge. Theory helps, but at times, can also hinder. Of course, there’s no harm in figuring out what you played after the first creative unfolding from the seed.
Jackson Pollock Example
Here’s an example Jackson Pollock seed idea at the piano, with first steps of working the idea. The original “hand-throw” was a six-note chord: three notes in left and right hands respectively. Note that the two three-note clusterings are rough (not exact) intervallic mirrors—typical of a voicing found by hand and feel rather than by ear (though the ear must assess the results, of course). The second voicing (bar 2) was derived from the first by noticing a prominent dissonance (low E against the F) and swapping the notes, again, with no prior certainty of the resulting sound. The starting seed idea is now a two-chord riff or cycle, but with a far-from-cliché sound:
FIG. 6.1. Jackson Pollock Example. With initial working of the seed idea.
Because the chords are unusual and harmonically ambiguous, a melody set against these chords is also likely to take us out of our comfort zone. I illustrate a first melodic development step in figure 6.1. The initial phrase begins and ends on tones found in the voicing (G and C). The second phrase seeks out and emphasizes a note not in the voicing (D). The cadences form a question-and-answer phrase structure, with a start at lyric exploration via syllabic sounds. A slow rubato tempo and pulse allows phrase durations to breathe. This encourages experimenting with shifts to odd-bar timing, alternative phrasing, and metric positions. This irregular timing may or may not persist into the final song.
Other “At Your Instrument” Strategies
Here are related strategies for discovering chordal seeds at your instrument:
Seeds from technical practice. As you practice scales, new chords and combinations, and physical patterns, seed fragments naturally leap out at you: sounds, voicings, and progressions that are fresh to your ear. If you’re stirred by a particular chord sound, even if it doesn’t immediately suggest clear emotional associations, capture it as a seed. (Then keep practicing!)
Seeds from exploration. Related to disciplined practice of repertoire or technical exercises is more free-form exploration: playing in a
new tuning, or experimenting with new shapes, patterns, and sounds. Though also technical work, this is more self-guided discovery than practice and drill. Fresh harmonic ideas or chordal textures often arise from such sessions that you’ll want to capture as seed material.
Seeds from mistakes. Songwriters practice differently than performers. When we make a mistake, the mistake itself sometimes suggests cool creative material. Be attentive for serendipitous sounds you stumble across when you get a chord shape spatially switched around, or when your hand slips. Accidents are sometimes songs waiting to happen. (“Don’t waste that mistake!” says my student Ellie Buckland.)
Seeds from repertoire: In Search of the Lost Chord. As you listen to or learn to play existing repertoire music, be attentive for particular chordal “magic moments” that move you and delight your ear. While this isn’t exclusively an “at your instrument” strategy, it helps to be learning how to play the song when you make the discovery.
The Beatles often worked this way, creatively “borrowing”
isolated fragments from other songs. For example, the classic Motown hit song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, and a signature song for Marvin Gaye) makes an unusual harmonic move in the transition from verse to prechorus—from the IV7 chord of a minor blues key to the VI minor. The prechorus thus contrasts harmonically to the starting key before returning home to the blues-based tonic on the chorus. Reputedly, John Lennon borrowed this distinctive chord idea for “Come Together,” where the same move is used to spotlight a move to the refrain line. (Listen to the two songs and see if you can hear the borrowing.)
Using Your Chord Seeds
To write interesting and evocative full progressions, we need more than just novel chord sounds and voicings as starting points. If these are our primary source of innovation, we can easily wind up with stock progressions peppered by a few chordal “special effects.”
When working from a fragmentary chordal song seed—typically the kind of material obtained at your instrument—consider carefully where to use this bit of harmonic novelty. Unusual chords or novel chord transitions draw attention as a landmark. One or two such chordal seeds can provide a signature moment for a song, while stringing successive weird chord moves dilutes impact of the individual ideas. Try using just one seed (from a given facet) or “surprising move” per section. Don’t crowd seeds in the planter!
In addition, don’t assume you must lead off with the seed at the start of your song or section. Seed-based writing is inherently asequential with respect to structure and flow of the final song. The strong or fresh idea—your starting point in process—might be best placed at a transition point or a spotlight position, for a primary bridge, or as just an intro, interlude, or coda.
Suppose I’m playing in the key of D and—whether by accident, experiment or a self-challenge—stumble on the BD– chord. This is a DVI– in the key of D major—an unusual chord, and one I’ve never used in a song. To use it in a section, I’ll spotlight the chord by surrounding it with less surprising material, and by transitioning to and from the chord in a plausible way, making the surprise of using the chord even more effective. In figure 6.2, I show an example progression written around this chord seed. I decide to get to the DVI– via a “rocking” motion from and back to the less startling DIII chord (F):
FIG. 6.2. Using a Chord Seed in a Sectional Context
Chord Seeds Away from Your Instrument
For most writers, chordal seeds are hard to hear away from an instrument. Song seeds typically come amidst everyday activity: a lyric title, or a bit of melody that pops into your head. Chords or p
rogressions that “come to mind” this way are sometimes remembered fragments of already existing music. It’s harder to find novel chordal ideas away from your instrument, “in your head.” Exceptions are strong instrumentalists and/or those with extensive compositional training and inclination.
Picture an inspired composer walking through the Alpine hills, hearing entire symphonies in his mind’s ear. Beethoven could reputedly “hear” his music even after he was almost completely deaf. The great French composer, organist, and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen was a synaesthete (“heard” colors, “saw” harmonies) who notated the rushing of waterfalls and transcribed landscapes of natural sounds (wind, bird calls) into dense orchestral textures.
For us mere mortals, hearing chordal ideas away from an instrument involves dual challenges: complexity and originality. Though many musicians (and nonmusicians) can silently conjure the memory of existing music, it’s challenging to conceive, hear, and capture novel harmonic material in this way. It’s particularly hard to hear complex, many-voiced harmonic textures without benefit of the external sound of an instrument. Here are three strategies that, taken progressively, can move you toward greater ability to hear and “think” harmony away from your instrument: (1) recording technology, (2) notation, and (3) cultivating your harmonic “mind’s ear.”
Recording Technology
Recording technology can be a valuable tool for songwriters very early in the writing process. Although you use it initially when playing at your instrument, it provides a bridge toward working more independently. By using recording technology, you can be freed from having to play your instrument while
trying to compose related material at the same time. Compose your chord progression, and record it. Then listen back as you generate related melodies, lyrics, or even wordless lyric rhythms—in separate 360° style passes, if you prefer. An advantage of this simple strategy is that you can write to chordal ideas that are at the leading edge of your instrumental ability—stuff you can play, but only when focusing almost entirely on executing the chords. If you can manage to play it and then record it, you’re now in “hands free” mode! It’s safer to drive that way, and a lot more productive to write this way. It expands your writing options and scope, while also motivating you to expand your instrumental technique and knowledge. You more quickly see these skills translate to direct creative material for your songs.
Notation
A complementary strategy to recording technology is using notation to build ideas for your progressions. This can be especially helpful if you’re not confident as a player of a harmonic instrument (guitar, piano), and feel your writing is held back by the limited progressions you can easily play. It can also be liberating for more experienced players, who may tend to rely on familiar licks or to overwrite progressions working at their instrument. You can get to more interesting places—and more interesting places—when not constrained by what’s easy for you to play (whatever your current level of skill).
A common misconception is that recording technology makes notation unnecessary, even an annoyance. This misses the critical role notation plays, not just in communicating to players and singers, but as a mnemonic and visual aid in the creative work of composing itself. When you improvise musical ideas and record them, you are not necessarily forced to crystallize them and give them definite shape. The act of notating your own work helps you hear it and understand it in a different way. (This applies, not just to chordal notation, but to melodic and rhythmic notation as well. Even being meticulous about writing out “fair copy” lyrics can be revealing—lyric sheets are a notation as well!)
Notation enables you to write beyond not only what you can physically play, but also what you could remember to play, in live performance. Composing in notation, you’re free to design the progression outside of performance “real time.” Relieved of the pressure of remembering and executing the progression in performance, you can think about what you want the progression to do—as a story or narrative. This also helps you visually organize longer sequences and structures than you’d be able to retain in memory playing live, and to see parallels and correspondences that would be hard to hear and attend to in real time. As you write and recognize these longer-arc patterns, you get better at hearing them as well, and eventually, playing them. Skills of notation and live, extemporaneous play thus play off against each other in a “virtuous spiral.”
Notation can support both sound and sense connections to chords. For
example, working with a chord seed on guitar—grabbing a shape you’ve never grabbed before—you might want a chord diagram capturing the shape and position of the chord, without analyzing or interpreting it. If you’ve stumbled on an interesting voicing on piano, write down the (exact) individual notes before asking what functional type of chord it is, or even what the root is (implicit in the interpretive act of “naming” the chord). On the other hand, it’s also great to start “thinking in progressions.” You might be playing guitar as you write the progression, but you’re thinking about the function of the chord in the key, not that it’s a G chord in particular. I find this kind of harmonic thinking is facilitated by using notation that is pitch-independent but functional in nature, such as the Nashville number system (see the sidebar “Nashville Notation for Songwriters” on page 134). And functional notation is particularly helpful when working “notation first” as discussed on the next page—writing the progression as if you were writing a stanza of poetry.
Working Notation First
Notation is primarily useful as an adjunct to composing via live performance, or working with recorded material. However, there is a powerful if unusual strategy you can use as well—working notation first. In this strategy, you use the notation as your primary “performance” vehicle for generating the ideas. You compose directly in the notation itself.
There are inherent risks with a notation-first strategy. The first few times you try writing a progression “notation-first,” it may seem unnatural, awkward, artificial, and contrived. You won’t necessarily hear the progression in your mind’s ear; the notation will be doing too much of the work for you, and may lead you down some dead ends. Write the progression, then play it back. (You may want to use a tool like an automated software notation program or a sequencer.) Does it sound awful? Why? Or maybe it sounds different—but, hey, after a few repetitions you begin to get used to it, even like it.
This strategy enables you to dream up progressions you’d be unable to play—certainly, ones you’re unlikely to create via casual jamming. It’s possible to notate progressions that are essentially clichés, or sequences so contrived and complex as to be nearly unplayable or unlistenable. Some will work, some won’t. Progressions developed notation-first may sound too busy or “chord-y.” Sometimes a progression that sounds unworkable on its own will magically work when you find a melodic line that ties it together and makes it make sense. Learning to distinguish the unfamiliar and initially uncomfortable from the truly unmusical is an ongoing journey.
Overly complex progressions are a natural part of the learning curve with this technique. Be sure to listen back to your progressions and assess them for musical coherence. Expect to “thin out” your first notated versions as you play and tweak. Write yourself into a corner, then listen and play your way out of it. While you may initially “overwrite” using this technique, you eventually learn to use space and repetition more confidently, so your progressions use compositional time, duration, and harmonic rhythm—stillness as well as motion.
Cultivating Your Harmonic Mind’s Ear
Recording technology and notation are powerful and complementary tools for developing harmonic skills. At the same time, you also want to cultivate your “mind’s ear” skills for working creatively with harmonic material—your capacity for silent auditory experience of chords, away from an instrument or any physical realization of the sound. This work will gradually liberate your ability to design chord progressions from your
instrumental limitations (or facilities!).
In theory, you can learn to hear individual chords in your mind’s ear. But it is very difficult to hear unusual voicings this way, unless you’re an instrumentalist who can conjure tactile, mnemonic images of your hands on your instrument to reinforce the sound. It’s actually easier to hear progressions, because you’re focusing not only on the imagined sound of the individual chords but on the sense and flow of the progression itself.
As you practice letting chord progressions resonate and “play through” in your mind, you’ll start getting a feeling for the story the chords are telling. As you mentally track root tones, then bass lines, then inner lines that suggest qualitative shifts of major and minor chords, you’ll trigger associated bodily movement and gesture, emotional associations, memory, and imagery. As you develop these skills, you’ll also be less constrained by your physical chops as a player. You’ll be increasingly able to imagine progressions that might be hard for you to play, and less likely to accept compositionally weak progressions just because they’re easy to play.
Chord Progressions
We’ll now look at ways to expand our vocabulary for working with the sense or meaning aspects of chords and chord progressions. Our goal is twofold: to expand our strategies for writing interesting and varied progressions, and to develop our sense for the emotional and narrative aspects of those progressions. You can use all the sound-based strategies discussed previously: working at, or away from, your instrument; and using recording technology, notation, and harmonic ear training to expand your abilities to hear, remember, and revise chord sequences and progressions.