Chapter 4
Harmony
I assume that you are inspired by your playlist and have a rough idea what your song should sound like and what topic it shall cover. Let’s start with the harmony for your song.
In this step you will layout one part of the song (verse or chorus) by creating a chord progression.
A chord progression is a progression of chords that are played throughout a certain part of your song. There are no rules on how many chords you need to play throughout your verse or chorus. Actually, just one chord alone could do the trick.
Protip: do not overcomplicate your progression! Less is more! Some of the best songs on this planet consist of three chords only. There is actually videos on YouTube that will show you how many well-known songs consist of only three chords. Google it, you will be surprised.
First, pick a key that you are familiar with and that has many open chords. Open chords are chords that you can play on the first three frets of the guitar and that contain one or more open strings. By using open chords you can really focus on the sound of what you are playing and the music, instead of counting frets and transposing chords all the time, which will draw your attention away from the music.
Here’s a list of all open chords that you can play on your guitar.
And here is a list of keys ranked by the highest number of open chords per key.
If you do not know where to start, pick one of the keys above. For your information: C major / A minor is by far the most popular key in music.
Now let’s create a chord progression, which is simply a sequence of chords.
Again, I suggest that you start with an easy progression. Now that you have selected a key, just try other chords in your progression. Experiment with different number of those chords, different sequence.
Example: For the key of C major you could try C Major – G Major – A Minor – C Major. Or C Major – D Minor – G Major – C Major.
All of those two progressions are composed of chords listed in the respective key in the chart above.
The most important: Rely on your ear! Cycle and play through the different chord possibilities and pick the one that you like the most.
Congratulations. You have just created your first rough sketch of a part of your song.
In case you didn’t find a progression for your song, I have described another approach using an app further below in this tutorial.
Let’s see how I applied this method above on my song.
First I picked a key, namely D major. It’s not the number 1 key in terms of open chords in the list above, but it still ranks at number 3. The reason why I picked this key is because lately I had written a lot of songs in the key of A minor and E minor and I just wanted to use something different this time.
The next step was to create a chord progression.
I picked the progression D – G – A – D, which is the I – IV – V – I chord progression. I picked it because the two others chords in this progression, G and A, are open chords, so they are easy to play. Also, this progression is the classic three chord Rock’n’Roll progression. My background is actually in rock music, so I went for a real standard here. I just feel very comfortable using it and I really wanted to keep it simple.