Hi, I'm Pedro and in today's video I'll be showing you more tips for writing ambient chord progressions. I have approached the creation of ambient chords in another video, but now I'm going to expand on some of those ideas and show you other creative ways for you to explore and try out
in your music. I'll be dividing the content in two videos, this and the other one, Part 1 and 2, and I'll show you the emotional impact on slow changes, how you can use voice leading to create new chords, and how to make your chords as interesting as possible. Ready. Let's go. I'm just going to quickly mention some things that you should keep in mind while creating ambient chord progressions.
Usually ambient music uses a slow tempo or has a slow harmonic rhythm, which means that you are not changing chords all that fast. The idea is to give time to the listener to get accustomed and feel immersed in the soundscapes you are creating. So slow moving chords can help you to create momentum so that when the next chord change happens, it has more impact. I'll show you in the following example how important this consideration is for any style
of music really. Here we just went from C minor to F major. It sounds good, feels nice, but here the impact you are able to make just by delaying the harmonic movement. It feels more satisfying to me. You have more space to create momentum and build some tension if you like, and when the next chord hits, it can make a big difference and means so much more than if you had just changed, as we did in the first example. But what if you feel like your chords still sound bland?
Let's look into that. Chords play a big part in the reason why we feel the way we feel when we hear music, so it's no wonder that you may be worrying about it. With that said, our goal here is to make chords that sound as interesting and colorful as possible, and there's a nice technique that I will share with you in a moment.
Now, a simple triad can feel a bit too rooted and definitive as to the type of vibe it gives away, so an interesting alternative is to explore suspended chords if you wish to avoid that major minor vibe. Instead of C minor you could use or try to use a SUS 2 or SUS 4 chords like in this example. Another thing to consider is adding chord extensions.
As you add more notes to the chords, that strong chord quality starts to dissipate and become a bit more vague or ambiguous as you add the extensions. And on top of that, you can arrange the notes of these chords in other ways. One, because you may want to avoid the necessary leaps and to have better voice leading between chords. And 2nd because if you arrange the notes of a chord in different ways, you get different sounds. Now let's stick to this D minor
11 chords. You can either arrange or stack its notes in 3rd intervals and it sounds nice, but probably to normal. You can also find a way to voice your chord in fourths or mostly also sounds cool, a bit more modern and all. And now let's try to use mixed intervals. If you happen to prefer, let's say, the crunchy sound of seconds, try to voice your chord in a way where this interval predominates like this.
So now you went through all this trouble just to find a good voicing for the first chord, and now you have to do the same for the rest of the chords. Sounds like a lot of work, right? And the answer is yes. So you are able to have some harmonic coherence. And the first tip I can give you at this point is to try and have the same amount of notes per chord throughout. This can be especially important for that technique I mentioned
before. Let's say you have these four chords and that you adjusted the voices in the first chord in a way that you like. As you could see and hear, there is incoherence in terms of how the voices of the first chord move to the next and also in its quality, which is very different from the rest. And what I'm going to do is to adjust the chord voicing so that we adhere to good voice leading practices and try to use the same type of intervals that we used in the voicing of the first chord.
What you'll hear next is the same 4 chords voiced in a similar way as the first one, and the result is this. So on one hand, voice leading helps you to create smooth transitions between chords, but on the other, it can also be used as a guide to maintain a certain harmonic coherence and chord voicing arrangement throughout the chord progression. So create your first chord sounding as cool as possible and then apply that voicing formula to the following chords using voice leading.
And there is more that you can do with voice leading in mind. Let's check it out. Let's say that you decided the first chord you want to start with, and further along you also have an idea of the chord that you want to land on. But in between you decided that you will need another chord that you didn't quite figure out. Again, this is a technique that you can use in whatever context or musical style.
What we will be doing is to build a chord that serves as a bridge between the previous and the target chord, and how are we going to do that voice leading of all things? The cool thing is that you don't need to think about what that chord will be, just the type of voicing arrangement you want to favor and focus on how the notes could move or be maintained. Here we have some notes that are maintained while others move by
step, half or whole. Also, the nice thing about this technique is that you don't even need to think in keys as long as you are moving according to good voice leading principles. And with all this in mind, it's also a good opportunity to explore other aspects that contribute to the chord color, in this case according versions, but that I leave for Part 2. There is more that I'll cover in the next video, but in the meantime, try to explore and apply some of these tips in your
music. The point of all this is that it inspires you to create music. In the description of this video, I've added links to the blog, to the Beyond Music Theory book, online lessons and courses. So please check them out and as always, don't forget to like and subscribe for more videos like this and again so that you can make sure not to miss Part 2 with more tips. Thanks for watching and until next time.