Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpalmer | Hacker News Reader

> If you write a song in C with an E minor in it, you should probably think very hard if you want to put a chord that is anything other than an A minor chord or an F major chord.

God forbid your song deviates from the most 1300 most popular songs!

View on HN

co-founder of Hooktheory here. When this article was published (2012), it was based on the first 1300 songs in the library [https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab]. At that time, the two most common chords after E minor for songs in the key of C major were F major (59% of the time) and A minor (34% of the time). The library now has about 12k songs and the percentages have changed. Still the same two chords, but now F major (IV) is only about 34% of the time, and A minor (vi) is about 24% of the time. Here is an updated plot of the most common chords after E minor for songs in the key of C major https://imgur.com/a/lBfVK0X?

I was responding more to what I saw as the rather blunt application of statistics to the songwriting process. Admittedly I'm new to your site, but I'm curious about the theory.

I'm not totally familiar with the data set, but it would be nice to plot more things from it. For instance, what were the chords that were popular during certain years? You mention that the chords have changed, what does that graph look like? Is there any correlation between, I dunno, the DJIA's derivative and the 'sounds' of popular music.

Great work though! I really like the clear and informative data displays.

Someone should add (2012) to the submission title.

Hmm, my search for "Kodachrome" came up empty. I'm guessing "Tallis Fantasia" won't work either :-)

*pop song

If you're writing pop, you want it to be a hit, and you want to use a non-standard chord progression? You better know your harmony theory inside out. Otherwise stick to the usual chord progressions.

I guess it's like saying "if you want to build a native iOS app, you should probably think very hard if you want to use something other than Objective-C or Swift to build it"

Music production, just as any other profession, works through a lot of convention. Most music has more things in common than not, just as most software or most humans have more things in common than not -- and that is completely fine. If something falls in the 95th percentile then it's probably a good rule of thumb to not mess with that particular rule, if your goal is to get something going.

There is a ton more to music than chord progression. Figuring out which parts to change, and how, and which parts to leave alone is key.

Ok, let me take a crack at it — I think Ray Charles’ “Georgia On My Mind” breaks this rule wonderfully with a B7 in the opening, and that nice D major over the C bass note resolving the verse.

If that’s not “pop” enough, I’m pretty sure it’s the same structure McCartney used in “Yesterday”.

Which, if you want to see how to break every damn rule and still make hits, ladies and gentlemen: The Beatles!

also what the hell. how are you supposed to write all your songs without using the dominant chord of your key?

There was a typo in the post that has been corrected. It now reads “If you write a song in C with an E minor in it, you should probably think very hard if you want to put a chord that is anything other than A minor or F major after the E minor. For the songs in the database, 93% of the time one of these two chords came next!”

ty for the response, makes a lot more sense now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com