What chords do you need?
jefftk.com
jefftk.com
But even for something discussed previously on HN-- the Beach Boys "God Only Knows"-- this doesn't work. Wilson really wants a half-diminished seventh chord at the high point of the melody. One could perhaps degrade to a diminished triad in the accompaniment, but he's literally singing the seventh of the chord so it's there regardless. Substituting a major or minor triad there is a qualitative change and sounds suspicious.
If you're making your own instrument you might want to be aware that there's a "suspicious" sound that some types of consistent chord substitutions can have on certain classes of instruments.
For example, a bagpiper can make severe simplifications to the harmony or even change melodic intervals to fit what they have available. Audiences generally accept this because the strictures of the instrument have made that a common practice. (Even if you're unaware of the strictures, you've probably gotten used to hearing the result of the common practice.)
However, if one consistently employs major/minor triad substitutions on the guitar people are eventually going to hear that as a lack of quality. As in the Beach Boys example, this will often happen during key points. The guitarist may get lucky if the singer happens to fill out the missing note of the chord-- e.g., guitarist plays a minor triad and the singer fills out the seventh at the beginning of the chorus of "Last Dance with Mary Jane"-- but eventually the audience will figure out that the guitarist is missing a vital skill.
Anyway, unless your instrument is so novel it doesn't have any associations with extant instruments, make sure you have some kind of "escape hatch" so that skilled performers can play the chords they need. :)
I love it when people do not take themselves too seriously.
But there is one thing I do know:
When composers want to emphasize the chord they're about to play, they will often choose a new chord consisting of notes within a step or half-step of the original. And they will quickly play that new chord as a way to smoothly introduce the chord they wanted to emphasize.
Whether it's Mozart in the retransition of the G minor symphony, Wagner in a transitional phrase of the interminable Götterdämmerung, or a folksy award winning singer-songwriter, that new chord counts as a chord. And that new chord must be added to the sum total number of chords used in the song.
Thank you.
Edit: the Mozart chord is G-G#-B-Eb, as a kind of "neighbor garbage chord" of a dominant seventh in G minor. For Wagner, I can't remember what key it was in, but it's a half-diminished seventh chord with a pedal-tone a minor third below the root. It's function is as a neighbor chord to a dominant seventh built on that same pedal-tone. Not sure about OP's reference but I bet I could find an interesting transient chord in there, too.
Edit2: Oh yeah, the Wagner reference is indeed Wagner, so you can be sure it gets sequenced with at least three iterations in case you missed it the first time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
Rick Beato has kind of the opposite video about "the most complex song ever":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8
The song in question is Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes; plenty of videos exist of it; here's one live:
If you do enjoy that, be sure to check out Patricia Taxxon's video on the subject, which is a very worthwhile analysis of that idea. It might be my favorite youtube video in the music theory genre.
[1]: (PDF) https://countrymusichalloffame.org/content/uploads/2019/05/W...
Well yes the Axis of Awesome thesis is a bit disingenuous and the critique at the beginning of Patricia Taxxon's video is justified; just because the chords are the same doesn't mean the songs are the same! And the analogy is quite true that in visual arts all colors can be formed from the three primary colors.
Actually, I'm currently trying to make songs based on this simple 1465 progression, in that order; here are my first two attempts (the titles are a hint ;-)
Alp 1465 https://open.spotify.com/track/5TxVfIf9JUAhCEL3O5cWXT?si=86c...
Bet 1465 https://open.spotify.com/track/2ghJN1EtQwXAZZj91B5yqs?si=f16...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnUa6SNJFQ (Video showing the chords more clearly) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIaw-MgNzM (Original song)
So much of it is conditioning, maybe all of it. There's conditioning around chords, progressions, dissonance, harmony, repetition, subjective ideas of what constitutes music, and so much more.
The only way to prove it isn't mere conditioning is to remove the conditioning and then evaluate.
What would be an example of if it's their own or not, and would it actually make a difference?
So I did it by choosing to abandon all judgment and then reframing perspectives I heard using the words "like" and "dislike." The reframing always had in it "I can learn to enjoy everything."
However uncomfortable the Steely Dan song might be, it has a nice consistent construction to it, and, once you get into the groove, it becomes straightforward. Almost all music I listen to that I'd call complex, from classical to prog metal to jazz, can be described like that too.
The Mendes song, however, sounds disjointed to me. It sounds built out of all sorts of fairly standard bits and pieces, but thrown around completely haphazardly.
To me, the jazzy changes in the Steely Dan song are very in-your-face -- the song is built around them. It’s pleasant enough but feels very random and meandering to me.
The Mendes song, as you say, is “built out of standard bits” -- it feels like a “proper” soul ballad. For me the unusual changes work because they’re used a bit more sparingly, and each one comes as a little jolt, either to elevate the emotion (in the conventional “go up one key at the end of the song” way) or alternatively to ease off the pedal a bit for a change in lyrical tone. It’s like the whole song consists of final choruses and bridges, which are often the best bits of a good song. :)
I found a similar feeling in Shostakovich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDeJeBvln6E But I enjoy this challenge. It's a beautiful yet strange and twisted music.
I think it also depends on what jazz is actually being discussed -- it applies well to most jazz standards, but a lot of modern jazz and jazz-adjacent (or perhaps just what I'm familiar with) seems to gravitate heavily towards nonfunctional harmony.
The original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s13sASS5F4
I think the trick is that it’s bossa nova, which tends to have a lot of those semitone shifts that Rick highlights. The Girl from Ipanema is the classic example.
I love that they seem so complex when you look at the individual chord movements, and yet the melody flows very naturally (to my ears, anyway!)
The effect in Never Gonna Let You Go feels a bit like the dramatic key change you often get right at the end of those 80s ballads, but smoothly integrated throughout the whole song. I can well imagine some hate that, but I love it!
And they do! The Dionne Warwick and Stevie Woods versions have the same chords (and nearly the same arrangement); so it comes from the original songwriters (Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann), although it’s a perfect fit for Mendes’ style.
That reassures me that the chord structure is really integral to the song (as I’d like to believe) and not just tacked on afterwards to make it sound cooler.
When I was learning the guitar, I frequently would skip passing chords and simplify voicings I didn’t know how to play. As a result, my covers were pretty boring and lacking the impact of the originals. That’s fine for beginners, but a pro musician is going to take pride in either faithfully recreating a cover or intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it, not just skipping over stuff that’s hard.
Rick Beato interviews (acoustic guitarist) Tommy Emmanuel - https://youtu.be/PLIZZ9lIlwg
When I think of complexity I think of unreconcilable elements that force the transposer to make tough decisions ("intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it").
- Rhythmic patterns and variation
- Interplay between instruments
- Instrumentation and arrangement
- Structure
- Vocal style
- Lyrics
- Recording and mixing
By these metrics (and the ears of 99% of its listeners) it's a more or less generic 80s adult contemporary song. Yes it has a weird chord progression. Would it be more complex if it couldn't be boiled down to a series of chords?
That’s what the word “pop” is being used for in “the most complex pop song ever”. Rick Beato is giving an example of a literally popular song, one that somebody suggested they perform an impromptu concert because it was in the charts at the time, and which sounds totally mainstream, and yet has a very unusual chord progression.
And I think “music theory” in this context is basically jazz theory, where a song is boiled down to what you’d see in the Real Book - melody line, chords, and a description of the tempo and groove. Unless you’re doing big band, instrumentation is one of the standard small combos, or just whatever musicians you have to hand. Which again is reasonable in the context of “here’s a song we tried to busk in a scratch group, and it turned out to be crazily complicated”.
He’s not claiming it’s Schoenberg or anything!
There was a long period where jazz influences were very big in popular music -- jazz itself was actually popular! -- so there were a lot of very harmonically interesting pop songs. I agree with him that that seems generally less true nowadays (thinking of big mainstream singer-songwriters like Adele and Ed Sheeran). But I'd be interested to hear of good counterexamples.
> While it's almost always I, IV, V, and vi, we have both II/ii and III/iii, differing on whether the third is major or minor.
This might be a bit confusing as written, because the slash "/" is normally used in roman numerals to indicate secondary chords. For example, the II chord may be written as V/V. (V/V is always II, but not the other way around... the "/" notation indicates that the chord is functioning as a secondary chord, which is something you figure out from context.)
The terminology "open chords" is also a bit unusual. The term "open chords" usually refers to chords that use open strings (strings that are not fingered). Chords without a third are often called "power chords". You can do your entire song with power chords if you're playing rock music.
I'd also add that what chords you get as the three/four chords you need depends so heavily on genre. If you were playing blues, you might pick I7, IV7, and V7 for your first three, and then maybe bVII7 as the fourth. If you were playing jazz, you might pick something like I69, ii9, IVmaj7, V7.
Sure in rock'n'roll the guitar player isn't hitting the third a lot, but the singer almost certainly is!
Also, if you are playing modern jazz, you are not really doing functional harmony like this analysis assumes except at a very macro level. Chord changes there are about color more often, only punctuating with a true harmonic change. This can be true even if they are moving from, say, an I9 to IV9. That seems like a "change", but its really just elaborating on the I.
I seem to remember "open chords" in my brief counterpoint studies, but can't find anything to back that up now. But in counterpoint you could talk about the openness of certain "harmonies" in terms of their compatibility to any number of changes. Something with a lot of doubled roots and fifths are less open to changing, if you are following the "rules".
I picked something like I69 not because it has function different from I, but because a 6/9 chord is a common choice for a Jazz musician to play as a I chord. Or, at least, it's one of my first picks. And if you're playing I9 -> IV9, my question is whether the I IV is just comping on I or whether it's harmonic movement.
And I will say that while there is no requirement to use functional harmony in Jazz, there is a massive repertoire of Jazz that uses functional harmony, or at least uses harmony where you can get insight by analyzing it functionally. For example, I might analyze something as "bV7/V I" in a jazz song and that is both very functional and very jazzy, and in a classical piece I might see "N6 V7 I" and while N6 and bV7/V are similar chords, using the chord with dominant function is, stylistically, a jazz idiom.
Maybe not directly related or as confusing, but also worth noting here I think is that you can play three notes sequentially and still call it a chord. It would be a "broken chord". And you can play just two notes simultaneously as a "harmonic interval".
Sorry, that's not something I'd seen. Edited the post to switch to "or".
> The terminology "open chords" is also a bit unusual. The term "open chords" usually refers to chords that use open strings (strings that are not fingered).
Looking some, you're totally right. I'm confused where I picked up the idea that these were called "open"? I think I've seen them written like "G<sub>open</sub>" to indicate that you don't play a 3rd? Calling them "power chords" in a non-rock context sounds off to me, though. Edited the post to call them chords without thirds.
Even jazz musicians call them powerchords
Not a guitarist, but I always assumed "power chord" referred to lots of doubling up over octaves, not the absence of a third.
Lots of powerchords in pop too. "powerchord", to me at least, implies that there is a distortion effect somewhere in the signal chain. Powerchords on their own sounds really weak.
I wish more of the internet looked like this.
But it's pretty extreme to pretend that none of basic design practices adopted over the past 30 years have any merit whatsoever. This design is not good. The black text on white is too much contrast. The default browser text of Times New Roman is less readable than more modern sans serif fonts (this is arguably a problem with Chrome's default value though, not just this site). The graph titles are not text but rendered into the images, and the images have no alt text to help with accessibility. The double solid border on cell boundaries in the tables looks crazy and does distract from the content. The page content is much narrower than it should be on desktop, it could use an adaptive width. There is no dark mode to make the page easier on your eyes in low light.
The design here on HN is a much better example to strive for, it has a similar minimalist aesthetic but addresses most of these issues.
I wish more of the internet behaved like this, but I do not need it to look like this.
This statement intrigued me. Without getting into what is fashion and progress (because I am NOT a designer), I was curious what is "too much" contrast. There's lots of literature out there about applying too much contrast in image/photo elements. But here, we're talking about text, and this honestly piqued my interest. Too little is usually pretty obvious. But what is too much? I don't honestly know.
I found the discussion at https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra... pretty interesting.
Modern designers argue that high contrast is "harder on the eyes" and they seem to prefer solid colored boxes. It is a real pitty, infested the web with sites that are basically gray on gray. Great, the text is now out of the way for the beautiful design and the eyes can relax from all the reading. Except when you actually want to read it.
No really, low contrast text is a real strain and these "too much contrast" arguments are too blame that it still happens.
It integrates flawlessly for me.
And that's why I do it that way. No other reason. Definitely not because I can't do modern design to save my life...
EDIT: I wrote this without carefully reading the article (oops!). Author does a great job with the "adjustments"...I suspect adjusting to relative minor covers a huge amount of these issues, and the author throws in mixolydian for good measure! There will always be edge cases, secondary dominants, modulations, blah blah blah, but I suspect adjusting to include relative minors handles the vast majority of popular music.
"Yeah, as time went on, definitely bass, I started to think, Wow, you know? Once I realized that you didn’t have to just play the root notes. If it was C, F, G, then it was normally C, F, G that I played. But I started to realize that you could be pulling on that G, or just staying on the C when it went into F. And then I took it beyond that..... Once you realized the control you had over the band, as we talked about earlier, you were in control. They can’t go anywhere, man. Ha! Power!"
(source: https://reverb.com/news/interview-paul-mccartney-on-his-life...)
> It is F with a G on top (on the 12-string), but you’ll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story
The person who wrote it down as CMaj7 and not Emin6/C says.
"The name is there to express a feeling. If you don't know any context it can be hard to put a definitive label on a chord." - Paul Davids
Flicking through my songbook, so many great songs are just a few basic chords. Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah - C, Am, F, G, E. Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane - Em, A, D, G. Hound Dog is just A, D, E.
Blitzkrieg Bop is just a few power chords the whole song. One of the first songs I learnt but heaps of fun to play!
I have way more admiration for good songwriters. I love Cat Power, and many of her songs are pretty simple & sparse. Leonard Cohen wasn't known for being a guitar virtuoso, and neither was Neil Young. But I'd take them any day over, say, John Mayer. I'm sorry John Mayer fans, but just because Neon is difficult to play, does not make it a good song.
As I practice and get better at guitar I try to take inspiration from great songwriters rather than great players.
It’s about how you combine them in a sequence, how you arrange the instruments, how you voice the chords and do voice leading, and how you combine them with the melody and rhythm
Still, I liked it. I compose a lot of songs in Dm but do get stuck in the same old chords.
https://perfectauthenticcadence.blogspot.com/2016/01/analyzi...
> "By creating this system of cyclical patterns, Coltrane changed the language of jazz and broke the mold of ordinary jazz harmonic progressions in jazz history. (Wernick 23). The use of “Coltrane changes” is still used by jazz composers today, and has become one of the most influential jazz compositional techniques of the last half-century."
Note that what jefftk calls "open chords" are more commonly called "power chords" (or "indeterminate" or "no3" or "5" chords). This is a distinct concept from the open/"zombie" chords that that youtube video is about. (But if you did use only power chords when covering songs, they would also usually sound quite dull!)
But it's not just about open chords. If you strip down a Bm7b5 to a Bm and play the Bm on the second fret it still has half of the character of the Bm7b5 chord.
Only recently did I start gaining the patience to learn every suggested chord and it makes a tremendous difference.
That said, I prefer piano for accompanying because the piano's tone is somehow more forgiving with basic chords than guitar is.
One other thing that makes it harder on guitar is that the chords that are easy to play are often various inversions, so your "A" chord might actually be a first or second inversion. I'm still just learning movable shapes on the guitar, and getting the fingerings right is tricky as things grow and shrink moving up and down the fretboard, something that also isn't a problem with keyboards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%9...
[EDIT: Meant as a joke, but it was not a good joke, as the author explicitly addressed upper extensions and their irrelevance to the point of the article.]
Also if you have not seen Hook Theory yet, worth checking out: https://www.hooktheory.com/about
I have no idea what any of this means (what is a chord? what is a major chord? what is a note? what is a first/fourth/fifth note? is there a 65th note? what is a scale? what is a major scale? what does it mean that a note is of a scale? what does it mean that a chord uses a note? is there a difference between a chord using a note of a scale and not of a scale?), but it implies to me that music is as complex a subject as physics.
The standard notes used in Western music and discussed in this piece differ in pitch by a factor of the 12th root of 2 (~1.06x). This means that if you go up twelve notes (which we call "half steps", confusingly) your pitch doubles. Two notes that differ by a factor of two are said to be an "octave" apart, and sound almost like the same note.
A scale is a series of notes, and a "major scale" is a specific series where you go up by two notes, two notes, one note, two notes, two notes, two notes, and then one note. This gives you seven different notes in your octave. We can call these notes the "first", "second", etc notes of the major scale. We typically don't talk about "65th" notes because they would be way too high.
A chord is multiple notes played at the same time. The chords I am talking about this post are "triads", which means they are three simultaneous notes
A major chord is notes one, three, and five of a major scale. A minor chord is the same, but the middle chord (three) is moved down one note ("flat" or "minor").
The steps have to add up to 12 to end up on the same octave. I'm not sure about every possible combination but there are other scales called "modes" which are rotations of that pattern (which can be derived from the white keys on the piano, just starting one of the 7 different notes; whether something is a 2 or a 1 depends on whether there is a black key between the white keys). The different scales derived from that are:
2 2 1 2 2 2 1
2 1 2 2 2 1 2
1 2 2 2 1 2 2
2 2 2 1 2 2 1
2 2 1 2 2 1 2
2 1 2 2 1 2 2
1 2 2 1 2 2 2
The first pattern is a typical Major (associated with happy songs) scale. The sixth one is a standard Minor scale (associated with less happy songs). The third one is called Phrygian and has a dark/exotic feel that works well in metal ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DzGlzdbkDI )
(My comment based on referring to https://learningmusic.ableton.com/advanced-topics/modes.html )
You could have other scales such as:
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (chromatic scale, i.e. every white and black key in order https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUpKPaKhsEc )
The main other combinations you see are the same 2212221 pattern, but starting on a different note. For example, if you start on the sixth note, this permutes to 2122122 which we call the (natural) minor scale. We call each of these permutations a "mode".
According to observations by ancient Greeks, the sounds whose frequency have simple ratios of small natural numbers like 2/3 or 4/3 or 5/4 sound harmonically and pleasing together. Except for number 7 (I don't know why). So, if we take several such sounds we expect to get a nice sounding chord.
For example, in a C major chord (C + E + G) the frequencies ratio of E to C is 5/4, ratio of G to C is 3/2 and ratio of G to E is 6/5. So, if we denote frequency of C as 4f, then the frequencies of C, E, G are 4f, 5f and 6f. Those are indeed ratios of small numbers and notes in C major chord are considered in harmony with each other.
By the way, if we invert the chord as G, C, E we get ratios of 3f, 4f and 5f. These are the smallest numbers that we can use to build a 3-note chord. Does it mean that inverted C chord is the most perfect and sounds most harmonical? As a person without an ear for music I don't understand.
Because of this ancient people made scales that consisted of notes with good ratios. For example, if we take first 6 notes of a major scale (C, D, E, F, G, A), the frequencies would be f, 9/8f, 5/4f, 4/3f, 3/2f, 5/3f. Except for D, all of these are small numbers and if ancient Greeks were right, the song made from them should sound harmonical. D also has good ratios with some notes like G (D/G ratio is 3/4).
But this scale has a disadvantage, that one cannot easily raise or lower the pitch. Different people have different voice ranges, but if you have an instrument with these notes, you cannot change the key and transpose the melody. For example, if you had a sequence of C, D, F then you cannot pick higher or lower notes with same ratios.
That's why people invented an equally tempered scale. It turned out that if you divide an octave into 12 equally spaced notes, then 7 of them are pretty close to a traditional major scale. That's why it is 2212221 and not something else. With equally tempered scale one can transpose a song up or down easily, keeping the same ratios between notes.
By the way, note B seems to use different pitches in different scales. There is a space between frequencies of A and C, so there is a place for a note, but there is no simple ratio one could use for B and different scales used different pitches for the note.
You can read more about pitch ratios here [1].
While major chord sounds "most" harmonical, but there are only 3 major chords in a major scale, and the music tends to be boring if it uses only perfect ratios. I guess that's why musicians started to use more and more "imperfect" chords over time. For example, in a minor chord like A, C, E ratios are 10f:12f:15f. And indeed a minor chord sounds like a wrong version of a major chord. If we take a chord with 7th, the ratios get even worse, and some musicians use chords with notes that do not belong to a normal chord, or even do not belong to the key.
By the way, non-harmonical notes are ones that differ only by a half tone - for example, E and F (ratio is 16:15) or three tones (ratio is 36:25).
[1] http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/ceverba1/Class/e5_2006/Musi...
3+3=5.
c to e is a third c1 d2 e3 e to g is a third e1 f2 g3 c to g is a fifth c1 d2 e3 f4 g5.
Its amazing how sparse a representation of a song can be recognizable (and enjoyable!) The mapping of musical meaning is due for a new look; the way we talk and write about sound needs to be rationalized before we can progress further in understanding why and how it works.
At some point claiming the person at the top of the ivory tower is the only one that knows the worth of something is useless if you can't get them to communicate with you.
Like anything you can really deep dive and get lost in you can end up lonely places that outsiders can't fathom. I found it quite poignant in Steven Levy's 'Hackers' book where Lee Felenstein remarks on all the focus on computer progress "You're doing all that the the computer? What are you doing for the people?"
You can still participate and get a value and joy out of something whilst being ignorant of its formations and there's nothing wrong with that. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Or your opinions just differ.
The meaning of music is in the listener. what you hear may not be what others do.
even the Brown Note doesn't hit everyone.
A lot of Western music centers around a tonal center, and then rocks back and fourth on the circle of fifths between IV and V. A lot of pop tunes these days add the vi, further to the right on circle of fifths.
In contrast, jazz music tends the move down in fourths a lot, so you see ii-V7-I all over the place, a lot of vi-ii-V7-I, and a sometimes a iii-vi-ii-V7-I. All of these progressions just start some place on the circle of fifths, and then go counter-clockwise until they reach the intended tonal center.
Instead of analyzing by chords I would have analyzed by key - what keys do you need? Convention says G Major is the "people's key" and so it makes sense to learn since so many songs use it. The key of A minor is pretty popular, and so is it's relative C major. Throw in E minor (which is G major's relative minor!) and with those 4 keys you can play the bulk of all rock and popular music written over the past 50 years!
(Many of the other options include either B major or F major in the I/IV/V, and those are considerably more difficult to play)
[1] demo: https://youtu.be/JWj3QP9wsCU
Unless you have a keyboard in your band. Then it's C.
While I would agree that you'll be okay playing any major scale in C major (or whatever other major key choose to learn), playing a song in a minor scale on a major scale just doesn't sound quite right. So, I'd double all of the numbers on their final table to account for learning a full set of major and minor chords.
In real life though the key usually depends on the singer's vocal range, so you won't really get away with learning just one key
The chords in the key of C major will be the same chords in the key of A minor, although their patterns might be different.
Any physically realizable fingering on the guitar is a chord. Whether it's useful is another matter. Different permutations of the same notes, in different ranges, is a way to add things like motion and emphasis in the music.
Another way of looking at it is how many chords are you likely to encounter if you get into something like a band or jam session situation, where you're expected to hear a chord and play it. That depends on the musical style, and where the music came from. For instance, tunes that were composed for other instruments might have their own chordal language that results in the same chords cropping up unexpectedly in guitar music.
A lot of folk music has its own "logic" for lack of a better term, based on the mechanics of the instrument.
Even the better players were becoming so dependent on them, that it was detracting from the music, so I went cold turkey and learned the tunes.
An app called "iRealPro" has chord changes in a strange format, and somebody once created a Python library to decode it.
There was once a book called "pocket changes" with just chord changes, and I think it was converted to text format, but can't find it anywhere online. The changes are an outgrowth of a quirk in the copyright law, where the melody and words can be copyrighted, but not the harmony.
Wish I could be of more help.
Some of the chord charts are machine readable (available as just plain text), while others are images, but looks like all/almost all of them are available as MIDI as well.
This is standard notation, especially in American folk music, that sections are labeled A, B and sometimes C. This makes it very convenient when playing with others who're not familiar with the tune (e.g. This is Kitchen Girl, key of A, two A parts, two B parts)
yeah the beatles loved that one
Maybe it doesn't show up much in pop/rock/country, but it's not uncommon in jazz.
vi III V II IV I ii III
And the chorus
IV I V vi IV I ii III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxC1fPE1QEE
(Yes, it's a youtube video, and I hate videos, but this one is worth it)
Despite the complex chords, the bulk of the melody is that ultra-simple two-note semitone riff (IIRC Ian MacDonald’s book says it was inspired by hearing a police siren). When John Lennon said someday they’d write a one-note song I always figured this was what he meant -- that I Am The Walrus is a “two-note song”.
Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
But as with reading this article, as an avid music lover I'm afraid to ruin how I feel about some of my favorite compositions.
That one isn't there, because the original motivation of the post was trying to design a chord input system for an instrument. In which case I'm happy telling the instrument in advance "this next song is in Dm" but not changing that on the fly (hands are full)
Leonard Bernstein seems to have a knack of writing simple sounding songs but with every chord in the book. I noticed the same in Tonight.