GraVeu wrote:Hi everyone, thanks for all the replies! I'm just going to make a general statement addressing what everyone has said so far.
Now I get that I shouldn't expect massive results in two weeks, but I'm not progressing, at all. I'm still in the same place I was before I decided to read some theory and other articles. I don't know how/where to begin progressing. I've looked at the sample songs, but again, how they were created and why they work the way they do boggles my mind, as great as they are to look at, its basically like trying to learn a new language by staring at the letters.
The music theory I do know is all very basic: Scales and what chords are. I do not know what progressions are, nor do I know how to use them properly. LMMS has a few chord presets but every time I just play them without anything else it sounds terrible. I don't know anything else about music or music theory.
Thanks for all the replies (I hope you're notified of this one).
Well, I can't say just what the right level of progress for a total newbie would be after 2 weeks... But whatever it is, you still are probably too hard on yourself.
As for chords and progressions, there are several ways to understand and use them, here's one way to look at them based on piano roll, which represents it in a very visual way...
Basically a progression is an arrangement of chords that just flow smoothly into each other, like this:
That's what called an I-IV-V-I progression because we build a chord on the first, fourth, fifth and the first note again.(also note that I didn't use the TripleOsc for this, I don't like how it sounds with chords.)
You heard things like that before.
Notice that while you'd think jumping up by fourth and then up to the fifth should have created those large, bombastic jumps from the Sunrise, it actually doesn't. The chords flow, but they flow very smoothly. Here's why:
By doing a few inversions we see that lots of notes are actually shared between all the chords, but there are those gentle half-step jumps up then down. (although it doesn't quite work for the V chord.)
So, you get the best of both worlds, the sense of motion, but not too much.
Here's another one: (you heard it a gajillion times...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ )
Canonical:
EDIT: Made a stupid error in the first set of pics, too late here... I think this is finally the correct way of doing this.
Inverted:
EDIT: Made a stupid error, too late here. I think this is finally the correct way of doing this.
Now, there is one thing different in this one, the sixth note can't build a major chord in a major scale, so we use a minor instead: that's why it's I V
vi IV. Not capitalising the Roman numeral means a minor chord. But otherwise, you see the same "flow" to it with those same shared notes and half-steps.
By using more advanced chords and concepts (7 and 9 chords, sus chords, etc, you can further jazz things up (Jazz has very advanced harmonies and progressions, more advanced than most classics, in fact)
12tone has more old-school and formal explanation of all this: It's heavily based on classical theory, the kind you'd get in a college textbook (which often reads like "How to write a song that would top the King James' Courte's Top 40 Danse Hittes," but that's where lots of chord lore came from... So, if you want to do some of those more advanced things, it's worth looking into.)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTUtqc ... sadh6AOx5w
I put the chord notes as those whole (one-bar) notes strictly on top of each other for clarity, but in actual music all kinds of stuff might be done to them. Chord roots (base notes) double up as the basis of the bassline, and the singer (if there is a singer) sings a melody featuring lots of chord notes (some departures are OK) and sometimes (arpeggiated) chords are the melody, and so on.