So far you’ve learned a lot about chords, melody, and how they fit together to make a great sounding song. This is a great start, but just because you’ve been exposed to the theory doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll able to use it effectively.
There’s a lot more to writing a great song than just knowing which chord goes after another. In this chapter we will pause for a moment to discuss some common creative techniques that you can apply using the knowledge you’ve obtained in earlier chapters (and Hooktheory I) to make music that is more unique and memorable. We hope this will help you unlock some of the potential in the tools that you have at your disposal.
One of the most important elements of being a successful songwriter is being skilled at controlling the expectations of your listeners. Writing a song that people love is often a delicate balance between knowing how to give your audience the sound they want to hear next and surprising them with something new when they least expect it. The theme of this chapter centers around ways of controlling these expectations using the theory you know to write more effective songs.
The “energy” level of a song is intuitively easy to understand but hard to define concretely. Everyone knows how they feel during a particularly powerful section of their favorite song, and gaining control over this dimension is a critical aspect of songwriting. Song energy is a complex mixture of tempo, volume, instrumentation, and harmony.
The simplest way to add intensity to a song is to increase the volume. While this can be done by playing louder, it is often more effective to increase the volume of sound by adding new instruments. In addition, some instruments are more “full” sounding than others. A lightly picked acoustic guitar produces a very different energy level than playing the same exact progression with power chords, synth strings, and a full percussion section crashing the cymbals every beat.
While volume is perhaps the most obvious way to affect the energy of your song, there are more subtle approaches as well. The energy can also be increased by changing the rate that chords change. This is known as altering the harmonic tempo. If you change chords every two beats, people expect you to continue this pattern. Switching to a faster harmonic tempo in which the chords change every beat can increase the intensity. While the converse is often true as well, slowing down the harmonic tempo can affect intensity in complex ways. For example, once a climax has been reached, slowing down the harmonic tempo so that the song seems to “hang” on a harmonically important chord can actually increase the intensity. “Ever Ever After” by Carrie Underwood is an example of a song that uses many of these techniques to build intensity:
The harmonic tempo starts out slow, repeating chords every four beats, before speeding up starting from the third measure. Then, as the powerful V chord sounds, the harmonic rhythm slows down again, “hanging” on the chord as cymbals and snare drums crash. The buildup in this example is also reinforced by the chords that were chosen. The chord progression uses inversions to create a connected ascending bass line (see the Hooktheory I chapter on inversions), directing the listener to the final V chord. This harmonic buildup is a like a coiled spring, building up energy as you stack on more chords. The longer you can make it last, the more energy you build up and the more powerful the final release is when the cadence finally occurs. Manipulating the energy of a song in conjunction with several techniques at once is a very effective way to control the expectations of the listener.
Another example of a song that uses harmonic tempo to affect the energy of the song is the intro to “We Are the Champions” by Queen:
The intro starts with slowly changing harmony alternating between the I and the IV chord. Notice how the second inversion of the IV chord is used to keep the bass note static on scale degree 1. As we learned in Hooktheory I, this “pedal” harmony controls the energy making the harmony feel closer to home base. Then all of a sudden, the pace of the chord changes doubles, the volume increases, and the bass comes in and descends on each beat before finally cadencing with a strong double cadence from the secondary dominant V/V to V to I. Just as we saw in the previous example, good songwriters often use multiple techniques at once, acting in parallel to multiply the effect they want to achieve.
Vangelis’s Academy Award-winning score to the movie Chariots of Fire also uses harmonic tempo to control energy.
The verse harmony begins mostly static, alternating between only two chords, a long I and an inverted IV. As in “We Are the Champions” above, pedal harmony is used to keep the bass note static on scale degree 1 (IV is in its second inversion to achieve this). In the following phrase, the harmonic tempo increases and the more exotic sounding iii arrives to break up the relative monotony of the previous section. Later in this chapter, we’ll discuss more how contrasts in the complexity and variety of the chords used can play an additional role in controlling how impactful a section of music is. Finally, the instrumentation itself contributes, with the piano having a more dramatic and rich arrangement, complementing what we are hearing in the harmony.
This section focused on ways that allow you to control the emotions and expectations of your listeners through harmonic tempo manipulation. In the following section on deception, we will discuss how breaking with these expectations can be another powerful songwriting technique.
Next up: Deception