Song Challenge: Key Changes
Added 2015-09-23 21:11:45 +0000 UTC"Nothing Was Your Fault" from Cosmos started with a simple drum beat (which it still opens with, in exactly the same form it had when I first put it down). As I started to play with adding chords though I gave myself the challenge of trying to come up with more unusual progressions. This led to a lot of modulation and eventually the decision that it should never rest in one key for more than three chords in a row. There was a lot of back and forth between coming up with the melodies and coming up with the chords that would go beneath them, which is not the way I normally work (usually it's one and then the other) but I'm quite pleased with the results. Hope you enjoy this, and if you want to play along, I put a ton of extra editing into getting all the chord names and piano fingerings on screen!
Thanks for supporting - you bring a lot of joy to working as an artist. xo
Comments
This was a mainly lot of experimentation and playing around. I did intentionally try to avoid many standard cadences as I wanted a more unpredictable feeling. A lot of extended chords were brought in to introduce the flavor of a new key, eg. in the chorus I could have gone from a Bbmaj7 to a C, but by making it a maj7 as well it takes it out of the key of F and it leaves you floating in this nebulous space for a bit - are we in C now? Or is it the IV of G? And then the Ab yanks us away to something new again...
Andrew Huang
2015-09-24 18:49:31 +0000 UTCReally cool, highlights what a well written song this is. Do you have a specific way of going through keys like that? I've found perfect cadencing into it works well for me, but this just seems seamless and gives the track a modal feel at times (like the Ab chord in the chorus)
Matt Good
2015-09-24 11:18:55 +0000 UTCI had no idea you played around with the chords like that, awesome! I'm really digging this album, by the way!
Jess Wagstrom
2015-09-24 00:52:43 +0000 UTC
