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Music Composing & Writing Tips

Composing techniques used in Apell tracks that may give you some ideas for those of you stuck in the one key or chord progression.

Modulation, Relative Keys and Chord Substitutions

Here are some ideas to get your music out of a one key or chord progression rut. You don’t need to be a composing genius like Beethoven or Wagner to make your song or track more interesting to change or modulate the key for a bridge / middle out / break down. It’s simply a matter of following a few simple rules and knowing what chords work together.

The most common way to modulate (change) to a different key or tonal centre is to move the song to its relative minor or major. For example if you have a song in the key of C Major, A Minor is the relative Minor due to both chords sharing the C and E notes.

If the song is in D Minor the relative major is F Major again because both chords share two notes. In this case F and A.

The rules to follow here are to go from a Major Key to its relative Minor Key go down 3 notes (e.g. C to A) and to go from a Minor Key to a Major Key go up 3 notes
(e.g. D to F). Simple!

Apart form using this technique to modulate a song or track to new key you can also use this as a simple form of Chord Substitution. This is a technique often used in jazz music where one chord is replaced with another. For example if you had a chord progression that was Dm F G Am you could use the rules of Relative Minors and Majors to change the chords to F Dm Em C.

You can hear examples of this chord substitution going on in the verse of Dubya. The first 4 chords played by the strings in the verse are pitch changed on the second time they are heard to follow 4 chords that are actually chord substitutions of the first 4 chords.