Is THIS The Best Way To Write CHORD PROGRESSIONS?
Do you want to write the most incredible chord progression ever written?
Well, if you think about it, the one truly effective method for doing this, the one way to be 100 percent sure that you have the best possible chord progression to ever bless society... is to try every single possible chord, in every position of the progression.
Sounds like a lot of work, I know.
But these things take commitment.
I don’t want to hear any whining, any complaining, nothing. Just put your nose down and start trying chords. All the chords
“How long is this going to take?” You might ask, pessimistically.
Well...
... quite a long time. And that's not considering that the same chord can be played in many ways on your guitar.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation (that you will find the video below...) tells you that trying all of them will take on the ballpark of 20.000 years.
So, no, you can't just try all the combinations.
You can still try some chord progressions and listen and decide what's better or worse. A process that lots of people refer to as "trial-and-error" but given the specific situation we should name instead "triad-and-error" lol...
Horrible puns apart...
You might be wondering at this point, “Won’t the vast majority of those semi-random chord progressions sound terrible? Is there a way of filtering out the bad chords or progressions from the beginning so this process can be completed inside of a single millennium, or better yet, my lunch break?”
There sure is! Watch the video linked below, and I’ll show you how to make this process much easier.
If you want to write great chord progressions in less than 100 lifetimes, consider checking out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course, which teaches you everything you need to know about chords and harmony on the guitar!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! In a previous video we were talking about creating chords by starting from a triad and then changing some notes and see what was going on, so using a little bit of triad and error.
And then we went in the comments we were discussing, but is this possible to do it from scratch? Is this possible to just try all the possible chords and see how everything sounds? Well, we ended up in this point.
No, you can always brute force it. Since there are only 12 pitches, there are only 2 to the power of 12 equals 4,096 possible chords. Well, maybe 4,095 because this includes the no-pitch chord. If you're counting pitches over a 3-octave range, that's 2 to the power of 36, which is still a finite number.
Okay, so can we brute force it or not, okay? Can we, when we write a new chord progression, is it feasible for a human, okay, to write a chord progression and then try all the possible chords for every chord so that this way we can get exactly the sound we want?
Well, this is an awful number of chords, isn't it? So if we consider just pitch classes, so a pitch is a note, okay? Essentially it's like this E or this E or this C, etc. And two Es on different octaves would be two different pitches, okay?
A pitch class instead is just considering all the Es, all the Cs, all the Gs, all the C-sharps, as if it was one note, okay? So we could just consider, we have 12 pitch classes. Now C, C-sharp, D, D-sharp, E, F-sharp, G, G-sharp, A, A-sharp, B, okay?
12 pitch class. And each one of them could be in or out, okay? So C could be in or out of those two possibilities. The C-sharp could be in or out of my chord, so I allowed the two possibilities in total.
The number of possibilities is 2 to the 12, which is for, like we're saying... in 4096 if I remember correctly yes okay so that's quite an awful amount of chords to try if you think about it okay I mean really it's it's an awful amount of chords okay.
Now of course some of those chords one of those chords contains zero notes one of those chord contains all the twelve notes eleven twelve of those chords contain eleven notes so I mean it's not really a great calculation but it gives you an idea that there are a lot of notes and chords what if I say okay I'm gonna take only chords that have three notes how many three notes chord you can find in a key.
Well the calculation is a bit more complex here because you will have to do the number of the notes factorial that's twelve times eleven times ten times ten times nine times eight until the end and then you have to divide it by the number of notes and then you have to divide it by ten. And that by the number of notes and if you do this calculation.
It turns out to be 1, 3, 2, 0... I need a calculation right now, I don't mind, yes okay, so around 1300 chords so there are 1300 chords of 3 notes if I consider only the pitch classes, do but that's a problem because, I mean, that's already an awful number of chords I mean, would you really sit down an afternoon and try 1300 chords to see which one is the right one at 1 chord per second this is slightly more than 20 minutes so.
Chord, chord, chord, chord, chord at this, for more than 20 minutes and you just finish I'm not sure it's viable, but not only that, there is another problem, is that even if I take the humble C major chord C, E, and G, but I can play also C, G, and E and I can play also, I don't know, C, E, E, and G or E, G, and C, or G, G, E, and C and all those possible inversions and voicing I can spread them apart as much as I want.
Okay, so I can play this but I can also put this, or I can play this, or I can play this, or I can play this, or I can play there is an awful amount of inversion and voicing even just for each one of those chords and those are important because sometimes if you put the C in first inversion or second inversion the effect is completely different so, if you want a more precise calculation what we were doing with my friend Christopher in the comments he was saying,
okay, so let's say we have three octaves and every note can be in or out so that would make 236 which turns out to be quite an awful beat, actually. 664 by mine, but it's around 68 billions if you do the calculation.
At one chord per second... First of all, you need to find a way to play all the notes, because some of those chords have 36 notes. At one chord per second, 1 billion, second is 31 years. 3 billions are a century, so 60 billion are 20 centuries and change, so let's say this could take around 22, 23 hundred years, 24 hundred years.
Yeah, I definitely have all this time, no problem. So you see that starting to... starting to try all these by... the trial and error becomes too much. Now again, you can tell me, but what if I want only notes?
What if I want only chords of three notes? Yeah, we can calculate the twos if I limit myself to chords of three notes. The number will be 36 factorial divided 3 factorial divided 33 factorial which is 36 and 35 and 30 which is equal to 42 000 and change.
Okay, it's not as awful as the 68 billion as before, okay, but I mean, okay, at once per second that's 24 hours. For every chord in your chord progression. Or you can spend 10 minutes every day of your life studying a little bit of music theory so you know already what chord sounds good and what chord don't sound good and you don't have to do all this trial and error crap.
Okay, now am I exaggerating? Yeah, a tiny little bit, I'm not saying no, but the real value in studying music theory is that you already have an idea about all that, you know immediately where to go to get the sound you want because you learn the principle behind this and you don't just have to try every possible combination.
Okay, so when you create a chord progression, you know if the chord progression is in key, not in key, if there are chromatic notes, if there are specific inversion, etc., because you learned them before in a way that you can hear and so you can guess reliably what is the next chord in your chord progression the sound the way you want rather than spending 24 hours trying one chord per second and finding the right one.
Do you guys want to study the answer because people are like why should I learn music theory for this reason? trial and error sucks okay you can get much more music down if you know a little bit of music theory I have a course it's called complete chord mastery it teaches you how to make this instrument work with chords okay now to make chords work with this instrument how to see the chord on the fretboard how to guess what's the next chord in the chord progression how does chord fit together and definitely is going to take less than trying 68 billion chords okay go and get that course or go and find other ways to learn music theory not a problem but that's why we learn music theory because we don't have time to lose we don't have days weeks months or years to lose in trial and and believe me it adds up fast learn theory as soon as you can you will write way more music in your life you really don't have that much time.
So think about it. And with this encouraging thought, this is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy.