Tip: The Big Picture of Making Music
This tip is about the Big Picture of making music. What is that? It’s the mental model that helps you understand how music works. Without that, then scales, chords and maybe even songs will make no sense to you. So let’s answer some fundamental questions about the Big Picture of music and see if it helps you untie some mental knots you’ve made for yourself.
All you need to do to see the Big Picture of music is to understand this: key centers. If you understand how key centers are made, moved into and out of, and how chords work within key centers, then you can fit anything new you learn — chords, scales, songs, fruitcake recipes — into your brain, and it will be a joy to learn.
So what is a key center? Get out your guitar. Play a Dm, followed by a G7, followed by C major. You just established a key center of C. If you sing or play the note C, it sounds like the most restful note, doesn’t it?
The next question is how do those three chords work to create a key center? Let me defer that question for now, and offer instead an encouraging statement: there are only three actual chords in any key center. Say what? Three chords? “I was told there are 7,” you say: you know, one for each note in the scale. Yes, that’s true. But for the purposes of establishing a key center, there are only three chords — or actually, three types of chords.
Watch out now: when I write, “type of chord” I’m not talking about a chord’s quality: major, minor, diminished, polka-dot, etc. No, “type” refers to one of these: tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Let’s explain these, and relate them to some actual chords.
The tonic type of chord is the one that represents the key center itself. It sounds more or less restful and says, “We can just hang here. No need to go anywhere else.” It’s important to note that you will have a true “Tonic,” which is the key center, and other “tonics” that can serve as representatives, or substitutes for the true key center. The true Tonic (note the capital “T”) is the first degree of the major scale. But tonic chords (note the little “t”) in any major key are found on degrees One, Three and Six.
Translate these to C major. The C major chord is the Tonic chord. But the Three and Six, Em and Am, are also tonic. This leads us to the next Big Observation about key centers:
You can often swap out one chord for another if the chords perform the same function (tonic, subdominant, dominant). That means in C major, the chords C major, A minor, and E minor are interchangeable.
“Objection!” someone yells. “I’ve tried that before and it sounded worse than fingernails on chalkboards.” So to that we say this: this stuff about tonic, subdominant and dominant is a part of music theory. And you did notice the word “often” back in the sentence starting with “You can often…” Often doesn’t means always.
Back to the point, and how to apply it. The next time you’re playing a tune in C major, try swapping around the Em, Am and C.
Am has two of the same notes as the C chord, C and E. In essence you’ve created a C6 chord, which is C, E, G and A, but without the G. This is why Am7 (made up of A, C, E and G) is an even better substitute tonic than just plain old Am.
But what about Em? While it also has two of the notes of the C chord (E and G), it doesn’t have the C and missing the root can sometimes seem a little jarring. But when you’re playing in a band, you often have a bassist or keyboard player who’s playing the root. And when we add the root C to the rest of the Em chord, we get C, E, G and B, which is Cmaj7.
C6 and Cmaj7 have jazzier flavors than your normal C chord, which is why they don’t “always” fit in with the mood of a particular song. But quite “often” they will. When? Well, that’s a matter of both personal taste and experimentation.
So take some time and experiment with tonic substitutions and next time out we’ll discuss the subdominant.
Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News – July 1, 2005 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.