I intend to use this blog to share my knowledge of music theory along with my ever growing notebook full of song analysis' in order to create a framework within which the reader may begin to identify and appreciate the different harmonic patterns and tricks that colored the songwriting of the 1960's. I will be digging up some of the most common and cliche chord progressions while also hoping to discover some odd and forgotten 'harmonic dinos' from the era.
As a guitarist, I have long been fascinated by the many different ways that chords can be chained together to create a song. I admit that I used to be in the dark when it came to understanding how or why these sequences worked at all. The more songs that I learned how to play, the more it seemed that a majority of songs shared many of the same chords and patterns with each other. The music critic in me would often whine that certain musical artists clearly "ripped off' the chords to someone elses song and just camouflaged it into a new song of their own. I wondered how all of these musicians could get away with stealing these formulas from each other. I would later learn that there are certain progressions of chords that just work and that this is actually based on physics and the fact that we as musicians who grew up in the Western musical tradition only have a total of 12 tones to work with. While stealing certain elements of a song, such as a melody, motif or lyrical content are punishable by law, you can not legally copyright a chord progression. The use of identical chord sequences that appear from one song to another is not considered plagiarism (see the Doo-Wop craze and Blues, etc).
The art of creating chord progressions is a tradition that has been passed down throughout the generations. It is interesting to find that these progressions would briefly settle into distinctly recognizable harmonic patterns that would musically define a certain decade. Ever since the creation of the radio, there has been a high demand for commercially successful radio hits and therefor the composers became keen to which formulas would were popular at moment. This would lead to some rather predictable and boring songwriting until a wave of young composers began to dominate the airwaves in the 1960's forever changing the approach to creating popular songs.
There certainly seemed to be a revolution in songwriting in the 60's that showed composers of popular songs break from the traditional songwriting molds and draw influence from all styles and genres. This was in large part because of the success surrounding The Beatles, who in the mid-60's earned complete creative control of their music and began to explore new harmonic territory. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney clearly deserve a lot of the credit for pushing the boundaries of pop music, they did not act alone. Many adventurous songwriters, Harry Nilsson, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Paul Simon and Brian Wilson to name a few, followed suit and created adventurous and uninhibited pop songs which drew from many sources and contained a plethora of harmonic tricks.
Most of these young songwriters did not have the luxury of being classically trained in Western music theory, however they were all still able to put chords together in sequences that "worked".
How were they able to create these chord progressions?
How were they able to make chords lead to one another?
How did they know how to resolve chords?
How were they able to modulate or change key?
The answer for many of these composers is that they had learned music through listening and playing songs written by those before them. One example would be The Beatles, who got their start as a hard working cover band, learning numerous songs and therefor many chord progressions before further developing them into their own original songwriting.
While you will find that the act of listening and performing is still the most important part of learning music, having a basic understanding of how Western music functions is going to be invaluable. In this blog we will work to uncover some of the best songwriting tricks by analyzing several chord progressions and song structures from some of the most influential artist of the 1960's. Through this exercise we will discover the nature of music theory such as harmonizing scales, relative chords/keys, the functions of individual chords, finding chords within a key, borrowing chords from a neighboring key, as well as how to utilize secondary dominants, cadences and modulations.
I look forward to digging into these songs and finding some relics of my favorite musical era. I hope that following this blog will allow you to gain an understanding of chord progressions and that it may inspire you to further develop these ideas to create your own original compositions.
-Keith
