Andalusian Cadence: Composition Techniques in 5 Styles

[00:00:00][Music] for the musician who wanted to write songs but didn't think they could do it for the child who dreams to be a composer but doesn't know where to begin for the student who created their very first chord progression but it just sounds really bad i am that musician i am that child i am that student i am the andalusian cadence a real common mistake that i see beginning composers make is that they avoid using common chord progressions they're afraid of sounding unoriginal or generic but a common chord progression is like a very old recipe if you want to become a good cook you should probably follow the recipe first and then as you improve your cooking skills you can add your own little spin on things you can improve that recipe today i'm going to be cooking with a very old-fashioned recipe known as the andalusian cadence and i'm going to be cooking it up five different ways now this chord progression itself has a very rich history and there's a lot to talk about it and i'm not going to discuss those things in this video this video is going to be a demonstration of how to make music different kinds of music with something like a stock chord progression but i do want you to know more about this chord progression so i'm going to direct you to two excellent resources regarding the same topic the first is a video by composer david bruce it's titled the mystery at the heart of flamenco it's a wonderful exploration into the theory and origins of these chords and of course i have to send you to 12 tones very thorough explanation of the exact same set of chords both of those links are in the description and i do suggest you watch them because we're not going to be discussing much music theory in this video but this is signal's music studio so i do have to talk a little music theory the andalusian cadence is a sequence of these four chords and i do explain where these four chords come from in my video on writing chords in minor keys but here's the really easy way to look at it start on any minor chord like e minor and then jump back a whole step and play a major chord now jump back another whole step and play a major chord now jump back a half step and play a major chord so i started on e minor i went a whole step back to d i went a whole step back to c and a half step back to b so i only have one minor chord and then all major chords and you can already hear the spice the flare the flavor of those four chords these first three chords all come from the e minor scale if i look at the notes in each of these chords i'll see oh yeah those all come from the e minor scale but this last chord b major well that has a note that's not allowed in the e minor scale specifically you see it's playing the note d sharp so i can play the e minor scale over these three chords and it'll sound just fine take a listen here's the e minor scale over an e minor chord and over a d major chord and over a c major chord but now listen over the b major chord hopefully here that doesn't sound too good because right now i'm playing the e minor scale which contains a d natural note and we just saw that the b chord contains a d sharp [Music] so i don't want to be playing lots of d naturals over this chord instead what i want to be playing is a lot of d sharps so if i keep all of the notes of e minor the same but i take every d and sharp it i'm left with this scale which is e harmonic minor and e harmonic minor is the scale that i will be using over just that chord so that's about the simplest way i can describe this chord progression but like i said i don't want to do too much theory in this video i'd like to talk more about songwriting composition and what we can do with these chords the first way i'd like to compose with this chord progression well you already heard it it was that thing we heard in the intro that was basically just an andalusian cadence i just made a few slight adjustments to it and i actually did an entire 20 minute video on exactly how i composed that starting from the very very basics and working my way all the way up to that composition but that's posted just for my patreon supporters you can sign up there for any dollar amount to have access to that video i've also made this one page guide detailing the important aspects of this chord progression and have posted it there at my patreon but i personally think what this chord progression is born for and born from is a more latin style groove we'll be in the key of d minor this time which means my chord progression will go from d minor to c major to b flat major to a major now i could keep these chords just like they are but i'd like to make a few improvements to them specifically what i'd like to do is use some suspended chords where i can for example here on d minor i can get away with playing d sus4 and it doesn't leave my key of d minor here's c major i'm allowed to play c sus4 here b-flat i'm allowed to add in the sharp 11 and then for a i'm just going to play an a7 instead so my entire chord progression as i record it on a spanish classical guitar sounds like this from there what i did is added in some percussion loops next i programmed in a baseline using just the roots and fifths of each one of these chords [Music] lastly i programmed in a reggaeton style drum beat and that gave me this wonderfully spicy little latin jam which was just begging for some leaves on top [Music] do [Music] now let's try out something completely different by using the same chord progression but to do more of a film score cinematic movie trailer kind of song let's move over to everybody's favorite key a minor and we'll have these four chords of a minor g major f major and e major but we'll just make it an e seven very common to make that five chord a seventh chord instead now instead of playing these entire chords let's just play one note from each chord all right so for my a minor chord i'll just play a for g major i'll just play the b for f major i'll play c and for e7 i'll just play the d so i've picked one note of each chord it gives me the simple ascending pattern of a b c d now let's play that with whole notes on a brass section [Music] now let's introduce some strings but the strings will display the bass note of each chord so the strings will just be moving down the notes a g f and e so they'll be moving down while the horns move up and even though we don't have any full chords here we're only hearing two notes at a time the chord progression's so strong that you're still going to hear the implied chord progression you're still going to hear the full and the lucian cadence even though we're only playing dyads here two note chords [Music] now i do like the way this sounds but it's certainly missing any sort of rhythmic activity so i decided to add in some percussion layers some tribal style cinematic drums and also some marching snare [Music] and at the same time that comes in we have some staccato cellos playing the exact same notes that our string line is playing just down the base notes of the andalusian cadence [Music] and then i added one more staccato string part much higher and once again it only plays one note of each chord and this specific line gave me a very zelda-like feel [Music] now i really like the way this sounds but it's missing something in the spotlight there's no focal point there's no centerpiece there's no big melody now i really didn't know what to do here so i decided to use my phone a friend and call in one of the heavyweights david bruce himself not only did he put together an epic melody for all of us here he's also making a video describing how he went through the entire process and you're going to be able to find that entire video on his channel which i'm linking right here so here's just a little example of how he decided to approach this challenge of writing a melody for this simple chord progression hi jake really great to be here and thanks for having me so if you're trying to build a melody on top of an existing chord pattern like this you've really already got a lot of the hard work of composing out of the way you know this harmonic structure is there and you just have to find ways to fit a melody line over the top of it so the obvious starting place is to take the chords themselves and use notes from there perhaps moving between them from one chord to the next maybe adding some scale figures it's also important i think to try and not make it too obvious so if you just have a sequence that uses the same shape on each chord just moving downwards it might get a bit boring so try and find ways to sort of shake things up a bit maybe do a pattern that goes over two different chords or that runs into the next one slightly i had a lot of fun doing this little solo and i hope you enjoy [Music] so [Music] so once again thank you so much to david bruce for making an appearance here in this video i absolutely love what he wrote here for us if you did appreciate that please go check out his channel and subscribe it is literally one of my favorite resources on the entire internet i love his productions and his videos and i learn so much from each one of his videos so let's move on another drastic change of directions into the world of metal specifically what i'm aiming here for is like video game metal i want you to think like you're playing doom old school pc game dos based doom or mega man one of those kind of games i actually wanted to write something that would translate well over to the synth chips that would be used for an nes or a similar style system so to begin we won't even change keys here we'll just still use the key of a minor which is a minor g major f and e but for metal we don't need entire chords we can get by with just power chords you should know that because you watched my video on power chords and you understand how versatile they actually are so instead of a minor i'm just going to play an a power chord i'll play a g power chord an f power chord and an e and you can hear just those power chords on their own give you the feel of the andalucian cadence even though we don't have the full chords there and instead of just playing these four chords on a loop like we've done this entire video let's just change our harmonic rhythm that's changing when we change chords for example let's stay on our a power chord for two measures and then we do our g power chord just for one measure our f power chord for one measure our e power chord for two measures back to our a power chord and then back to our e power so i know that we've broken the rules here a little bit we have our andalusian cadence and then i decided to just go back from a to e because it sounds good a to e will always sound good so i can just kind of tack that on the end of my andalusian cadence and i'm still going to be cooking with the same recipe i've just made a few little modifications to it so i'll take these power cords and instead of just you know hitting them once i'm actually just going to palm mute them and i'm also going to syncopate the chord changes i'll be switching these chords early and of course you know all about syncopation because you signed up and took my name your own price rhythm course which really explains everything you could possibly want to know about rhythm so we've just syncopated these chord changes and i've also added in a few little gallops here and there one two and three and four and one and two and three and four and two and three four and two and three pin and for this very last power chord this very last e what i decided to do is instead of playing a power chord let's do a scale run it's pretty common in metal to just play scales you don't play chords you don't play power chords you just play something in a scale or just play a bunch of notes so let's do that and the scale that i've picked is just the a harmonic minor scale because we're on that chord hopefully you remember that this is where the harmonic minor scale comes in so what i'll do is i'll just kind of play around with the harmonic minor scale the lick that i wrote goes like this and it ends on that leading tone of g sharp so for my last chord i'm not playing a chord i'm just doing just a little bit of riff so the whole riff altogether with some bass added in and with some drums sounds like this [Music] [Applause] [Music] now it's time to write a melody for that and here's the technique that i decided to employ is pedal point let's say we're just going up and down four notes of the a minor scale one two three four three two one now what if after every one of those notes i just decided to play some specific note like let's say after the notes every other note i decided to play this note this is a low e so i'm going to return to low e after everything i just played so watch here's one and then e and then two three four three two one one two three four three two one that's the same thing as one two three four three two one but it's more interesting because we have that pedal tone there we are using pedal point and we're constantly returning to this note e and e is a note that's in my a minor chord so that's why i've chosen that note as my pedal note so keeping this technique in mind just by going up and down the scale and pedaling on a chord tone i was able to come up with this melody on top [Music] now after that i decided to harmonize with it using the exact same rules that i taught in my last video on writing harmonies now in that example you might be able to hear there's just a little passage of harmonized fourths to help you know break up the monotony of just those pure harmonized thirds but let's take a listen to what this all sounds like when we put it all together [Music] oh [Music] um now there at the end during our bonus solo did you notice that the e minor chord made an appearance so remember we are in the key of a minor and the five chord in the key of a minor really is an e minor that's the natural diatonic v chord what we've been doing here the whole time is making it major because it has that inflammatory rebellious flavor to it right but there's nothing wrong with the minor v chord actually that's the one that we're supposed to be playing if we wanted to stay in the key so here i thought it would be nice to introduce a little bit of that soft e minor because we're so used to hearing e major it might be like a nice comfortable softer change and i really enjoy its appearance right there but it's kind of cool you know you can see right in the short period of time we've got an e major chord and an e minor chord two different qualities of chord off of e and they both sound fine in the key of a minor now let's wrap things up with something a little experimental what i'd like to do is create something weird something trancy something psychedelic something a little disorienting and i thought what would help here is to use a pedal tone on the bass instead of my bass note changing with each chord let's have the bass note stay the same so here's a minor with a on the bass here's g major but a is still on the bass here's f major and a is still on the bass right here how nice that sounds how slighty and kind of tethered right it kind of keeps you a little bit more in the zone because you don't have these big blocky changes but i did decide to finally introduce a base change over the e major chord i thought it would help to kind of pull us back to a so what i did is record that progression but i set my daw to be in 6-4 time instead of being in 4-4 i think six is fun because it provides a lot of different opportunities here for us [Music] then i decided to write a little synth line that doesn't make a lot of rhythmic sense all i know is that it takes up two measures of six and it's weird it doesn't really fit in on the beats and that's what i wanted i didn't do much composing here it was more of a kind of clicking around and finding something that i kind of liked now after that i tried programming in some drums but i really didn't like the way they sounded and fortunately for me beard stank is back so i sent this track to him and got some deep drum grooves on top [Music] after that it was a matter of adding a lot of synth layers so backing up these pedaled cords that we've created to kind of get a transier vibe [Music] now to introduce this entire groove i thought it would be fun to use some vocal samples the sound of a human speaking so to find some source material for that i just went on youtube and searched for the psychedelic patron saint himself terence mckenna i immediately found an interesting sounding clip of him speaking and the mushroom set i decided to just chop that up put some effects on it and throw it on in the beginning of this song so if we put it all together here is what it sounds like and the mushroom said for one human being to expect to obtain enlightenment from another is like a green sand on the beach expecting to attain enlightenment from another grain of sand on the beach don't you get it you're all grains of sand [Music] so do you get the point it's not about the chord progression you wrote it's about what you do with the chord progression you wrote i hate to break it to you but you're probably not going to write a new chord progression like they've all been done before there's only 12 notes you know what i mean so it's pretty hard to come across something new when you're only talking about a four chord loop but you can still make that four chord loop completely original and you can do anything you want with it you know within reason but you're gonna have to be creative you're gonna have to you know try out different things you're gonna have to leave your comfort zone or maybe consult different uh musical techniques from different regions or from different types of music theories it's just you know if all you know how to do is play an a minor chord and a g and an f and an e like that on your guitar and if all you know is one strumming pattern then yeah then then you're going to be writing generic music because your box of compositional skills is very small but once you have a chord progression if you know lots of rhythm patterns if you know lots of inversions if you know lots of voicings if you know lots of arpeggio patterns all these different little music theory tricks allow you to take a very simple chord progression and expand it into something that i would consider musical and i hope you consider every one of these examples as musical they might not be the best compositions you've ever heard but they are still compositions that i'm proud to have written and if you had shown me these you know 15 years ago and said hey you know this is something you wrote i wouldn't believe you these are compositions that i would have believed are beyond me and they're very simple they all exist within this four chord box so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you learned something from it and i hope you were inspired by it to just not throw away some old progression you were sitting on to maybe just play with it and see what happens so if you like this video and you'd like to support this channel please consider signing up for my music theory and songwriting course it's a professional course that walks you through everything you need to know about modern day music theory i also have a name your own price rhythm course as i did mention that's also available on my site but you could also sign up to my patreon i've left a link in the description for that as well but if you don't want to do any of those things that's fine just leave a like and a comment that's good enough for me thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you