Saturday, August 11, 2012

Tones

I had worked on this file with a friend on mine years ago and I just found it by chance. I thought I'd share it.

In short: this shows you all the chords contained in one basic tone (top to bottom). The tones follow the circle of fifths from left to right for "#" and from right to left for "b".

Say you're in C. Your standard 1-4-5 (or I-IV-V) is C-F-G7 (or G). To spice things up, you can thrown in any of the chords in that column and it will sound "coherent". What you can also do is jump from one column to the next. Say you're in C again, so you have your C-F-G7. Take the F and go to the F column. The IV is Bb. Try to incorporate that into your progression: instead of C-F-G7 ad lib, try C-F-G7(-C) followed by C-F-Bb(-C). Tasty :-) To make it even tastier, try adding 9th and 11th for jazzy funky sounding chords.

Minor chords are more difficult but the same principles apply - use the spreadsheet :-)

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