How To Write A CHORD PROGRESSION For Your RIFF
How do you write a chord progression for your riff?
While lots of guitar riffs can work perfectly fine on their own, with no need for a chord progression played alongside it, many others will sound much better with an accompanying chord progression.
The issue here is that many guitar players do not know how to do this.
(That's probably due to the fact that most guitarists think that music theory is "just cramping their style" or making them "less creative"... If you are reading this article, though, I think this is not your case, right?)
It’s one thing to come up with a riff, but coming up with chords to play underneath it is a completely separate skill.
Luckily, it’s not the most difficult skill in the world to learn. In fact it’s quite simple, if you know the notes on your fretboard!
(And if you don't know the notes on your fretboard, reply to this email immediately so I can help you)
To see precisely how to go from a riff to a chord progression, you want to watch the video below - we'll do it step-by-step together.
Want to know more about chords, writing progressions, and harmony as a whole? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course if you want to massively improve your knowledge of chords and harmony on the guitar!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! Let's say you are writing a rock riff and you want to find some chords that go with it so that you can play the riff and the chords at the same time and support your riff and actually make your riff shine. And as you're gonna see, the chords can make or break the riff because they colour the emotion and the perception of the riff. So how do you pick the right chord?
How do you pick the right chords that go with your riff? Well, a student asked me that and then we were going through the whole process together, okay, from the riff to the chord and how to change the chord while the riff stays the same to give new life to the riff. So let me show you the whole process. Let's go and see it.
Imagine you have a melody in your head or something you came up with. How would you come up with like cool, interesting chord progressions to get from that? Or if you have a cool chord progression, how do you get a good melody out of it? Very good. So either way can work and it depends how you write. The basic rule is this. Now it's a rule, but there are many exceptions, but the basic idea is this.
If you have a melody and you want to find the chord progression, you want some chords that contain the note of the melody in that moment. There is more than one note. You want the chord to contain at least one note of the melody, right? If you start from the chord progression, you want to write a melody, the melody must contain some note of the chord, one or more, okay? So there must be a correspondence between the two. Otherwise it doesn't feel like that melody belongs to the chord progression and vice versa.
Now, are there exceptions to this? Yes, okay. But when you are ready for those exception, you will just hear it, okay? Meaning that it's like, no, I want this note. I know it's not in the chord, but I want this note, that's the right note. So when this happens, you do whatever you want, okay? And you just throw the rules to the wind. Makes sense, but before that, you try to do this. So do you have a melody or a chord progression in mind? Yeah.
So first of all, you guys can hear the chords under that, right? I hope, right? Good. So let's take just the first few notes and spell out all the notes slowly, please.
C major.
Something like that.
Something like that, no? Good. C, A flat, F, G. This sounds a lot like an F minor. Okay, now how do you know that? You learn on the chord by heart. You find the pattern, it's simple as that. I was improvising over a D minor drone. Uh-huh. That's where I came from it.
A D minor drone. Yeah. And you play an A flat over a D minor, it contains the A. Sure, why not? But, play exactly what you're playing. Does it work for you? It's not going to go off. Okay, play it again. That sounds more off, though. I mean, if I play a D. I see, though. Okay, so now you're... For me, this could be F minor, or C or C minor. Why? You're playing a C, A flat, F, and G. So I'm either thinking C, F, A flat, F minor, or I'm thinking C and G, which is C, and the F and A flat are flavour notes. Okay, so you try both and see what works. And the second thing you're playing is that different...
You're doing the same thing, but you're doing the same thing one step down in the scale. So if before I had F minor, I need to play E flat because it's the chord that is a step down in the scale.
If before I was playing C, now I need to play B flat because it's the chord I stepped down in the scale. So let's play it from the beginning.
So at the beginning I was just doing C, Bb, following exactly what you were saying, because you were saying C sounds better, F sounds a bit off. And so I'm thinking I have two possible harmonization for every chord. The first chord could be C minor or F minor. The second chord could be Bb major or Eb major. The one that sounds better to him, so I give him first the stuff he likes, C, Bb.
But the second time through I'm going C and then I'm going up to Eb, which is the alternative harmonization of the second chord. See what I mean? And then when he goes to the whole thing again, I'm doing F and then Eb. And then I'm coming back to Bb, C. Makes sense? So that's one possible way to think about all that. Yeah, it comes the first time you're using the root note basically that I'm starting each line on. Yes. And then you're going to the minor six that I'm using. Yes, exactly.
Now, you may like that, you may not like that, this may be in your ear, or it may not be in your ear, it's a possibility, okay, I'm not proposing this as, this is the solution to the problem, there is no such a thing, it's music, you can have more than one solution. Now, what happens if you like only the first harmonization and not the second one, so you don't want to play that E-flat and F?
That's where you start using, where you could do that, you can start using chord inversions. So, C major power, C minor power, chord root position, but then I can play C minor power, C minor, but with an E-flat at the base, so E-flat and C.
You may like one of those chords, two of those chords, all those chords, and then you can change it by feeling, okay? So what do they do? I'm thinking of the C minor chord, and the C minor chord is C, E, flat, G. On a power chord, I'm playing the I and the V, so C and G. That's what I'm doing at the beginning.
But the second time, I want to play something different. So I'm playing the chord in first inversion, which means I'm playing the third and I'm putting it at the bass. So the lowest note is E flat. Which is the third of C minor. And then the top note is C, which is the root of C minor. And those give me a major sixth as an interval, which doesn't sound as good with distortion as the fifth, but it still sounds pretty acceptable, right?
And then I'm doing exactly the same with B flat, D and D. And B flat, sorry, D, B flat. Makes sense, yeah. I could use also the second inversion. The second inversion has the G at the bass. So I can play G and C, second inversion of C minor, as G at the bass. So I can play either G and C or G and E flat. Now, those chords are a bit more, a bit crunchier, because it's not a fifth. They are major sixth or minor sixth, which is perfect, OK?
Because it gives you a bit more of that flavour of the distortion. So one, find the chord by simply seeing what notes you're playing in the riff, and seeing if you can spot some pattern, OK, if there are two notes, it could be that chord. Then don't play that chord on your root position, just the power chord, but change the bass using another note of the chord. Makes sense? Yeah. Does that help? Yes, it does. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Thank you.