Chord progression - Rearrangement, Transposition and Enhancement
I like the harmonic mood style mentioned above, but there are not infinite possibilieties for chord progressions at it. One possible chord progression there is my alltime favourite. The problem is, i cant make 10 tracks with the same progression, it would be boring. But i made 3 tracks with it, and they all sound different. I think that many people would not recognize immediately, that that are more or less the same chords. The songs are galactic birds, stratosphere and heaven. There are some possibilities in music theory to make the same used chords sound different.
First of all, you should use different scale keys for the tracks. And then there is rearrangement, transposition and enhancement.
I will use the scale key E. Its easy, because with E, you only have to use white keys for the melodies, using the minor pentatonic scale. All the added melodies will match together, even when you create them independently.
I already talked about pentatonic above, but i always mean minor pentatonic. As you can see in the resource of #7, there is also a major pentatonic scale existing.
The melody notes of the minor pentatonic scale are: E - G - A - B - D (also G flat matches good here)
Here my favourite chord progression in a 4 bar loop, its very simple and nothing special in its basic form :
2 bars E minor: E - G - B
1 bar C major: C - E - G
1 bar D major: D - G flat - A
Rearrangement:
You can rearrange the chord progression to get a different chord progression, still containig the same chords. I dont know statistically the exact number, but there are many possibilities to rearrange 3 chords. For example rearrange them backwards. Or just mix them in any way. Then also rearrange the mixed progression backwards, and so on. Also give some chords more bars than others. Or make an 8 bar loop instead of a 4 bar loop.
Here an example:
1 bar: C major
1 bar: E minor
2 bars: D Major
Transposition:
With transposition, i dont mean to transpose the whole chord. I mean to transpose single notes of a chord, one octave up or down. In Ableton, just select the note and press shift and arrow up or down for that. This is a poweful tool, in my opinion. There are also many possibilities, here is one of them. Its the same progression as in the basic example above:
2 bars: E minor
1 bar: C major transposed E - G - C
1 bar: D major rearranged G flat - A - D
A chord with 3 notes has 2 possibilities to be transposed in that way. A chord with 4 notes has 3 possibilities to be transposed, and so on. So when you have, as in the basic example, 3 chords containing 3 notes each, then there are also many posibilities to get a new progression. And when you combine that with rearrangement, then you get really a lot of possibilities.
Enhancement:
With enhancement, i mean to add one or several different chords to the progression or to replace a chord with a different chord. There are really many possibilities for the basic example above. For that, you can use following chords for example:
G major, B minor, B major, A minor, A major (the A major chord gives a more happy mood here)
Here a very simple example:
1 bar: E minor
1 bar: C major
1 bar: A minor
1 bar: D major
So, when you make a track with a very nice chord progression and want to make another track with the same mood, just mix all these tools together and you will have infinite possibilities. And always remember to add much huge reverb and delay to the melodies