> Step by step

1. Exploring basic three-note chords and building a progression with them

1 Let’s look at chords. For now, we’ll just use simple three-note major and minor chords. We won’t go too deep yet – we’ll just show you what these chords are and how to make them – but our later walkthroughs will help clarify how to choose chords in the right context. Load up our sample project, shown on the previous page. 2 The Chords Keys.mid track is triggering Phonec CM. Right now, every chord is two C notes, spaced an octave apart – pretty boring! A chord is played by playing two or more notes at the same time. For the first eight C chords in the MIDI part, delete the top note so we can build something new. 3 There’s a world of possible note combinations, but here we’ll focus on the most common by creating specific three-note chords – aka ‘triads’. We’ll start with a C major chord. Take the C note and duplicate it four steps up to the note E. For the third note, duplicate that E, and move it up by three steps to G. Our C major chord contains the notes C-E-G. 4 Next we’ll duplicate this chord, moving all three notes to make the chord F-A-C. This chord is F major. Although we have different notes, the pattern between them remains the same – from the first note, F, we go four steps up to find our second note, A, and then three steps up to find our third note, in this case C. 5 If we continue to move this chord to other notes, we’ll still get a major chord, because of the pattern between the notes. Move the chord notes to make it a G major ( G-B-D). Now we’ll make a minor chord as the third chord, namely C minor:

D#- C- G. Compare it to the C major at the start – the only real difference is the middle note. 6 Again, what makes this chord minor is the pattern between the notes (up three, up four). We move it down to make it an A minor ( A-C-E), then program our last chord as an F major ( F-A-C). We then duplicate this chord progression for the entire track on this instrument. Check out the video to see and hear it all in action, and grab our new MIDI chords track in the Tutorial Files folder.