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5. Instant chord construction: major, minor and diminished triads

1 Let’s build the most basic chords, triads, and use them in a chord progression. Load Dune CM on a MIDI instrument track in your DAW, and select the 022: Earth Views RL preset. Load Beat.wav on an audio track and set tempo to 100bpm. We’ll use our MIDI Construction Kit once again to guide us, this time showing you how it’s done in Logic Pro X.

2 On the Dune CM track, create a fourbar MIDI clip starting bar 10, loop it, then import C > Scales > C Major - All notes.mid, starting bar 14. Select both clips and double-click them to open the Piano Roll editor. You can now use the stack of notes as a visual guide, or click the collapse mode icon ( just right of the View dropdown) to restrict programming to only the notes in the scale.

3 To create triads, we use a simple 1-3-5 pattern. Draw in the first note of the scale on C3, then miss out the D, draw in the E, skip over the F, and draw in G. This gives us C major: C-E-G. Carry on up the scale and create the rest of the triads using this 1-3-5 pattern, and we get the other six C major triads: D major ( D-F-A), E minor ( E-G-B), F major ( F-A-C), G major ( G-B-D), A minor ( A-C-E) and B diminished ( B-D-G).

4 Let’s make an eight-bar chord sequence – create a new MIDI clip from bars 1-9, and loop it. For bars 1-3, program chords C, Em then F. We want a ‘turnaround’ in bar 4 to bring us back to chord 1, C, and a classic method is to use the 5th chord of the scale right before it – going from chord 5 to 1 is a very strong progression, and it’s technically called a perfect cadence. So program chords Am and G during this bar.

5 We’ve used all the triads except chord 2, Dm, and that pesky B diminished triad, chord 7, so let’s try and work those in during bars 5-8. Program bars of C, Em, then Dm, then half-bars of G and Bdim to fill the final bar. The B in Bdim is called the leading note, and it has a strong ‘pull’ to resolve to the next semitone up, C, which is why it makes a good transition back to chord 1.

6 Let’s make our sequence less predictable. Going from chord 5 to chord 1 sounds super-strong – so strong, in fact, that if we don’t go to chord 1, it will sound unexpected. Change bar 5’s C chord to Dm, and bar 6’s Em to G, so we get a ‘back and forth’ between chords 2 and 5, leading up to our 5-7-1 turnaround. Finally, load CM Arp.fxp patch in Dune CM for an arpeggiated take on our tune.