SONGWRITING
Your monthly feast of writing chops c/o Clews
The term ‘chromatic mediants’ probably isn’t something you’ll have come across very often in your songwriting pursuits, but working these mysterious creatures into progressions can be a useful way to expand your palette of chords beyond the realms of your regular, day-to-day diatonic triads.
So what is a chromatic mediant anyway? In music theory, diatonic means ‘in the key’, while chromatic means ‘not in the key’. So if you have the scale of C major, which contains the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B, those notes are all diatonic to the key of C major. Something like a G# note, however, is not in the key of C major, so in this context G# is described as chromatic. The same thing goes for chords – when in the key of C major, F major, for example, is a diatonic chord as it belongs to the key, but Ab major, say, is a chromatic chord because it does not belong to the key of C major.
Meanwhile, the term ‘mediant’ refers to either the third or the sixth chord in a diatonic set. So a chromatic mediant is an altered mediant or submediant chord, related to the tonic chord by means of its root note being a major or minor third interval above or below that of the tonic. Film composers like chromatic mediants because of their strong emotional pull, but they work in songwriting too, especially as passing chords in the neo-soul or gospel genres.