HEARTBREAK CHORDS

Dave Clews starts crying…

Music is an incredibly powerful tap into the emotions. As an experiment, try watching the most emotional scene from any movie you can think of with the sound turned off. Without music, the emotional impact of the scene will be hugely reduced. So when it comes to conveying raw emotion, such as soaring joy or devastating heartbreak, there are various tools composers can use in a soundtrack to heighten all of these emotions in the viewer.

The same sort of thing can be put to good use in your songwriting. If you’re starting out to write a sad song, the lyrical content is only the half of it. You’re also going to want to use a musical backdrop that reinforces the despair of an intense breakup, a forlorn memory of a longlost love, or losing your keys down the back of the sofa. It’s OK, I know, it happens to all of us at some point; it’ll be OK, I promise.

Anyway, the point is, to make a sad song properly sad, you need a properly sad chord progression, so this month I’ve made it a point to seek out one or two of the saddest chords known to mankind which – when combined with the saddest of all keys (according to Spinal Tap that is), D minor – will make anyone want to shed an empathetic tear.

OK, so maybe that’s a bit extreme, but you get the idea: if you’re going for a certain mood in your track, you need to know how best to create it, so read on as I equip you with a few tearjerking tools.