>Step by step

Building sad chord progressions

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You’d think that for a sad chord progression, the majority of the chords would be minor, right? Well, not necessarily. With the right combination of chord shapes, major chords can play a surprisingly large part in creating some seriously sad stuff. Let’s illustrate this by starting with undeniably the happiest chord of all: C major (C, E, G). 2

We can have C major as our first chord and then add in one or two of the minor diatonic chords from the key of C major. Here’s the full set of diatonic triads, all laid out in order, built by stacking up alternate notes from the C major scale. It’s quite interesting to note that, out of the seven chords in the diatonic set, three are minor chords. 3

So let’s tag one of these diatonic minor chords onto our major tonic chord to try and create a sad vibe. Let’s try C major to A minor. This is a conventional, diatonic move that occurs in millions of songs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, but it’s not particularly sad – we can get a lot more heart-wrenching than this. 4

Things often sound sadder if the listener is expecting ‘happy’. So try starting your progression with a major chord and then – wham! – hit them with a non-diatonic minor chord – one that’s not in the key, that they won’t have been expecting. For an idea of what this sounds like, try a major tonic chord – C major, for example – to the minor iv chord, Fm. 5

Shifting between major/minor works in reverse too. Take the first chords of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, one of the most plaintive and haunting pieces

Ebm7 ever written. We start on an chord

Bb with a high melody note, which suspends over a shift to an underlying F major chord, before dropping a semitone to A: the major third of the F chord. 6

There are two particular types of nondiatonic chord that make great tearjerkers, the first of which is the halfm7b5) diminished, or minor-seven-flat-five ( chord. This is made by taking a regular minor seventh chord – I’m using a D minor 7 shape here (D, F, A, C) – and flattening

Ab, the fifth by a semitone, making D, F,

Dm7b5.

C–

m7b5 7

The chord has a particular type of yearning, heart-wrenching quality. A quick way to shape one is to play the root note of a minor triad, find its minor third and then build a minor triad off whatever note that third is. So to get a Dm7b5,

play the root note of D, find the third of D minor – F – and play an F minor

Dm7b5. triad over the D root. Result –

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The is a great heartbreaker chord to add to a progression if that’s the emotion you’re trying to convey. Let’s try it in a major key, rooted off the minor ii chord. In the case of the key of C major,

Dm7b5 that makes it a chord. Moving from

Dm7b5

C major to is a similar move to our C > Fm change from step 4, but with a D in the bass under the Fm.

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Now let’s focus on our second non# diatonic chord shape – the IVdim chord. This is an easy one to put together. Find the fourth degree of the major scale of the key we’re in and frame the diatonic IV major chord that uses it as its root. So in the key of C major, that would be an F major chord (F, A, C).

# 10

To make our IVdim chord, all we have to do is raise up the root note by a semitone, keeping the rest of the chord shape – the A and C notes – intact. This

F# F# gives us dim ( , A, C). Paired with our tonic C major chord, this brings a really wistful, longing character to our progression, which now takes the form C >

# Dm7b5

F dim > > C.

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Here’s a minor key diatonic progression that, in Roman numeral form, is spelled i > VI > III > VII. In the key of

Bb D minor, that translates to Dm9 > > F > C. Even though three out of these four are major chords, it has a faintly tragic, still contemporary vibe. Slipping in a dominant

C#

A7/ passing chord back to the Dm helps make things even more miserable.

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Our final progression this month is also in the key of Dm, and features a chromatic, descending bassline that never fails to conjure up a melancholy feeling.

Dbaug Bm7b5

We’ve got Dm > > F/C > > Gm/ Bb Abdim7

> Dm / A > > A7. The chords are enhanced by a wistful superimposed bell melody (shown in red). Anyone got a tissue, (sniff)?