Songwriting chord progressions: using loops

Chord progressions don’t have to be complicated. In fact, the best ones are often very simple. Songwriters, however, often tie themselves up in knots trying to write intricate, complex sequences. Intricate and complex can work very well indeed, but complexity isn’t a virtue in itself.

Couple of songs for you to listen to before we carry on (Youtube links): Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and The Postal Service’s Such Great Heights (which I was writing about not so long ago.)

Although they sound very different from one another, those two songs have something important in common: they are both based on looped chord sequences. Each song has a simple progression of four chords which is looped under every verse and chorus and only varied slightly in a couple of bridging sections.

Let’s take a look at the sequences. Viva la Vida’s is short, but has some interesting chords:

Dbmaj7 | Eb7 sus 4 | Ab9 | Fm

…especially because the song is actually in the key of Ab major, meaning the first chord is the subdominant. Starting your chord progressions on a chord other than the tonic chord of the key is a great way adding a sense of tension and drive to your songs, but it’s also a good way of getting lost and winding up with an ambiguous-sounding key if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Another interesting feature of Coldplay’s choice of progression here is that the Dmaj7 and Ab9 chords are only completed by the melody line: the accompaniment is a straight Db major chord, spanning the octave and with it’s major third (an F) removed. The first sung line of each verse starts on a C, making the complete chord a major seventh. If that’s unclear, watch the video below for a visual explanation (yes, I know the lyrics and the orchestration are horrendously pompous, but try to block them out.)

Such Great Heights is much simpler - and in my opinion, ten times as good a song as Viva la Vida, though that’s more to do with the lyrics than the melody and chords. Here’s the progression:

F | Am7 | Dm7 | C7

One general point that’s worth drawing out here is the presence of that Am7 as the second chord in the progression. A C or C7 would work equally well harmonically, but as the next chord isn’t the tonic (F), such a strong resolving chord isn’t necessary, and even sounds a bit trite. Am7 is very similar to C (it contains all the notes of the C major triad, plus a A - effectively it’s the same chord as C6), but it gives the song a richer, mellower sound at that point.

Again, if all that is as clear as mud, watch the vid below.

The main takeaway from this post is that you don’t need complex chord progressions with different verse and chorus sequences, bridges, middle eights and all the rest. You can write a great song with just a loop of a few chords. Other songs that do it include James’ Sit Down (which just goes E - A - B7 all the way through) and REM’s brilliant and beautiful Nightswimming (which uses a longer, more complex sequence, but is based on loops nonetheless).

Here’s the vid explaining those chords:

(In the vid, I talk about the point in Viva la Vida where ‘the Db isn’t a ninth’. Clearly what I meant was ‘a major seventh’. I like to introduce these little deliberate mistakes to keep you on your toes.)