Chords for every occasion

When it comes to music there are chords for every occasion. Understanding how chords are formed, and how they sound, is a crucial part of any music curriculum. Students can often tell major from minor, but how well do they know the other chords on offer.

In this Sound Advice for Soundtrap blog I will be looking at creating a chord for every occasions. Using the new chords feature within Soundtrap, students can quickly learn how chords are formed and how they sound. I will be looking at a lesson approach that will arm students with the knowledge to then create these chords in other keys.

Back to basics

Like any good lesson, let’s start with the main focus – what are they actually going to learn? The knowledge that we want to impart to our students how chords are formed, and how they sound. I won’t spend time here going through the starting points as I want to get to the Soundtrap part. But consider where this might fit in your curriculum. Students may have studied chord progressions and you want to add some extension work? It could be that you are working on compositions and want students to embrace more than just I, V, vi, IV.

Whatever the starting point, this lesson will help with understanding how different chords are formed.

What chords?

In this blog I am going to be looking at the following chords:

Major, Minor, Augmented, Diminished, Sus2 and Sus4

Hopefully you will be able to take this approach and then look at seventh chords and beyond. The key thing here is that students will start to see what makes these chords different. They should also start to think about how they might be used in their own composition work

Chords in Soundtrap

Open up Soundtrap and enter the studio. Add a piano to your piece and then select the chords option in the lower middle of the screen.

Ask students to now add 6 C Major chords to the piano part. They do this by simply clicking on the + sign next to the C In the chords window. For now they should keep the playing style as “none”.

Now that we have 6 C Major chords we are going to look at how to make them each a different chord by simply moving one note. It is important to link this back to tones and semitones, explaining the process as you go. The approach here will be much more powerful if they can link back to the theory behind why chords sound the way they sound.

Piano Roll Chords

The next stage is going to involved the piano roll and the MIDI blocks that make up the 6 C Major Chords. When you click on “Piano Roll” just to the right of “Chords” it will move to a new window as you can see below:

We can now start to edit each chord by simply moving one note. Depending on your class and approach, you may like to ask the students to experiment. By changing just one note, what happens to your chord. They do however need to always keep the C, because that way they will create lots of triads that all have C as the root.

Alternatively you can give them a clear task to make the following chords:
C Minor, C Diminished, C Augmented, Csus2 & Csus4.

You may or may not tell them how to do this, or you may offer some advice.

Creating these different chords will simply require them to drag a MIDI segment up or down in the piano roll window.

Counting spaces

As mentioned above, it is good to now link to tones and semitones so that students understand these triads more fully. Soundtrap can help us with this in a very visual way. As you can see in the piano roll images above, there shaded lines in-between each MIDI segment. Counting these lines will help with the basic understanding of intervals between the notes. Moving the middle MIDI segment down will therefore move that note closer to the root C. This creates a minor triad with a minor third between the C and Eflat. If they count the spaces above the note and include the next note, they will discover the number of semitones that occur between the notes.

Hopefully you can see how counting spaces might be helpful, but it will all depend on what has been covered in your curriculum. It might be that you need to cover this in the next lesson.

Now try in G

Now that they have created these triads in C Major, they could try it in G Major, the Dominant. In fact they could try it in any key signature they wish in order to fully understand. I say fully understand, this will be down to you to check. Are they seeing how changing the notes, gaps or intervals between the notes affects the chord? Do they then spot the different when they listen?

It might be useful to use the whiteboard to write out the notes of the chords, and also use stave notation to show the chords. The combination of as many visual aids as possible is sometimes referred to as Dual Coding. This approach often helps students to see the full picture, embedding the understanding and helping them make progress.

Labelling in Soundtrap

Now they have created these triads, it might be a good idea for them to label them. If they have been working on this independently without too much guidance, then you can quickly see if they have the correct chords. It is easy to label the chords using the “section” tab just above the piano line. Usually reserved for structural text, there is nothing wrong with using this to add chord names. You simply click on “section” and then go down to “custom name”.

Chords for every occasion

This approach is fairly quick and easy in Soundtrap thanks to the chords section that has recently been adding. The knowledge and understanding that goes alongside this is however a little more advanced. creating a chord for every occasion will not only help students with composition, but also aural skills. As they create these chords they are considering what makes them different. They are also listening back to them which will help develop their aural dictation skills.

And once they have this created in Soundtrap, they have a resource that they can refer back to when they are next looking to enhance their composition.