Music Theory Basics for Music Production

For the next eight weeks, I will be writing a series of blog posts covering ‘how music works, music production, and the music industry’ for Learning Ledger. This week, I’ll be illustrating a brief roadmap of what I hope to cover and go through the basics of music theory for music production.

Preliminaries

I started playing the piano and violin in primary school. Although I have been practicing less over the past few years, I have maintained a decent level of consistency overall. Those of you who read my previous posts would notice that I’m quite the music enthusiast. But recently I’ve realized how little of the ‘theory’ I know, both the music theory and neuroscience/anthropology perspectives. I learned a bit of music theory when I first started playing the piano, but most of the knowledge faded away, and I only retain the ‘practical’ knowledge now - whatever is needed to play the piece, and nothing beyond. This seems to be the case for many, so I decided to start from the semi-basics before delving into music production. As to ‘why music production’, it seems super fun! The ties music production tools have to algorithms and sound engineering are worth exploring as well.

Basic roadmap for the first half of the series¹

Week 1: Music theory basics for music production

Week 2: How music production technology works (e.g. Autotune and FFT²)

Week 3: Start a project on music production - I’ll get a MacBook by then and Logic Pro free for 90 days (and if not I’ll get a different DAW, digital audio workstation).

Week 4: Continue with the music production project, but I’m not sure whether my progress would be worth a full blog post; from this point on I’ll read more about how music works.

Music theory basics for music production

Before I lose you in the process of explaining all the chords and chord progressions, it’s important to note that most 21st century pop music follow a very specific pattern: I-V-vi-IV. In C major, that would be C-G-Am-F. A perfect example is this mashup video with six country songs on YouTube: the transition from one song to the next is indiscernible, if not for the different vocals and audio quality. Essentially, all the songs in the mashup follow the exact same chord progression, which says a lot about modern pop (including country) music. Other megahits that follow this chord progression: Despacito (Luis Fonsi), Stronger (Kelly Clarkson), Bad Blood (Taylor Swift), We Are Never Getting Back Together (Taylor Swift). All of these songs use the I-V-vi-IV progression — which in C major translates to C-G-Am-F — because this pattern creates a balance of tension and resolution that’s very satisfying to our ears.

All my examples in the next few sections will have C as the root note and move up from there. For better visualization, I’ll attach a stock photo of labeled piano keys.

Keys and Scales

A key serves as the basis of every song. It defines the central note (tonic) and the scale (major or minor). One thing to note is that each key has a unique number of sharps and flats.

A scale is “any consecutive series of notes that form a progression between one note and its octave”. In short, a scale defines the set of notes you’re using in a key. The major and minor scales are the most frequently used scales in music. The major scale is composed of tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone. Semitones are adjacent keys in the keyboard (including the black keys). Starting from C, that would be: C - C# - D - D# - E - F - F# - G - G# - A - A# - B - C. If you move two keys to the right, that’s a tone. You don’t have to memorize the semitone-tone ordering of the major scale! It’s just all the white keys in C major - the C major scale is C-D-E-F-G-A-B. The natural minor scale is the same as the major scale, but with the third, sixth, and seventh notes lowered. The A minor scale is easy to remember; A-B-C-D-E-F-G. There are other minor scales as well; the harmonic minor, with the seventh note raised back up, and the melodic minor, with the sixth and seventh raised up.

Chords

So, chords! Whenever you stack up notes and play them all together, it’s called a chord. If you stack three notes together, it’s called a triad. The basic triads are major chords, minor chords, diminished chords, and augmented chords.

To play a major chord, start from the root note. Move up 4 semitones — this gives you the major third (i.e. the second note of the chord). Then, starting from that note, move up another 3 semitones to find the perfect fifth (the third note of the chord). For clarification, if you move 4 semitones to the right, that interval is called a major third; the interval of 3 semitones is called a minor third. In other words, a major chord can be summarized as major third + minor third. If you start at C, the three notes you get will be C-E-G. And that’s a C major! Minor chords are minor third + major third, so C minor would be C-E♭-G. An easy way to remember is to move the second note down by one semitone (E to E♭). In diminished triads, you stack two minor third intervals. In other words, it’s a minor triad with a diminished fifth. The C diminished chord (Cdim) would be C-E♭-G♭. Augmented triads work the same way, but with two major third intervals. The C augmented chord (Caug) would be C-E-G#.

If you stack another note on top of the existing triad, you can play a seventh chord. Which seventh chord you get depends on whether you add a major third or minor third to the existing triad. You get a dominant seventh chord by layering a minor third to a major chord. The dominant seventh chords are quite common in the blues progression. If you add a B♭ (3 semitones away from G) to C major, you get C7 (C dominant 7th chord). In the same way, layering a major third produces a major seventh chord - Cmaj7 would be C-E-G-B. Stacking a minor third on a minor chord results in the minor seventh chord, and a major third in the minor major seventh chord.

Chord progression

The chord progression is just a succession of chords. The chords C-G-Am-F (in this section, the letters don’t refer to each note of a chord; they note the root node of each chord) in C major would be the same as the chord progression D-A-Bm-G in D major. This makes perfect sense if you assign the Roman number I to the tonic key (e.g. C in C major, D in D major), then increment as you move up the scale. A notation trick is to capitalize the Roman numerals for major chords, and decapitalize for minor chords. That way, C-G-Am-F in C major becomes I-V-vi-IV, which is the exact same as D-A-Bm-G in D major! Even when the keys are different, the songs would sound very similar if they follow the identical chord progression. If you’ve ever been to karaoke with a basic karaoke machine, you may have noticed that the machine lets you adjust the keys; the song sounds essentially the same even if you lower the keys, just easier to sing! It also explains why relative pitch is such a valuable skill to have for musicians.

Not all songs follow a strict chord progression. Some composers make use of modal mixture, also known as modal interchange, by using chords from a parallel mode (e.g. C major and C minor are parallel modes). It generates a degree of intrigue, instead of perfect harmony. Some songs have a 50:50 ratio between the two parallel modes, making it harder to discern which key the song is in. Blues songs do this a lot!

Note: If you need more visualization or have zero knowledge in music theory, this may serve as a good accompaniment. This video is also a good intro to music theory that I followed along the way. I would love any feedback or recommendations as I continue the series of posts! Do let me know whether it’s easy/hard to follow along, and if I need to cover more/less music theory.

1. subject to change, this is just a general guide for my future self

2. Fast Fourier Transform