Identifying standard pop chord progressions

This week in aural skills, we are practicing identifying pop schemas, that is, chord sequences and loops that occur commonly in various kinds of Anglo-American top 40, rock, R&B and related styles. We previously covered the permutations of I, IV and V and the plagal cadence. Now we’re getting into progressions that bring in the rest of the diatonic family, that is, the chords you can make using the notes in the major and natural minor scales.

Singer-Songwriter/Axis progression

A huge percentage of current mainstream pop and rock songs are built on the four-legged stool of the I, IV, V and vi chords. In C, those are C, F, G, and Am. You can find these chords in any order, but there’s a particularly inescapable sequence that my NYU colleagues call the singer-songwriter progression: I, V, vi, IV, which in C is C, G, Am, F.

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Things I wrote in 2023

This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.

The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.

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Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing

Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up to the much more guitarist-friendly key of E minor. 

Yusuf Roahman plays shaker and Sheila Wilkerson plays bongos and güiro, and Stevie plays everything else: piano, (synth) bass and drums. I assume that Stevie put down the piano first and then they overdubbed everything on top?

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As The World Falls Down

As kids, my siblings and I watched Labyrinth about eight billion times. It has been super gratifying that my own children love the movie too. Together with their separate David Bowie fandom, that has put “As The World Falls Down” into heavy rotation lately.

When I was a kid, I didn’t especially love this song, I thought it was boring and weird. I started connecting to it in adulthood. It seems like a straightforwardly cheesy pop ballad, so why is it so magical? There’s more musical substance here than you might think.

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For No One

The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.”

Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. (He also played in the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”) John and George were not involved.

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The Song Factory course

I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose only goal is to be a songwriting class. It’s called The Song Factory. I didn’t choose the name, but I like it.

The class is meant to both be a songwriting workshop and a survey of American popular song. My plan is to do six units. For each unit, the class will do some listening, reading and discussion, and then they will write an original song. I am requiring that these songs have lyrics, and the students must sing/rap them in class. I am not particular about how they accompany their vocals. They can play their instruments, record their own backing tracks, or use existing loops, instrumentals, type beats or karaoke tracks. We will talk about composition, arrangement and production a bit, but we will mainly be concerned with the sung/rapped aspect of songwriting.

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I Want To Hold Your Hand

My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on top of some highly ingenious music.

The funniest day of music theory class in grad school was when the professor played us the intro to this song as an example of bad voice leading. Everybody in the room lit up with recognition: “Oh yeah, we love that riff!” If the professor was trying to illustrate the universal validity of eighteenth century voice leading conventions, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was a terrible choice. If those conventions are supposed to be universal, then why does it sound so good when the Beatles violate them? But if the conventions are limited to a particular historical and stylistic context, then why does every music major have to learn them?

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