L4a gave you space. Now the harmony that fills it. Two notes make an interval. Three make a chord. Four chords make a progression. A progression makes a mood.
Repertoire: Temple of Time (Koji Kondo, Zelda: OoT, 1998) for the pad you heard in L4a. Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) for emotional chord progressions with simple means.
Parallel composition: Adding harmonic foundation under your ambient piece.
What you already know: Everything from L0-L4a, especially pads, reverb, and delay.
Everything so far is one note at a time. What happens when you play two?
C and G together. Comma inside brackets means “play at the same time”:
Now C and E-flat:
C and E. One note different from the last one:
Three pairs, three different moods. Which pair felt heaviest? Which felt unresolved?
Try [c3,f3], [c3,ab3], [c3,b3]. Which ones sound stable? Which sound tense?
The orange wave is C. The blue wave is whatever you clicked. The green wave is both added together.
Click C+G. The green composite repeats cleanly. Click C+Gb. The composite writhes. The simpler the frequency ratio between two notes, the more regular the composite wave. 3:2 (the fifth) repeats every 2 cycles of C and 3 cycles of G. 45:32 (the tritone) takes far longer to repeat, if it visually repeats at all.
Your ear tracks this. Regular composites register as stable. Irregular composites register as tension. Click through all 13 notes and watch the green line.
The keyboard shows isolated pairs. This editor puts them in motion. The melody stays the same. The bass note changes every cycle:
Six cycles, six bass notes, one melody. Each root changes the intervals you hear against those same four notes.
Three of those bass notes at once:
The chord is all the pairs at once. One root gave you a relationship. Three roots give you a context.
Hold C in the bass. Let another voice move over it:
The C holds still. The top voice moves: Eb, G, F, Eb. Each melodic note sounds different because of the C underneath it. The held note redefines each interval above.
Change the anchor. Same melody, different bass note:
Same four notes on top, completely different feel. The bass note redefines every interval in the melody.
Try note("g2") as the anchor. Or note("bb2"). Same melody, different intervals against the bass.
A held note with a voice moving over it. Every culture got here independently.
| Tradition | Instrument | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Scottish | bagpipes | drone pipe holds, chanter moves |
| Aboriginal Australian | didgeridoo | circular-breathed drone, voice sings over |
| Indian classical | tanpura | 4 strings drone, sitar/voice moves above |
| Medieval European | hurdy-gurdy | wheel drones, keys play melody |
| Gregorian chant | voices | held bass note, melody in upper voice |
The drone changes the texture. The relationship stays the same.
Stack all three from the pairs (C, Eb, G) together at once:
C and Eb (a minor third) give it its character. C and G (a fifth) give it width. Three notes sounding together is a chord.
Three or more notes sounding at once. A triad has three: root, third, fifth. C minor = C (root), Eb (third), G (fifth). The Eb (minor third) is the difference between this and C major, which has E natural instead.
A sustained chord sound. Slow attack, long sustain, reverb. It fills background, sets mood. In the mini-notation, commas inside brackets mean “play simultaneously”: [c3,eb3,g3].
A chord is a shape on a circle. 12 notes in an octave = 12 points on a circle, like the euclidean necklace from EDM.0.
Three notes, three points, a triangle. C minor and C major use the same outer two notes (C and G). The middle note shifts by one position. The triangle flips.
The euclidean necklace from EDM.0 distributed drum hits on a circle. A chord distributes notes the same way.
The chord holds. A melody moves on top:
Same idea as the drone, but the anchor is now three notes instead of one. The melody has more intervals to agree or clash with. Phase 2 builds this properly.
The Cm triangle holds. A melody dot walks the circle following the melody from the editor above: G, Eb, C, Eb. When the dot lands on a triangle vertex, it is a chord tone. When it lands between vertices, it is passing.
One chord loops. A progression moves. Four chords, one per bar:
Cm → Ab → Bb → G. Four bars, then loop. Listen to how the G major at the end leads back to the top. Its B natural is one semitone below C, so when the loop restarts on Cm, you hear that half-step resolve.
A sequence of chords that creates harmonic movement. This one is i–VI–VII–V in C minor. Roman numerals show the relationship to the key. Uppercase = major chord. Lowercase = minor. The V (G major) creates tension. The i (Cm) resolves it.
The i-VI-VII-V progression shows up everywhere in dark/minor music.
| Track / Score | Artist | Year | Progression |
|---|---|---|---|
| Numb | Linkin Park | 2003 | i-III-VII-VI (close variant) |
| Scary Garry | Kaito Shoma | 2016 | i-VI-VII in phonk |
| Skyrim main theme | Jeremy Soule | 2011 | i-VII-VI-VII |
| Stairway to Heaven (intro) | Led Zeppelin | 1971 | descending minor line |
| Hit ’Em Up | 2Pac | 1996 | i-VI-VII loop |
Same first and last chord. The second chord changes the middle of the journey. Ab lifts. Fm darkens.
Watch the triangle morph through Cm → Ab → Bb → G. Notes that stay between chords turn green. Notes that move get the accent.
The progression has four chords. The 808 from Section 01 plays one note at a time. What note should it play?
Go back to the drone idea. When C was underneath the melody, it felt like home. When Ab was underneath, the ground shifted. The bass note decided the mood. In a progression, the bass note needs to shift WITH the chords or the ground stays in the wrong place.
Simplest version: the bass plays the root of whatever chord is happening. Cm chord = C in the bass. Ab chord = Ab in the bass.
Each bar has the same root in both the bass and the pad. That shared root is why the two layers sound like one piece of music instead of two.
One root per bar works. But the 808 can do more. It can move WITHIN each bar while still anchoring to the chord:
The bass still starts on each chord’s root. But now it moves between hits. C bar gets C and Eb. Ab bar gets Ab and C. The roots anchor. The other notes create motion inside each bar.
The chord has three notes. The bass has been playing the bottom one (the root). The top one is the fifth:
The root is the anchor. The top note, G, is the fifth. Alternating both in the bass line gives the low end more melodic range:
The bass alternates between root and fifth. C and G for the C minor bar. Ab and Eb for Ab. Each pair is drawn from the chord above it.
One more idea. The last note of each bar can sit one step below the next bar’s root, so it resolves upward when the chord changes:
G is one semitone below Ab. Listen to how the end of bar 1 connects to the start of bar 2.
The last note of each bar is one step below the next bar’s root. G slides up to Ab. A slides up to Bb. F# slides up to G. B slides up to C (back to the top). Each transition has that same half-step or whole-step resolution.
Root = the chord’s anchor note. Fifth = the top note of the triad, reinforces the root. Approach note = one step below (or above) the next root, creating a stepwise resolution into the next bar.
Approach from above instead of below:
Now the last note of each bar sits one step ABOVE the next root and resolves downward. Compare to the previous editor, where the approach was from below.
Try two approach notes in a row: [bb2 ~ f2 ~ bb2 d2 c2 a2]. The bass walks down through two steps into the next root.
The difference is one semitone. A major third is 4 semitones above the root (C to E). A minor third is 3 (C to Eb). That single semitone shift changes the entire character of the chord.
First bar: C major (C, E, G). Second bar: C minor (C, Eb, G). Only the middle note drops by one semitone.
In the progression Cm–Ab–Bb–G, three chords come from C natural minor (Cm, Ab, Bb). The G major doesn’t. It borrows from C harmonic minor, which raises the seventh degree (Bb → B natural). That B natural is one semitone below C, so when the progression loops, the half-step B→C resolves directly into the home chord.
The payoff. The triangle morphs through the progression while a melody dot moves over it. Watch what happens when the chord changes underneath a note: the same pitch goes from chord tone to passing tone. The meaning of each note depends on what is underneath it.
Three progressions. The pad is written. The bass is a placeholder. Replace it.
Cm → Fm (two chords, i–iv):
Right now the bass plays one root per chord. Try: add a leading note before F (e2 at the end of bar 1). Add a fifth (g2 in the Cm bar, c2 in the Fm bar). Make the 808 move.
Cm → Eb (two chords, i–III):
Cm → Ab → Bb (three chords, i–VI–VII):
Apply what you learned: roots, leading notes, fifths, movement. The pad stays. The bass is yours.