J. Anthony Allen breaks down the chord progression in OneRepublic's "All the Right Moves," explaining why he picked this track: the chords are clean and upfront, without drums cluttering the sound. He walks through how he isolates the progression and time-warps it to line up perfectly for analysis.
Okay, let's do a little dissection, if you will. In the theory world, we call this an analysis, but let's call it a dissection, just for fun. What I want to do is figure out the chords in a song. So I have queued up here this song, all the Right Moves by this band called One Republic. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, this is not an electronic track, and this is supposed to be electronic. The reason I've chosen this is because the chord progression is nice and transparent, so we can hear it pretty quickly. It's stated by itself right at the beginning, so we can hear it alone without the drums and without all the other instruments. And the other reason is that I have just a bizarre, odd fascination with this song. It's just. I don't know. I don't normally listen to music like this, but this song is just really catchy. And a lot of the music by these guys, I just really kind of dig it. It's like my guilty pleasure, to be totally honest with you. So enough of that. Let's hear it. So here's the beginning of the song where we get the chord progression. Okay, so this song uses pretty much the same chord progression through most of it. And we can isolate it right here, so it starts right there. So let's get right up on that. That looks about good. And let's put that right on a down beat. Okay, let's get rid of that. Now I'm gonna do a tiny bit of warping on it just to make sure that I get the chord progression to line up right.
