In this tutorial, J. Anthony Allen introduces the fourth installment of his popular series on music theory for electronic musicians. He explains his motivation to extend the existing three‑part course and outlines the focus of this lesson: transforming static, "blocky" chord progressions into fluid, cinematic sequences. Allen reviews the problem of repetitive chord‑to‑chord movement and demonstrates several practical techniques to blur chord boundaries, including the use of passing tones, sliding a single note from each chord by half a bar, applying voice‑leading concepts, and respecting diatonic chord functions within the key of A major. He provides live examples, showing how a simple shift of notes can create smoother motion and emotional depth, while also noting the need to adjust chord qualities (e.g., minor vs. major) to maintain harmonic consistency. The tone is instructional and enthusiastic, encouraging experimentation without heavy rehearsal.
Chapters
Hey, everyone. Excited to be back making another music theory for electronic musicians? This has been my most popular course that I've ever made. This series of one through three that already exists. So I'm really excited to make more. As a lot of you know, I wrote a book about the first three, and now we're going into the next set of three. I guess this is going to be part four, and I'm committed to making part five and part six. I might write a book about him. I might not. Who knows? So in this class, we're going to focus on getting away from blocky chord progressions. Okay. You might be one of those people that's writing chord progressions that go, chord, chord, chord, chord, and it just feels like there's these blocks of chords. How can we make those more elegant? We looked at some of this when we looked at voice leading and using inversions. But now we're going to take it up to 11 by looking at all kinds of different ways that you can blur the lines between your chords to make it feel less blocky and more cinematic, more emotional, more real. We've got a whole bunch of different ways we're going to do that. So let's jump in and get to it. Chord. This is a passing tone. Okay. Because we're going to pass through it. Let's hear what it sounds like. Right. Sounds nice. Now, does this make a different chord? Yeah, kinda. You could say that. Now we're on an F, A sharp C chord. That's a different kind of chord. But that's not how we hear it. That's not how we feel it. What we feel is A or F major here and then still F major, but with a passing tone taking us up to this C. Okay. I'm just gonna kind of randomly go through and grab some notes. Sure. Okay. One note from each chord. Here's what I'm gonna do. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm going to slide that over by half the bar. Okay. So I slid some notes, one note per chord over. That's all. I'm not going to change anything else. I'm not going to do anything else. Let's hear what we did. All right. Sounds great. I, like, didn't rehearse that, just randomly grabbed some notes, shifted them over. It usually works because for on G, we're on a five chord. If we go up another fifth, we actually jump over the tonic. Then we get back to a II chord. So we're on a II chord. Now you have to think back to our diatonic chord progression in A major key. The ii chord is minor, right? Goes major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. Right. So this is going to be minor. So we have to adjust it a little, Sam.
