Scales, chords, intervals...

Production, hardware & technical - tips and tricks.
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WraithVeil
Posts: 92
Joined: April 11th, 2021, 1:13 pm
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Scales, chords, intervals...

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Hopefully not too much of a can of worms or too broad a topic to broach here. I've been looking into it elsewhere but nowhere else is there any information pertaining to music theroy in WH.

I love listening to dissonant, tense music but too often when I write music myself, it sounds too clean and "happy", even when writing in a minor scale like G Minor. Possibly it's my natural human tendency to want to "resolve" a series of chords or notes. I've struggled with this for a long time, but only just come to understand exactly what I was doing in the last few months since finally learning some music theory.

Without giving away any of your secrets, can anyone share any tips on how to make the WH I write more tense, dissonant or uncomfortable? I've just learnt about adding dominant 7th's, so I'm keen to experiment with those. My go-to to add some of this was always vocal distortion, dense reverb, pitch shifting etc but that's really fixing things after the fact rather than treating the problem at its source.

And I've you've read this far and are thinking "just write some fuckin' tunes man", I'm trying :lol:
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tendernessofwolves
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Location: Lincoln, UK
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Re: Scales, chords, intervals...

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A jarring sound effect or sample, drone or low frequency rumble can give the illusion of dissonance and tension within a track. And Using something like https://autochords.com/ and just messing with the results, adding intervals and extra notes to the progression can really help with that.

Coil were really the masters of utilising dissonance and tension within their music. Sometimes it was as simple as a jarring vocal line, other times it was a real deep dive into world music traditions they transposed into electronic music.
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tendernessofwolves
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Joined: March 4th, 2021, 3:15 pm
Location: Lincoln, UK
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Re: Scales, chords, intervals...

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Been watching a few of the videos on this channel as well recently https://www.youtube.com/c/iximusic - it's very focussed on Nine Inch Nails, but deep dives into the chord progressions and tricks that Trent uses in his song writing to build tension and otherwise create dissonance.
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ɅLUCɅRDɅ
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Joined: October 26th, 2021, 12:06 pm

Re: Scales, chords, intervals...

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I've picked up more than a few tricks from black metal and doom metal music theory videos, as well as some on music in horror games.

5 Black Metal Scales You Need To Know
https://youtu.be/qofS7oaa_5E

Atmospheric Black Metal Concepts - Chords, Intervals
https://youtu.be/1NzqL38BnFA

Scariest Metal Chords
https://youtu.be/MFPx-MUNW9o

Black Metal Lesson - How to Create Dark, Melodic Atmospheres
https://youtu.be/4JskMOfjUto

How Koji Kondo Writes Creepy Music
https://youtu.be/HlNFaaW3sB0
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t33nage_trag3dy
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Joined: December 14th, 2023, 10:49 am

Re: Scales, chords, intervals...

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this might be a good start:

check out his site too:
https://www.tabletopcomposer.com/blog

that's where i started, intervals and chord contexts are important topics to portray emotions if u're a theory nerd like me
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