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“Think like a songwriter, cook like a beat maker.” That’s the mantra that’s been on Ryan Harlin’s mind recently as he’s approached his own music making endeavours recently. And in order to help him in that goal, he recently connected with songwriter expert Olivia Broadfield to understand how she approaches chord voicing that go beyond the basic three-note triad form and introduces additional notes and colorations that evoke more interesting emotions and melodic opportunities.

Best of all, Olivia made a Chord Sequencer preset we can all use to apply her own songwriter chord voicing tricks in our own music! Check out the video and make sure to download her preset below!

DOWNLOAD PRESET HERE

Transcript

Intro: Why Ryan wanted this conversation

Okay, so recently I’ve been thinking about something that came up — well, actually it came up because I’m not that great at piano. I mean, I can poke around and I can get the job done, but I’m a lifetime guitarist — all the cool chords and all the cool voicings that I know are on guitar. In Reason, I rely heavily on tools like the Scales and Chords Player to do the math of the sharps and flats, the white keys and the black keys, and chord inversions and all that stuff.

When I need to play keyboards in the way that I most often use it, Scales and Chords is wonderful for quickly generating the most common type of chords used in music, which are called triads. But I know from my guitar playing that the coolest-sounding chords happen when you add the extra notes that extend beyond the basic triad. On piano, those are the colorful chords I hear in more accomplished singer-songwriter songs — the kind of songs written by people like our longtime friend of the channel, Olivia Broadfield.

Olivia is a singer-songwriter who has released a bunch of solo albums that you’ve probably heard used on TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Vampire Diaries, or most recently all over the BBC drama The Split, and who co-writes with other artists for their albums. One thing Olivia does super well is chords on keyboard — her chords are way cooler than my chords, and I want to figure out why. So with that in mind, I recently spoke with Olivia about this very topic. Here’s my conversation with Olivia, to hear her explain how songwriters think about chords, and how she makes them more interesting than straight-ahead triads.

The interview with Olivia Broadfield

Ryan: Olivia, welcome to my video, thank you for joining us. Are you ready for me to sort of pick your brain and take the essence of the Olivia Broadfield chord methodology, and see if we can translate it for all Reason users?

Olivia: Please do take my essence.

Ryan: Okay, the essence of this concept is basically, you are very anti-triad — basic chord triad.

Olivia: Yes and no. It has its place, I think, if I’m really honest with you — I don’t have all the frills, um, to make my piano playing maybe sound so beautiful, so I rely on something else to convey emotion and loveliness, and that tends to be straying from a triad, in my experience.

Ryan: Here’s where I want to go with this — I would like us to take a make a very basic chord progression, and then I would like you to instantly Broadfield-ify it, and then I want us to dissect what you did. So, a one-four back-and-forth chord progression — would that be sensible?

Olivia: Yeah, I can do a one-four. So a one-four, just as a triad, is going to be your C here… and then the F. So that’s the non-Broadfield-ified way. A Broadfield-ified way of doing that would be something along those lines…

Building a I-IV progression, the “Broadfieldian” way

Olivia: So if I was to go for my C, rather than this, I would play something like this. Now, if I explain what that is — I’m still doing a C in the bottom hand in this instance, but I’m inverting that chord. So the first thing you’re hearing is the G, which is usually the third note that we would hear of a C-E-G. So I’m taking the G from the top, sticking it on the bottom, and then I’m hitting C and E in the traditional way. But what I will then do is add usually a fourth, or a second, or a seventh — those are the things that make them be Broadfield-ified, or just to cluster those all together, you might get a second, a fourth, and a seventh all together.

Inverting the chord and adding extra notes

Olivia: So when I play that C, I put that F on the top just for a bit of that — what’s that, I guess ambiguity, slightly more — which as a songwriter, you’re creating a suggestion of where that melody line could also be. So if you were to just play the traditional C, and I’m saying that I want the F — if I wanted the F to be the melody, that’s going to probably sound quite jarring over a traditional triad.

Passing notes and melody suggestion

Olivia: This might sound jarring over what I’ve just played as well, but if I then sing that — at least you’re slipping it in there as a kind of passing note, rather than where it just jars.

Ryan: So you’re giving, I think, the singer and the topliner — you’re putting the notes into the chord that you would like to hear come out of the melody.

Olivia: Yeah, it’s probably not a very conscious thing when I’m doing it, but I would say that’s probably right. If I’m doing this, maybe if I put the D on top of that, I’m going to make that feel like a note that I could sing more than if I did it over this, which might sound a bit weird. If I do it over this, at least you’re hearing it in there somewhere, you know what I mean — so that’s me adding an F. If I do it again for you, and I’ll spread it out just so people can hear it — that’s one way to play it. I could also have it traditionally as the triad and just insert that fourth in there, and that’s going to sound like this.

Olivia: Again, sounds different, because we’re ending that with the G, which belongs — so that probably feels more whole than something like that, because your ear hears that as the last note. So that’s how you can kind of do those — the same chord, by inverting it slightly differently.

Root-position cluster chords

Olivia: Again, if I was to stick the E — my hand isn’t big enough to do that — that would be the other way to play it, which is, that feels too spread out for me. I tend to be quite small and clustered when I play chords. The only other way that I could play those notes is if I did C in the root, with E, F, G, and C together, which becomes — that’s really beautiful, but that’s a very kind of squished-together sound. So you’ve got that little cool cluster chord.

The four chord, Broadfieldian style

Olivia: That was what was originally in our very basic chord progression — the one chord. And then we went to what’s called the four chord, which again — it would be an F triad, that was an F. So I think if I did that to start off with, I probably did — let me remind myself — I probably, that sounds very Broadfield-ified — I probably did that. So in this instance, I tend to go quite fifth-y in my left hand, so just then I played an F and a C in the left hand, and then I played a G, an A, a C, and an E in the right hand.

Framing it as an A minor 7 with a bass-note trick

Olivia: Not to get into music theory — well, we’re going to dabble a little bit — to my ear, I think I’m hearing what is effectively a minor 7 chord. I’m basically playing like an A minor 7, albeit arranged slightly differently, so I’m playing the notes of an A minor 7, which is this — which, if I played it with the A at the bottom, feels very, very minor-y.

Olivia: I’m slightly changing that because I’m putting the G grouped with the A down the bottom, for a little close and hooked touch. But then, as soon as I very heavily suggest that we’re going to an F, the right hand freezes up, and I’m like, yeah, we don’t need to do an F in the right hand, we’re still going to feel this is an F. So if I do those exact notes, but I choose to do an A in that bottom hand — very minor. If I play exactly the same notes but change the bottom hand, for me that’s still what you feel — I think that bottom note, for me, maybe because you feel it in your body more, that tends to be — I’m hearing that as an F anyway.

Olivia: I think in some ways, the more you know the rules, probably the more confusing it would get, and I think it’s about training your ear to hear the notes in between and shifting out of that triad mindset, because it’s a very kind of — you know, we were, like, classical music is, pop music, you know, particularly probably in rock and roll and the early pop music, we were probably so triad-dependent.

Ryan: So I’m going to take this, I’m going to try and move this out of piano into other instruments, split it up across tracks, and see if we can come up with the Harlin version of the Broadfield mentality — I think that’s the twist.

Olivia: Can you take something which I’ve made be very un-pop, and get it to be pop again? I think that’s a fun challenge.

Ryan: I need to get out more.

Olivia: I must need to get out more too, because I actually think it sounds fun to see what happens when we work with these Broadfield-style songwriter chords.

Recap: the “notes in between”

That depart from the straight-ahead triads to add those — as Olivia called them — the notes in between, which are the intervals like the second or the fourth that are clustered into the traditional root, third, and fifth triads.

Step one: a collection of chords (Olivia’s preset)

So step one to working with these chords is that we need a collection of chords that qualify as Broadfield-ified and cluster chords. Thankfully, I asked Olivia to help us all out with an official set of chords that she sent me as a Chord Sequencer preset. Here I’ve got 16 of her chords, with all these interesting cluster tones and color variations, and you know what — if I play around with them on a Radical Piano sound, it really does sound instantly way more like a songwriter style.

Applying the chords: swapping to Polytone

So far so good, but I want to cook up a beat, so the first thing I’ll do is to swap out Radical Piano for a synth like Reason’s Polytone, and let’s drop some chords into Chord Sequencer to get ourselves a progression to work with. I’ll tell you the truth, I usually have to fight the temptation to not just stay on Polytone’s default preset, because I really do love how round and analog it sounds, but let’s open Reason’s browser and try out some different options. I’ll filter down to synth and…

I like the metallic yet analog nature of this one, but the sustain dying off the way it does makes me want to try to add some more movement.

Adding an arpeggiator for movement

So I’ll put a Dual Arpeggio player below the Chord Sequencer to animate our Broadfield-ified chords. I mean, even the default is interesting sounding, but I’ll spin through the patches to see what else it could be doing to my chords. This one is interesting, but it’s a bit sparse at this speed, so I’ll double the rate while also doubling the octave range. Let’s add a Channel EQ underneath our Polytone to round off a little of that top end, for something on the warmer, more metallic side of the sonic spectrum.

So, I mean, already I’ve got chords playing very interesting tones outside of the traditional triad, and just like Olivia mentioned, they’re suggesting more interesting notes that I could imagine a topline melody writer going with, on their part, to turn these chord arpeggios into a more developed beat.

Adding a bassline with root-note CV tracking

Let’s add some other synth layers, but to stick with the spirit of what I’ve done already, let’s add a bass using Polytone as well. I love the bass patch in Polytone’s bass folder called “Chicago 86.” I’ll drag a Bassline Generator above Polytone to handle the rhythm, but what I’m looking for is a relatively flat, single-note type of bassline from my player — like this combination of A3-1 and B5-1.

The reason that I want the pitch to be relatively flat is because I’m going to do one of my favorite player-combination tricks, which is to flip the rack and cable a control voltage cable from the root note out of Chord Sequencer on my chord synth, to the root note in on the Bassline Generator of my bass synth — which now has my bassline following along with my chord changes.

I think it’s probably time we put some drums under this, so that the direction of our beat comes into focus.

A second, higher CV-tracked layer with Scales and Chords

To add a little more interplay between our bass and our chord arpeggios, let’s repeat some of this process by adding another Polytone to the rack, putting a Bassline Generator above it, and let’s go to the back of the rack to do the same root-note trick. But in order to do that, I’ll need to add a CV Splitter, so that I can take the original root note that comes from the Chord Sequencer and send one signal to our bassline player, and one signal to the root-note input of this new player as well.

I’ll also transpose this player’s pitch up one octave to keep it out of the way of the actual bassline. And when I’m doing these types of daisy-chain devices, where players are generating the notes based on CV signals that I’m sending them, I like to add another player underneath my Bassline Generator here — Scales and Chords can shift wrong notes into right notes for my song’s key.

So I’ll turn off the Chords mode, and for the key of the song, I’ll choose C major pentatonic instead of C major. The pentatonic scale is a limited subset of notes from the standard major scale that, on its own, can sound less colorful and more limited. But since my songwriter chords themselves are playing ninths and fourths and 11ths and all those fancy colorations, this layer will stick to the most basic tones, so as not to clash. Once I find a pattern I like on the player, the result of this layer sounds like this…

Adding Ripley Space Delay for texture

And if I drop the Ripley Space Delay underneath my synth to give it some — well, just as the preset says — much-needed spice, we end up with this part, which, if we bring it in with the rest of the beat, sounds like this…

Wrap-up

So, there you go — if I wanted to pass this off now to a writer to come up with a hook, write a topline melody, or wrap some bars on it, well, this is probably dense enough to convey my idea without taking up so much space that they have nowhere to fit in. And thanks to the interesting chord tones from my songwriter chords, I can probably expect to hear some interesting melodic choices that are happening from the mere sonic suggestion inside those chords.

This chord sequence, or preset, is up on our blog and linked below in the description, so make sure to download it and experiment yourself with how having these colorful chord clusters changes the direction that your beats might go. Think like a songwriter, cook like a beat maker, and I’ll see you next time.