DJ Tonka style Chords

[Maschinenbauer]

Hi everyone,

DJ Tonka had this great euphoric vibe throughout his tracks and I can't wrap my head around, how the chords are being made.

I'm a novice in music theory and I hope you can nudge me in the right direction.
"Standard" major/minor triads played with the M1 HousePiano didn't do the trick for me.

Here are some examples of his music:







Thank you in advance.

Cheers,

Chris

[Nystul]

I think most of these chords are indeed "standard" major or minor triads, but the voicing is smooth. Let's say as an example you start with Am chord and want to go to a C chord. First idea is to write the Am chord as A-C-E (from bottom to top) and the C chord as C-E-G. But if you write everything in root position like this, you are going to have a lot of jumping around in parallel motion. Imagine instead, we have a bass line that goes from A to C (maybe there is a passing note B right before the chord change to C also, for example), but the midrange piano part goes from A-C-E to G-C-E. By changing the voicing, the chord notes have barely moved, instead of everything jumping in parallel to the bass note.

Let's imagine our third chord is F. So our bass line is probably going to make some move to get down or up to F. The previous chord was voiced G-C-E in the midrange. If we want to sound smooth, how should we voice the F chord? Should it be F-A-C, A-C-F, or C-F-A? If you think in these terms, you can get a more authentic piano sound. If you work in other types of chords, you still want to give thought on how to arrange the voices. This kind of fits with the earlier thread asking whether 4 part harmony rules are relevant to dance music. You aren't bound by formal rules here but the principles are very similar.

The other thing to pay attention to in these links is the rhythm of the chord stabs. It's not just straight beats but following a consistent groove.

[Maschinenbauer]

Thanks for your reply, Nystul.
I will try it out

[NKF]

Using the same progression idiom used in pretty much all dance music these days.

They are all simple chords with suspensions which either remain unresolved because the following chord uses that note as a chord tone or another suspension.

The voicing can be hard to pick out because typically you would not need to have say the root in the piano part if it is being played by the bass instrument.

I quickly browser 2 tracks. No inversions used. I'm going on memory and 1 play thru so I might not be 100% accurate but it isn't really important because it would just be a matter of taste and colour. The guts of what I will say is essentially what is going on.

The first track, an analysis ignoring the non chord coloration and 7ths is the chord progression used in pretty much every track. Lets just say it is in a minor key for simplicity. It is actually in major or a mode but that isn't important.

So first track. Listen to the bass note. You get the ubiquitous, i - bVII - iv - VI . Let's just use c minor to make it easier to explain. So you would get

i - Cm
bVII - Bb
iv - Fm
VI - Ab

Now start adding the coloration. The trick is about parsemony in movement or what they call voice leading. Basically if you can leave a note sitting, leave it, if you can't, try to move it down a semitone of it is a suspension and if it is leading to the root of another chord you would go up a semi tone.

i becomes minor 7 with a suspended 2 . Because the bass is playing the root, and you can generally omit the 5th of a chord , you would have the upper chord voiced as

Bb - d - eb / over the bass root c

Next chord,

IBb-d-f, notice you have the 7th of the previous chord in the basic triad the suspended 2 as well, and now the eb can be a coloration acting as a suspended 4. You can just keep all the same notes over the root

Bb- d -Eb / Bb. Notice the 5th is still omitted.

The iv , the Bb can now act as a suspended 4, the d as a suspended 6 altho technically the 5 of the chord is already there so no point removing it and the Eb acts as the 7b making the iv minor triad a minor 7 with a suspended 4 and 6.

Bb - d - Eb / F

The next chord VI

The Bb now is a suspended 2 , the d a suspended 4, the Eb, the 5th .

Basically you never actually moved on the top chord voicing but because the voicing never requires an e mediate resolution, it works.

It the actual track, i think the upper chord chunk that is repeated over the bass tone is Bb - Eb and F.

The principle is the same.

[Maschinenbauer]

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Hi NKF,

the hints about 7th/9th and suspended chords did the trick for me.
They seem to be the key to this smooth summer-ish vibe.

http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/Ch88PvpQ/file.html (http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/Ch88PvpQ/file.html)

Thanks for your long and informative post!