Minor Chord Progressions

[nuffink]

Take me away to Jazzland.

Certainly

In jazzland minor tonality is treated as set of substitutions of the parallel major scale chords. This process is known as Modal Interchange. It looks like this...



You can freely replace any of the chords from the major scale with it's relation from any of the minors. Some work better than others and a swift google will probably find you a slew of stock MI progressions.

Replace every major chord with its MI relation from, say, the parallel Harmonic Minor and obviously you're back in the (somewhat limited) landscape of traditional 19th century diatonic harmony.

edit: sorry about the capital B's in the ii column. They should of course be b's to denote flats. MS Word "helped" me by auto capitalising them and I didn't spot it.

[No name]

But yeah, minor is complicated. Suppose you wanted to derive all your chords from the melodic minor ascending, then you'd have an augmented chord on III (the C in your example). That clearly doesn't happen.

Compositions that use minor, use melodic fragments that are from some minor scale or other, but they do not stick to one minor scale through the whole piece. So at any given moment you can harmonize the melody however you see fit, as long as it doesn't clash with the melody.

It sounds a bit weird if you alternate minor and major chords on the IV and V too quickly, but both variants are allowed.

And no sillyness like dim or aug chords are necessary.

Victor.

After toying around with the it last night, I see your post is spot on about it, because I was all over the place trying to use the harmonic minor. It didn't sound so natural, and plus I see that the website I was learning off of mixed the harmonic and I think it was the natural minor scales to get a better sound. I think it switched out the 3rd,might have switched out the fourth and seventh too, I don't clearly recall right now.

[No name]

I will not stop my education on this subject until I figure out what you guys are talking about. It's all so frustrating learning this stuff, but I just know that once all this stuff is learned, it can be sooo much fun to use all the chords. The possibilities, I think that is what keeps me from snapping and just quitting this whole theory thing

[Toxikator]

The possibilities, I think that is what keeps me from snapping and just quitting this whole theory thing

I feel that way ALL the time, don't give up on it... you WILL get it.

I find that one of the best ways to do it is to try to find songs that employ a certain trick so I can get a feel for the sound... listen to a lot of stuff in minor (get MIDIs if you can) and try to figure out when they use each form and what sort of musical effects it has.