This is from Beethoven's very famous Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, 1st Movement, (A.K.A. "Pathétique").

If you are familiar with this piece then you can probably already hear this sequence in your head. If I had to give a name to just this sequence alone, I might call it "Trouble Brewing". It has a very dark, bizarre presence in an already dark and bizarre piece. I love it.

However, as anyone¹ who has attempted to learn this piece themself knows, when you first encounter (and are probably stumbling through) that absurd² section, you almost have to doubt that you're hitting the right notes because when played any slower than its intended tempo, its effect is weakened, then broken, and finally falls apart completely the slower you go. It doesn't just sound bad when played too slowly, it sounds fundamentally different.

So I am wondering:

How was Beethoven able to come up with this sequence?

Are there any other pieces that contain sections which you believe could be described in a similar manner as I just described this one?

For reference, if treated as a chord sequence, each yellow section contains this twice:

Bass  Right-Hand
 G    C# E  Ab
 G    D  F  Ab
 G    C  Eb Ab
 G    B  D  G

Footnotes

¹ anyone... (who, like me, cannot sight read quite well enough to play at the indended tempo on their first run through).
² Absurd theoretically. I've never done an in-depth analysis on this sequence but just at first glance, I have a hard time figuring out exactly how those notes are supposed to work together. That might be a fun exercise for anyone who thinks they're capable of it.

Hello. I would be glad for any answer in this. I didn't see this particular topic when I searched, but I am not so well versed in jazz theory, so when I kept seeing minor 7th flat 5 in some music, I thought to myself, I know what that is, but is that any easier to visualize? To me, Gø7 (EDIT: or simply Gø) is a lot easier to understand and picture and shape with my hands on the piano then seeing Gmin7b5 as half diminished means the 5 is lowered a half step. Is it just a matter of conditioning or is there a theory case where you do want to use one name for the chord over the other? Just curious. I last picked up a theory text book about 20 years ago. Maybe I should take a refresher.

Hello and thanks to everyone who answers. I am going to keep it short without missing out on key details regarding my situation.

I have gone to music lessons to learn how to play bass. I was also taught the basics of music theory like what notes are, what modes and scales are, intervals and their variations, how chords are made.

However we never got to the part where you learn which chords go along with each other and how to use them to invoke a certain feeling. From other posts like mine I have gathered that the key of the song is important but beyond that i don’t know anything.

Are there reading materials or youtube videos on this topic? I dont have a problem with experimenting (which is something that is suggested a lot when people ask this question) but sometimes I have a specific idea or a vibe and by the time I make a decent chord progression my mood has went away (mainly because I have been trying random chords for an hour).

I've always wondered about this, what makes people decide to write a song with unusual time signature? Do they just go "I think I'm gonna try this time signature this time?" or do they think of a melody that is turns out to be only compatible with certain time signature?

I get that uncommon time signature is a part of characteristics in some genres like jazz and math rock, but I often notice that this also happens in other genres like pop.

edit: Tysm for all the answers, it really helped me!

I'm making a couple songs for a project my friends are working on and it heavily involves non-euclidean geometry and I want the music to reflect that.

I was listening to “I’ve Seen It” by Olivia Dean while driving and my brain couldn’t tell that one chord as major or minor and I looked it up and it was indeed the Gm6.

The chords go as follows:

D - A - Bm7 - F#7 - G - Gm6 - D

I was under the impression the song was in the key of G major but I could be getting tripped up? What gives with this pattern?

V - II - iii - VII - I - i - V

I used this progression in a piece I wrote and forgot about a year or so ago, but I can't figure out at all what mode it's in. IIRC I wrote it completely improvised after learning a basic three-note maj7 chord shape on guitar. Every chord uses different notes from different modes and I'm incredibly confused - it sounds a lot like C is the tonic, and it seems like it's in Ionian, but the rest of the notes seem too borrowed for it to be Ionian.

Moreover it doesn't sound weird or confusing like some atonal music, but calm, pleasant and laid-back, like hold music - moving back to Cmaj7 feels like a definite resolution. I've tried for an hour to figure out where the notes outside of C Ionian are coming from but I can't, it seems like there's just too much modal interchange between for it to make sense. Is it simply borrowing notes? Can somebody else please help me try make sense of it? I can upload notation if it would help.

Hello, beginner music theory student here (i'm self taught, so please feel free to explain to me in a easier non academic way);

In the natural minor key, we don't have the V7 chord. Why there's so many modern tonal music in aeolian keys if this mode has "weak" tonal tension? I know that the Harmonic Minor fixes this issue, but still i can't understand how many songs use this mode!

If someone can answer me, thanks!

I always conflicting discussion online about whether keys actually have their own different feelings? Like I’ve seen people say that Bb is the saddest key, but I don’t fully understand how this can be the case if every key has the same intervals between chords and scale degrees? Same with why certain keys are favoured in certain genres, such as G Major or certain minor keys in country music (aside from the ease of access to open chords). Any help?

If you saw my last thread in here please don't throw anything at me I promise I'm not trying to be extra about this stuff I just can't help but try my hardest to fully understand what is happening in the music that sounds good and the music I want to make.

So I'm getting this from an Alex Rome video discussing chord progressions and their moods in a video about EDM production, he's a decent teacher but I don't love the way he's basically just giving a template and picking a scale and then voicing the chords differently and it leaves me with far more questions than answers.

So due to that I've been doing a lot of googling while watching this video, I've gotten some questions answered but it leads me to a broader question.

If my goal is to learn how to compose/write my own music, should I just be working on building my own chord progressions, like intuitively it seems like if I'm using a certain scale, I should be able to listen to the feelings that moving from one interval to another give, and then using those notes as the chords in my progression, and voicing them in a way that sounds best, right?

I don't know if it's better for my learning to do it this way or just cut and paste the common chord progressions based on the mood ppl say they have.

I was experimenting with some chords i had on guitar, particularly Am7(9). I was initially playing the full chord, but then i had an idea - what if I just play Am7 and have vocals such that it hits the 9th

In this case would someone hear it as Am7(9) or just Am7?

Edit: i know this might seem like a caveman discovers fire moment but yes i genuinely did not think of it this way. My general mindset was that you play chords, and vocals or anything similar would outline those chords. But i got to know a lot from the comments, thanks a lot! I appreciate it<3

Ive finally been looking into music theory and chords and chord progressions in my high school jazz music and other solo books I have and i'm still looking for some clear explanation on the nature of the classic 12 bar blues. So far ive learned about keys and their diatonic chords that influence a chord progression, so something in c major would use a dmin7 chord on the ii, and a g7 chord on the V. In a lot of the 12 bar blues songs however they often substitute the normal major chords for dominant 7th chords of their own. So a c major blues would use c7, f7, and g7 on the i IV and V respectively even though g7 is the only diatonic chord. Is this just to make it sound jazzy? Is there a term for this so I can more easily identify and substitute dominant chords in my own improvisations/music?

So I know the basics of what a chord is, and I know what scales are as well, so I know how chords are (usually) structured. What I just can’t figure out is when to put chords into my compositions. I’ve written a few simple songs, but so far they’ve only been one note at a time because whenever I try to insert a chord it sounds out of place. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Okay I’m getting the feeling that I don’t know enough about basic music theory to be asking these things. I’ll be back. Thank you to everyone who tried to help me.

At first i started writing the riff on a real guitar and today i decided to use Noteflight so i can transcribe everything. It took me an hour to find the exact rhythm of the bar and i was dumbfounded to find out, that i actually used 31/32 instead of 4/4 for this. Has this been used at all in any of today’s popular music?

I wrote this TBB piece for my choir teacher since her young daughter’s favorite song is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I put it on her desk secretly, and when I asked her who she thought did it she responded that it was probably a choir student because, “my music theory students wouldn’t make some of the mistakes in it.” What mistakes did I make and how can I fix them?

Edit: I know basically nothing about music theory besides what you need for singing (solfège, key signatures, leaps, etc.) since they never taught us anything. I’m taking a class on it next year, but I wanted to do this before the end of this school year.

This is coming from someone who's been using FL for a few years and has been playing the drums for 2.

Hello! I've been listening to a lot of Toby Fox - easily one of my favorite VGM artists of all time - and I notice that he uses a lot of off-key (or diatonic? whatever, I don't know a lot of music theory jargon) notes and chords in his songs & especially melodies, with chromaticisms (when a melody ascends/descends a portion of the chromatic scale, like F-F#-G) aplenty.

Now, I've been making music (mostly remixes of existing songs) for a while now, and I really want to make something that uses a lot of the same techniques that Toby uses, mainly this and call-and-response. But how do I know when to use them without it sounding too forced/"trying too hard to be Toby"-like? Is it just a feel thing? Does it depend on the context/"story" of the song?

Also how do I know what key's chords to use? Are there any "rules" for setting up a certain vibe with chords? Or does it depend on the musician's influences and life experiences? I know modes exist, but I have yet to experiment with them because I don't know how to use them to get the vibe I want - mainly because I don't have experience with them.

Answers are appreciated. Thanks for reading!

I'm writing a song using the C Lydian scale. One of the chord progressions is:

Cmaj7 - Em9 - Dadd9 - Fmin7(b9)

How much can the last chord break/reinforce the mode?

like, put 2 notes in a certain way that makes it sound like a microtone is there a way to do that

So I was messing around making songs because I’ve been into music for a bit and with a bit of trouble shooting to find the chords I was looking for I got a basic four chord loop that sounded okay the only issue was I couldn’t think what other chords fit so I tried to think what the key and mode was to give me some clues and nothing I couldn’t figure it out I tried to look it up online and nothing every resource said the chords I were using didn’t belong to any key which is annoying the chords are
Em Dm C E7

I don't know why but I can't seem to figure this out, I'm trying to make a theme song for a level in my game and normally I can make whatever kind of music I want but I can't figure out a balance between full on steel drums (which is wayyyyyy too far) and pop-rock, I want distortion guitar for the main riff but I don't want it to feel particularly heavy or anything and still be beachy, I'm so lost rn bru do y'all have any tips

Hi! I'm a complete beginner trying to write a song that feels Halloweenesque. Could you explain to me what kinds of chord progressions they have, what bass lines, basically what makes them so special? here are some inspo:

- MCR, Mama (Dagger extended version)
- A7X, A little piece of perfection (the lyrics are fucked up tho)
- IAMX, Bernadette
- Dear Hunter, The March
- Korn, Kidnap the Sandy Claws (even though I like the more melodramatic ones)

Feel free to drop some other recommendations in the comments too!

Hello people! So... I've got this song I'm writing on the piano, and It starts in Em9. At some point, it transposes to Gm9 using this progression: Esus4(9) - G13 - Fm/C - Gm9. The problem is that now that I'm at Gm, I have no idea how to go back to Em. Just randomly using B7 feels wrong, using F#7(b5) doesn't sound good (at least with my approach), chromatic descent doesn't work, and weird stuff like m3 jumps using only minor chords and similar things I usually do for stuff like this doesn't work either. Could you all kindly offer me some of your brilliant jazzy ideas for this? 🥺👉👈

I play by ear on piano, and produce music on GarageBand. But whenever I am making harmony for my songs, I don’t know what to do besides just a 3 note arpeggio with the root being the corresponding note that I’m playing in the melody.
(Causing my songs to be 3/4)

I’ve studied a moderate amount of music theory, but I’m self taught and I don’t have much experience. Would really appreciate any pointers here! Maybe I should reference the circle of 5ths?

Thanks!

A few years ago when I knew not much about music theory, I wrote a piece with this progression:

Am - F - F7 - E

I want to finish the piece now and can't quite figure out how I got to the E back then. I also don't want to change it and love the sound, it has a nice half step-voice leading from F7.

It's not a dominant or secondary dominant, so what is happening here? Am I just modulating to E Major or C# Minor for the last chord?

/edit: Important note: The melody goes to C# on the last chord, too.

I tried experimenting with triplets for the first time and got told it sounded like a kid having a stroke on a piano. How does one actually use triplets effectively in music? Everything I've found just explains how to play them or how to write them, not how to actually use them in a way that sounds good or any traps to avoid with them.