When people first learn Neo Soul chords, most of their attention goes to the notes above the bass. The 7th. The 9th. The 11th. The 13th. The voicing. The top note. But change the bass note underneath that voicing and something interesting happens. The upper notes may remain almost identical, yet the chord can suddenly […]
Neo Soul harmony often feels as though it is constantly moving, even when the chord itself barely changes. A note hangs over. Another note shifts underneath it. A chord seems to resist settling for just a moment longer. Then one note moves and suddenly everything falls into place. That feeling is often created by suspension. […]
Neo Soul gives you a huge number of harmonic possibilities. Extended chords. Passing chords. Borrowed harmony. Chromatic movement. Altered dominants. Inner-voice movement. Bass substitutions. Grace notes. Rhythmic fills. That freedom is one of the reasons the style is so interesting. It can also create a problem. A progression can contain so many good ideas that […]
Neo Soul is often associated with rich harmony. Extended chords. Smooth voice leading. Warm Rhodes tones. Chromatic movement. Beautiful voicings. But one of the things that can make all of those ideas work is something much simpler: space. Space is what happens when you do not fill every moment. It can be the gap between […]
Neo Soul is often associated with rich chords. Minor 9ths. Major 9ths. 11ths. 13ths. Altered dominants. Borrowed harmony. Smooth voice leading. But using all of those things constantly does not necessarily make a progression sound more sophisticated. In fact, if every chord is equally rich, equally tense, equally wide, equally colorful and played with the […]
That can create an understandable assumption: If a chord contains notes outside the key, it must be wrong. Neo Soul quickly challenges that idea. A progression may begin with chords that clearly establish one key, suddenly introduce a chord containing several notes that do not belong to it, and then return to the original harmony […]
You might play a rich minor 9 chord, move to another equally rich voicing and find that the transition somehow feels awkward. The individual chords are correct, but the movement between them feels mechanical, abrupt or disconnected. This is one of the reasons a progression can sound impressive on paper yet still fail to create […]
You play a minor 9, major 9 or extended dominant and instead of hearing depth and color, everything seems to blur together. The individual notes become difficult to distinguish. The low end feels heavy. The chord may even sound impressive by itself but disappear into a muddy mass once the bass, drums and other instruments […]
You discover richer chords. You learn a few progressions. You start experimenting with major 7ths, minor 9ths and different voicings. Suddenly the keyboard sounds much closer to the records that made you interested in Neo Soul in the first place. Then something can change. You keep practising, but the improvement becomes harder to hear. You […]
Every chord may technically belong. The voicings may be rich. The extensions may sound sophisticated. And yet when you reach the end, something still feels incomplete. The progression seems to be waiting for another chord. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Neo Soul often uses unresolved harmony deliberately because tension can be expressive. But […]
