#what makes j-pop chord progressions so colorful?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

muted jetty
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Every time i look at a j-pop chord progressions its just so colorful but the more i explore it, the more complicated it gets. The royal road progression and using jazzy 7ths is the only real thing that i learnt from all of this exploration.

pseudo magnet
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honestly "because jazz" is the simplest answer

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study jazz harmony and you'll see what's going on

muted jetty
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i'll look into that, thanks

low wave
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There was a question about how to make things sound more colorful harmonically that may also help out

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(And basically it turns out that it’s very much not just the chords that makes things colorful)

pseudo magnet
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I mean, the question was about the progressions

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sevenths are an important part of it, but understanding secondary dominants and tritone substitution will also be really important

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and modal interchange, and chromatic approach chords, and

muted jetty
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is there any good jazz harmony tutorials/places that i could start?

low wave
fathom agate
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-japanese traditional music, and traditional music in nations with close musical ties to japan like indonesia with gamelan heavily influenced several french movements in the late 19th & early 20th centuries that im gonna clump together as "impressionism" for convenience, and so impressionist ideas are often drawn from music that means to sound japanese
-disco has a stronger enduring influence outside the west in places that werent effected by the sudden end of disco in the west caused by 'disco demolition night' that forced it to splinter and go back underground. Disco is also heavily influenced by classical and jazz, similar to impressionism.
-in 1990 japan offered money to many brazilians with japanese ancestry known as "dekisagi" to immigrate to japan, this lead to a sudden spike in influence from brazilian music and broadly influence from latin america as a whole.
-video games & anime became huge exports for japan in the last half century, and so they influence culture and music heavily.
-This is a weaker point but japan also had a very developed internet and smartphones long before the rest of the world, so its relationship to electronics and the internet is far more culturally engrained than in the west albeit the west very slowly starting to catch up culturally about technology. The implications of this are more ambiguous, but you can see some of it in the influence of vocaloid and utaite and again vgm, or the rarity of music that tries to sound entirely acoustic but isnt a style of japanese traditional music.
-theres a lot more stuff im not mentioning like japanese minimalism being funded by stores to get background music, but my point here is mostly that japanese music is colorful because its most heavily influenced by styles that are very unusual or "colorful" to the traditional west

pseudo magnet
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that's a good point, "jazz" is a bit of a one-word simplification

pseudo magnet
muted jetty
muted jetty
fathom agate
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"Jpop" is a very very broad category, so it may also help to specialize on more specific styles so its easier to look into how those styles came to be, and in doing so, how to replicate those styles

muted jetty
fathom agate
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Both, research everything you can