In this Ableton Live tutorial video, Liveschool Trainer Yama Indra (aka GLOVES) shows you one of the most distinct sounding types of house chord progressions techniques, widely used in electronic music, known in music theory jargon as either ‘Chord Planing’ or ‘Parallel Harmony’ .

This style of chord progression infiltrated electronic music as a by-product of the use (or misuse?) of samplers in the 80’s and early 90s and has been used extensively ever since, particularly in UK Garage, Deep House, Rave and more recently Future Garage and modern Deep House. Though the technique is relatively simple to execute, the notes and chords that it results in are often astoundingly complex and rich sounding.

The video goes through examples by Disclosure, Kerri Chandler, Julio Bashmore & Lone who have all used this style of chord progression across many of their tracks. Yama demonstrates how to create this style of chord progression, touches on the music theory behind it but then shows you how to go beyond the traditional limitations of this technique using Ableton Live 9’s new Convert Audio to MIDI feature.

Here are the full-length versions of the song examples used in the video…

Kerri Chandler chords: Video link

Disclosure chords: Video link

Lone chords: Video link

Julio Bashmore chords: Video link

Commodores – Easy (where we sampled our chord from!): Video link



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Learn more about Music Theory for Electronic Music.