TL;DR - is chord ii "supposed" to be a lower, or higher pitch than chord I? or do we have the freedom to create chords as we'd like?
Before I start the post, I also wanna say that I realize pretty much all of these production rules are meant to be broken/experimented with. But I'm quite new to music theory, so I wanna get a solid understanding of the basics before trying some weird things.
I've got a minimal/basic understanding of music theory. So, the thing is, I've recently found out about hookpad/hooktheory (www.hooktheory.com). Looks like it's gonna be great for creating chord progressions or melodies on the go (regardless of the outcome of this question), but it's causing me a little bit of confusion in terms of how chords should be. I'll be talking about C major for any notes in the next part.
In hookpad, chord I is (might be wrong on the inital octave but doesn't really change anything): C3 - C4 - E4 - G4
and chord ii is: D3 - A3 - D4 - F4
I understand how they're able to move the notes around like that, in comparison to the "root triad" (I being C-E-G), but I don't know why they are moving them in that way. The biggest reason this is confusing me is that throughout learning the basic "root triads" I've become used to the fact that each successive chord is higher pitched than the previous (ii higher pitched than I, iii higher pitched than ii, etc, because of the root triads simply being C-E-G -> D-F-A...).
Due to this, when I make chords, I try and respect that tendency. So basically, in the end, the chords in hookpad give a much different groove when I->ii is keeping a similar "average pitch" (don't want to say same pitch, cause they're different notes, obviously, but that's basically what I mean) while if I made I->ii in my DAW, it would be noticeably going up in pitch.
Any advice or simply telling me what I can research for this would be greatly appreciated. I tried searching a LOT on this sub and on google, but I'm probably not using the right keywords.
Submitted November 26, 2016 at 01:50PM by 4everPluto https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/5f0aou/are_certain_chords_supposed_to_have_a_certain/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Saturday, November 26, 2016