Let The Minor Chord Sit

For years I let Spotify tell me what I liked and did nothing with the information. Then I pulled my real top five tracks and looked up every chord chart, and one move showed up again and again: right before the chorus resolves home, the song lets a minor chord sit for a full bar instead of rushing past it.

One song does it with a true borrowed chord, the fourth turning minor for a bar before landing home. The other four do something more ordinary: they just give their normal ii or vi chord real time instead of treating it like a passing tone. Same feeling, different theory each time. The pattern was never the trick. It was the choice not to rush.

I could have guessed this. I did not need real data to know a minor chord feels sadder than a major one, everyone learns that by ear before they learn the chord’s name. What the data gave me was proof: five actual songs I actually chose, not a theory I liked the sound of.

That is the whole argument for studying your own taste before you try to make anything. Not because your taste is unusual, most people’s isn’t, but because a technique you find in your own five favorite songs is a technique you already trust. I built one drill out of it: write a four chord loop, pick one chord to be minor when it shouldn’t be, let it sit. Twenty minutes, not a treatise.

A thousand songs is a lot of days. I would rather spend the first few studying what I already love than guessing at what a song is supposed to do.