So here’s today’s easy-to-implement tip: suspensions.
Suspensions are an incredibly easy way of adding colour to a series of chords. At their simplest, suspensions ‘suspend’ one note of a chord over into and replace the nearest note in the next chord (usually the chord’s middle note, or 3rd), and then ‘resolve’ to the note it originally replaced.
In traditional, western, classical music, suspensions must always be ‘prepared’. The note has to be heard already in one chord for it to be held over into the next chord.
Suspensions sound great – they give a real crunch to the harmony so it feels unresolved, tense but without giving an explicit emotion of happiness or sadness or anything like that. Suspensions can give the music that edge that’ll make your hairs stick up on the back of your neck, and get the audience really involved in the onscreen action.
In pop music and guitar chord-speak or nomenclature, suspended chords are called ‘sus’ chords, eg Gsus4. The ‘4’ simply refers to the distance (or interval) between the root note (in this example, G) and the suspended note (so that would be a C).
I’ll never forget first learning a Dsus4 chord in guitar lessons when I was a wee nipper. It was pretty momentous, I have to say… and I’ve been putting them in my tunes ever since.
I can imagine this really ticked off my then guitar teacher who really just needed the whole class to play the same thing, without me messing it up with sus chords… and 7ths and 9ths and open 5ths. Wasn’t such a fan of the diminished chords though, they were tricky to get your fingers round…
But I digress.
You can ‘chain’ suspensions in a sequence of chords: the suspended note is resolved, then that note becomes the suspension for the next chord, which gets resolved… and so on… (I’m listening to the V for Vendetta soundtrack at the moment and Dario Marianelli just did this at the exact time I was writing… serendipitous or what?)
Because the suspension chords just sound so good even out of context of the harmonies around them, in modern, contemporary music, you can use them without preparing the suspended note. In fact, you can use them with the resolution note at the same time for a different flavour altogether, creating gorgeously crunching chords – Thomas Newman is one composer that springs to mind that likes to do this a fair bit.