Synth Pop

Bright, Sequenced Pop With a Synth Hook

The pulse is a machine, dead on the grid, and it usually sits around 120bpm. Chords change once a bar and stay mostly plain, so the colour comes off the synths rather than out of the harmony. A poly comp states them, a pad holds underneath, and an arp runs over the top as a voice of its own. In most songs the hook is a Juno lead, and the singer is in front of all of it.

The First Wave and the Revival

The first wave is British bands like OMD, late seventies into the early eighties. It's busy from bar one, a bass figure under one hand and chords under the other. La Roux brought that back in 2009. In the revival, CHVRCHES and Nation of Language let the arp carry the motion and save the weight for the chorus, so a verse runs on almost nothing.

Why It’s Synth Pop

Synth pop runs on a machine pulse in 4/4, anywhere between 85 and 155bpm, with the kit dead on the grid and a few hits on the sixteenth-note triplet. A sequenced bass rides that pulse. The chords last a bar and stay mostly plain triads, with fewer extensions than dream pop takes. Synths carry the arrangement, and when there's a guitar it picks chord shapes. There's a chorus every time.

The Chords It’s Built From

Written as numbers rather than letters, because a progression is a shape and the shape works in any key. I is the chord you start from, V is the fifth step up, and lower case means minor. So I V vi IV in C is C, G, Am, F.

major

About three songs in five. The brighter side. Driving rather than sweet, since these chords move a bar at a time.

I IV14%V I IV6%I V IV6%I vi IV V5%I vi V IV3%I V vi IV3%

and 76 rarer loops this mode can take

minor

About three songs in ten. Melancholic, and it draws on its own pool of chords.

VII i VI11%i VII iv VI6%i III v iv3%i VI III VII3%i IV VI3%i VII iv III3%

and 44 rarer loops this mode can take

mixolydian

About one song in twenty. Major with a flat seventh, so home is a dominant that never resolves and the loops sit on I and bVII. It's the commonest of the modes here.

I ii ♭VIII ♭III ♭VI v ♭VII♭VII I ♭VII ♭III IVI ♭VII ♭III ♭VII I IV ♭VII IVI ♭VIII ♭VII IV ♭VIII IV ♭VII IV♭VII I IV♭VII IV I ♭VII IV

lydian

About one song in fifty. Major with a raised fourth, so home floats instead of settling. The loops sit on I and II with no four chord.

vi I iii II II I II I III III II V III V vi IIII I VII I V II I

dorian

About one song in fifty. Minor with a natural sixth, which turns the fourth chord major. Bittersweet rather than dark.

III VII i IV VIIi III IVi IVi IV i VIIi III VII IVIV i VIIIV i VII IV i

About three songs in five come out major and three in ten minor, and roughly one in eleven goes modal. Mixolydian is about one song in twenty, more than dorian and lydian put together. A song keeps its key and mode to the last bar.

Every chord from outside the key here is one this genre's bands play. In a major song they nearly all come from the minor key on the same home note, the flat seven most, then the flat six and the minor four. A minor song borrows from the major key instead, mostly the major four. Every part follows the chord, so over B flat in C nobody holds a B natural or lands on one.

A chord holds a bar through most of a song and two bars through intros and outros. That's the same pace dream pop moves at. Once a bar under a machine pulse is what keeps a sequenced part readable, with the arp already running over the top.

A bridge slows down further. It takes a progression carrying a chord the song hasn't played yet, and where it has the bars for the whole thing, each chord gets twice the length it has either side. The drums move to a groove of their own and the lead turns its idea upside down, over chords changing half as often.

Some songs break for an instrumental between two sung sections, and the odd one has two. Nobody sings in it. Unlike a bridge it brings no new chord, just the intro's progression where the intro moves through one, or the verse's where it doesn't. Underneath, the band from the section before usually carries on without the singer, at the verse's level and the verse's pace of chord changes. It runs four, eight, twelve, sixteen or twenty-four bars, each as often as records near its tempo break for that long, whatever the genre. A break lasts about the same number of seconds at any tempo. So a fast song's instrumental runs more bars and a slow song's fewer.

Before the second chorus it's a link, taking the song back into a verse, and where the intro had a tune, the same instrument plays it again. Anywhere else it's the lead's solo. It starts simply, builds to a single highest note and ends on one it holds.

Songwriting lore says a chorus should arrive home on the chord it opened with. Here a chorus ends where its own loop ends. A section that resolves has stopped, and these songs don't stop.

How Much Colour a Chord Takes

A seventh puts a fourth note on top of a triad and takes the plainness out of it. A suspension swaps the third for the note above or below it, so the chord hangs unresolved until it drops back.

Here the triads mostly stay as they are. About a fifth of the chords in a song take a seventh, where dream pop puts one on about half, and a song's own rate runs from one in ten to one in three. Suspensions are rarer still, with two songs in five taking none at all. The colour comes off the synths rather than out of the harmony, so the patch you load decides more here than the chord under it.

How much of either a song gets is settled once and held all the way through, so one song comes out heavy with them and the next is mostly plain. Two bands with the same influences still write differently. Decide it chord by chord and every song drifts to the same middle, which is how a run ends up sounding like one song over and over.