Nevermind, an album on major chords

[lozzo]

Here is a thing. If you are okay with HTML, you might want to write an article using GitHub pages instead of any blogging platform (e.g. medium.com) The only constrains then become your skills instead of what your chosen platform has decided to support (typically embedding videos, code snippets, ...)

[mingus88]

Pretty much every chord he played was a power chord. Thats just a root and a 5th.

It’s neither major or minor, because you need the 3rd to establish that

And nearly every punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are. It just sounds good to them. There aren’t any rules because punk is a DIY genre. If you told him he was doing a thing, he’d do the opposite just because. And it would still probably slap.

Kurt cobain was a fantastic song writer but you see these types of articles come out now and then propping him up as a genius. His own quote refutes that, and anyone who listens to punk music will agree that trying to analyze it using classical western tonality is silly and pretentious

[thisismytest]

That’s just not true. Off the top of my head Lithium, Dumb, About A Girl have critical minor and major chords.

Also part of what made him so good was how he played vocal melody and rhythm off of chords. So in some songs you might have plain power chords but the melody hits important major or minor notes.

I don’t know what your definition for genius is but the guy wrote some of the best songs in human history and did so without a primary collaborator or big production crew of cowriters and collaborators. I think we can call him a genius.

[williamdclt]

> punk and metal band uses predominantly power chords, without any real care in the world as to what the progressions are

Somewhat true for punk, mostly incorrect for metal. A lot of metal is very analytical, deeper in musical theory than most popular genres (rock, pop, rnb…), they care _a lot_ about it. Metal is often very technical, it bred some of the top musicians in the world, it’s no surprise they give a shit about it: it’s their craft and a hard one.

In fact I remember the singer of Gojira in a French interview, saying (iirc, surely not quite remembering his point) that metal is in many ways closer to classical than rock, as it values composition so much more where rock is all about interpretation (closer to punk)

[killerstorm]

That's actually not true. Cobain used a rather "weird" technique where he would "accidentally" hit 4th in addition to 5th. That actually has characteristic Nirvana sound and is sometimes called "Cobain chords". Assuming Cobain doesn't hit any other strings these are sus4 chords.

Here's a video with some analysis of "Smells like teen spirit": https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137

I find it really weird that people claim these are power chord even though they sound really different. In my view they are important to the vibe of "Smells like teens spirit" as they bring some dreamy characteristic as they make it a lot brighter compared to what it would be if it was played with only two lowest notes.

[notahacker]

Yeah. And if you did want to analyze it using classical western tonality, then taking into account vocal melodies, quite a lot of it sits better in minor...

Power chords were quite heavily used by some of the bands Kurt liked and were easy to play, hence the stuff that sounded good when he was noodling used a lot of that. Nirvana weren't innovators in tonality, but they had great crunchy guitar tone, catchy hooks and a singer with a raspy voice - exactly what you'd expect a band that didn't care about music theory to potentially excel at, and exactly what was needed to breaking the trend in layered reverbs and guitar hero solos of the 80s ...

[seanhunter]

Yeah. It's really poor musical analysis in general, and my ears just don't agree. For example "Come as you are"- it's really hard not to hear that as functionally in a minor mode.

Also, there's nothing particularly unusual about not having any minor chords. In fact, here's a thing that may surprise some people: most African music for example has no minor chords of any kind, and we're not talking about power chords etc just only major and no minor triads. In African music it's really common to have the first inversion of the 4th degree triad function as the relative minor (so in the key of C that would be A-C-F instead of A-C-E).

[hn_throw2025]

Power chords are also common when guitars are played with distortion, like most of this Nirvana album.

R 5 R - the intervals are far enough apart that in this powerchord that they don’t clash harmonically.

R 3 5 R - the third is too close to the root and fifth, so the sound would be indistinct.

If you play the usual cowboy chords with a high gain tone, it turns to mush.

Of course, you can get around this with inversions to produce different voicings. I like R 5 3 with distortion to push the third up an octave, and keep it clear of it’s neighbours.

[tptacek]

There's a whole thing here where people are trying to axiomatically reconstruct Cobain's guitar playing, but he famously shoplifted riffs from other acts. I don't mean that as a dunk, any more than I would talk down J Dilla. But I feel like the process he used to construct memorable hooks might not be too hard to reverse engineer. The band's most famous hook comes from Boston, for crying out loud.

[tangue]

Yep 90% power chords and the sound on Nevermind was in part due to Butch Vig. It’s simple but at the time quite unheard : bit of compression a lot of overdub, maybe a little flange/chorus but it was quite minimal compared to heavy metal, guitar heroes of the time and really different from the punk bands.

[wvh]

He was not a great guitar player, but he had an ear for tonality and combining melodies on top of those ambiguous chords. I read somewhere he was a Beatles fan, and I can see how their pop vocal layering and more complex instrumentation via George Martin and Co might have had an influence above and beyond the basic blues pentatonic scale and chord progression that inspired a lot of rock and hard rock. Dude did not accidentally "make it", which is the other, often-heard opposite opinion than that of him being a genius.

[anton-c]

They probably didn't care what they were but when you pull them apart it's usually some variation of a 1-4-6-5 with occasional chords on the 2nd or 7th scale degree. Generally it was diatonic. I think most musicians listen to enough to know when something doesn't sound "right"(beyond welcome subversions of expectations usually found in more sophisticated genres, musically. I love and played punk for the record)

[otabdeveloper4]

Here in 2025 a "chord" is the new name for "pitch", and "chord progression" is the new name for "melody".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[cue_the_strings]

A common thing w/ Nirvana songs is that Kurt plays power chords, and then has the thirds (+ other tones) in the vocal melody.

But also, it was just a (counter-) cultural thing to feign lack of music theory knowledge or practice at the time. Quite a destructive one, I might add.

A nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWY4YYmSTWg

[strunz]

Yes, Kurt falls into the "obviously knows music theory without knowing what things are called". He played by ear and had a gift for melody and chord tones. Rick Beato has great videos about Nirvana and Kurt's very sophisticated ear - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l1ZnWc-sFd0&pp=ygUNYmVhdG8gbml...

[florilegiumson]

Really cool project. I love the animations that go with the songs.

I’d go through all of the chord progressions and make sure they actually match what is being played. There are quite a few errors. Happens to everyone.

Also, you and everyone else should remember that while the band is mostly playing power chords and omitting the fifths, what Cobain sings is part of the chord as it’s heard. This means that, for example, a lot of songs do sound major, Smells like teen spirit is probably in F minor.

I find determining key in popular music to be tricky. Most progressions consist of something like 4 chords, and there isn’t the teleology you see in something like Tin Pan Alley or Chopin to give the sense of where one is to arrive. Even the Axis of Awesome progression can be heard a major or minor depending on how you end the song.

[genewitch]

Bill bailey converts songs to minor so it all sounds like funeral dirges, like happy birthday and god save the queen.

[crucialfelix]

Just like many punks before him, he did know chords, but he wanted that classic punk naive sound and in interviews he claims he doesn't know anything. It's about moving up and down the neck and finding the sweet, sick and weird sounds.

I don't know why the article claims this was a Nirvana discovery. It started in the 70s. Discharge, Wire then Fugazi, Minor Threat. These people are smart, just raw, and they like blunt aesthetics.

[kimi]

Don't forget Ramones.

[SwellJoe]

This is a remarkably ignorant take. Literally every detail is wrong.

They aren't major chords, they're mostly power chords, which are neither major nor minor (no third and the third provides the major/minor tonality). They often function as minor chords because of the melody or other parts, or just because of how the progression fits together. They aren't unique or new with Cobain, he was part of a long history of punk and rock and roll.

Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition. He was not particularly innovative or doing something technically unheard of, and he wouldn't have claimed to be. He wanted to be a good songwriter, and he succeeded. That's it, don't make up bullshit about it.

[SoftTalker]

About halfway through my first reading of this piece I thought it was satire. I’m still not convinced it isn’t.

[bigstrat2003]

> Cobain was a good songwriter in the rock and roll tradition.

He wasn't even that. He was a pretty bad songwriter. His music was by and large mopey, plodding monotonous work that is dreary to listen to. Apart from Smells Like Teen Spirit, I don't think he wrote a single song worth listening to.

[exabrial]

Fun Fact: Why is AC/DC nearly all power chords and Major Chords?

short answer: it sounds good

long answer: extra notes are added.

At some point during guitar history, some metal head was like "I wonder what happens if I turn this tube amplifier up ALL THE WAY to 11?" and... it sounded "good". Nobody really knew why at the time, but this distorted electric guitar was like, pleasing to the ear.

Sometime later, we figured out the science of why, after many many models of tube amplifiers had been designed and tinkered with.

It turns out that since electrons, are in fact waves, they can interfere with each other. As they blast across the space/time in a vacuum tube, they can interfere with each other... and if they are modulated in such way, let's say by a musical input, they happen to produce "interference bands" in a certain predictable manner as a function of the input signal.

What does that interference banding look like? Extra notes! Yep, when you slam a powerchord root-fifth at max distortion on a single-ended amplifier (the input stage to a Marshall), you produce "even order harmonics"!

If you rip A+E you'll get:

* Original A (root) * Original E (fifth) * Octave A (very forward, usually -1.5db) * Octave E (very forward, usually -1.5db) * 12th above the root (Another "5th"!) (Not as forward, but audible, -2.5dbish) * C# two octaves up (3rd) (Making this a major chord!) (Not as forward, but audible, -2.5dbish) * G two octaves up (Minor 7th) (Not as forward, but audible, -2.5dbish)

Whoah!? And the pattern continues but at some point amps filter out the series.

And guitar amplifier dudes also figured out how to make all kinds of distortion sound crazy! A 5150 produces "odd order" harmonics and makes adds totally different content. The pre-amp and the power amp sections interfere with each other, making the output function deterministic, but super complicated!

I used to think people were just being snob-ish about tube amps until I really dove into making my own guitar amp design. It's a crazy clash of music theory, functional harmony, and analog electrical engineering!

[feoren]

Every instrument produces harmonics. It has nothing to do with electrons being waves and interfering with each other. Clarinets produce odd-order harmonics too. Anything you can do with analog electrical engineering you can also do to a digital waveform. There is absolutely nothing special or mysterious about a distorted electric guitar except that it sounds cool.

[fuhsnn]

Chromatic major chord progressions were already popular since 60s psychedelic rock, and often used in full triads, no "power chords mostly sounding as major" argument required. Don't sleep on The Rolling Stones!

[jsphweid]

As other posts point out, leaving out the third takes away the major-ness.

It's also worth mentioning the way Kurt often played power chords, using his index for the bass note and barring the rest with his ring finger. This often leads to major chords when the root is on the A string and non-major ambiguous-sounding chords with the root is on the E string. It's obvious as early as the 3rd chord in the intro to Teen Spirit; it has the notes Ab Eb Ab Db (NOTE: Db, not C). It's inconsistent in Kurt's playing (edit: whether or not his strumming makes that 4th string, 4th interval sound come out), but the subtlety is a signature part of Kurt's guitar sound.

Also some of the chord analysis in the site (ex. In Bloom verse) is just flat out wrong.

[cue_the_strings]

If you want a song with all majors, where the full chords are played on the main instrument, first thing that comes to mind is Eno's Golden Hours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxyg3sP03Cs). For parts of songs, maybe the intro to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1pMMIe4hb4)

[codazoda]

If you like this you might like The Storyteller by Dave Grohl, it’s a great read from the vantage point of Nirvana’s drummer and his adventures and music influences both before and after.

The Kindle version is $3 right now.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B091Q9VCP4/

[hbsbsbsndk]

Dave needs all the money he can get, he has two families to feed!

[tim333]

Looking at the chords in the biggest hit, Teen Spirit https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/nirvana/smells-like-tee...

there seems to be a minor chord every 5 seconds or so which doesn't really fit the title?

[vunderba]

From the article:

> Careful music analysis was left for other bands.

I'm sorry... but lol what.

> And it's fascinating to think that Kurt Cobain was unaware of any musical composition's rule he was following, but just trusting his musical instict (sic).

This doesn't come as much of a surprise. A good deal of my friends who are musicians (particularly those who could sing) found themselves writing music at a pretty young age before they had any real understanding of music theory.

[0_____0]

It was wild to watch deadmau5 live streams and see him dink around in the piano roll seemingly with no plan or idea what key he was in. This isn't a knock either, clearly he makes some dope 4/4 house bangers, but not because he went to Berklee.

[marko-djuric]

Not sure Im following.

What is the point of the thread. Github page HTML or music theory.

[gatestone]

I don't think there has been a rock album ever since, that would have been so big, popular, revolutionary and generation defining. I guess some genius must have been there.

[Synaesthesia]

Kinda like the Beatles there are clasically "wrong" chord progressions that just work. (EG V-IV-1). Just a classic punk album.

[seanhunter]

V-VI-I is a plagal cadence. It's most definitely not classically wrong. Take any old hymn, Bach corale etc if they do a big "Amen" that will be a plagal cadence.

https://www.musictheoryacademy.com/how-to-read-sheet-music/c...

For some reason, people who don't know music theory say things like this about the Beatles because they think because they haven't heard something before it must be new.

[senderista]

That’s just the end of a classic 12-bar blues progression.

[codedokode]

I am under impression that almost every progression works as long as you are in the key, am I wrong?

[sambapa]

I can explain this in one sentence: major chords sound the best on distorted guitar because of the harmonic series, eot.

[eimrine]

Finally the text in not-ask-submission do not become just a comment to HN post?

[andrewinardeer]

I wonder if genius is carried in the genes?

If so, let's see what happens with Kurt's grandson.