If your music isn’t getting the play counts you want or attracting the fans you expect, it’s likely because your productions have no emotional pull. I would imagine this is the sole reason why, out of the 60k songs uploaded to Spotify daily, only a tenth of a percentage gets more than a few streams.
Writing music that elicits a feeling from your listeners and an emotional response from your fanbase is the secret sauce to a lasting career as a music producer. Nobody knows this better than Corren Cavini, whose melodic acumen has garnered support from Eelke Kleijn, David Hohme, and many other top-tier talents in the music industry.
And with Corren closing out the year hot with a string of phenomenal releases and a couple of massive bookings at ADE, we decided it was high time we sit this guy down and pick his brain about how he manages to write emotional and compelling dance music that pulls at your heartstrings and moves a crowd all at the same time.
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What’s the most important to consider when adding emotion to your chord progression?
To me it’s not really a question of adding emotion into a progression; the very core of my creative process is about searching for the right combination of chords and chord voicings to tell the story of whatever it is I’m writing that song about.
I think that is the most important thing to consider in music: what story am I telling with this song? How do I put what I feel into something other people will hear?
For example, I wrote ‘Haunted’ when I had anxieties I couldn’t seem to let go of. The track has some sound design tricks to give off that ‘Haunted’ vibe, but the chord progression decides its emotion.
Why is it so difficult to write highly emotional chords?
Accessing your emotions and writing music about that can be incredibly scary. That process is very personal and intimate; for me, that’s where the crux is for writing music.
Of course, it still helps a lot to have knowledge of music theory and be able to play an instrument, but once you’ve crossed that bridge of the emotional process, it gets a lot easier.
There are a lot of plugins out there that can help with this nowadays; for example, I like XFer Records’ Cthulhu. That helped me when I wrote ‘My Mind’, one of my most emotional tracks in which the harmonic main synth was programmed with the help of Cthulhu.
Interested in crafting unforgettable dance tracks? Explore ‘Songwriting in Dance Music: Tim Green Shares How He Writes Music That Stays with You’ – enhance your songwriting skills here.
Listen To ‘My Mind’ By Corren Cavini Below
How do you remain objective about the emotion in a progression after hearing it on a loop in a studio session?
When something comes from the heart, that’s a feeling that does not get lost – Ever.
The most exciting moment for me is to see the reactions when other people hear it; that’s when you know if it hits them in the same place where you wrote it.
The beautiful thing is that the same music can mean very different things to different people, but I have noticed that the tracks that mean the most to me also resonate the most with others.
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Where do you think producers go wrong that results in emotionless chords?
Maybe some producers are more focused on chasing a particular impact with their music rather than putting their heart and soul into the song they’re writing.
When you focus on the song’s feel first, the impact will follow.
How does sound design relate to adding emotion to your chord progressions?
Once you have found the right chords to tell your story, you can still express those in very different ways. You can emphasize different sides of that progression by spreading it across other instruments and tweaking them. A synth with a very open filter is much more energetic, while an organic instrument played softly can express vulnerability.
For all your theory nerds out there – My This Never Happened debut 1635 is a good example of this concept; it is the same progression (I-VI-III-V in Fm = Fm-Db-Ab-Cm) throughout the track, but in certain parts, it’s pretty energetic in that lead synth whilst it’s also very emotional with the piano in the break.
Interested in Hyperbits’ unique approach? Explore ‘Tuning into Authenticity: Hyperbits Talks Production, Teaching, and ‘Another Life” – uncover his insights here.
When do you know a chord progression is truly finished?
For me, that’s when you see people react to it for the first time. I remember when I played ‘A Crying Synthesizer’ live for the first time, I saw people tearing up, and that’s when I knew I had succeeded in telling that musical story.
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Share one production secret about adding more emotion to music that you wish you had learned earlier.
Step outside of your main chord progression for a specific part of a song. In Tempranillo, the main progression is in Fm but when it needs to be more uplifting around 2:32 it goes to Ab (the relative major to Fm).
That lifts the emotion up, and from that moment, I start a different progression that slowly builds until it stays at Cm7, the dominant 7 natural to Fm, which really gets the tension as high as possible until it drops back into the main progression at 3:03.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
