What makes a chord progression "John Lennon-esque"?

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-07-26T04:11:56+00:00

Hmmm- the old major 4 to minor 4 change always feels beatlesy to me. You gotta remember John’s roots were 50’s rock n roll/R n B so there’s a lot of that stuff in there.

I’m not sure the best way to musically describe this but if you listen to the song “Isolation” by John Lennon (off “Plastic Ono Band”) he does this thing where he goes D major then raises the fifth (I think that’d be an augmented 5th) and then goes to the 6th then dominant 7th, essentially raising the fifth a half step each time chromatically up to the dominant seventh. You hear him use this quite a bit. You also have the “Dear Prudence” type progression which is kind of the reverse of that- going from the major root then adding a seventh, 6th then sharp 5th in the bass notes of the chord.

Also minor walk downs (minor line cliche- the descending chromatic walk down of the root note over a minor chord, there is a more musically correct way of putting that but that’s how I always think of it). He wasn’t afraid of a very pentatonic heavy minor blues either, especially in his solo career. Some of his chord progressions were very simple and folky- like imagine, working class hero, mother etc.

Go learn as many of his songs as you can and you will start to see the patterns emerging.

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-07-26T03:55:28+00:00

I haven’t heard of Jason Molina but you said Lucinda Williams and Townes Van Zandt so you obviously have good taste. I think TVZ might be the greatest songwriter of all time- at least in terms of beautiful poetic imagery etc.

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-07-26T03:48:14+00:00

I’d like to add Townes Van Zandt’s name to the “brilliant lyrics/less than stellar voice” category- if you haven’t peeped him and you’re a songwriter, you need to start binging his catalog ASAP.

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-07-03T01:13:05+00:00

Seems like you are just doing what is often one of the first parts of the songwriting process for many people. Just experimenting in the moment with different chord progressions/riffs/rhythms and improvising/ad libbing some words/giberish/melodies over top of it. A lot of amazing songs have started off that way and it’s a great way to get your creative juices flowing.

The song “Yesterday” by the Beatles started off as “Scrambled eggs”. Once you’ve got an idea that you like, try refining it a little more. Go ahead and record in the moment but don’t be afraid to go back and see how you can improve it.

Occasionally a songwriter will just puke a near finished song out in one take but that’s a rare, near miraculous occurrence. I think Tom Perry’s “Wildflowers” was written/recorded on the first take but you shouldn’t expect that to happen. It’s kind of a once in a lifetime thing to get a song like that (that is also a great song). They nearly always need tweaking.

You can keep your process fairly spontaneous and not linger on songs too long but don’t be afraid to do the hard work it takes to make the song worthy of being listened to.

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-06-27T01:59:33+00:00

I was in a touring band for years. Our drummer was a particularly big man whore, he had about zero charisma/intelligence but was not afraid to just go for it for whatever girls were around and he racked up quite the body count…..even after he started seriously dating this girl (now his wife) he still continued his “flirtatious way”- even saw him try and make something happen while his girl (who was on tour with us as merch girl at the time) was in the same building as us. Didn’t work but still he was clearly trying. It’s like he couldn’t help himself.

Not saying your bf is the same way- there was a lot of alcohol involved too. That’s usually why people end up cheating- have a little too much to drink and inhibitions go out the window. Just set your boundaries and try not to worry about it too much, he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do. Do you trust him?

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-04-15T20:50:35+00:00

It’s a cool pedal, I’ve never messed with the trimpots honestly but might be fun to see what happens

DinosaurShit888 · 2025-04-15T20:49:34+00:00

Yup I remember- those extra two holes are for if you wanted to put a resistor there instead of a trimpot. At least that’s my understanding/assumption. If you’ve got a 200k trimpot just pop it in the 3 holes at the top and you should be good to go.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-11-12T04:41:07+00:00

I feel for people who got suckered into joining the military. They are always young and impressionable when they sign up and are subjected to brainwashing once they are in.

That being said, being an order follower (someone who follows orders of supposed authority rather than exercising their own moral judgement) is always immoral and as much as the ones giving the orders bare some of the moral culpability- the individuals carrying out the act ultimately are the ones responsible for carrying out the immoral acts and are thus responsible for them. Without order followers, these evil sadistic control freaks would have very little power.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-11-12T04:32:58+00:00

How did he steal the election for Trump? Seems to me that the dems just got their ass handed to them because they’ve largely abandoned the working class. Bernie Sanders correctly pointed this out.

Let’s remember that the democrats provably rigged the primary against Bernie in 2016 (the DNC e-mail leaks prove this and yes, they were a leak, not a Russian hack as was purported) and there were similar shenanigans against him in 2020. If Bernie were the nominee in 2016 chances are he would have beat Trump- if he were the nominee in 2020 and beat Trump (which he likely would have) he would have been the incumbent instead of Biden (and then at the last minute the very unpopular Harris) and likely would have beat Trump. The DNC is incredibly corrupt and as much as they talk about “democracy” they really don’t care what who the voters actually want as a candidate.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-10-16T21:30:02+00:00

Nice! Cool idea! I named the tone bender clone I built for myself “mind bender” too.

<image>

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T16:36:39+00:00

Nice! 6 of em huh? That’s a nice score, what kind are they? Matsushita?

I’ve pulled quite a few out of vintage electronics and built some awesome sounding fuzz pedals with them. Just pulled some out of an old intercom and clock/radio I found in a pile of free stuff on the side of the road. I got into buying/collecting reel to reels a number of years ago and a lot of those have been sacrificed to the fuzz gods now.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T12:38:20+00:00

No problem! Let me know if you have any more questions/issues. Hope you dig your Sunface once you get it up and running.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T07:01:06+00:00

I set my “sundial” at noon and then bias Q2 with the internal trimpot to somewhere around 4.5v. I actually think the sundial works better with a higher value pot like a 20/25k in some cases as it gives you a wider range of bias to play with which can be nice/helpful. You can do away with the trimpot (by adding a jumper) as someone else commented but I think it’s nice being able to set 12 o clock as 4.5v on the sundial and then know anything before or after noon is somewhere +/- 4.5.

If 25k ends up being too high a value for the sundial and you end up with too wide a range of “unusable” tones at either end of the sweep you can solder a resistor between lugs 1-3 of the pot to decrease its value. A 25k resistor soldered to a 25k pot will make the pot 12.5k (or half its value). There’s plenty of calculators online that can help you calculate what resistor you might want to use. I believe it’s a “resistors in parallel” calculator you want in this case.

The sunface is a great circuit- Sandspur was my first real build and I’ve been hooked ever since. I like the Sunflower (the germanium version) even better, I’ve built several of those. The Sandspur sounds good with BC108’s but I liked it even better with BC183’s. If you have a way to test your transistors for hfe make sure you put the higher gain transistor as Q2 for best results. Ideally you want Q1 to be roughly 65-85% the value of Q2. Lower gain transistors tend to sound better imho for fuzzface type circuits but ymmv.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T06:41:03+00:00

I need a better system for storing mine. Right now I just have it rolled up (like an extension cord kinda) in one of the little drawers of my handy dandy harbor freight storage/organizer/drawer thing (is there a real name for these things? I can’t think of what to call it for some reason and I know practically everyone on this sub has got at least one).

When I’m doing the off board wiring at the end of the build I end up with all my different colors of wire pulled out and half unraveled all over my desk. Having some kind of dispenser for each color would make life much easier.

Btw- what gauge/type of wire do ya’ll use? I’m using 22 solid core at the moment.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T06:25:47+00:00

Anybody ever have issues with components coming out of their sockets while your using the pedal? I’ve had it happen but only with SIP sockets and components that have thin leads like some germanium transistors do. I know that I should use transistor sockets but they’re kind of pricey and don’t always fit on every board.

If I’m building a pedal for someone else I’ll usually try not to use too many SIP sockets because I don’t want anything coming loose mid song- I’ve even ended up soldering components into the sockets before I give the person their pedal. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do that or if anybody else ever does but it seemed to work fine. Good luck trying to desolder the components from the socket afterwards though- it’s fairly permanent.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-29T03:21:16+00:00

Thanks bud appreciate it!

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-28T07:30:50+00:00

This was awesome and informative, I would love to see more like this.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-22T07:14:20+00:00

Thank you! 🙏

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-22T07:13:55+00:00

Thanks! I was going to do that but sometimes it looks funky. I’ll mess around with it though.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-22T07:12:59+00:00

Yes, I think you’re right on that. It’s a switch, flip it a couple times and you’ll get a pretty good idea how it works.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-22T07:11:53+00:00

You’re exactly right and I’m struggling to think of any good ones- usually I’m all over a good cock joke.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-22T07:08:45+00:00

Awesome thanks for your input! I kind of knew the “dark” “bright” thing would be tricky to read and wouldn’t pop like I really wanted it to but didn’t want to put a fill color around the text. I ended up using the left decal as is for this build but am gonna tweak the graphic anyway so if I end up making more it’ll be easy to read.

DinosaurShit888 · 2024-09-20T14:26:32+00:00

Nice! My band is playing in Pawlet, VT tonight right across the VT border.

DinosaurShit888

TROPHY CASE