Modern composing techniques | cush chords

The most important objective of any modern musician/composer, due to the globalisation and ease of access to endless amounts of music through streaming, is to catch the listeners interest as quickly as you can. Regardless of genre the general audience demands a reason to listen to what you make; and with an oversaturated market like music production, there is little they won't have heard already.

How do you avoid being uninteresting, but not pretentious?

Using cush chords, simply put is the method of retaining the tonic (first) chord whilst shifting the other chords in your progression to another modal set of chords, in a new key.

For example, let's begin in C major. The 2 5 4 1 pattern would consist of:

Dm / Gmaj / Fmaj / Cmaj

This sounds fantastic by itself, but listeners have heard this progression 1000 times without knowing it. So how do we engage them?

Let's say we use cush chords, and shift everything EXCEPT the tonic C major to the key of Eb major, a minor third above. You use the respective chords from this key aside from the tonic C.

Fm / Bb7sus / Abm / Cmaj

(Instructive video by openstudiojazz for visual explanations)

And here is a transcribed example of these sorts of chordal changes and methods used:

Now your progression sounds vastly more open, more engaging more interesting. This isn't limited to just shifting a minor third above and you can do it as many times as you want in a composition. Implementing something simple like this gives your composing the edge above standard methods used by the majority of others in your position.

Happy composing! let me know if composition effortposts are something wanted or not