“Film Sound” Chords: Chromatic Mediants

A widely used technique in film music is the use of chord progressions involving “chromatic mediants”. These are chords that differ by moving up from the root chord to the mediant chord or down from the root to the submediant chord. The mediant or submediant chords so used can be chromatic, where for example a C to E minor change might instead be a C to Eb minor, or C to E sharp major, and so on. Here is a simple video of a chord progression I created in MuseScore to demonstrate how chromatic median chords can sound. This is not a real composition, just a simple series of chords using simple synthesized sounds in MuseScore (when composing music for production I use high quality sampled instrument libraries):