Do your chords sound chunky and disjointed? You've been keeping the notes in key. You've watched some youtube videos. You know how to build the major and the minor chords, but the chords you see in tracks look nothing like those. It's not an issue of sound design, the chords just aren't flowing. Maybe you've even opened up some other user's tracks (a practice that I highly recommend for learning new techniques) to discover that their chords look nothing like the ones you've seen.

I've been in this boat, and even with so many resources available on the internet, it wasn't until I took a real-deal (high school) music theory course that I understood what makes a pro's II-IV-I progression sound so spicey, and mine so...mechanical. So for your convenience, I am going to condense this high school semester of information with no musical notation, and with everything you need to know in order to take your chords to the next level.

Disclaimers

1 This post assumes you know some basics. If you don't know what it means to be a I-IV-V progression, or how to invert a Major chord. this post is too advanced for you. No worries though. You will eventually get here. (and I believe Infyuthsion has videos on these subjects)

2 All rules are made to be broken. Countless composers have forsaken these rules in favor of a certain 'sound'

SATB Composition

SATB stands for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass. If you've ever taken a voice lesson, you'll immediately recognize these as the human voice types, organized from highest to lowest in pitch. For our purposes, we will refer to the highest note as the Soprano voice, and the lowest as the Bass voice. Here are some rules that composers use to evaluate the 'accuracy' of a chord progression. For lack of a better word, accuracy will just refer to how well the chords conform to these rules.

1. Keep Everybody Close

Say you're singing tenor in a choir. Would it be easier for you to sing consecutive notes that are close together in pitch, or to jump around the octave--each not being really far from the last? Any professional tenor will tell you the latter. Ideally, he's barely moving at all. It is helpful (at least for me) to think of the notes as people's voices, so that I can use my empathy to tell if their working too hard. In an example, if you are playing a C major, and a G major chord, it is probably best to use the third inversion of the G chord, so that your bass, who was singing C, only has move to B, and your alto, who was singing E, only has to move to D. The soprano does not even have to move at all--she's still on G. If you want another note, you can always double one of the other notes in the key in another octave, or choose to use seventh chords. They work in a similar way.

2. No Parallels

Let's reuse our C and G chords. If you didn't invert the G chord, your bass would be going from C to G, and your soprano would be going from G to D. This is already a sizeable distance, but when you have two notes, the same distance apart and moving the same way, you have a parallel. Having some are okay, but as a general rule, you want to avoid parallel fifths, and parallel octaves. These give the chord a mechanical feel, and many music theory professors will shake their head in dissapproval, if you show them something with too many parallel fifths or octaves.

3. The more open, the better

This one is exactly as simple as it sounds. Within reason, give your voices some elbow room. Instead of putting your third right between your root and your dominant (fifth), give the note to the bass, and drop it a whole octave. This makes it so that your root is a sixth up from your bass, which is playing the third. This will give your chord a 'wider' sound. Sometimes you want narrow, especially if it helps you conform with the first rule, and sometimes having more closed voicing helps build tension. But as a general rule, wider chords sound better to many people.

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These will get you far. There are many more principles of tension and rhythm to know to be creative.