Chords and Chord Progressions 101

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on Chords and Chord progressions. This is the one oh one course where we're going to be covering the basics. Whether you're interested in learning about intervals, basic chords or how chords are extracted out of major and minor scales, I got you covered. We're going to dive deep into these basics so that you can easily jump on a pop track, start to write your own compositions, or just generally better understand harmony. As a segue into some more advanced material, we're also going to dip our toes into some diminished harmony. So there's going to be something for everyone within this course. This course really is designed to be a prep for the two oh one and three oh one courses available within the same series. By the time you get to the end of the three oh one course, you'll have a pretty fundamental understanding of Western harmony, including classical influences, jazz influences, and, of course, all this can be wrapped up into pop, rock, funk, and so many other genres. Now, there is going to be a project within this course, and it's relatively simple. What you're going to do is you're going to take one of your favorite class topics from within this course and apply it to a chord progression that you have played previously. So let's say there's a pop song that you really like to play or there's a composition that you're working on, and at some point, it uses a let's say, four chord chord progression. Well, I want you to take one of the things that we've covered and apply it to that chord progression so that you can start to develop it even further. Of course, from there, you're going to record yourself and submit it so I can check it out. But there is going to be a full class that outlines all the details of this project, so make sure that you check out that class. If you're interested to really instill those fundamentals within harmony and playing chords on the piano, then this course is exactly for you. I hope you're ready to have some fun, but also put in some work. I'll catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: So this course does have a project that you're expected to submit. What I'd like you to do is extract the chords out of either a major or a minor scale and randomize them so that you're playing with four different chords. One of those chords should be the one chord. So if you're in the key of C major, you've extracted them from the C major scale, one of the chords should be C major. Ideally, the first chord, but it doesn't have to be. So if we have chord one, two, three, four, five, six, and the diminished chord, number seven, which is a little bit harder to incorporate, let's take four of those numbers and randomize them. Again, I'm going to start with one because I think one is a really safe place to start, and I'm not going to touch that diminished chord just to keep things really safe. Let's go one, four, three, five. This is a chord progression I would not usually play, but it can almost be randomized. So one is C major, four is F major, three is E minor, five is G major. Now, I understand we haven't gone through all the material of this course yet. So make sure that you do go through the entire course. Feel free to come back to this class just to remind yourself what it is you have to be doing. But once you've learned how to extract chords from a scale, you're just going to be coming up with your own chord progression. Come up with a few, in fact, and pick your favorite one and make sure that's the one that you're submitting for this class project. From there, you're going to do a really basic recording of yourself, either audio or video. You're going to submit it to me through whatever you prefer. I usually go with YouTube, Vmeo, SoundCloud, anything where you can supply a public link. Make sure that you're submitting that link within your project submission. I'll review what you've done. I'll give you some feedback for better or for worse. I'll let you know what you did well, as well as some areas of improvement. Again, make sure that you pick out a few different chord progressions, because sometimes when they're really randomized, it might sound okay, but it might not be your favorite. So pick your favorite progression that you've come up with and make sure that you're submitting that one. Of course, if you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out. This should be a little bit challenging, but mostly just fun. So I hope you have a fun time doing it, and I look forward to seeing what you submit. 3. Disclaimer: Short disclaimer video. You'll notice that I have a real keyboard where you can see my hands as well as a midi keyboard just above it. That midi keyboard can be set to flats or two sharps, and I do go back and forth quite a bit between those two. However, in some examples, I might be taking you from a base key like C major and C minor and taking you into an alternate key like E major and E minor. C minor uses flats, E major and E minor use sharps. So in some cases, you may hear me referring to flats, but on the screen, you're seeing sharps or vice versa. Ultimately, trust what I'm saying. If I'm talking about C minor and I'm referring to flats, the C minor scale has flats. Trust what I say, not always what you see. There's only a couple moments where that does happen, but I wanted to give the disclaimer now. If you're watching this video, it is expected that you would know that a C sharp is a D flat and a G flat is an F sharp Again, there's only a couple of moments where that happens, but I just want you to understand that it was a bit of a tough workaround for that particular discrepancy, but I did my best to make sure that before each video, I set the sharps or flats accordingly. The only time there's going to be any issues is when in one class, we're talking about different keys, sharps and flats. So just be aware of that. Everything else will be very straightforward, and I'll see you in the next class. 4. Intervals: Hello. Welcome to our first discussion about harmony. We're going to start by talking about building blocks within music. In other words, intervals. An interval is the distance between two notes. For example, a C way up to an E. That might be considered a large interval, C, to an A, C, to an E, even a C to itself, the distance between any two notes. And we're going to start off by talking about four of the smallest intervals available. Think of it this way. Why would I start with these small intervals? Well, even if you want to build a ego castle, let's say, a big ego castle, you still need to know how those small building blocks work. Those are essentially going to help you detail the castle as you build it. Well, in music, for us to build a song, we need to then deconstruct things down to scales or what we might call a key center, and then even then, how do we build that? Well, we boil it down to these small intervals. So let's get discussing them. The first one is the minor second, also known as a semitone. A minor second is the distance between two notes that is smallest. There's no notes in between. So C to C sharp or D to D sharp. F to F sharp, G to G sharp, A to A sharp. There's five so far, C sharp to D, D sharp to E. So any of these black to whites or whites to blacks that are right beside each other, as well as a white white where there's no black in between, and the other white white, where there's no black in between. Now, you might be thinking, but, Josh, there's another white white here and another white white. Well, here we used B and C, followed by ENF. So we don't need to do that again. This is another B and C, another E and F. So there are 12 of every interval. And we started with the minor second or the semitone. So one more time, Whites to Blacks. Blacks to whites and the white white semitones. That is one of four intervals that I want you to understand. Please feel free to practice these on the side. Doesn't have to be a lot of practice just enough to understand that a semitone is two notes that are closest together with no note in between. And again, it's often called a minor second. Next up is a major second. This tends to be how in the West, we start most of our scales. Think of it like do to. So in this case, the major second, what can also be called a tone or a whole tone would be C to D. Where there's one note in between, in this case, a black note, and we have a few of those types of tones, C to D, D to E, E to F doesn't count. There's no black notes, so F to G, G to A and A to B. So that's five white white tones or major seconds. We have a couple of black black tones, again, also called major seconds. We're going to be referring to them both ways probably within the course, but I'm going to try to focus on the minor second, major second end of the spectrum. So we have the black black, black, black, black, black. Some of the tougher tones would be these diagonal ones that happen within this large gap here. So when they have the group of three, group of two, group of three, group of two, here we have, as I mentioned, a larger gap between the groups. So we're going to choose a diagonal tone with one note in between and another diagonal tone. We have here, same idea. Again, major second, major second, so we end up getting all of these major seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. So now you know your minor seconds, semitones, and your major seconds, tones or whole tones. Those are used to create scales, but we also need to understand thirds or what might be called skips. So there's two types of thirds that we'll start with. There's a minor third and a major third. And as you can probably guess, we're still slowly expanding and getting slightly bigger. So we had zero notes in between our two notes to create a semitone, one note in between our two notes to create a tone. Now we're going to expand a bit further. So what happens if I have one, two notes in between, and I get to this third note here. So we have two notes in between. There's our minor third. So again, minor second semitone, major second, tone, minor third. And then you can probably guess major third is slightly bigger. So let's go through the different minor thirds and then the major thirds, and then you'll have all those basic building blocks to refer back to as we go through this course. So minor thirds. Whites to Blacks. There's three of them, C to E flat, F to A flat, G to B flat. We have a couple of black white minor thirds. We have a couple of black black minor thirds, as well as some white white minor thirds. You'll notice these jump around quite a bit. So I would recommend maybe starting these chromatically. So you start with C to E flat, and then you just move both of these notes up a minor second or a semitone. So you move it up the smallest distance, smallest distance. There's your next minor third, smallest distance, smallest distance. Your next minor third, so on and so forth. You can practice them ascending or then coming back down, descending. Almost sounds kind of cartoony. So we also have major thirds, as I mentioned, so let's get discussing those. So we have C to E, in this case. So that's your classic do ra, me, do me, so the distance between a dog and a me. So we have one, two, three notes in between our two notes. Here they are one, two, three. So let's go through them chromatically again. Cromatically, again, just means moving by semitones. So I'm going to go up until I reach my next C to E, use remember, I started on a C to an E down here, then we'll work our way back down. I'm using some very primitive fingerings just so you guys can see very clearly, but you could also try doing this on one hand, and then try the other hand, as well. Ain't my idea. So we covered minor seconds, also known as semitones. That's the smallest distance between two notes, no notes in between. A major second also referred to quite often as a tone or a whole tone. That's where we have the distance between two notes with one note in between. Following that, we talked about the minor third. Now we're getting from what we called steps before. I don't know if I referred to these as steps, but again, seconds can also be referred to as steps. There's so many overlapping terms. I want to get some of them out of the way. But again, I'll try to stick with a few boiled down versions of these terms for this course. So seconds, minor seconds, major seconds are referred to as steps. It's almost like the fingers are stepping along the keys. One step at a time taking a little walk. But what if I start to skip over notes? Well, then I'm starting to get into skips. And those are Our thirds. Minor third, having two notes in between Our notes. Major third, which has three notes in between, hour notes. So we pick a note, pick another note and there's three in between. That's your major third. And that's it. So the minor second, major second, steps minor third, major third, skips. These are the building blocks for our scales and our chords that we're going to be referring to to give you context so you can better understand harmony harmonic chord progressions and generally how all of this stuff is structured. I will see you in class number two. 5. Basic Chords: Next up, let's talk about cords, also referred to as triads. We're going to be talking about three basic types of cords, major, minor and diminished. And with these three chords, you can get tons of mileage. Almost every pop song under the sun can be boiled down to just these three types of chords. So let's get into it. First, let's just talk about the term major and what it means in music. Major essentially just means happy, joyful, triumphant, all the sort of synonyms for happy. So if we listen, just, for example, to a quick chord, which we'll dissect in a moment, we can hear it sounds pretty happy. So that's major, minor refers to sad or spooky. Now, for the most part, a minor chord is going to give you a more sad sound, and a diminished chord is going to give you that more spooky sort of sound, but they do sort of overlap one another. So let's start to boil things down. What is a major chord or a major triad? Try meaning three, there's three notes in these. Whether it's major, minor or diminished, we're starting with three note chords. And we're going to be using skips. Remember our minor third and major third from the first class? Well, let's start to apply them. If I start with a major third from C, so C up one, two, three, four semitones, and then up another three, one, two, three, we have the distance between the bottom and the middle is a major third. The distance between the middle and the top is a minor third, and that's essentially the formula for creating a major chord. We can do that anywhere. Let's start it on a couple of different notes. How about E flat? One, two, three, four, one, two, three. There's another major triad. One more. B flat. One, two, three, four, one, two, three. Beautiful. So you can see it's really helpful to know your semitones. So make sure that you do practice them, I'd say more than the other intervals, because those smallest building blocks you're already starting to see, they help us build chords, and later, you'll also see scales as well. So the major chord, the major triad is a major third and then a minor third. Four semitones, three semitones. The opposite is true for a minor chord. If I start on C, and I go up 123 semitones and the 1234. Now I have a minor tread, you can hear that sad flavor. Listen. That's just a C minor chord moving up through the notes. Back down. So let's try that formula built off of a couple of different notes. Let's try B next. If I go up one, two, three, one, two, three, four, there it is. B minor. How about E flat, D sharp? One, two, three, one, two, three, four. Bad. Pretty minor sounding. And one last one. Let's go from G this time. One, two, three, one, two, three, four. So you can do that built off of any note on the piano. I would say work with your teacher on this, start to learn maybe all of the white, white, white chord shapes that are minor and the white, white, white chord shapes that are major. Get to know them intimately and then move on to, for example, white, black, white chord shapes. You could also do this chromatically. In other words, start on C, find your minor chord, then move up one note, one semitone, do the same thing. Up to D, same thing, and just move it up very gradually. But again, I would work with your teacher to really implement this stuff, to really get it learned and memorize it. But you can do this on your own, as well, too. There's a few different ways. So like I mentioned, learn them based on their shapes, so all the white white white shapes. You could practice them chromatically, or, again, you can practice them completely randomized. So pick Randy random note and then pick major minor or diminished. Now, we haven't talked about diminished yet, so let's finish up with that. A diminished chord is two minor thirds. Starting on D, one, two, three, one, two, three, definitely the spookier side of minor. Let's try a couple more. B, one, two, three, one, two, three. Here's our B diminished. F, one, two, three, one, two, three, so two minor thirds, stacked. There it is F diminished. So again, feel free to practice your majors, minors and diminished randomly, chromatically, or with your teacher based on groups of shapes. Now, there's one formula that we didn't talk about, which is two major thirds to build a triad. These are called augmented chords, and notice the term diminished and augmented. Diminished means to make something smaller. So we've taken our minor chord and lowered the top notes a very crunchy, small sort of shape. An augmented chord is built off of two major thirds. C1234, 1234. Here it is? Not going to give you too much context right now. We're going to be talking about these more later, but the idea is it's a major chord with the top note raised. It's been made bigger, augmented, like augmented reality. Reality has been enhanced and it's larger. So we discussed major chords. Minor chords and diminished chords. And again, I'd recommend practicing those all over the piano. Hands together would be preferred. And once you get comfortable with those continue through the course, you don't have to memorize all those before you go to the next class, but I just don't want you to go through the course forgetting how fundamental it is to come back and practice these, isolate them. So the same way we get better by practicing songs, we also want to make sure we're practicing all the fundamental components that make up a good pianist or musician in general. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Major, Natural Minor and Harmonic Minor Scales: Our third class in this course is going to be broken up into three components. 3.1, we're gonna be talking about major scales. 3.2, we're gonna be talking about natural minor scales, and 3.3, we're gonna be talking about harmonic minor scales. Let's start off with our major scale. So we've talked about those small building blocks, semitones or minor seconds and tones. Or major seconds. When we play these in succession, in other words, we play like a tone and then a tone, and then a semitone, and we move up, it's not so random, but if we do it in a particular way, we'll get a particular scale. In this case, we're going to start with major scales, moving up the formula, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone or it's more of a mouthful. Major second, major second, minor second, major second, major second, major second, minor second. You can see for scales in this discussion, it's a little bit easier for us to use tone and semitones as our terms, so that's what we're going to be using. You might not even know what a scale is, so let's quickly cover that. Basically, it's a succession of notes moving linearly on the piano, higher end or lower without skips. I mean, there's some larger steps that will look like skips later, but we'll cover that when we get there. So here's an example. C major, the people's key, the first scale that most pianists learn urea is. Straight out of the sound of music, do rem faso a ti do, that whole thing. That's a major scale. So I mentioned tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Let's try to apply that to a couple of different notes on the piano to extract their major scales, starting with C but broken down this time. C, this is not a tone. This is not a semitone. This is a single note. Remember, intervals need two notes. So from C to D is a tone. Now, from D to E is another tone. E to F is a semitone. So here you can see starting back on C, we have tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Even easier to see when you see the skipping of the black notes along the way. So C tone, tone, semitone. Tone, tone, tone, semi tone. And that gives us the C major scale. Now let's try starting on other notes. Maybe a black note. How about B flat? Sure. Sounds good. Okay, so we're here. It's not a tone. It's not a semitone. Let's go through it, though, starting off with our tone. Tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Sounds great. Let's try one more. This time, little bit lower. A. A, not tone, not a semitone, A, a starting point. A, tone, tone, semitone. Tone, tone, tone, semitone. And there's our A major scale. So you can do this starting on any note on the piano. Use the formula, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, and you'll get a major scale. Just remember the first note is not a tone. It's just a starting point. You need that second note to complete that first tone. I've just seen a lot of students that try this, and they go, tone right off the bat, and they say tone as they play that first note. It's not a tone, so don't call it a tone. Next, let's move over to natural minor scales. A natural minor scale is naturally extracted out of a major scale. So we learned that C major was all white notes, C up to C. Now, if I start on the sixth note of a major scale, in this case, A, and I play all the way up to A, choosing all the same notes. C major is easy because it's all white notes. But if I continue to choose all white notes, A up to A, I get A natural minor. Let's try it out. And you can hear it sounds a little more sad. This admittedly is not my preferred way to extract minor scales or to find minor scales, because you always have to have this sort of secondary thought of, what's the major scale? Where's the sixth note? What were the notes in the major scale? Move from the sixth note to the sixth. It's just kind of messy, in my opinion. You can use it. Feel free to, and it's good to understand in context that there are minor scales hidden within your major scale. Just start on the sixth note, go to the sixth but it doesn't really give you a good understanding of the flavor of the scale. Or by flavor, I mean the tonality, the, the spice use whatever adjective you want to, but just the essence of the scale, we'll say. Instead, I want you to think of a natural minor scale this way. We have our major scale, and what we're going to do is flatten three of the notes. And by flatten, I simply mean move down a semi tone. Sometimes you're actually moving to black notes to flats, but sometimes you're taking a note that's black and moving it down to a white. Just move it down a semitone a minor second, and you'll be fine. So your C Major, let's hold down all the notes together and flatten three, six and seven. This is really handy if you know solfege, which I will be doing courses on solfege down the line. But instead of DR mi fa so a t do, we end up getting do re me fa so late do. Notice the flattened solfege syllables pull out this A sound. So M becomes M, becomes e, T becomes A. Let's try this on a different scale. Maybe A major this time. Starting on A, we're going to go up tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Here is our A major scale. And if I flatten the third, the sixth, and the seventh, Ah, you can see I get an A minor scale, which is all whites. And referring back to before we talked about how C major, the sixth note is A, and then it pulls out this A natural minor scale. We've gotten to A minor now two different ways. So really, take your preference. If you like the idea of starting with a major scale, finding the sixth note, and moving between the sixth and the sixth, like one octave higher, that can work. For me, it feels kind of slow, and it doesn't help me understand the nuances of the scale. Me, I prefer flatten the three, flatten the six, flatten the seven. Now, I did mention that for the major scale, we were using tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. And you might be thinking, but Josh, why don't we just for the minor, use tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, some other similar type of formula. Well, to me, and from what I've noticed with my students, is it just becomes a jumble of all these tones and semitones. So, fundamentally, we start with our tone tone semitone tone, tone tone semitone for major scales. And then from there, we feel out the scale, we understand the distance between the notes, where does it feel happiest? Where does it feel most stable? And then we alter it slightly on a couple of different notes, and then we see from there, how does the scale change its tonality, its flavor, it's filter, whatever you want to call it. So that's how we're primarily going to be doing things in this course, is we refer back to the major scale using tones and semitones. From there, we figure out our minor scales by adjusting the major scale. And again, down the line, check out the solfege course that I put out. And even right now, I would say, if anyone else has a great solfege course, check it out. There's going to be a lot of overlap between scales and solfege, and then scales, as you're going to find out, really help us better understand harmony. Now, there's one other type of scale that we haven't discussed yet, and that is the harmonic minor scale. This one is obviously very fundamental in harmony. It's called the harmonic minor scale. I'm not going to discuss now why it's called the harmonic minor scale, but that is coming up. So let's discuss it. Back to C major. Flatten three, flatten six, but don't flatten seven. Just keep seven where it is. That's it. That's the harmonic minor scale. Major scale with a flat three and a flat six. Maybe that's a weird way of thinking about it. Think of it this way. It's a minor scale with only a flat three and a flat six, but it has what we call the major seventh, the seventh note from the C major scale in this case. Let's listen to it. Mmm. Pretty spooky. Some people say it has a bit of a Middle Eastern flare, especially towards the top. It has a very different sort of sound than the natural Manor scale, which to me, just generally feels a whole lot softer. So let's go through the three types of scales back to back just to summarize this class. So major scale, start on a note up a tone, up a tone, up a semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. In this case, we get C major. Now let's take those notes, flatten the third, sixth and seventh to give us the C natural minor scale. Here it is. And lastly, let's talk about that harmonic minor scale where we have a flat three, flat six, but a major seven. Here it is. What we're going to be doing next is extracting chords out of these scales to give us a collection of chords that we know are safe so we can move between them and get some sort of fundamental harmonic progression or generally have some harmony that sounds cohesive. So that's all I wanted to talk about for scales in class number three. Let's move on to the next class. 7. Major Scale Chord Extraction: Next up, let's talk about major scale chord extraction. A bit of a mouthful, let's break it down. We talked about in our last class, how to make a major scale using the formula, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone semitone. Now we have a collection of notes, and what we're going to do is we're going to play the first note of that scale and skip one note in the scale and then skip another note in the scale, essentially creating a chord kind of blindly just choosing a couple of notes out of the scale, so we have C, E and G. If we move up through the scale, we end up getting the next chord. DFA EGB. And I'm just moving up through my major scale, playing each note of the scale as a chord, right? So instead of playing single notes as we go through, I'm playing chords. This is relatively easy in C major. It can get a little bit trickier in other scales. I'll give an example like A flat major. Right? There's lots of Blacks, lots of whites, lots of different types of shapes. So you can see why I'm starting with C major to keep things nice and simple. So when we play a chord built off of the first note of a scale, it's called a one chord. And we use Roman numerals to identify harmonic chords. The reason being in music, we have finger numbers, we have scale degrees, we have chord numbers. There's all these different sort of ways that terms can overlap. So Roman numerals have been set aside specifically when you're talking about harmony and in this case, chord progressions. So our one chord is an uppercase Roman numeral one because it's major and major chords are going to be uppercase, whereas minor chords will be lowercase. So if we go through it, what we end up getting is a uppercase Roman numeral one. The second chord is minor, so it's going to be a lowercase Roman numeral two Third chord is minor, so lowercase Roman numeral three, upper case four, upper case five, lower case six. Lower case seven, diminished a lowercase, but there's also a superscript circle. So you have to put that after the lower case seven to identify it as diminished. So this brings us to the next thing that's worth memorizing, which is the order of chords within a major scale. In this case, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. This is true for any major scale. If I start on G, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. We have one black note. Let's extract our chords. Major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. Now, if I went through that too quickly, don't worry about it. We're going to be sticking in C major and C minor for this first course. But as you go through the different harmonic courses, it's going to be the expectation that you learn to do this in other keys. So I don't know what level you're at. If you're an absolute beginner, don't worry. If you feel like you're intermediate, but going through this course, just to make sure you don't miss anything into the later courses, you can feel free to start to experiment in other keys. I'd say start off with relatively simple keys and then expand as you go. So major, minor minor major, major, minor diminished major using Roman numerals. That is how we're going to be discussing the movement between chords. And thus, we have extracted the chords out of a major scale. I'll see you in the next class. 8. Natural Minor Scale Chord Extraction: Next up, let's get discussing the chords that exist within a natural minor scale. In other words, now we're going to extract those chords from our natural minor scale. So let's use C minor. As with this course, we're really trying to stick as much as we can to C major and C minor. So here's our C major scale, flatten three, flatten six, flat and seven. These are the notes we're working with. Starting from the lowest notes C and moving up two skips, we start with a minor chord. And notice that with our major scale, the first chord is major, and with our minor scales, the first chord is minor. You don't need to know all of your scales to know the chords, because we've talked about how you can use major thirds and minor thirds to also construct chords. However, over time, all of this stuff is going to mesh together if you want to up your level of musicianship. So C minor is our first chord, moving to D. Ooh, already we're onto a diminished chord. Remember, if it was D minor, but we flatten the top note. Now we have a diminished chord. So we have lowercase Roman numeral one. Our two chord is diminished lowercase Roman numeral two with a superscript circle. Now, on this third chord, we are talking about this as a three chord, but in relation to our major scale, we're starting on the flattened third. Remember I said flat three, flat six, and flat seven for the natural minor. So we're actually going to call this chord the flat three chord, and it's major. So flat three uppercase Roman numeral with a flat sign, then three our four chord is minor. Our five chord is minor. Flat six is major. Flat seven is major, and then we're back to one, which is minor. I'm going to get a little bit ahead of myself here, but just to show you how this stuff works and to give you a little bit of glimmer of hope that this is all going to come together, trust the process. So if I start on my first ord C minor and just jump to a couple of other cords that were extracted just a moment ago, randomly, we'll get a pretty good sound. Let's try it out. Sounds pretty beautiful. And all of those chords were from the natural minor scale. So again, we have minor one, diminished two, flat three is major, minor four, minus five, flat six is major, flat seven is major back to a minor one. That is the natural minor chord extraction. Next, let's move on to the harmonic minor chord extraction. I'll see you in the next class. 9. Harmonic Minor Scale Chord Extraction: Next up, let's get talking about chord extraction from a harmonic minor scale. Let's start off with our major scale. In this case, C major. We're going to flatten the third note, the sixth note, but not the seventh. The seventh note is going to stay as a major seventh, and this is partially so that the harmony that we extract out of this scale is a bit more accommodating in a very particular way. What you'll find out is at the five chord, which is usually a minor chord, if we're extracting harmony out of a natural minor scale, it's now available as a major chord, which is very fundamental within our perfect cadences, which we will get talking about soon. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's dial things back, make those same adjustments. So major scale, flat three, flat six, and we're going to take all these notes, and we're going to on each scale degree, go up two skips and find out what chords are available to us within this scale, starting with C minor. So a lowercase Roman numeral one. D diminished a lowercase Roman numeral two with a superscript circle. Our flat three chord is augmented. This one's really wild. So we have an E flat. We're skipping F, G, we're skipping a flat, B natural. So where the diminished chord was similar to a minor chord with a flattened top note. So here's D minor, here's D diminished, E flat augmented is similar to a major chord, but with a raised top note. Let's not forget the words diminish and augmented mean to make things smaller and larger. So by making the top note of a minor chord lowered, it's now a smaller feeling chord. It is diminished, and we have E flat major. Again, if I take the top note and raise it, no different than augmented reality being a reality that's much bigger than our usual day to day reality, this is a augmented chord. So we have minor one diminished to augmented flat three, which we will represent with a plus sign. Never confuse the plus sign from augmented with using the plus sign for a major chord. That's a no, no, as they say. Rarely will you see a plus sign used for a major chord, but sometimes you'll see a minus sign used for a minor chord. There's lots of rules to all this stuff, but just wanted to set that one disclaimer. So we have flat three augmented, four is minor. Five is major, right? Again, we have that major seventh within our scale, and that's accommodating a major five chord. That's the main reason this scale exists is to accommodate that little shift in the harmony. It's very important. Flat six is major, and then we have another diminished chord built off of the seventh scale degree. So again, minor lowercase Roman numeral one, lowercase roman numeral two with a little degrees sine or a superscript circle. Flat three is augmented, so that's flat uppercase three with a plus. Four is minor, so lowercase Roman numeral four, uppercase Roman numeral five, uppercase Roman numeral six, so flat six, in this case, lowercase Roman numeral seven with a little superscript circle representing our next diminished chord and then we're back up to one. So just playing around with some of these chords, we would get this sort of sound. Beautiful, very minor. To me, it lends itself a little more towards the scarier side of minor. So harmonic minor is used a lot in, like, Halloween music and just generally spookier music. After all, it does offer up two diminished chords and diminished. There's no getting around it. It's a pretty spooky sound. So that is it. That is the chord extraction of a harmonic minor scale. To recap, we started with our major scale. We flattened three and six only, and then we extracted chords by going up each of the scale degrees with two additional skips. That's it. That's the harmonic minor scale, and it's available chords, LlCU in the next class. 10. Cadences: Okay, here we are. Class seven talking about cadences. So what is a cadence? A cadence really is one of the best ways that you can finish a chord progression. So quite often we'll end up starting on our one chord. In the case of our C major scale, we're starting on C major. So this is some sort of statement to the listener. It's kind of like saying, Here's our dough. So we play our first chord, and things feel grounded, we have our statement placed. But any good story needs some sort of tension. You can't really make a song off of one cord. You can, but it gets boring pretty quick. So we need some sort of destination, some sort of tension. Well, think about, again, good stories. Moving to the neighboring cord, too, is not very adventurous. It's like, if you know Lord of the Rings, proto Baggins walking to the neighboring farmers field and then coming back home. That wouldn't be quite the same story that it is in this three part saga that we end up getting. So we're gonna move a little further away from home. And in this case, we're going to go to our five cord. Our five ord really is one of the most distant cords we can go to. You might be thinking, but what about the six? Or, what about the seven? That's even further away from one. But if we move down, seven is right beside one. Or six is only one skip away. So the five chord is either the fifth note up five or down four notes if we're moving to the five chord moving downward. So it's a very large distance either way. But we can't finish the song there. That's like Frodo, being on Mount Doom and finishing the story there. At some point, we want to try to come back home. So we return back to our one chord. So the first cadence we're going to learn is called the perfect cadence, and it is one, five, one. Something like Beethoven's Ode to Joy uses pretty much exclusively these two chords. One, five, one, one, five, so on and so forth. It's a very well rounded cadence, hence the term the perfect cadence. It's kind of like this. This is a statement. I'm holding it up. There's some tension. What's going to happen? It falls, and there's our resolution. So in terms of harmony, that's like, our one holding up the pencil, five lifting up the pencil. What's gonna happen? Comes back to one. Listen to what happens if we finish on the five chord and we don't return. There's gonna be that lingering tension. Pretty tense, right? We want to come back to that one chord. So in a major scale, 151 is the first chord progression that we're going to cover the perfect cadence. This works very well in a lot of different styles of music, but as we get a little bit more sacred and work with church music, we'll start to realize that we don't normally come to one from the five, but rather from the four chord. Again, this is a chord that's very distant from the one. It's either up four notes or down five notes. So no matter which way you go to get to the four chord, there's a bit of a journey to get there. Here's our one, four, back to one. A bit of a softer sound, and you can hear that sort of baked in Amen worked in. So 151, perfect kinds, 141, we're calling this a plagal cadence. A great way to finish soul R&B chord progressions, anything kind of gospel driven, and just generally a lot of church music. So that covers the two main cadences within a major scale, but let's continue on over to our minor scales. In this case, first, we're going to explore the natural minor. We're still going to stick with our one, four and five chords, and we're going to get a couple of different combinations. Let's check it out. In C minor, our five chord is naturally going to be a minor chord. It's actually not the preferred five chord for a lot of composers. More often, we're going to find that the five chord is major. But again, in a lot of other styles, I come back to R&B soul No soul you'll hear a lot of this minor five chord, especially with some extra color added on top. I hear it kind of like pirate music a little bit, minor one to minor five. Let's check it out. If we're just moving between the minor one and the minor five, that's sort of the sound that I get out of it, that pirate sound. But I'm sure there's lots of different ways you can twist and turn it. At the end of the day, it's two minor chords, so it's going to sound inherently quite minor. Going from the one chord to the four chord, again, we get two minor chords. Minor one, minor four, and then back, one of the saddest chord progressions, in my opinion. Very sad. So from natural minor, again, if you need to go back to the natural minor chord extraction video, I'd recommend doing that just to double check what chords are available, but the four and the five are both going to be naturally minor. The harmonic minor scale has a minor four chord, so we're not changing anything. 14, one is still a minor one to a minor four and then back. But the five chord, you might remember the notes in the harmonic minor scale, give us a flat three and a flat six, but the seven is still on this B. It's still a major seven or what we might call just like a regular seven from the major scale. So we end up getting a five chord that's major. We hear the minor one to the major five, again, the perfect cadence a lot in classical music, even something as fundamental as fear release by Bethoven. Minor one, major five, back to the minor one. So let's review the different cadences that we've talked about. For major scales, we have one, five, one, all major. For the plagal cadence, so that was perfect. For the plagal cadence, we have one, four, one. For natural minor, we have a minor one Minor five, very soft sound. Same with a minor one to a minor four, a very soft sound. And then from the harmonic scale, we end up getting a major five chord that's available. So minor one, major five, and then back, one of my personal favorites. So those are the basic cadences that we're going to be working with, and you'll notice that a lot of our chord progressions will finish with a 42 oh one or a 52 oh one, not always, but it's going to be pretty recurring. So we want to break that down into cadences first before we get over to predominance. So next, let's talk about our predominant chord progressions. 11. Major Predominants: Next up, let's talk about predominant chord progressions in our major key. So first, we have to discuss one other type of term, and I'm going to go through this a little bit quickly because it's not super fundamental, but it's important. So in classical music, we often refer to the notes of our scale with kind of fancy special names. For example, tonic, supertonic, median, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone, and back to the tonic. The only one that we really need to be concerned with is the fifth note, known as the dominant. And so when I build a chord off of that note, we could kind of call this chord the dominant chord. So when we're thinking of predominant chord progressions, we're thinking of our one chord and then something happening before the five chord, pre being before, dominant being the five chord. So one, something five, one. Let's talk about the three most fundamental predominant chord progressions within a major key. The first one uses the 14 and five. So we have one, four, five, one. Used a lot in old rock and roll. I blues, one, four and five chords are very important. But it's just a very happy, simple chord progression. Next up, we have one, two, five, one, very fundamental in jazz, but again, we hear it all over the place. One, two, to the five and back to the one. Lastly, we have 1651. One, here's our five, so one hires the six, down to five, back to one. I actually prefer to move down to the six because it's only down one skip like this one, six, five, one, which kind of has that e kind of Michael Jackson and all that Motown kind of feel to it. So one, four, five, one, one, two, five, one, and one, six, five, one, very fundamental chord progressions, where our cadence is finishing with the perfect cadence, a five chord, back to a one chord. Some simple melody writing tricks that you could use with this. And this course isn't really about melody writing, but I want to give you a trick you can work with. You start with your one chord. And choose any note from that chord. Let's say G. Okay? So when I go to my four chord, I take a look at the notes that are available. In this case, F, A and C and move to one of the closest notes from where I was at. I was at a G. So let's move to the F or the A. Let's go with the A. And then on our five chord, maybe we'll move to one of these available notes like the B. And then when I'm back to my one chord, again, I have C, E and G to choose from. Let's choose the C. So I'm trying to be efficient with my movement between my melodic notes or the notes within my melody, but I'm also trying to choose notes that are available in the current chord at that moment. G is in my one chord. A is in my four chord. B is in my five chord, and C is obviously back in that one chord. We could try it differently. Let's start on E. Let's do a 1251 chord progression this time. So maybe down to the D. I'm going to stay on the D. My five chord has a D in it. So let's stay on that D and then maybe back to E. So have So I'm just doubling up the note each time, and then you can start to dance around those notes. And you'll learn these ornaments by studying classical music or there's also lots of ornaments in jazz and other styles as well, too. But you start off by focusing having your melody notes with the current chord in that moment. And then on the next chord, finding another melody note that is close because we don't want to be leaping around too much. That's really difficult for singers and just generally to recall a melody in your head. The shorter the distance between the notes, the more simple it is and the more simple it is, the catchier it is. So we talked about predominance in our major key, in this case, 14, five, one, one, two, five, one introducing a minor chord on the two, and one, six, five, one, again, with a minor chord for that six, so we're going between major chords and minor chords. Just because it's a chord progression that's based in a major key doesn't mean all the chords have to be major. Next, let's move over to predominance in our harmonic minor scale. 12. Minor Predominants: Let's talk about predominant chord progressions from our harmonic minor scale. We're not using the natural minor scale because these dominant chords work best with a major five chord, and the major five chord isn't available within a natural minor scale, only the harmonic minor. So let's go through it and see what we get. We're going to use the same chord progressions, 1451, 1251, and 1651, but in the minor scale environment. Let's check it out. We would start with our C minor chord. In the harmonic minor scale, the four is also minor, and the five would be major as discussed, and then we're back to one. So here it is one, four, five, one. The two chord, you might remember is diminished. So when we have one, two, 51, we end up getting one minor, two diminished, five major, and back to one. Very common in Latin Mntunos. All right. And the next one, 1651 is also very common in Latin montonos. It's common in a lot of different styles. But we're going to refer to it as the flat six. Remember, in relation to the major scale, our harmonic and natural minor scales both have a flattened version of the sixth note. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, our flat six chord is major, and so is our five. So here's the sound minor one, major flat six, major five, and then back. Again, just listen. Very Latin from those Mntunos that are so popular. And again, like, going from one to flat six is a very common chord progression in film scoring in a lot of epic video game music, you will hear it all over the place. So to wrap this up, we're going to take one or two of those progressions, and again, we're going to try some melody writing. Let's give it a shot. On our one chord, we're going to start on the middle note, the E flat. Let's do the flat 651. So on the flat six, I could stay on this note. We could try that. Now on the five chord, I'm going to move down to the D, which is available in this chord. Maybe I'll choose two notes from that chord. And then on the one chord, I'll choose C which is available. So we end up getting With some development. You can see how this quickly comes together through a sort of logical almost puzzle based process, and then a splash of creativity overtop. I hope that you enjoyed our minor class on predominant Cord progressions and I'll see you in the next class. 13. i vii: Here it is, class number ten. Let's talk about moving between your one chord and your diminished seven chord. This is available both from your major scale and your harmonic minor scale. You might remember that our major scale goes major, minor minor major, major, minor, diminished major in terms of the harmony that's accessible and extractable from that scale. So an alternative to a perfect cadence 151 would be to move to the neighboring seven chord. It sounds like seven is very far away from one, but keep in mind, there's no eight. When you get to eight, you're essentially back to one. So it looks something like this. One diminished seven. One. Again, it's a good alternative to the five chord. Even with Ode to Joy, it'll sound a bit different, but we end up getting it works. So this is oftentimes where classical harmony starts this idea of one to the diminished seven and then back to one. I find that from a practical perspective, you're going to get a lot more four to one and five to one chord progressions. But I didn't want to blow over this because it is super fundamental, especially when studying classical harmony. Now, the harmonic minor scale also has the diminished seventh chord available. So if we're in C minor, that means we can have a B diminished chord and then back to C minor. So, again, for melody writing, you choose one of the three notes in your first chord. On your next chord, you choose a neighboring note as close as you can that would be available within the next chord. In this case, let's try D. Let's linger on this chord a bit longer, maybe to the F, back to the E flat. So we end up getting. Something like that. It was a bit elaborated, but you can see we can create our melody based off of our harmony in a very systematic way. It's almost like a logic puzzle. And then from there, we add a splash of creativity, a bit of humanization, and then you have a beautiful melody over top of your chord progression. Ultimately, this class isn't about melody writing, but I wanted to give you a glimpse into how all of this stuff does get connected. Another thing worth talking about is the flat seven chord. If we're in C minor, in this case, C natural minor, and I go through all of my chords that are available. By the time I get to the seventh note, B flat, I have a major chord that pulls us back up to our minor one chord. The pull is not as intense as this diminished seven built off of B, but it's still pulls us up, still sounds quite nice. So this sort of sound reminds me of old 80s boxer movies like Rocky and a lot of old 90s dance music. This sort of Do you hear it? So you can move just between those two chords, but you could also start a chord progression with that one, flat seven, maybe four, five. Or you could finish with it. One, four, flat six, flat seven, one. So I wanted to mention that the flat seven is another great available chord, although it's coming from the natural minor scale. So when we're first learning about harmony, it's not something that you hear first and foremost, but it is still very important. And if we want to kind of change things up a bit, you could even play the flat seven chord major in a major key. The Beatles also used this major one to the major flat seven pretty frequently, and one example is at the end of Hey Jude, where they have this sort of vamp that fades out. This isn't the original key, but it's something like C major. B flat major, F major, and then back to C. So the chord progression would be one major, flat seven major. Major and back to one. So that's more of, like, a modal harmony thing where we're coming out of a scale that isn't a regular major scale. We would call this C mixolydian. Now we have access to that flat seven or in this case, that B flat. So that's where you'd be getting that chord from. But we're not doing a lot of modal chord extraction at this point. I just wanted to mention it's another fun thing that you can add if you're playing around with chords built off of the seventh scale degree. So one more time, we have minor one, flat seven is major or major one, flat seven is major. Back to one. Also reminds me of Lord of the Rings. It's just very kingly when you do it in the major key. So if you have to compose something that's around some medieval times and the king enters the room, maybe consider trying this out. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it does have its place. So feel free to play around with it and use it when it's most beneficial to you. So there it is one, seven, one as a chord progression. I will see you at our wrap up video. 14. Outro: So that's it. You made it to the end of this one oh one course on chords and chord progressions. By now you've set yourself up for success. If you want to go into these two oh one and three oh one courses, you're going to really be able to amp up your understanding of harmony. But I'm not trying to funnel you at the same time, you should have a good understanding of the basics, enough to be able to chat harmony with a friend, start to develop your own chord progressions, and really develop your harmonic intelligence and language further. Knowing how to extract chords out of scales is so important. It's going to allow you to create your own chord progressions, and it's also going to be able to help you understand what a key center is and how the harmony and melody relate to that key. Now, in the next two oh one chorse, we're really going to amp things up to that intermediate level. So if you want to continue on this path, do make sure that you check out that course. I want to thank you for taking the course, and I also want to congratulate you because this was not necessarily easy. If you're a beginner, there was a lot of stuff that we covered, so congratulations. Now, don't forget this course does have a project. So make sure that you go back, check out that class that outlines all the details of the project, submit it to me so that I can give you some tips. That's it for now. I hope you had some fun, and I hope you were challenged, and I'll catch you in the next course.