Chords and Chord Progressions 201

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my two oh one course on Cords and Cord progressions. We're going to work off of the fundamentals that we learned within the one oh one course and, of course, expand up into the intermediate level from there. We're going to be covering inversions, dominant seventh chords, sus chords, slash chords, deceptive cadences, and so much more. So if some of those terms don't make sense to you, perfect. This course is probably for you. But at the same time, if you've heard of some of those, but want to understand them and develop them further, then I also make sure to go into enough detail that there's something for everyone. 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. So if you're really looking to build upon those fundamental techniques from the one oh one course, get into some harmonic tricks that can really impress, but also keep you intrigued as a composer and performer, then I've created this course specifically for you. Now, it is going to be a lot of fun, but there's also going to be a lot of work ahead. So make sure that you're ready to put in the practice so that you can get the most out of this material ahead. So if you're ready to learn, I'm ready to teach, let's jump in to the first class. 2. Class Project: Alright, so there is going to be a project within this course, and it's going to be relatively simple. What you're going to do is after you've reviewed all of the material within the course, you're going to take your favorite concept and apply it. You can apply it to a chord progression that you're working on, whether it be something that's within your own composition, or something that you like to jam out on like a pop song or rock song or something like that. So as an example, if you're really liking inversions and you're used to playing something like the chord progression from heart and soul, C major, A minor, F major, G major. Maybe you could try to re invert these chords so that they're staying mostly within the same position and barely moving as you're playing. Or you could try adding some sixes to some of your chords within a progression. The same progression might sound like this one, six, four, with a six to the five. So you can color the cores. You can invert them. Again, whatever class resonated the most with you, make sure that you're applying that technique. Now, what you're going to do is simply either record yourself. Audio or video is fine. You're going to submit it through whatever vessel you think works best. Generally, YouTube, Video, SoundCloud. These are really solid options. You're going to take a public link, and you're going to submit that within the course description as you submit your project to me. From there, I'll review what you sent. I'll give you some feedback for better or for worse, just to let you know what you really aced and some areas of improvement. Of course, if you have any questions along the way, make sure you reach. Have fun doing the project, make sure that you're really feeling in the zone on the day that you do these recordings, and it'll go so much further. It shouldn't feel laborious. So again, just make sure you're really feeling the project that day and then commit to it. So that's it for the course project. Of course, if you have any questions, do feel free to reach out. Make sure that you prepare and practice for your recording and do it on a day that you're really feeling in the zone. I hope it's fun, I hope it's challenging, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you submit. 3. Pedal Tones: So you've got the fundamentals of harmony down. You understand cadences. You understand predominance from our previous course. And I thought we could start this course with something a little bit different, a little bit lighter, if you would. We're gonna get talking about pedal tones or drones. So the idea is in our left hand, we're going to keep one note droning. In other words, continuing to just play and hold. If it's an organ sound, you just hold it. If it's a piano sound, you could play it as an octave or maybe just like a pinky thumb. Pinky sum. And we're going to go through all of the different chords in the C major scale, which we covered in the last class, we're going to play them kind of randomly, but admittedly, I'm going to prefer and prioritize any chord that has a C in it, which would be the C major chord, the F major chord, the A minor chord. And secondary chords that work really well might be D minor. And G. So basically, for the most part, I'm avoiding the B diminished, and even E minor should sound fine. So as a general rule, let's just say no B diminished. Let's try it out. So every chord is going to get about two beats, a pinky and a thumb like this. Sounds pretty nice. In fact, it's a device that's used a lot in Elton John's music. Check this out. Now, I'm using a bit of a reordering of the notes called inversions, which we'll talk about later, but even if I kept it more simple. So that's the idea of a pedal tone or a drone. It's used quite a bit in Indian music. They have specific instruments that are meant to drone while other instruments will play over top. So you end up getting this. As a very vague example. So droning or petal tones are used all over the place between different cultures, between different genres. So let's try that again one more time where we're going to drone a note in our left hand, but this time, we're going to play chords from our C natural minor scale. Let's see how it sounds. I'm kind of picking up dystopian 80s vibes, kind of like Tron or Done or something like that. So anyway, you can see sometimes you'll use these tricks, and they might inspire me differently than they inspire you. But still, we're able to pull some sort of flavor or essence out of the progression so that as composers, we have it as part of our tools, as part of our arsenal to be able to reflect the proper harmony in the right moment. I'll see you in the next class. A 4. A Major - A Minor: Okay, it's time to get you out of your comfort zone a little bit. So far, we've only been using the keys of C major and C minor or at least in the last class. Now we're going to branch out a little bit more and introduce one new key. As we go through the course, eventually, I want you to be able to apply what we're talking about in all the different keys, all 12 keys. But for now, let's start to expand with just kind of specializing with two keys. We're going to be moving over to A major and A minor scales, as well. So if I start on an A, and I use tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. The formula for creating a major scale that we talked about in the last course, then we end up getting an A major scale. And in this case, we have three sharps, a C sharp, an F sharp, and a G sharp. Now, it just so happens that those are the third, sixth and seventh note of the scale. And as you might remember, by flattening the three, the six, and the seven, we get a natural minor scale. So we can very clearly see these three notes moving to create the minor scale. If we were to only flatten the three and the six, then we get, as discussed before, the harmonic minor scale. So similar to C major, being really clear about flattening the 36 and seven, in this case, we're able to see in the major perspective, those raised three, six and seven scale degrees. And then when we lower them, we're back to all whites. Now, we've also discussed briefly in the first course how we can start a major scale on the sixth note and go up to that same sixth note. So C major's sixth note is A. So if I play A to A, following all the same notes, in this case, they're all white because it's C major that we're using as a reference, then we end up getting the A natural minor scale. But that doesn't really tell us much about the tonality or how a major scale relates to a minor scale. For example, if I go back to a major, you can see that one, two, four and five, the first note, second note, fourth and fifth are common between the major and the minor scales. So here's a major, here's a minor, and we didn't have to change one, two, four or five. So we can start to assume at this point that what lends itself to the minor sound is the flattening of that third, sixth and seventh notes. Alright, so here's our A natural minor, a harmonic minor, A major. Feel free to use this class as a reference. If you get stuck and you can't remember a whole lot about the A major and A minor scale, come back to this class. I was reluctant to make this a full class on its own, but it's a very easy rest stop for you to be able to come back to and reference if you need to. And I think it's super important and fundamental that around this stage, we break you out of that C major and C minor polarization because we can get paralyzed in one key. It's not that we shouldn't be specializing in one key. You'll want to specialize a bit probably in C major and C minor as a reference point, especially mentally when you're thinking about harmony. But I don't want you doomed to be stuck in C major and C minor forever. So by branching out into A major and A minor keys now, you'll be more comfortable doing that over and over again with other keys in the future. I'll see you in the next class. 5. Dominant 7th Chords: Next, let's talk about dominant seventh chords. In our last course, we talked about the idea of the perfect cadence, a one chord going to a five chord and then back to a one chord. In other words, statement tension resolution. Sounded something like this. Statement, we're in C major. Here's our dough tension. We don't want to linger here forever. We eventually come back or go somewhere else. In this case, we're coming back to our one chord. We also discussed at the end of that course the idea of an alternate route where we move down one semitone to the seventh note of the scale, which is a diminished chord. And it would sound something like this. One, diminished seven, back to one. But what if I took both of those tense chords, the five chord and the diminished seven chord, and we fuse them together? So here is our seven chord, which is diminished. Technically, there's something else called the diminished seventh chord, which we'll probably get to later. It's a four note version of a diminished chord. When I say diminished seven, in this case, what I'm referring to is a diminished chord built off of the seventh note of the scale. So we can say seven diminished, maybe. So here's our seven diminished chord. Here's our five chord. We're going to fuse them. End up getting our first four note chord. In this case, it's called a dominant seventh chord. This one is G dominant seventh. Do you remember before we were doing predominance, the idea of something coming before the five chord, pre being before, dominant being five? Well, here it is. It's a seventh chord built off of the fifth scale degree and is called a dominant seventh. It's a great way to heighten the tension when you're trying to do your statement, tension, and resolution. So now 151 might sound like 15, dominant seven. Back to the one. So you can see it adds a little bit more tension, a little bit more color, and it gives you more options when you're trying to spread those notes out and reorder them. So that's what a dominant seventh chord is. It's one way we can create it, but there's an even easier way to think about your dominant seventh chords. Think of it this way. It's a major chord. With what we would call a seventh, this extra note is a seventh because it's kind of like we're taking the first note of a scale, the third note, the fifth note, and now our next odd number, the seventh note. But this type of seventh is one tone below the octave. Here's G, the bottom note, here's G, one octave higher, and here's F, one tone below. So that's an easy way, an easy formula for creating a dominant seventh chord. Major chord with a tone below the octave. We call this distance a minor seventh. It's an interval that we haven't discussed yet. But again, just think of it as one tone below the octave. And because this cord likes to go back to a one, it likes to fall by a fifth, that is the primary function of a dominant chord. So a great way to practice these is start with C dominant seven. Fall a fifth. F dominant seven, fall a fifth. B flat. So you'll have to practice your fifths. Again, if you're working with a teacher, you can work that out. A fifth is just seven semitones. You can think of it that way. So we're going through E A DG, and then finish on C major. If you finish on C dominant, it becomes kind of like a dog chasing its tail where the tension never resolves. So when you finish, you can finish on C major or C minor. These dominant chords, when they fall by a fifth, when they fall seven semitones, they can fall to a major chord or a minor chord. As you might remember, before when we were discussing C minor, we talked about the idea of the five chord when we're using C harmonic minor. The five chord is major. And again, we discussed this in the last course, but in a harmonic minor scale, the chord built off of the fifth note is major. And in this case, you could also make it dominant. I apologize. Some of the note naming on this MI keyboard is sometimes going to show a sharp name instead of a flat name and vice versa. I'm doing my best to manage that as we go, but this will be an example where you should be seeing flats, but you're probably going to see sharps. But here it is, anyway. So C minor, G dominant, B to C minor. Or we could do A minor. To the fifth, which is E, E dominant back to A. A minor, E dominant. A minor. So it's used from classical music to pop music. Dominant chords are dominant in the field. They're used all over the place. So get used to them, practice them chromatically, practice them falling by fifths, and every few chords, you're going to have to bump it back up a couple of octaves. But just get used to them because they're super fundamental when you're creating your chord progressions, analyzing harmony or just generally doing anything with harmony. So that's what a dominant seventh chord is. There's a couple of different ways you can practice it as mentioned. And again, the formula is a major chord with an additional note that is one tone below the octave. Be coming back to these dominant seventh chords recurringly throughout the course. So, again, this is a reference class for you. If you get stuck on them, come back, check it out, and then continue from where you left off. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Deceptive Cadences: All right, so up next, we have the deceptive cadence. As you might recall from our first course, a cadence is a very simple chord progression. Normally a starting point. We're heading somewhere else, and then we come back. In some cases, we might have a one chord going to a five chord and then back to one or 141. And there's lots of variations of these. What we're going to be talking about next is something called the deceptive cadence. In this case, we're actually not going to come back to one. We're going to deceive the listener. One statement. Five tension, and we're not going to go back to one. There's still going to be a sense of resolution, but it might not be as resolved. So let's check it out. What am I talking about? We're going to start on our one chord, move up to our five. And again, you could make this a dominant seventh chord. Here that extra tension. And in this case, we're going to pull to the relative minor. A minor. The relative minor, we discussed before that within the C major scale, there's a minor scale kind of sneakily hidden within it. And if you start on the sixth note of a major scale and go up to that sixth note, you end up getting a natural minor scale. And this is called the relative minor. So we're pulling up from a five chord to a six chord. Again, the six is where that minor scale starts, so the six chord and that scale that starts on the sixth note are directly related. So we have 15. Let's make it dominant. And then six. This is actually the first three chords of one of the world's most common chord progressions, which is, I'll just show you now one, five, six, four. From No Woman, No cry by Bob Marley to Let It Be by the Beatles, it's used all over the place. Lady Gaga's using it like other modern artists. It's not ever going to go out of style. It is around. So check out the 1564 chord progression on your own. But what I wanted to show you is that initial 156, that deceptive cadence. And deceptive is basically to trick. If you deceive someone, you've tricked them. So you've tricked your listener, not only by okay, so here's the thing. You're actually tricking them three different ways, as I've come to realize over time. Instead of moving back down by a fifth you're not moving down, you're moving up. And instead of that fifth, that big distance, you're moving a very small distance. So we're not moving down. We're moving up. We're not moving a big distance. We're moving a small distance, and we're not going to a major chord, back to C major. In this case, we're going to a minor chord, A minor. So there's just a lot about it that ends up sort of tricking the listener. Let's try the same thing, but in C minor. In this case, we would have C minor, your one chord. G dominant seven, your five chord. A little bit fancier. That's okay. Up to the flat six chord. A flat major. One of my favorite moves when I'm in a minor key 15, six. And again, moving up, moving a small distance, and moving to a major chord, as opposed to down big distance minor chord. So it's just very deceptive. It's very different. We can try it in A major. You're still going to be seeing flats, but the theory still applies. So A major, one, five, and then up a tone five to six is a tone. One, two, three, four, five, six, there's our tone. So F sharp minor. One, five, six. And if we go back to C major, you'll see one, five, six, this five to six is the distance of a tone. That will always be true. And you can practice these in all 12 keys once you pick up some of these tricks. So one chord. The five is built right on the top note of that one chord. Five, up a tone to a minor chord, six. Or you could try it again, one with a dominant five, E dominant seven up to F sharp minor, the six. And again, it works in a minor key. 15, let's make it dominant seven, up to F major. In a minor key, the five to the six is only a semitone because remember, we're moving to the flat six. So in the case of a minor key, you're going 1-5, and then up only a semitone to a major chord. So you can feel free to try this in other areas, too, in other keys that is. But for now, I would say get used to C major, C minor, A major and A minor. So here's one more quick recap. And I'm just going to stick to basic three note chords this time. C major is the one. G major is the five, up a tone to a minor chord is our six. There's that deceptive move. To minor this time, C minor, G major, a flat major. And again, over to A major, we have A is our one, E is our five and F sharp minor is our six. And I should quickly mention when I say A is our one, if I say A, if anyone says an A chord, you would assume A major. So I'll specify minor always. Sometimes for a major chord, I might just call it by its letter. So A E, F sharp minor. And if we go back to the A minor example, we have a minor, E major, F major. And it's a really great cinematic trick, as well, too, when a scene takes a sudden change and you want to really deceive the listener a little bit, pull them from major to minor, pull them from minor to major, whatever that shift happens to be. There's lots of great uses for the deceptive cadence. I recommend. Get very used to it because it's not going anywhere. There it is the deceptive cadence, LCU in the next class. 7. Pre Subdominant Progressions: Let's next talk about pre subdominant chord progressions. It's a mouthful, so let's break it down. Pre meaning before, subdominant meaning your four chord, Chord progressions, a series of chords. So we're going to play our one chord, then some other chord that's available within the key followed by four back to one, or we could sum it up as saying one, something for one. Let's explore some options, starting in C major. Here's our one chord. Let's just move up very simply to two, followed by four, back to one. Sort of a triumphant sound. And a lot of these are going to have a softer feel because that four to the one is just going to be softer sounding than the five to the one. It's that churchy Amen. It's a very friendly sound. Used a lot in R&B, soul gospel music. Even just regular secular classical music it's used all over the place. So that's one, two, 41. We could have one, three, 41. That one, to me, feels a bit more uplifting. Everything's really rising up. C to D was a rise, but this one just has this pull up to the F that's a little bit more strong. Now we're gonna jump over the four and go to the five and then to the four. So one, five, four. One. Hard to say exactly what sort of sound that has, but it is all major chords. So it's inherently a little bit more major sounding, let's listen one more time. Kind of reminds me of let it be when they go. The difference there is after the four, they walk down three, two, one. It's kind of a two. But anyway, so there's an example of one, five, four, one. And we have one left 'cause we're not gonna use the diminished chords for these. The diminished chord is just a bit more adventurous, and we're gonna be using it more as we go through this course. But as a pre subdominant, it just doesn't work so well. Do you want to hear it? I'll show you now. It sounds like this. One, diminished four. One. It's very conflicting. It's, like, major and then it's very haunting. And then we're jumping from a B to an F, which is a very haunting sound to a major chord. Sometimes fusing major and minor works really well together. I think, in this case, it's a little bit polarizing. It's like pineapple on pizza. Some people like it, some people don't this is more like cake on pizza. It's just like I just shouldn't exist, right? Feel free to play around with it. If you can do something with it, then by all means, but for now, we're going to mostly ignore it. Next, we have one, six, four. One. And again, my move 1-6 is usually descending. Four. One. What I like about this progression is it's very safe. If you have a simple melody that repeats, you could play these chords, and it should sound good over all three chords. So something like let's take that as our melody. Sounds beautiful. So that's a bit more of a forgiving chord progression that does have some major and minor tonality in it. But those are the basic pre subdominant chords that you could try. One, two, four, one, 1341, both a bit more uplifting, 1541, very major sounding, and 1641, very forgiving with your melodies. Let's try the same thing in a minor key this time. Let's start from the same place. One, two, four, one. In this case, we have one minor, two diminished, four minor. Back to one minor. Oh, super spooky, super minor. I love it. Let's move to the next one. One flat three, four, one. E flat major. F minor. B to C. Listen again I won't talk. It's just begging for a melody. It sounds great. It's uplifting within a minor context, I should say. Mm, it's a nice one. One flat, three, four, one. Let's try 15, 41. But there's two types of five chords available in our minor keys. If we're using a natural minor scale, we have a minor five chord. If we're using a harmonic minor scale, we get a major five chord, minor one, minor five, minor 41. Let's try it out. Minor one. Minor five? Four. Minor one. All minor chords. Similar to the major 1541, which was all major chords. Now we have all minor chords. So again, inherently, it's going to sound a little bit more minor. If we try the major five, I kind of works a little bit like a deceptive cadence. We have this one to five. We might expect it because it's that major sounding five to pull us back to that one. But instead, we move to the four. It's kind of like a cushioned landing a little bit. We do come back to the one, but there's this sort of sense of prolonged tension one, five minor four, one, the cushioned landing. Next, let's try minor one, flat six, minus four, back to one. C minor is the one. A flat is the flat six. F minor is the four, and then we're back to the one. To me, this is one of my favorite minor chord progressions or short chord progressions, because, again, it's very forgiving with melodies. Let's take a few notes from our C natural minor scale. How about kind of like, Well, Batman style. Here we go. Here's our flat six. So I got a little bit fancy, but mostly just some slight ornamentation. In the left hand, I'm just breaking up the chords instead of playing them together. Very simple tricks on the piano for the most part. If you've never tried that, try it out. It's a great little simple trick to do something with that chord in the left hand that isn't just playing it blocked. So I mentioned that we kind of wanted to avoid that diminished sound going to the four when the seventh chord is diminished. But remember, in the natural minor scale, there's a different type of seven chord. It's a flat seven, and it's a major chord. So let's try it out. We would end up getting one flat seven, minor four, back to one. And this sounds totally great. So there are a lot of different options in this one particular class by using pre subdominant chords. So let's review them. Major, one, two, four, one, one, three, four, one, one, five, four, one, and one, six, four, one. Same sort of chords in the minor. We have one, two, four, one. Next, we have one flat three, four, one, followed by one minor five, four, still minor. Back to one. We also have one major five cushion landing, minor four, back to one. We have the one flat 641, which sounds like. Again, one of my personal favorites. So minor one, major flat six, minor four, back to one, and it also works with the flat seven. One flat 741. So you've probably started to notice occasionally, I will reorder the notes in a chord. Like, right at the end there I head this cord, and there's my C minor in the right hand. The C is not on the bottom. It's on the top. And that's what we call an inversion. In our next class, we're going to be talking about inversions and how you can use them to amp up your chord progressions. It will also help you keep things a little bit more efficient in terms of your movement between notes as you're going from one chord to the next chord, I will see you in our next class on inversion. 8. Inversions: Next up, we're going to be discussing inversions, and this class is a game changer. Put this one in your back pocket, keep coming back to it because it is one of the most valuable classes within this course. So let's dive right in. Let's start with a C major chord. We've played enough of these throughout the first course and up till now, where it's pretty comfortable at this point. C EG, we talked about the major third, the minor third. You can also see it as a C major scales first third and fifth note. But you're not burdened or doomed to always play the chord that way. You could reorder the notes. What if I put this C up to the top? Well, now we have a different version of the chord, and we can do that again where now we put the E up to the top. And if we do that one more time, we're back to where we started just one octave higher. So these different positions of the cord have different names. Root position. We move the C to the top, first inversion. We move the bottom note up again. We have second inversion, and then we're back to root position. If I'm moving down, I do have to reverse the order. Second inversion, first inversion, root position. Now, why would we even consider using these inversions Because there's already so many chord shapes to memorize? This feels like now we've tripled our workload. Well, first, I want to have a little disclaimer that I didn't learn these overnight. No musician did. The best way to really learn your inversions is to either compose a lot or jam along with other musicians. You might become a master of a few inversions that you're very comfortable with off the start. And as you explore more and more song material, you'll get more comfortable with other inversions, as well. These work in the right hand. They work in the left hand. If you're curious about which finger numbers to use and how to best approach that, I would recommend studying with a teacher, but I will quickly overview it with you right now. In the right hand for root position, we use fingers 13, five, first inversion one, two, five, second inversion is 135. So we always have a one and a five. If we were to just say the middle notes finger option, we would have three, two, three, three, two, three, and it continues, three, two, three, three, two, three, so on and so forth. Left hand is a little bit different.Te in the middle, three in the middle again. And then two, three, three, two, so on and so forth. And the reason why three is selected sometimes and two is selected other times has to do with the fact that our thumb does the stretching out of the side of the hand. So when I'm in this first position, everything is one fingers on each noe, everything is aligned very nicely in this position. So we just use one, three and five. Now if I move my pinky to this top C, you'll notice that two is naturally on G. In that case, we'll let the thumb do the stretch down to this E. So two is on G, and then again I put my pinky on the top note. The sits on the C, and the thumb does the stretch down to G. So that's a quick overview of the fingerings for inversions. But ultimately, that's not why we're here. This isn't a course on technique. This is a class on inversions and how you can use them within your harmonic chord progressions. So let's get back on track and talk a little bit about how we can start to apply these inversions. Let's take one of our chord progressions from before. How about one, four, five, one? We're in C major, one, four, five, one. Now, if I'm singing out to an audience, these leaps might be hard for me to gauge. So what you can try is using inversions to keep your hand more within one tighter position. I'll show you what I mean. Here's our C major chord, and you'll notice that there's CEG, and our next chord, F major also has a C. The other notes aren't common, but there is a C that's common. So why would we move? From this C, up to this C when we can keep that C where it is. Here's our one chord. Let's just move to the F and the A with the other two notes. There's our F major. In second inversion, the C is on the bottom. Next our G chord, we could just move up one note. Everything moves up one note, and we're in second inversion G major. I might also consider if we have one to four trying This inversion here, first inversion of G major. But because F major and G major have no notes in common, everything is going to have to change. The idea is, what's the most efficient movement for that change? How can I get to the next chord with moving all three of my notes as little as possible? Let's try one other chord progression. Let's try C minor, one, six, four, one or one flat six, four, one. Here it is, one Flat six is A flat major, which happens to have two of those notes from one chord. It has the C. It has the E flat. So let's just change the G to an A flat. So here's our sound, C minor, A flat major. Again, when I move to F to F minor, two of these notes are in F minor. The C is in F minor, and the A flat is in F minor. But there is no E flat, so I'll change that to F. Now I have my three notes from F minor, and then back to C. If this feels like too much, that's okay. This is a deep concept, and you're just getting used to it now. But what I would recommend is use one hand as a simple reference with your basic chords as your other hand finds out these inversions. I'll do that same example again, but I'll show you what I mean. So we're starting on C minor. Here's my hand that's going to be doing the inversions, and the right hand is the reference hand. Also playing C minor, totally regular root position in this case. Now, I'm going to move my reference hand to the next chord, just a basic triad Aflat CE. Okay. Sorry, A flat C E flat. We have C and E flat. Okay, so I can see the C and E flat. Is common. But there's no G in this. Oh, there's an A flat, so I'll move this up. So that's kind of the idea. You can use one hand that's just playing regular chords as a reference while you sort of dissect and figure out what's going on in the other hand. This doesn't work on the fly. If you're jamming with a band, you're not going to be able to do this on the fly too easily. But as musicians, we're expected to pay our dues. So as a starting point, this is great. You can use that reference, and it will get you the right result. Over time, that result will speed up until eventually you don't have to think too much about it and you can just focus on having fun. So that's one great way that you can use inversions to make your chord progressions a little bit more smooth in the transitions between those cords. In terms of playing style, what I would recommend is to start, there's two really solid options. One really great option for a playing style is in the left hand. Player roots, and in the right hand, player inversions. Again, we'll do this one flat 641 chord progression because we're starting to get used to it, and it's a great reference at this point. So we could start with our one chord. Left hand moves down to the next root, and the right hand is going to play the appropriate inversion, the most simple way to get to that next chord. Then we're down to the four in the left hand, again, playing an inversion in the right hand and then back to the one. So the left hand is grounding the roots, and the right hand is being efficient with its movement. The other option is to have the left hand playing all these inversions and the right hand is playing a melody of some sort. So I'm going to bring the left hand up to here. There's our chords. So They both sound great. It depends on the context of what you're playing. If I was playing with a singer or a horn player or someone else has taken care of the melody, I would choose the first option that we discussed. But if I'm expected to play a melody, then I would play that in the right hand. I would play inversions in the left, and it's even more ideal if you're playing with a bassist who can be grounding those roots as you play. In other words, on the C chord, they're playing that foundational C note or what we might call the root. So we talked about inversions. We briefly discussed the fingering and the technique for how you can apply that on the piano. We discussed how you can apply them to your chord progressions. And then we also talked about two different playing styles depending on the environment that you're in within that context of a jam or a song or a composition. So you understand what you can do with your left hand and your right hand to get the most use out of these inversions. Then we talked about two different playing styles that you can use depending on the context of what you're playing. If you're playing a melody or if someone else is playing the melody, you have a great foundation for what you can do on your instrument to best accompany the situation. So that's it. That's the basics of inversions. We're going to be using a lot of them moving forward in this course. Please feel free to continually come back to this class. Brush up your understanding of inversions because it's fundamental, it's super important. And I can't stress enough how much you need to take this class very seriously because it is going to be the thing that unlocks much more of your potential as a composer, as a performer, I will see you in the next class. 9. Slash Chords: Up next, let's talk about slash chords. What is a slash chord? Well, you're going to see occasionally a ord notated with a basic chord symbol, then a slash, and then some other sort of letter. For example, C G. You might remember in one of the other classes from this course, I briefly mentioned that when we call a chord a C chord, we assume it to be a major chord. So in the case of C G, what they're saying is it's a C chord with a G in the base. So the thing that comes before the slash is going to be your ord, and then the thing after the slash is going to be what happens in the base. So if it said C minor G or C min G, then you would play a C minor chord with G in the left hand. In our first example, C G. That's where we get C major with G in the left hand. Now, these are technically inversions, and I think a lot of people overlook that because an inversion is really determined by what is happening from the lowest note up. So if I have Cs Es and Gs in any order, C G, G, C G, G C. That's a C major chord. And because C was on the bottom, that's root position. But if I do the same thing again with G on the bottom, here it changes the sound by having that G in the left hand. So now the chord is technically in second inversion. So slash chords and inversions really do relate to one another. If you see C G, and your right hand is expected to play a melody, how in my left hand could I play a C chord with a G down below it. I could do that. I could do something like stride piano where I play the low bass note followed by the chord, or I could just put that chord in second inversion. Here's my C chord and what's in the bass, G. So technically, we could say this is a C G. But I think more often than not where you're going to see this in context is when you're jamming along with other musicians or accompanying by playing chords for someone else. So this is probably going to be the context where you see it a little bit more where we have C major G. Now, we've been doing a lot of these last couple examples in C, so I want to come back to A major and A minor and discuss these slash chords in that environment. So here it is. A major. A major slash C sharp, A major E. Once we move to other notes outside of the three that are available in the cord, there's some really solid options and some not so solid options. The two in the left hand sounds fantastic. It's used a lot in a lot of sort of soul and RMB. What comes to mind is Silk Sonic with Anderson Pock and Bruno Mars. You'll hear a lot of these types of slash chords. So a major chord with the root, third, or fifth in the left hand is very safe. A major chord with two in the left hand sounds great. This would be A major slash B. If I put the four in the left hand, it's not gonna sound as great because this C sharp and D are clashing, almost like a semitone, but we would call it a displaced semitone. It's been a little bit rearranged. So there's A major D. It's not horrible. It's just maybe not the first one that I would go to if I'm getting used to slash chords and wanting to play them in a relatively safe environment or with a more digestible sound for your listener. Next, if I move to F sharp, this becomes a whole other chord altogether. We wouldn't really call this A major slash F sharp. Later, you'll discover in the next course that there's a lot of different types of four note chords, and this one here would be called F sharp minus seven. So not exactly what we were looking for. No technically an acceptable slash chord. It becomes a different cord at that point. And the next note in the A major scale is G sharp. Mm. Pretty adventurous, pretty crunchy. They all have uses. They all have different sort of applications for where you can use these. But I would say to start for the major chord, root, third, or fifth in the left hand, or the two in the left hand are very solid options. In our minor key, like A minor, again, the root, third and fifth are all fantastic options. Also, I think when we use the root in the left hand, things feel more grounded. When we use the third in the left hand, it's going to sound more major or minor because you're bringing out the note that makes that chord major or minor, right? Like, if I have A major, there's a C sharp in the middle. If I have A minor, there's a C in the middle. That's the only thing that's changed. So if I put that C in the left hand, sort of highlighting that minor sound. It instantly reminds me of Beethoven, very commanding, very minor. If I put the fifth in the left hand, it's still stable, but it just sounds a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit less stable than the other options. So root in the left hand, very grounded. Third, you bring out the tonality, the major or minor. Fifth, still very acceptable, just a little bit more tense like it wants to move to a more grounded sort of sound. The two in the left hand, A minor B, in this case, still has that same issue that we had in the major environment where we put a four in the left hand. Allow me to break it down a bit. So in A minor, we have a C, but I'm putting a B in the left hand and B and C are a semitone away from each other. And I think of semitones as crunchy and tones as colorful. We want to generally avoid some of that crunchy sound until we get a little bit more evolved as a composer and performer and understand where those crunchy sounds work. So because A minor has that C or we're putting B in the left hand, there's gonna be a bit of that crunch. But now the four, in this case, D sounds totally great. Again, very silk sonic, very R&B, very soul. Sounds fine. If I put the six in the left hand, we're back to the same issue. This becomes a different chord called F major seven. And if we put the G in the left hand, so remember, if we have a natural minor as a scale, G is available. And if we have a harmonic minor as a scale that we're using, we have G sharp as an option. Let's try both. So here's a minor with G. Ooh. Sounds nice. Right? It's a tone between the A and the G. But as you can guess, when I move to this G sharp, there's a semitone, so let's check it out. That's so great. So, the flat seven sounds fine. The major seven, not quite as much. But again, there's always use for these maybe it's a soap opera, and Johnny's in the hospital. Right, so there's always some sort of use for all these different sort of slash chords, but some are gonna sound very safe. So are gonna sound nice and colorful, and others are gonna sound pretty crunchy and dissonant, in other words, not too pleasing to the ears. So we discussed petal tones in the first class from this course, and technically, petal tones are slash chords. But in this case, you're just really keeping one note in the left hand the whole time. When we're doing slash chords, very often that left hand is still moving around. But let's give that sort of Elton John sort of example where we have one, four, five, one in the right hand. Notice I'm using inversions now. So what this would be notated as is C major. F major C G major, C, and then B to C major. Here it is no inversions. C major, F major C, G major, C and B to C major. So F major C. Again, remember that means we have C in the left hand, and everything in this case is going to be C because C is in the left hand consistently. Unless it's a C major chord, then you just call it C major. You don't need to say C major. C, it's very redundant. So that's breaking down the pedal tones or the drones. Again, that relates to slash chords, so that's important to note. But what I want to do to finish this class is take a basic chord progression and apply some slash chords by not always choosing the root of the chord, but rather sometimes the third or the fifth. Let's choose a minor. So one, four, five, one, one of our predominance. In A minor, one, four, five, one. On the four chord, D minor, I'm going to put F in the left hand, the third of that chord. D minor F. And then for the E major chord, I'm going to put the fifth of that chord in the left hand, which is B. So we get A in the left hand for our A minor chord, F in the left hand for our D minor chord, B in the left hand for our E minor chord and then back to A minor. Let's put it in context with a little bit more of a playing style applied. Sounds a little bit more evolved and a little bit more classical by nature, too. I think we hear a lot of this stuff in classical music, especially late classical. So feel free to play around with it. You're not burdened to having a classical sound if you use these. They're used all over the place. Like, again, R&B, soul, jazz, reggae, all of it. It's used everywhere. So get comfortable with slash chords. They're relatively simple. By nature, they have relations to inversions, and they're just important to know. So I think this is another very important class to have as a reference. If you're ever having a hard time understanding how to play a slash chord or why we even have them, I would recommend come back to this class, check it out, and that's it on slash Cords. I'll see you in the next class. 10. Alternate Cadences: And next, let's talk about some alternate cadences. We've discussed the idea of 151 and 141 in its diatonic sort of setting, and diatonic means we're staying true to a scale. But what if we kind of break out of the scale? So here's an example. If I'm an A major, one, five, one would be following the proper chords that we should be playing within A major. But what if I made the five chord minor? What if I just changed the tonality of it a little bit? One, five. One. It still works. And often these little changes are going to sound a little bit more cinematic because there's just a very evocative mood that gets brought out from these changes, which is generally great within music for film and cinema. Next, we could have a major one to a minor four. So we would have A major. Instead of going to D major, we're gonna go to D minor. Me time. Melancholy starts major, but there's that kind of uncertainty that that minor four chord pulls out a bit of a minor feeling, but not too minor. And then we could also have one to a major four, then turn it minor, and then back to one. This gets used all over the place, whether it's pop music or even old video game music. Check this out. Mario, one, four, minor four. Back to one. It's one of my favorite uses of the one to four plagal kids. I feel like a lot of more adventurous bands will use this like Radiohead or, like, a lot of kind of math rock bands. You'll just hear this a lot, but there's something so melancholy about it. It really cuts through the major of the major one, the major four, and then back. It just pulls out a little bit of minor from within a major story. So if you're composing for something and the whole story is very major, very happy, but there's this underlying sort of sadness, maybe this is a progression that you might want to try out. And in the context of minor, we've discussed that the minor one can go to major five or minor five. It can also go to a minor four, but we haven't discussed the major four yet. Let's check that one out. Minor one. Major four. Minor one, major four. This is used in one of the themes from Alice in Wonderland by Danny Elfman. This sort of Descending almost snowfall effect on that minor one to the Major four. It's used in Mad World by Tears for Fears and repopularized by Gary Jules. It's used even in one of my favorite bands Medeski Martin and Wood. They have this song called Bubble House. It's sort of a Which is a major four C major back to G minor, the minor one, major four, minor one. It's all over the place. It really cuts through that minor sound of starting on a minor chord, and it just kind of adds a bit of playfulness to it. So the cadences that we discussed here are major one to minor four. Major one to major four, then minor four. Back to one, major one minor five. And we discussed one other cadence where we're starting on a minor one and going to a major four. So play around with these. They are essentially parallel harmony, where what we're doing is that random chord that we're taking outside the context of our key. In other words, I'm in C major, and I'm using a G minor chord. It should be G major, if I'm staying true to the C major scale. But C natural minor, the parallel minor scale, in other words, the minor scale that starts on the same root, C has a G minor chord in it. So we're borrowing the harmony from the minor scale. Some people will call this borrowed harmony can also be called parallel harmony. So I want you to understand it's not totally randomized. There is this sort of borrowing of a chord from the parallel major or the parallel minor. To flip the example, when we were in A minor and used our major four chord, that chord is being borrowed from the A major scale. So there's quite a bit to understand within these alternative cadences. But keep in mind, it's all about playing around, having fun, and slowly starting to break the rules, but at the same time, understanding how we're breaking the rules, putting some terms to the way that we're breaking the rules, so we can always have some sort of context for the sounds that we're hearing and the sort of chord progressions that we're creating. I'll see you in the next class. 11. 5, 6, Sus Chords: Next up, let's talk about five chords, six chords, sus two, and sus four chords. We're throwing out a lot of other numbers within this class, five, six, two, four, and you'll see them all the time, especially in pop music and musical theater music. So let's start to break things down. What is a five chord? This is probably the easiest thing I'll get to teach you within this class. It's just a fifth. So C to G. In other words, it's a major or minor chord with no middle note. It's just this hollow sound. And if you play it on guitar, quite often they'll call them power chords, especially when you have some gnarly distortion on there. Think of that metal chug that tun tun, to tune. That's generally a power chord, which is the same as a five chord. So this would be C five. This would be E flat five. This is D five. This is G five. Just a fifth. Easy, Ps. Next, let's talk about six chords. These are relatively simple as well, too. There's major six, and there's minor six chords. A major six chord is a major chord. And from the fifth, the top note, it's just one tone higher that we're going to add a sixth. In other words, the sixth note from our scale, in this case, the C major scale. So CEG with an added sixth. Super friendly sounding. It's just whenever I'm trying to finish a song on a very friendly note, I'll use this chord. Where I really like to use these six chords is when we're doing a 141 chord progression or anything with that four chord, the four sounds really great with that color on it. So if I go one, four, which is a major six chord, back to one, it sounds really beautiful. Also works for minor chords. C minor, one tone above the fifth. Now, we're actually not choosing the flat six in this case. So, despite the fact that natural minor has a flat six, harmonic minor has a flat six. When you see a minor six chord, you're still choosing that major sixth, one tone above the fifth of that chord. Very mysterious sounding. And again, sounds really great when used on the four chord. So if we have minor one, minor four and back, let's try that four with a six added onto it. So minor one, minor four, with a six back to one. This sound was used a lot in the romantic era, but you'll hear it all over the place. Where I love this chord the most is how Chopin uses it. He uses it all over the place, and he has some very adventurous ways of voicing the chord. So, I mean, if it's good enough for Chopin, it's good enough for us. Next up, let's talk about sus two and sus four chords. These are also relatively simple to understand. You have a basic major chord or minor chord. And as I mentioned before, in a major scale and in a minor scale, one, two, four and five are common. So if we just focus on one, two, three, four, five from our scale, the third can be, in this case, E flat if it's minor or E, if it's major. If I play a major chord and we see a sus four chord symbol, I'd be changing this middle note to F, in this case, the fourth note of C major. Also the fourth note of C minor. So these aren't meant to sound innately major or minor unless they resolve afterwards. For example, C SS four C major. Sounds very happy or Now we're getting quite sad. So SS four is a root, it's a fifth, and it's the fourth note from our scale. And as you can probably guess, SS two uses the second note. There it is there. It's like those old news broadcasts where they would go, This just It's almost always that sus two chord. It's not major, it's not minor. It just kind of gets your attention, which is, I think, ultimately what they're going for in that moment. It should be mentioned that when you see the term SS chord, it's assumed generally to be the sus four. When we say sus, what we mean is suspension. We're suspending that middle note up to the fourth or we're suspending it down to the second. But if I was to say to you, Hey, I need you to go suspend that piano, you would think suspend it up into the air, pull a rope, and now it's up into the air. So when we hear suspend, the assumption is generally higher. That's the way I think of it. So when you hear a sus chord, it's generally going to be sus four. If you're in a jazz environment, they often mean both, something like this. And finding some fun voicing to use either the two or the four or both. So this would be CSS or CSS four. And this would be CSS two. If you're in a jazz environment, you can do a SS two and SS four, and that would just be called a SS cord as well. For the younger generation, I'm sure this is going to be a bit of a funnier class, how many times I've said sus, but don't be suspicious because this is a very important set of chords that you're going to see all over the place. So we have discussed C five. C major six, C minor six, C SS four or CSS. Again, this could also be CSS and C SS two. Where you'll see these sSchords quite a bit is on a five chord. You'll hear a SS four, followed by a regular five chord. And in the context of 151, let's try that out. We're gonna be in C minor. One, five with a sus four, resolve, and then back. I think why this works so well is that we end up getting a dough, te dough voice leading. In other words, the top notes are singing out dough, te dough. Let's try it one more time. There's our dough. There's our T and back to dough. If you don't know solfege, I'm just referring to it's a first note of the scale down a little bit to the seventh and backup. And why that's important is it's actually one of the most used sort of melodic cadences. In other words, this way of wrapping up a melody with this dough, T Oh, Doug. You'll hear it all the time, especially in classical music, but we covered quite a few chords within this class five chord, six chords, sus four, and sus two. Use this class as a reference as we bring those up in the future, and feel free to spice up your chord progressions by randomly assigning some of your chords to these types of chords. It might sound great. It might not sound so great. But when you find the sound that works, it's going to lend itself to your style. I'll see you in the next class. 12. Omitting Notes: Up next, let's talk a little bit about how harmony can relate to melody within the context of what I've been teaching you so far. So let's say we have an A major chord, and in the melody, there's a lot of that middle note C sharp. So a couple other notes, but we're really anchored onto that middle note. Well, because my harmony in the left hand, the chord has a C sharp, and the melody is playing a lot of C sharp, I actually don't need to keep that note in my left hand. I could choose to add some other color, maybe add a six or a four or something else that we've discussed, but even that's not necessary. So if I have the A and E in my left hand with no C sharp, and I have put the C sharp into the melody, that's still completing the sound of that A major chord. So I've eliminated one note, Let's move to the four chord. But this time, I'm going to eliminate the top note A because A is going to be my melody. One more time. C sharp in the melody so it's not in the chord. A in the melody. So it's not in the chord. That's not always necessary. You don't always have to get rid of a note in the left hand, but this is also giving you some insight towards orchestration. If your horns are playing two notes of a chord, maybe your strings should play that third note, right? Really starting to divide the different notes that make up harmony between different sections or between different roles. In other words, the harmony and the melody, making sure that if the melody is playing a certain note, the harmony is very much getting out of the way, not stealing the show by eliminating that note that the melody happens to be playing. Now, another thing worth mentioning is because now we're getting talking about eliminating notes. We've talked so far about how to stack all of this and build it, and now we're kind of deconstructing things. Let's talk a little bit about the foundational roles of the three notes within Accord. And we've touched on this in one of the other classes, but I want to review it and give you a fun analogy that you can use, as well, too. Back to A major. Well, what do I need to make an A major chord? I need A. It's A major, after all. I need C sharp. That's what makes it major. Remember, the middle note changing determines major or minor. So I need that C sharp to make it major. The E is not necessary. But why is it there? I think of it sort of like a thickening agent. Have you ever had, for example, thin gravy? It tastes good, but the texture isn't quite right. We don't want our mashed potatoes and roast beef or whatever it is to have this runny liquid all over. We kind of generally want that thicker gravy. So I think of the fifth of a cord, kind of like flour to gravy. It thickens the sound. It doesn't change it from major to minor or anything crazy like that. It just gives a little bit more thickness, a little bit more power or cohesiveness, whatever word you want to use. That's why we have the fifth. Rit is necessary for any chord, so we know how to name it. The third tells us major or minor. The fifth is optional. So again, that's a note that you can omit, especially if it's up in the melody. So whatever your melody is playing, like, here's an example. As a music producer, sometimes I'll do full fleshed out chords, so the chord progression has all the notes. And then once I've determined what my melody is, I'll look at the relation between the two and take out certain notes from the harmony that are up in the melody. Now all of a sudden, there's this sort of more complex looking and very intentional looking harmony because we're understanding its relationship to the melody. I know this course isn't really on melody writing, but I wanted to start to give you some context because as we're talking more and more deeply about the study of harmony, we need to start to consider how it does relate to melody. So you don't always need every single note within every single chord. But if you're going to get rid of a note, you want to have some context as to why you're getting rid of it. Maybe it's the fifth of a chord, maybe it's just not necessary, right? You've taking some flour out of the gravy. Or maybe you already have that note up in the melody. Maybe it's doubled in the melody. Maybe there's just way too much of that one note happening. So in the left hand or in the harmony, you're sacrificing that note. But at the same time, you're still getting that full big picture of the chord because between the harmony and between the melody, that sound is completed, right? So this is something that you can play around with. I think it's a bit of a later stage thing as you get more and more into melody writing. But again, with the context of what I mentioned as a producer, start with full chords. And when you have your melody and harmony down, ask yourself, What can I get rid of from that point, and it'll just be a much more efficient and sort of professional sound to your relationship between harmony and melody. So hopefully, that gives you some context as to when you can omit notes from your harmony. I'll see you in the next class. 13. Inner Voice Leading: Another thing that I would recommend the pianists taking this course try out is inner voice leading. Or even if you're a composer, pen and paper, inner voice leading is very important. It can help us fill in that gap that we have between our harmony and our melody. Allow me to explain. Here's an A major chord, and my melody might just be something simple like EDC sharp. Now, there's quite a big gap, especially when I first start, look at the gap between these two hands. So I can ask my right hand thumb to play one of the notes that's in my chord or in this case, maybe A. Now, things are a little bit more filled out. Let's move to a D major chord, the four chord, and continue to work on this melody. Maybe it's Okay, but I'm going to add an A with my thumb down below because it's one of my options in my chord. So now I have Now, my thumb has been staying on this A the whole time. Let's move to an E chord, and my thumb is going to move to a G sharp, one of the notes from my chord. So notice I'm starting to add this thumb to all the different chords that I'm playing, but I'm not doing anything too fancy with it. I'm just holding. You could play the same rhythm as your melody with that thumb gives a slightly different sound, something like and you can feel free to play around with this, but I wanted you to understand the term inner voice leading and how you can relatively quickly apply it to some of your chord progressions, especially if you're a pianist. Just think about what can my right hand thumb do to add to the left hand harmony? And again, in some cases, you might have a chord in the left hand, and let's say our melody is something simple like that. My right hand thumb is going to play C Sharp, one of the notes from my chord. In fact, all three of these notes are notes from my chord. So something like when we put it all together, the chord, plus the C sharp, plus the melody up top. But similar to the last class, we talked about how if there's something happening uptp in the melody or in this case, the inner voice leading, a secondary melody of sorts, we can get rid of that note from the left hand. So now it sounds like maybe another chord. So now I have a D major chord with no A because my A is in the right hand thumb, and there's the melody up over top. This is getting a little bit more advanced and it can be sometimes difficult to think up on the spot. But it gives you a great compositional tool. If you feel like there's always this big gap between my left hand chord and my left hand melody note, what can I do in between? You can add an inner voice leading or secondary melody with the right hand thumb, and then optionally also choose to omit, get rid of one of the left hand notes that might be overlapping with the right hand. And just to clarify, overlap isn't a bad thing. There's almost always going to be some notes that are doubled between the hands. But if you want to thin out the sound a little bit, you now understand how to do that. So that is inner voice leading, something we can do with our right hand thumb to help spread out those voices across the keybd. I will see you in the next class. 14. Outro: Congratulations for finishing the two oh one level of cords and chord progressions. Are you sweating a bit? Was this a bit more tough? I'd imagine there was some material that definitely challenged you much more than the one oh one course, because I'm really trying to make sure that by the time we get to the end of three oh one, you feel like a little bit of a harmonic master. Now, this material is not to be brushed through, so make sure that you develop it as deeply as you can. But most importantly, take the topics that you were most enthusiastic about and make sure that you nurture that passion to really make sure that it becomes part of your harmonic style. In fact, that's where we're going for the project within this course. You're going to take your most inspired class and apply it to a chord progression. But before I go into all the details, remember, there is a class that outlines all the details for this project, so make sure that you go back and check that out. So now you know how to invert chords. You're playing seventh chords, you're coloring chords. You're really getting past the basics, and I want to congratulate you because the level that you're at now is not easy. If you're putting in the work, you deserve a big congratulations and also thank you for taking this course. The income generated from these courses just fuels back into trying to improve the content that I'm able to provide for you. I hope you had some fun, and I hope you were challenged, and I'll catch you in the next course.