Chords and Chord Progressions 301

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on chords and chord progressions, level three oh one. This course is really designed to build on the material from the one oh one and the two oh one courses. We're going to take things up to an advanced level, and we're going to be covering a lot of really interesting topics that'll take you really far as either a composer and the harmony within your compositions or a performer and your harmonic choices within your performances. Some of the topics that we'll be covering will be extracting seventh chords from scales. We're going to be talking about parallel harmony, rootless voicings, drop voicings, upper extensions, and so much more. This course really does get quite a bit more colorful. We're going to be dipping our toes into the language of jazz harmony, but I'm also going to be giving you some tricks that you can apply to pop, rock, classical, and so much more. It's really about helping you take your harmonic language to the next level and being able to break down some of the barriers and boundaries within harmony. It's really about helping you take your harmonic language to the next level while breaking down barriers within styles and genres so that you can really feel free as a composer, specifically within your harmonic language choices. So if you enjoy the material within the one oh one and two oh one courses, I'm certain that this will help you take your harmony up to a level where you feel like you have a lot to work on. There's going to be a lot of stuff you can practice, and you will be able to mull through this material for years. It really depends on how deep you want to take your study within harmony. 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. Now, to me, this course is the most fun, but it's also the most amount of work. So make sure that you're ready to practice. If you do take private lessons, bring up some of this material to your teacher so that they can help you develop it to the furthest extent. Let's get ready to jump into the first class. I'll see you there. 2. Class Project: So there is going to be a project for this course. Similar to the two oh one level, you're going to take your favorite concept from within one of these classes ahead. You're going to apply it to a chord progression that you've already been working with. Let's say you're working on a song, whether it be an original composition or something that you're learning like a cover. So let's say your chord progression is C minor, A flat major, F minor, G major. Well, you could incorporate some rootless voicings so that it ends up sounding something like this. If you're going for something jazzy, that might be a great option. But if you see yourself in the future arranging horns and orchestral pieces, then maybe drop voicing is more for you. Again, take the class that resonates with you the most, the one that you feel is most beneficial to you and make sure that you're applying the material from that class. So once you have this concept picked out and you've practiced it a bit, you're going to record yourself. It's either going to be an audio or video recording, and you're going to upload it to whatever vessel you feel works best for you. Generally, I would recommend YouTube, Vmeo or if it's audio, something like SoundCloud. And you're going to supply, to me, a public link through your project submission. I'll go through that link to see what you've recorded, and I'll give you some feedback for better or for worse. I'm going to let you know what you did well, as well as some areas of improvement and let you know how you could expand upon this material in the future. Now, this should mostly be fun, but it will be a little bit challenging. So make sure that you do put in some practice ahead of time, make sure that you're recording this project on a day that you're really feeling in the zone. And, of course, if you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out. I look forward to seeing what you submit, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Extraction of 7th Chords (Major): Hey, everyone, and welcome back. Let's start off with talking about major seventh chords, minor seventh chords, and we'll review the dominant seventh chords that we talked about in the second course. And then we're going to be using a major scale to extract these chords plus one extra type of chord that we'll talk about momentarily. So C major seven. Let's start with C. It's a nice friendly key. We have a major chord, and then the octave goes down one semitone. That's it. That's the formula for creating a major seventh chord. That's one way that we can figure out this particular shape. Now let's take that formula and apply it to a few other chords. Let's say a flat major. Here's our octave down a semitone. A flat major seven. B flat. Here's our major chord. Here's our octave, down a semitone. B flat major seven. The other way you can think about a major seventh chord is going back to building things off of major thirds and minor thirds. So they keep alternating in this case, where we have C, up four semitones, major third, up three semitones, minor third, and then again, up four semitones, major third. So find a note up a major third, up a minor third, up a major third will also give you a major seventh chord. I think it's a bit clunky, building your cords off of all of these smaller building blocks. They are a great method to be able to fall back on if you completely get stuck. But what I would recommend is that you memorize your major chord shapes, your minor chord shapes, and then you understand that just below the octave is a seventh. If it's a semitone below the octave, it's going to be a major seventh. If it's a tone below the octave, it's a minor seventh. So we're combining major or minor chords with major or minor sevenths. That I think is the easiest way, but it is going to take some time for you to memorize your different chord shapes. After all, this is the third course on this topic. So I'm hoping at this point you've paid your dues and those major and minor chords are ready to go. Next up, let's talk about the minor seventh chord. Let's use C again. Here's our C minor chord. Here's our octave, tone below, and we get C minor seven. Let's try it off of E flat. Here's our minor chord. Here's our octave down a tone. E flat minor seven. One more. Let's do a trickier one B minor. Here's our octave down a tone. There is B minor seven. And again, we can build this cord using major thirds and minor thirds. A little bit clunky, but a great resource if you get stuck. B, up a minor third, up a major third, up a minor third. So in other words, up three semitones, up four semitones, up three semitones. So three, four, three or minor third, major third, minor third. That also gives you a minor seventh chord. Starting on E, up a minor third, major third, minor third. E minor seven. A flat, up a minor third, major third, minor third. We get a flat minus seven. But again, my preference would be learn your minor chords and then try to see the seventh in relation to being just below your octave. So those are major seventh chords, minor seventh chords. We have discussed previously the dominant seventh chord, which is a major chord with a minor seventh, a tone below the octave. You could think of it, again, as major third, minor third, minor third, but I'm going to stop referring to things in that regard. Again, just wanted to give you another context to be able to think about this stuff. But ideally, major chord with a tone below the octave. There's your dominant seventh. One other example might be F major. Here's your octave, tone below. You get F dominant seven. There's going to be one other type of seventh chord that we discuss briefly. But now let's pivot over to using our C major scale to extract all the different seventh chords that are available within that scale or within that key. So C major, a friendly place for us to start. We end up getting our first chord is C major seven, D minor seven. E minus seven, F major seven, G dominant seven, A minus seven, B minus seven, flat five. We'll talk about it in a second. Back to C major seven. So what is a minor seven flat five chord? Well, remember, a chord is built off of a root, third, fifth, and seventh. So a minor seven flat five implies that the fifth, the third note of that chord is flattened. So in this case, we had B minor seven flat five, There's the shape of B minor seven. If we flatten that fifth, we get B minor seven flat five. This chord can also be called a half diminished seventh chord. I'll briefly explain why. But in this course, we're going to be referring to it as a minor seven flat five. And in a lot of jazz charts, pop charts, musical theater charts, that's the term that you're going to see. So let's discuss the half diminished seventh chord, which is the other name for the minor seven flat five. A diminished chord, as we've discussed, is built off of minor thirds, one, two, three semitones, one, two, three semitones. And if I go another one, two, three semitones, I end up getting a diminished seventh chord. That's because we have a diminished cord with what we would call a diminished seventh. Here's our octave. Down a semitone major seventh, down a semitone minor seventh, down another semitone. We're getting into sixth territory, but if I want to call it a seventh of some sort, you would call it a diminished seventh. So diminished chord, diminished seventh, you get a diminished seventh chord. But in the case of our minor seven flat five or half diminished seventh chord, I'm using the minor seventh, a tone below the octave. So not everything about this cord is fully diminished. It's half diminished. It's a diminished chord with a flattened seventh. Technically, it's not really even half diminished. It's three quarters diminished, but that's just what they call it. A half diminished seventh chord, and to notate it, you would have a lowercase Roman numeral, a little degrees sign, a superscript circle with a diagonal slash that goes through it. So if you ever see that cord symbol, it's the same as minor seven flat five. So I would recommend memorizing those different chords that are available within the major scale. You don't have to do this for every scale right off the bat in the next class, we're going to be talking about three different types of minor scales. All the cords that are available within those scales, it's too much to memorize. So I would recommend just start with memorizing the major content and then move forward from there. So we ended up having major seven, minus seven, minus seven, major seven, dominant seven, minus seven, minor seven flat five, major seven. Let's try this in one other key. Let's go with G major. G, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. There's our scale. Let's give it a try. G major seven, A minus seven, B minus seven, C major seven, D dominant seven, E minus seven, F sharp, minus seven, flat five, G major seven. We'll try it in one other key as well. F major from F o tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Here's our F major scale. Let's extract the chords. Major seven, minor seven, minor seven, major seven, dominant seven, minus seven, minor seven flat five, major seven. So you'll notice that when I was in the key of G major, any note that was F had to be F sharp. I have to stay true to this key or this scale. And when I was in F major, all of my Bs had to be a B flat because I'm staying true to the F major scale. So that's it. We talked about all of the seventh chords that are available within a major key. We applied it to three different major keys. And again, I would recommend that you memorize these chords within a major scale before moving forward and memorizing the chords that are available within the three types of minor scales that we're going to be talking about soon, especially because we're talking about seventh chords. The chord names are getting a little bit more dense and complex, and you don't want to feel overwhelmed by this. A lot of this stuff is here as a reference to you, but at the same time, I want to be able to explain things as we go so you have an understanding but knowing that it will take time to memorize, you also have this resource to fall back on. Next, let's get talking about extracting seventh chords from three different types of minor scales. I'll see you in the next class. 4. Extraction of 7th Chords (Natural/Harmonic/Melodic Minor): Alright, let's get talking about extracting seventh chords from the natural minor scale. We're going to start by using a natural minor, and then we'll apply the same concept into one or two other keys. So here is our A natural minor scale, as we've discussed in the previous courses, and we're going to go through and start on our first note and follow it up with two skips. Now, as some of you keen folk out there might recognize, these are all going to be the same chords that we saw in our C major scale. A minor or a natural minor in this case, and C major share the exact same notes. So they should have the exact same chords just starting from a different place. So we're not starting on a major seventh chord. We're starting on a minor seventh chord. So what we get is A minus seven, B minor seven flat five, C major seven, D minor seven, E minus seven, F major seven, G dominant seven, and then back to A minus seven. This scale has a bit of a softer sound to it, and in my opinion, it's because the five chord, in this case, E is a minor seventh. It doesn't have that demanding or dominant sort of sound that a dominant seventh chord built off of the fifth gives us. In other words, the five chord being a dominant seven is something we will see in the next two scales, but we have a bit of a softer sound choosing this E minor seven built off of our fifth note. So, again, if I don't give letter names, but just the chord qualities we get minus seven, minor seven flat five, major seven, minus seven, minus seven, major seven, dominant seven, and then back to minus seven. I think the natural progression of memorizing all the chords that are available within your minor scales starts most easily from the natural minor scale because it uses all the same chords as the major scale, but just reordered. So there's no new fancy names at this point. And again, it's just the same order, but reshuffled from a different starting point. So another thing worth mentioning is that the seventh chord, in this case, G dominant, this is where our dominant chord resides. So often we see dominant chords built off of the fifth scale degree, but in this case, we're seeing it built off of the flat seven or minor seventh. Again, referring to a tone below our starting point A or below the octave. So if we have A to A as our scale, one tone below is the flat seven or minor seven. So we have this dominant chord, and it kind of has this poll up to the minor seventh chord. A lot of old sort of like 80s boxer movies use that sort of or like 90s dance music. So there still is a dominant chord. It still does pull us back to the one chord. It's just shifted to a different spot in the scale, so it's built off of the flat seven or the seventh note of that scale. And again, it just offers a softer sound. Instead of this dominant five to a minor one, we get this dominant flat seven to a minor one. Again, listen, the harder sound, the softer sound. So that's it. In the natural minor scale, those are the chords that we get, and we're going to try it out in two other keys. Let's start off with using D natural minor. If I start on D and I go up tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, and then I flatten the third, sixth and seventh notes, I end up getting the natural minor scale. So it has a B flat. So anytime I'm going to play a B as I'm going through these chords, it has to be a B flat. Let's go through them. We get D minor seven, E minor seven flat five, F major seven, G minus seven, A minus seven, B flat major seven, C dominant seven, back to D minor seven. Notice it's the same order, minus seven, minus seven, flat five, major seven, minus seven, minus seven, major seven, dominant seven, back to the minor seventh chord. Let's try one other key. It's important that we keep this ball rolling. Let's try G natural minor this time. G, tone, tone, semitone. Tone, tone, tone, semitone. Flatten the three, flatten the six, flatten the seven. There is our natural minor scale, G natural minor with Bs that are flat and Es that are flat. So really, I mean, you could go through this where every chord starts white, white, white, white, and then you look for anything that needs to be changed. Start with your major scale, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. To change that to a natural minor scale, you flatten three, six and seven. And then, again, you can go through all these four note chord shapes with all whites and then make any adjustments that are needed based on the key that you're in. And notice that I used the term key and scale interchangeably. They're kind of the same thing, but a scale is played linearly. And a key is just that clump of notes, just thinking of all the different notes that are available. So when we say we're extracting from a key or a scale, it's relatively interchangeable. So that's it. We talked about the natural minor scale, how to extract all the seventh chords that are available within it. And again, this is a good natural progression. Once you've memorized all the seventh chords that are available within a major key, I would next recommend moving over to natural minor scales because they have all the same chords just reordered. That's the only difference. Next up, we're going to be extracting seventh chords from our harmonic minor scale, else U in class 2.2. Alright, so let's start extracting the seventh chords that are available within the harmonic minor scale. We're going to start off by using C harmonic minor as our starting key. So we have A E flatten A flat. Again, remember, it's like, starting with a major scale, but you've flattened the third and the sixth note. Now we have our harmonic minor scale. From there, we can go through every one of the notes within that scale and add two skips. So we're skipping a note in the scale, hitting the next one. Skipping a note in the scale, hitting the next one, and we're going to do that off of every scale degree within C harmonic minor. So what we end up getting is C minor major seven to start. Usually, our one chord is a place of rest. It's a place of resolution, but there's nothing resolved about this sound. I call it the soap opera chord. It's kind of like, and Brad is in the hospital and Jimmy broke his leg. Transition to the next scene. So it's very dramatic, not very resolved, but it has its place. So we had this minor major seven, which is named that way because it's a minor chord with a major seventh, one semitone below the octave. Minor major seven, followed by minor seven flat five. The next one is really wild. Major seven sharp five. This is very close to E flat major seven. But the fifth, remember, we have a root third, fifth, and seventh. The fifth has been sharpened. So it's E flat major seven, sharp five. Then things get a little bit more normal. We have F minor seven, G dominant seven, A flat, major seven, B diminished seven, and then back to that C minor major seven. The harmonic minor scale is used a lot in classical music and the eras before and after. So the Baroque and the romantic era. Generally, what a lot of lay people would summize as classical sounding music, the harmonic minor scale gets used a lot. And during that time, composers didn't have as much range with the types of chords that they could use to appease their audience. So some of these really wild chords, like the Major seven Sharp five, just weren't used a whole lot. So the harmonic minor scale, extracting seventh chords out of it is not quite as common as extracting seventh chords out of the natural minor and the next scale that we're going to talk about the melodic minor scale. But for context, it's still important to make sure that you understand all the different chords that could be available within this type of scale because at the end of the day, I wish to leave no rock left unturned. I want you to be able to have a resource to come back to in case you get stuck. If you're really loving the harmonic minor scale sound, you're feeling adventurous and want to play around with it using seventh chords, this class is available to you to be able to fall back on as a reference. Try things in one other key. Starting with G major, G, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone, flat and three, flat and six. Now we have our G harmonic minor scale. Let's go through all the different chords that could be available within this particular scale, starting with G minor major seven, A minus seven, flat five, B flat major seven, sharp five. Again, here's B fi major seven. We're sharpening the fifth. C minor seven, D dominant seven. E flat major seven, F sharp, diminished seven, and then back to G minor major seven. You can do this on any note on the piano or if you're not on the piano on whatever instrument you're on, find a note, create a major scale, flatten the third and sixth. Now it's harmonic, and then go through that scale. So whatever note you're on within the scale, just go up three skips and you'll end up getting that seventh chord. So back to the example from C, if we go up a skip in the scale, a Skip in the scale, a Skip in the scale, we get that available seventh chord. So again, I recommend playing around with this and the seventh chords available within it, maybe at the later stages because you don't hear some of these chords quite as often, because at the end of the day, the harmonic minor scale, we don't extract seventh chords from it quite as much as some of the other available scales. Speaking of which, next we're going to be talking about extracting seventh chords from the melodic minor scale. First, we're going to have to talk about what is a melodic minor scale? What are the basic chords that we can extract from it? And then we'll also talk about the seventh chords that are available within it as well. I will see you in class 2.3. Up next, let's talk about chord extraction from our melodic minor scale. Let's break things down a little bit more, though, because we haven't really talked too much about the melodic minor scale leading up to this. Let's break things down a little bit, though, because we haven't talked about the melodic minor scale leading up to this point. It's relatively simple. We have a natural minor scale, like a natural minor, and similar to the harmonic minor scale where the seventh note is raised, we also raise the sixth note. At this point, it's almost a major scale. It's like a major scale where the third note has been lower to semi tone. But of course, we don't want to think of it in context to a major scale. The bottom part of the scale still sounds quite minor, but the top sounds a little bit more major. So depending on where you're playing within the scale, you can pull out different emotions. The melodic minor scale, when practiced by classical musicians, as you're going up through the scale, you would raise the sixth and seventh notes. And on the way down, you would play the natural minor scale. They re flatten on the way back down. We're not too worried about playing it like a scale or using it within the classical context. We're going to approach it more by its secondary name the jazz minor scale. We're always going to keep the sixth raised, we're always going to keep the seventh raised. This is the scale that we're working with. So we haven't talked about extracting the basic chords, which we should do before we get talking about extracting the seventh chords. So let's just talk about the basic chords first. We're gonna go through starting on A. We end up getting a minor, next up, B minor, C augmented. D major, E major, F sharp diminished, G sharp diminished, back to A minor. What's really cool and unique about this scale is that we have two minor chords, a tone apart, two major chords, a tone apart, and two diminished chords a tone apart. A minor B minor, separated by a tone. There's the minor chords. Then we get the C augmented kind of breaks things up a bit. Dmjor E major, separated by a tone. F sharp diminished, G sharp diminished, separated by a tone, and then back to A minor. So if you're playing around and you really like the sound of a diminished chord, up a tone to another diminished chord, maybe back and forth, you have some context, and you could understand, Okay, this is coming from the melodic minor or the jazz minor scale. Now let's get adding some extra notes over top. So we had this minor minor augmented, major, major, diminished, diminished. Once we add sevenths, things are going to get a little bit more complex. So let's get into this a melodic minor scale and the chord extraction of seventh chords available within that key, starting with A minor major seven, B minus seven, C major seven, sharp five. So here is C major seven. We're sharpening that fifth. D dominant seven, E dominant seven, F sharp minor seven flat five, G sharp, minus seven flat five, back to A minor major seven. So let's say, for example, you really like the sound of F sharp, minus seven flat five and G sharp, minus seven flat five being a tone away from each other. Something like And you're just playing around with that sound, but you have no idea where it's coming from. Which scale is that a part of? Well, now you know, it's the melodic minor. And again, there's a lot of these chords that are beside each other that are the same quality. We have D dominant and E dominant beside each other. F sharp minor seven flat five and G sharp minor seven flat five that are also right beside one another. So this melodic minor scale offers some kind of unique opportunities. But before we wrap this up, I want to try it in one other key. Let's use D melodic minor this time. Starting on D, we're going to go up tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. There's our major scale, flatten the third, now it's melodic minor. Let's go through all the different seventh chords available within D melodic minor, starting with D minor major seven. E minor seven, F major seven, sharp five, G dominant seven, A dominant seven, B minor seven flat five, C sharp minor seven flat five, and back to D minor major seven. I'm sure some of this for some of you viewers, is going to be a little bit intense. After all, we are in the third installment of this course, and it is expected that along the way, you've been doing your due diligence to practice the stuff in the first and second available courses. Now, that being said, it's not the case that every new class that comes out within this course is going to be something you can instantly digest. The material is getting more dense, it's getting more complex, and more is expected towards you as a student and the practice that you put in to this material. Really, all of this material is meant to act as a reference. So as you progress as a composer and as a performer, and you expand your palette, your harmonic palette, so to speak, if you want to be able to know quickly what's available to you, in terms of your harmonic choices, you have these classes to be able to fall back on. That all being said, Everything in 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 is more as a reference. We will get unraveling some of this as we go through the course. But the next class I'm particularly excited about because it's going to be very application driven, something that you can start to apply very soon, and it's going to give you a very polished and professional sound. I will see you in that next class. 5. Modulations and Secondary Dominants: Alright, up next, let's get talking about modulations and secondary dominance. I'm excited. This is one of the compositional harmonic tricks that I use the most, and the more you use it, the more sense it's going to make, the more accessible to you it's going to be. So let's first talk about what a modulation is and then get talking about secondary dominance as a form of modulation. Modulation is essentially starting off in one key. So let's say we're starting in G major, and I want to move into some sort of other scale or key. For example, maybe I want to move to E minor. But the question is, how do I get to E minor? It's sort of like the door is locked, and I need some sort of key to be able to open the door. Well, what we're going to use is a particular cord as that key. So when we talked before about a dominant seventh cord, in other words, a cord that is a major cord with a flat seven, one tone below the octave, this cord fell by a fifth, and that's how it resolved. Well, wherever your destination is, let's say, again, it's E minor. You just take one fifth above your destination, in this case, B, and you play a dominant seventh chord built off of that note. So, again, we're in G major, and I want to get to E minor. I'm going to use B dominant seven to get me there. Let's just listen for a moment. I'll do a very small composition, and you'll see how this B seven takes us into E minor. Now we're in E minor. Now, E minor was a very specific choice on my end because it happens to be the relative minor scale. Remember before I mentioned that if you start a major scale on the sixth note and then from there, you go all the way up to the sixth note, keeping all the same notes that you had in your major scale. So in this case, we had G major. Now we're choosing E minor. While starting from the sixth and going to the sixth gives you the relative minor scale. So in this case, E minor has one sharp, and it's the relative minor scale to G major. So I took us from G major. Into E minor by using E minor five cord, the dominant seventh cord built off of the fifth, and it takes us there beautifully. Now, let's just go through G major for a moment and rediscover what the cords are that are available. G major, A minor, B minor, C major, D major, E minor, F sharp diminished, and then we're back to G major. So with the exception of F sharp diminished, all of the other chords that were mentioned would be great destinations for your modulation. In other words, if I'm in G major and I want the next part of my song to sound like it has a new dough, and maybe I don't want to keep it major, maybe I want to have a minor sound. Well, I would get to one of these available chords that we just discussed by using the dominant five chord of that destination. I'll give you another example. We're still in G major, and we want to get to this third chord. But we don't want it to sound like it's wanting to pull back to G. We want B to sound like the new dough. Maybe I have a whole middle section of a song that I want to write in B minor. So how do I get to B minor? Well, I would use the five chord. In this case, F sharp. So B is our destination. A perfect fifth, seven semitones above is F sharp. So if I play F sharp, dominant seven, a major chord with a tone below the octave, that's going to be the sound or the chord that takes us to B minor. Here's an example. So I'm actually going to start this example with G major 151, so we really feel like we're in G, then I'm going to play the five of B minor. This might also be a good time to mention because B minor is our three chord in relation to G, our home key, we say that we're using the five of three. It's the same as saying the five of B minor. It's just a little bit more true to how we discuss harmony with these Roman numerals. So we're going to do a five of three modulation. Let's try it. One. Five, one, 53. To the three. Now it sounds like we're in B minor. So you'll hear these terms five of three, five of six, five of five. All they're talking about is the idea of getting to the three, the six, or the five chord by using the five of that destination, right? So if I'm in G major and I want to get to the two chord, A minor, I use the five of that two chord. So A minor, it's five is E dominant, which takes us to A minor. Now, often the big question is, how do we get back to G major tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and guess is, it's the five of the one chord. So a lot of people will ask, how do we get back to G major? It's pretty simple. For the most part, you just play the five of one, and that will take you back to one. So you play the five of G major, Ddminant seven, and that will take you back to G. So that is the basic idea of modulations, and the modulations specifically that we discussed are called secondary dominant chords. In other words, a dominant seventh chord that isn't built off of the five of our home key. In other words, the five of our one. It's the five of the two chord or the five of the three chord or the five of the four chords, so on and so forth. Again, you just don't want to land on that diminished it's just not going to give you a resolved sound when you get to that diminished chord. So generally, this works best when your destination is a pretty straight up major chord or minor chord can also work with the major seventh and the minor seventh chords that we discussed prior. Also, in a previous class, we've discussed how this dominant seventh chord is built up of the five of our home key and also the diminished seven. Of our home key. In the case of C major, it's like fusing a G major chord and a B diminished chord. So if the five chord G or even G dominant pulls down a fifth to resolve, we can also determine that the diminished chord built off of the seventh note likes to pull up a semitone, and it can pull up a semitone to a major or a minor chord. So the same philosophy applies. Back to G major, we pick any key that we want to modulate to. Let's say it's D, the five. Well, you would just play a diminished chord one semitone below your destination. And that will pull you into your destination. Same idea if I go one and I'm trying to get to my six E minor, I could modulate using a D sharp diminished cord to pull me into the E minor cord. Like I said, diminished chords pull up a semitone to a new major one chord or minor one chord. But generally, they sound most acceptable going to your minor one chord. Not that they won't sound great going to a major one chord, but you just hear diminished harmony a whole lot more within the minor key setting. So I'm going to give four or five random examples of modulations using our dominant five chord, secondary dominance or a diminished chord, pulling up one semitone to a new destination. Let's try it out. It's all going to be in G major for now. So G major, let's go to the four, which is C. So I just turned this to a dominant chord because it just so happens that G dominant is the five of C major. So I would look like this. Sounds nice, and it feels like I'm in C now. Let's try it again. This time, we'll go to E minor, and again, we'll use a diminished chord one semitone below. Sounds nice. Here's another one G major. To A minor, let's just use a diminished chord right in between those two because that pulls up a semitone to A minor in this case. So one the diminished seventh chord of our two into the tube chord. Here's another one. G major let's through the five of six. Here's the five chord, B dominant of E minor, 06 chord. One last one. We're in G major. I'm gonna play the five of five. Other words, A dominant taking us to D, let's make it D dominant to take us back to G. So dominant seventh chords can act as modulators by falling a fifth into a new key and diminished or diminished seventh chords can act as modulators by pulling up a semitone into some new key, and the destination, the key that you're moving into, is going to sound best if it's in relation to your home key. So in G major, you would want to modulate likely to A minor B minor, C major, D major, or E minor. Those are secondary dominant modulations with a little splash of diminished modulations. I hope you enjoyed that. Use it a lot. And if you want an artist that is the master of this stuff, check out Bach's music because it's almost like every second bar he's modulating into a new key. So if you're working with a teacher, do a harmonic analysis of one of Bach's prelude and fugues or anything by Bach really, you're going to end up picking up some of his modulation tricks. I'll see you in the next class. 6. Parallel Harmony: Next up, we're going to be talking about parallel harmony. And again, to switch up keys, this time we're going to be working in E major and E minor. So E. Tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Our E major scale has four sharps. If I flatten three, six and seven, I get the natural minor scale. And again, you guys, at this point should probably notice that if we raise the seventh or the sixth and seventh, we get other types of minor scales, respectively, the harmonic minor and melodic minor scales. So what is parallel harmony? Well, first of all, there's something called parallel major and parallel minor. And this is pretty simple for the most part, if someone says, What is the parallel minor scale of E major, you would say it's E minor. Or in the inverse, if someone says, What's the parallel major of A minor, you would say a major. So starting on the same root, it just flips from major to minor or vice versa. So here's E major, here's E minor, and they give us different chords. Or in the case of the natural minor scale, minor, diminish, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor. So as we're working with chord progressions, let's say one, four, five, one, we interchange maybe one or two of the chords with the parallel major or minor. Here's an example. E major, A major, B major, back to E. This is a 1451 chord progression in E major. Let's make the four chord minor, borrowing it from the parallel minor scale because in E natural minor, the four chord would be a minor. So we have one, which is major, four is minor, five is major, back to E major. You get some really wacky sounds, and some of them sound really appropriate. Others are sounding a little bit adventurous. And a great example of a band that does this very well is radio head. If you start to analyze some of the chord progressions that they've used, you'll quickly see that they love using that parallel harmony sound. So check them out, do some study on the side. But let's hear that in context again, one, four, five, one in E major, but the four is a minor chord. Oh. It's twisting and turning. It starts major, then it feels minor, then it's major. I like using parallel harmony as part of a narrative, especially when I'm scoring or composing for film. So if you think about the overarching theme of a story, and it starts happy, then it moves sad and a little bit mysterious, and then it comes back to happy again, and the whole movie finishes happy. This might be a good progression to sort of encapsulate the overarching theme. And without giving too much away, it's kind of like foreshadowing. You're not telling the listener all those steps along the way through the story, but at the same time, you're hinting at things by sort of shifting that harmony a little bit. So, again, we're major. Turns minor. And then finishes major. So it's really fun to play around with. It's a less grounded feeling. It's less diatonic, in other words, true to a key, but it's a whole lot of fun to play around with, and it can take you out of your comfort zone a bit and force you to play around with something that you might have otherwise not tried. So even the Beatles were using this, like the number of times that they'll go from a one chord to a flat seven major chord. So something like, Hey Jude comes to mind. Major one. Flat seven major. I'm using inversions, four major back to one. But where is the flat seven chord coming from? Again, the natural minor scale is going to set us up with that flat seven chord that's a major. So in the case that I was just showing you an F major, in the F minor scale, the seventh chord is E flat major, so they're borrowing that. It's parallel harmony. Major one is true to F major. They're pulling this chord out of F minor or technically possibly F Micalidian which we haven't talked about. There's lots of ways to interpret this stuff. But for the sake of this video, we're going to say from F natural minor to the fore chord and then back. So it's sort of a pre subdominant that uses parallel harmony. In other words, one something for one, and that something chord has been borrowed from the parallel minor scale. There's so many different options that you have with this. So with this stuff, what I highly recommend is that you just play around with it on your own and see if any of these sort of parallel shifts resonate well with you because ultimately, it's a trick that you can keep coming back to, you can continue to use, and the more you use it without overusing it, you're going to contribute to your style as a composer to the point where when someone else uses that same trick, you can quickly identify or in the moment of composing, you might want to use that trick. It's in the back of your mind. This would be a perfect sound for what I'm going for in this moment, and then you use that parallel harmony trick to get you there. So there it is, parallel harmony with a few examples. Again, all these videos are kind of short in nature. For the most part, there's so much room for exploration. So please play around with it. Go through it methodically. You could play around with substituting the two chord from the parallel key and do that for a couple of weeks and then try it with the three chord and then the four chord. So on and so forth. You can even grade each of these as you go. So later you can look back and you can say to yourself, I really liked when I substituted the six chord, when I made it minor instead of major or when I went to the flat six, borrowed it from the minor key instead of the regular six, that sort of idea. So go through all the permutations, all the possibilities, grade them, and then understand that the stuff with the highest grade is probably where you want to focus your harmonic attention as you're composing your own material, I'll see you in the next class. 7. Rootless Voicings: Next up, let's get talking about rootless chord voicings. Rootless meaning our chord has no root or no dough. So it's like a C major chord without the C. It's a bit more complex than that, but that's what we mean by rootless. And chord voicing is just the way we structure a chord. What note is on the bottom? Am I using an inversion? Am I really spreading out the notes across the piano, or is it a very close position sort of chord? So rootless chord voicings are really fundamental within jazz accompaniment, and there's a lot of different directions that you can take them. If you're a beginner jazz player and you're looking for some formulaic way to be able to structure your chord voicings, this is a great starting point. So let's first break down our major chords, then minor chords, and then finally dominant chords. So let's start with major. Everything is kind of in relation to major seventh chords, that jazzier sound. But technically we're going to call these major nine chords. We'll unravel this as we go. So here's our G major chord. What we're going to do is simply take this bottom note our root and replace it with a semitone below, which is our major seventh and a tone above, which is our nine. You could also think of it as scale degree number two. We're going to be talking more about this idea of nine and then eventually 11 and 13 extensions in class number eight. So what we end up getting is the shape here. The seventh, the ninth, the third, the fifth. And that's why we're calling this G major nine. We work with the uppermost extension, and it's assumed quite often that the lower extensions would be included as well. So if a ninth is in the cord, it's assumed that quite often a seventh would be included. This eventually has diminishing returns. If a 13 is in the cord, it's not assumed that it would have an 11 and a nine and a seven. But for the sake of nine chords or chords that we call like a minor nine or a major nine, very often, it's quite safe to include that seventh. So we're going to be calling these chords base off of their nine title. So we have this G major nine chord here that we've broken down, and then I had to put the root somewhere. So maybe you're working with a bassist, and they're going to play this G, or maybe you have the luxury of using your left hand to supply the root, and the right hand can supply the rootless voicing. So we would get sounds like Pretty simple sound, but just showing you you can move these chords around. Now, if you are playing with a bassist and they're covering your roots for you, then your focus is just on the rootless voicing in the left hand and then whatever role you were going to assign to your right hand. Maybe you're playing the melody, maybe you're improvising, but you have that hand free to do whatever you'd like musically with it. So we would say that this particular rootless voicing is voiced from the seven or from the seventh. In other words, the bottom note of this chord voicing is the seventh note of the scale or voice from the seventh, right? So we have the root in the left hand. We have our major nine chord, rootless voice from the seven in the right hand. That's quite a mouthful, but as you start to unravel harmony more and more, there's all these other terms that we have to start to include to get very specific about how we're voicing our chords and what type of chord we are voicing. Now, there's another way that we can voice a rootless chord, which is from the third. And this is relatively simple. The idea is you're going to from, let's say, our left hand is supplying the root, from that point, you're going to play the third, the fifth, in this case, the major seventh and the ninth. And again, the major seventh being a semitone below the octave and the ninth being a tone above the octave. There's our sound. It's really simple. It's very linear. We have our root, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, just voiced left to right. We could separate the hands a little bit. And when we do that, we start to see that the right hand is actually playing a minor seventh chord. It is playing B minor seven. So it just goes to show the power that a bassist has over the sound of our harmony. I'm playing a B minor seven chord. Bassist steps in and says, No, now it's a G major nine chord. So, just a quick tip with these voicings from the third for the major nine and the minor nine chords, you're going to, in your right hand have some type of seventh chord. And it's kind of interesting that it's flipped. So on this G major nine, my right hand is playing a minor seven chord, and on a minor nine chord, Rooless your right hand is going to be playing a major seventh chord. We'll come back to that in just a moment. So we have a major nine chord, rootless voice from the 77935, again, major chord, semitone down tone up for this root that we're replacing. Make sure there's a root somewhere, preferably. And then the other voicing is from the third, three, five major 79. And then we have our major nine rootless voice from the seven and voice from the three. We could do the same thing with minor nine chords. Now that we've talked a bit about these rootless chords, I'm going to go through this part a little bit quicker, and when we reach the dominance, we'll have to slow things back down again. Next up, let's talk about minor nine rootless chords. We're going to order them the same way. I'm going to show you how to voice this from the seventh and then from the third, let's start with the seven. So we're going to use G minor this time, keeping things on G. This time, I'm going to take the root and replace it with one tone above and one tone below. Notice the tone above is the same as with the major chord, rootless from the seven. But in this case, we're moving a tone below because we want that flat seven. We want that same seven that we would have had in our minor seventh chord. So this is the shape we get. And with the left hand, we're just going to supply the root. Briefly, I'm going to show you this house music trick that I was talking about before, whether it's UK garage or classic House, anything that samples chords. So let's say I'm sampling a chord sound. In other words, I'm taking a snippet of audio with just this sound. And I'm going to re pitch it up and down and create some sort of pattern. Maybe it's There it is. There's the trick. You take these minor nine chords, rootless voice from the seven. In other words, one of these types of chords, and you move it around. You can almost do it randomly. Let's just pick a few random left hand notes. Here, here, here, here. They don't particularly sound good. It's not diatonic. It's not true to a key, but let's take a listen. Sounds pretty good. So there's a quick little side trick that you can try out if you're a music producer and you really like house music or UK garage. But getting back to the basic theory, this is our G minor nine rootless voice from the seven. If we voice it from the third this time, we would get flat three, five, flat seven, nine. And I'm calling this flat three and this flat seven, not because it's specifically on a flat, but again, in relation to the major scale, this would be a third that is flattened and a seventh that is flattened from this major scales original position. So there's the sound. Left hand is covering the root. Flat three, five, a flat 79. And again, in this right hand, it looks like I'm playing B flat major seven. But in the context of the left hand, providing a G, now it's G minor nine, rootless, voiced from the three. So here it is one more time. G minor nine, rootless voice from the seven, and G minor nine, rootless, voice from the third. Our major nine and our minor nine chords are a little bit more simple than the dominant chords, but there's only one extra little thing you're going to have to do to spice up these dominant chords a little bit. Quick disclaimer, dominant chords, as we've mentioned before, are meant to act as tension. So we're going to add some extra color to these voicings. Let's start with voicing things from the seventh. Let's go with C major because these are a bit more complex, and we're going to stick with a key that's a bit more simple. Here's our major chord. If I go a tone up, there's our nine, and a tone down is our flat seven. Cause remember, a dominant seventh chord is major, but with a flat seven, a tone below our root. So that would be the basic voicing of C dominant rootless voiced from the seven. But we're going to take the fifth, which is essentially just a filler note within our chord, and we're going to replace it with the sixth or what we will later learn is called the 13. So flat seven, nine, major third, and the 13. Here's our sound. Getting quite jazzy, quite colorful. And although it's pretty tense, it's like a colorful version of tense because jazz always has this big fusion where things don't feel too major or too minor or too tense. There's always these colors to create some complexity within the harmony, and it kind of cuts through this very defined way of thinking of a sound as happy, sad, or whatever it might be. Making a chord colorful as a harmonic trick, really opens up the palette quite a bit in terms of how we can interpret these sounds. So, again, this would be C, dominant seven, rootless, voice from the seven. Let's voice it from the third next. Here's our C with our basis, three or just left end. You can think of it either way. Five, flat seven and nine. But again, our fifth, we're going to replace with this sixth or 13. There's the sound. So if I go back and forth between them, voice from the seven, voice from the third, voice from the seven, voice from the third, you can see even just this chord voicing. Sounds like you're improvising. I'm just playing the chords. Moving up, moving up, moving up, moving up. But you got to practice this stuff to be confident with it. So what I would recommend is that if you like the sound of these rootless voicings, start off with practicing all the majors of voice from the seven. You could do this chromatically. Right? Moving by semitones. That's one way you can do it. You could also do it with a particular pattern, like, let's say, up three semitones down one, up three semitones down one. And if you keep doing this, eventually, you get back to C, and you've covered all 12 keys. You could do the same thing with the minor voicings. You can voice these from once you get comfortable with the seventh, you can also voice them from the third. And if you're not a jazz musician, but you like the sound of these, I would focus on the major nine and the minor nine chords first. The dominant is very colorful. You can still use it, but it's probably more appropriate if you are actually playing jazz or a style that derives from jazz. So quick recap. We talked about these rootless chord voicings, chords that do not have a root. We are finding a way to supply that root either in our left hand or with our bass. If there is a bassist, my left hand can play the chord voicing, my right hand can either improvise or play the melody. But if there's no basis, and it's up to me, if I'm just playing with a singer, for example, it would be up to me to supply that root and then also supply the chord voicing that they would then sing over top of. So that's what a rootless chord is. We dissected the major, minor and dominant versions of these, both voiced from the seventh and the third. In other words, the seventh is on the bottom of the chord or the third is on the bottom of the chord, if we exclude what that left hand is doing. So major, voice from the seven, major, voice from the third, minor, voice from the seven, minor, voice from the third, dominant, voice from the seventh, dominant, voice from the third. Just like before when we discussed dominant chords way earlier in these courses, I mentioned that you can practice them descending by fifths. So C dominant, voice from the third, F dominant, voice from the third until you come all the way back to C. So we're falling seven semitones at a time or a perfect fifth. So check this out. If we voice the chord from the third and then the seventh and continue to alternate, we end up getting this really cool chromatic part with the bottom note of the right hand. Check this out. C dominant from the third, F dominant from the seven, B flat dominant from the third, E flat dominant from the seven. So this is just a different way that you can practice these chords, where, again, we're considering that things are falling by fifths. So C, F, B flat, E flat. But of course, you can zigzag around a little bit so you're not spanning many, many octaves on the piano, and the right hand is playing these dominant chords rootless just alternating. The first chord C is voice from the third. The next chord F is voice from the seventh, the next chord B flat is voice from the third, so on and so forth. So that's what rootless chord voicings are. That's how you can practice them, and now you understand how you can apply them. I'll see you in the next class. 8. Drop Voicings: Okay, let's get talking about drop voicings. A very simple concept. Not a lot of musicians know about these, but jazz pianists tend to use these quite a bit, so we're gonna take a trick from their book. Here it is. We have something like a C major seven chord. And if we were to consider a string section or a brass section, we would identify the top note as the first player. This would be the second player, the third player, and the fourth. So in other words, first trumpet gets the highest notes. Second trumpet plays a bit lower, third trumpet, fourth trumpet, or first violin, second violin. That's the general role for those titles. The lower the number, the higher the part or the more important the part. So we're going to consider that although this is the root of the chord, it is the first note. For drop voicings, we're thinking of things kind of backwards like this is one, two, three, and four, as opposed to root, third, fifth, and seventh. Lots of terms in music, so we're going to have to make that sort of switch in our head space for the sake of these drop voicings. So all we have to do is consider that one of these middle notes, technically, it could be the top note, but it tends to work better with the middle notes is going to be dropped. So we're going to take the second, number one, two, three, four, we're going to drop two. In other words, this note here is going to drop down into the left hand. So my left hand would probably already be playing some sort of root as a foundation. I'm now going to drop this G down into the left hand. Look how spread out that chord voicing is. Maybe I'll move this up here. Is that a chord voicing you would have jumped to for a C major seven chord? It's really simple. C major seven. Left hand plays a root, drop two. And as you can probably guess, we could also drop three. Remember, one, two, three, we're going to take this E down into the left hand. You can see this is a little bit clumpy, though. There's this big string of notes right here, four notes wide. Whereas when we dropped two, we never get that four we get three notes here. We get three notes, but we never get that four note width. So it's a little bit more equal feeling in terms of that spacing. So you can drop two. You can drop three. I would start with those for now. You can do this with minor seventh chords. Here, let's go E minor seven, drop two or drop three. And you can also do this with the rootless chords that we talked about in the last class. Here is C major nine, root in the left hand, and I'm going to drop two, which in this case, is E. A beautiful voicing. I could also drop three, depending on how big your stretches. So I'm dropping this D, one, two, three down into the left hand. If you can stretch a bit more than an octave, that's also an option for you. And it sounds really great when we voice from the third. So drop two. Look how spread that voicing is and drop three. We have the G in the left hand. And you can start to experiment, take some chord voicings that you really love and just start dropping some of the middle notes down into the left hand. Now, I'm not saying you can't drop the bottom or the top note. It's just a little bit less common. Start with drop two and drop three, see how that feels, and then try to experiment with some other ideas within drop voicings like dropping the top note or the bottom note. So that's it. That's all you have to do. Take some of your favorite chord shapes, especially if there's four notes within the shape, and try to drop one of those two middle notes, drop two or drop three down into the left hand. Now your chord voicing is more spread out. And although on the fly, this stuff can take a little bit of processing power. If you're a music producer or a horn arranger or a string arranger, this is a great way that you can go through slowly as a composer and make sure that all of your voicings are spread out properly. If you're doing this stuff on the fly, what I would recommend is just move through with one type of particular drop voicing on a lot of different chords and get your hands used to how that feels. For example, here is C major nine rootless, voice from the third. I'm going to drop three. In other words, the fifth down into the left hand. So now my focus is the left hand plays a perfect fifth. The right hand omits finger two. I'm going to try this on some major nine and some minor nine chords to illustrate something like this. I just play around slowly. I'm giving myself an extra pulse on each chord as I'm thinking about what chord I want to move to next. Now, that was just one type of voicing. So as you get more and more comfortable with that, then you can feel free to expand so that you have them readily available within your compositions. And while you're performing whether by yourself or with other musicians, this is another course that I would take very seriously. You can get a lot of mileage out of this. Again, whether you're a composer, ranger, performer, everyone has some use for these. They are the one thing that not everyone is practicing. So if you want to pay your dues and level up above some other musicians, I would take this class very seriously and get very used to playing with drop voicings, I will see you in the next class. 9. V7sus4: And let's get discussing the idea of prolonged tension through the use of a dominant seven sus chord. Another mouthful, let's break it down. We've talked about dominant seventh chords, a major chord with a seventh that is one tone below the octave, known as the minor seventh or the flat seven. We've also talked about sus chords, where we take the middle note of a major or minor and move it up or down to a relevant note within that scale. In the case of this major chord, it would be up a semitone from the middle note or down a tone from that middle note. So we're going to put those two sounds together we have the dominant seventh with our sus, the third, suspending up to the fourth. And where is that going to resolve? That's going to resolve to the dominant cord, which is still tense, and then that dominant cord will fall by a fifth. I use this sound probably too much, and I think it's important when you get really obsessed with a sound or just really like a sound to kind of overuse it. It's like if you're a chef, you kind of want to overuse a little bit of each spice, so you really get to know that spice intimately and then, of course, scale things back and balance out your dish. That being said, this is a sound that I've used quite a bit. So it sounds really great in a minor key. We could have something like a minor, a short melody. Now, let's try this five sus chord. So here is our E dominant seven sus four. So that chord progression was 157, sus four, to the 57. In other words, dominant seven, sus four, to the dominant seven, and then back. It's essentially a really fancy, perfect cadence. One, a version of five, five, and then back to one. And sometimes it's fun to not even resolve these. So taking one of these dominant seven sus chords and just coming straight back to your one chord. So something like this. That can sound great. And you can also try it with your deceptive cadence. One, 57 sus four, and then you can either resolve it to the five, then move to the six, or you can just move straight to the six. I'll break it down. Here's our one. Here's our 57 sus. And then up to that six, in this case, flat six F major. 157 sus F major or 57 sus. F major seven. A really beautiful sound. I use that quite a bit. 57 suss. 57 to the six. This time, I'm rootless voice from the seven. You can start to throw all these things together. That's one of my favorite things about harmony is that you learn all these concepts, and then there's an infinite amount of possibilities in terms of how you can fuse them together. That being said, once you learn how you like to fuse these things together, then you've ultimately found your sound, and you can develop it from there. Let's do just a couple more of these dominant seven suss chords before we move on. Let's try a couple of different keys. Let's move over to G minor. One, 57 sus. 57. Back to one. Let's try it again. One, 57 sus, straight to the six deceptive cadence. Let's move to C minor as a new key. Actually, this offers a pretty cool opportunity where we're just in G minor. Let's just turn it to a G dominant chord. Now that's going to take us to C, down a fifth. So we're down in C minor, in this case. Let's go four rootless. One minor four, rootless, 57 sus resolve to the dominant chord. And then, again, you could do a deceptive cadence or find your way back to one. In this case, I've gone rootless, voice from the seven. So that is the dominant seven chord suspended and a few different ways that you can apply it within your own compositions, improvisations, performances, wherever it is you are applying this stuff, I will see you in the next class. 10. Upper Extensions: Let's get talking about upper chord extensions. We know that our cords consist of a root, a third, and a fifth. Sometimes the seventh. We've even briefly discussed ninth. We've touched on 13, and there's also an 11 to fill things out. One, three, five, seven, nine, 11, 13. I hope you're good with your odd numbers because they come up quite a bit in harmony. So one, three, and five are foundational. 79, 11 and 13 are sort of like color. Here's our vanilla cake. Here's the icing. Here's the little message on the top of the cake, and now we've thrown some cherries on top. We've added some fudge, everything else to kind of decorate the cake a little bit further. That's just one analogy, but for me, it works. Hopefully, it works for you. So one, three, five, 7911, 13. We can also start to play around with the types of seven, nine, 11 and 13. I'm going to use C dominant seven as my basic chord example, and we're going to discuss first the nine, 11 and 13 and the ways that we can alter these a bit. The 13 we can call a flat 13 by flattening it by one note. We wouldn't call it a sharp 13 that's already the same as our flat seven. There's gonna be some overlap here. So we want to make sure we watch where these terms can overlap and what our priority should be. So we can have a flat 13. We can have a sharp 11. Very spicy. You wouldn't have a flat 11 'cause that's the same as your major third. However, your nine, in this case, D can be a sharp nine. Or a flat nine. You wouldn't have the sharp nine if it was a minor chord, because you already have that minor third in the left hand. So you don't consider this a sharp nine. It's just another third in this case. A lot of this stuff you're going to learn over time. I could spend 25 minutes on this course just re explaining you can have a flat 13, but you can have a sharp 13, but you're not going to come out of this course going, that's it. I've got it. It's in my memory for life now. No matter what you're going to have to practice this quite a bit and apply it in different situations to really get to understand the nuances of how we can name cords with these upper extensions. So it's going to take you a while to fully understand the nuances of how you're going to name cords with these upper cord extensions and their alterations. But stick with it. Eventually, it does settle in, and I'm giving you some basic ground rules to start with that you can consider to be pretty safe. So again, dominant seventh chord with a flat 13 or regular 13, sharp 11 or regular 11, sharp nine, regular nine, or flat nine. And then you can also start to apply some of this stuff to major seventh chords and minor seventh chords as well. Here's C major seven, sharp 11. So we have a nine, we have a seven, and we have that sharp 11. Notice I said C major seven Sharp 11. I could also call it C major nine Sharp 11. Quite often, sevens and nines are incorporated into a lot of different jazz voicings. So it's relatively assumed that if you have a nine, you'll likely have a seven, and if you have a seven, you will likely have a nine. So ultimately, from this class, what I'm hoping you'll get out of it is that we can have upper extensions of chords labeled as sevens, nines, elevens and thirteens. And essentially, if we play all of those, look at this. We have a C major scale just in skips. If I was to take these three upper notes and bring them down, it's a C major scale, missing that one extra top C. So now, our chords and our scales have started to sort of overlap. We could have a cord that is so dense that it uses every single note within that relative scale. Here's what we might call C major 13. You can say add 11, add nine. There's so many different ways that you can name this chord. But again, at the end of the day, it's every single note within a C major chord. So we've reached that point where harmony and melody, scales and chords are starting to overlap. This is a good place to be because now it's just about going back and drilling into the details of everything that I've given you up to this point within this course. I would highly recommend take some chord progressions that you already enjoy and try adding some nines, elevens and thirteens and see how it sounds to you. Maybe just take two chords out of a four chord chord progression. Try adding a little bit of color. Maybe one of them gets an 11 and another cord might have an added nine and 13. Over time, again, you could rank all of these and say, I like nines, like a ten out of ten. But thirteens I don't use very much. Well, that's okay. Start off with focusing on being a master of adding nines to cords, understanding how that's going to change the sound of the chord. And then once you start to get bored with that sound, then venture off maybe into elevens or thirteen's or some other sort of sound that I've offered within this course. Ultimately, at the end of the day, there's lots of stuff that you can sift through within these three courses. And the idea is, if even half or three quarters of the material resonates with you, then you're going to be able to use that material to help define your style as a composer and as a performer. So that's it. Upper extensions, seven, nine, 11 and 13. I will see you in the next class. 11. Jazz Harmony Prep: This next class, I'm going to keep relatively short because we run the risk of taking this concept and really blowing it up into potentially a full course of its own. But what we're going to be discussing is jazz harmony preparation. If you are a jazz musician, then some of these terms are going to come quite naturally to you. If you're not a jazz musician, I'll do my best to summarize things as we go. So within this C major scale, there's a bunch of other scales that exist, and one that we've discussed is a natural minor. You start a major scale on the sixth note, and you go up to the sixth note and you get a natural minor scale. But we didn't discuss taking a major scale and starting on the second note going up to the second note or the third note going all the way up to the third note. Every major scale has a bunch of other hidden scales or what we call modes hidden within it. So we have what we would call C Ionian, D Dorian EphrgianEbian. There's all these fancy terms for the other scales that are hidden within your major or minor scales. I'm going to give you an approach for extracting harmony from all of these different types of modes, but we can't go through all of it in this one class. So again, we'll keep it brief, and I'll give you an approach that you can use. Let's say we're working with that second mode, D to D or in this case, D Dorian. We're going to start with just choosing our D and moving up a few skips, and then we're going to go through each of the different chords that's available within that particular mode. As a jazz musician, you might say to yourself, This month, I want to really dive deep into the Dorian sound, which is basically a natural minor scale, but with a raised sixth or a major sixth. So we have minor sounding on the bottom and kind of major sounding on the top. So you'll get to know the mode itself and how it sounds, especially in comparison to a major or minor scale, but also the harmony that you can extract from that particular mode. So that's it. It's basically the same approach that we've had up to this point. But if you want to learn what is the harmony available within a Dorian mode, just go through the scale and continue to apply your seventh chords by skipping three times above each note. Here's D, three skips. There's our first chord that's available. Here's E, three skips. That would be our second chord that's available. So, for example, minor seven, minus seven, major seven, dominant seven, minus seven, minus seven flat five, major seven. It's all the same chords that are available within the major scale. Again, just reordered. So I would recommend if you want to become a developed jazz musician, start to study the different modes that are within major and minor scales. Probably start with your major scale, and your melodic minor scale tends to be a great place to start. And if you think you want to take your knowledge of these modes and other jazz improvisation sort of practices, feel free to check out my course called jazz piano Improvisation TICs which covers a very wide spectrum of different tricks and tools that you can use to improvise within jazz. For the sake of this class, we've discussed the basic idea of understanding that there are lots of scales hidden within our basic major scale, and any of those hidden scales or what we might call modes will have their own set of chords that are worth memorizing if you find that that's a particular sound you use a lot. If you're constantly using that Dorian sound, that Dorian mode, then why not learn the harmony that's associated with that particular mode? That's it. Like I said, I wanted to keep it brief. You understand the concept, and maybe in the future, I'll flesh out a full course on jazz harmony, but for right now, that might be getting a little bit too deep and outside of the context of this particular course. So that's it. That's your jazz harmony prep. I will see you in the next class. 12. Line Cliches and Asc/Desc Progressions: Next up, we have a sort of mixed bag of assorted tricks. I'm looking forward to this class because these are some of the tricks that fall outside of the regular theory that we've talked about, but at the same time, harmonic devices that I use very frequently. So let's start off with discussing line cliches. There's four that I use very frequently, and we'll start with talking about those. They're very simple. You have a major chord. You move the top note up a semitone, move it up a semitone again, and then up a semitone again. Now, in this case, it's kind of outlining a dominant seventh chord. So you'd probably end up resolving this down a fifth to some sort of new idea from that point. So we had the top note moving up. We could also have the bottom note moving down. Down a semitone, down a semitone, down a semitone. Again, this also works with minor chords. C minor, semitone, up again, up again as some of you might have started to hear, it kind of sounds like James Bond. But its back down there. So it's like a variation of the minor ascending line cliche. We could also take a minor chord and have the bottom note moving down by semitones. Notice it's always four, two, three, four. So one is our starting note. Then we move it. And then we have the bottom note maybe also moving down. So that's it. Those are line cliches. You can do them with major chords, minor chords, and you can also have an ascending feel by raising the top note by semitones or a descending feel by having the bottom note lower by semitones. Next up, I want to talk about ascending chord progressions. And what I'm talking about here is the idea of taking, like, a major scale like C major and having an associated chord for each of those left hand base notes. So maybe on C, we're going to use a C chord. I'm not saying that we just keep running up all the different chords that are available. We're going to be more sneaky than that. We're going to use a lot of C chords and also a lot of G chords, our very fundamental one and five chords. So when I play this D, I'm going to play my five chord because there's a D in it. Back to the one chord. This is C major E. Still following some rules from before. Maybe we'll move to F chord, back to a G chord. Maybe a D minor chord here with an A. I'm just improvising a little bit, but I'm trying not to play always the chord associated with the root in the left hand. So on this A, I'm not playing A minor. I'm playing D minor, a different chord that has A within it. For a B, I'm going to play an inversion of G major, and then we're back to C. So it sounds something like So we have this left hand ascending through all the notes within our major scale. The same thing with a minor scale, and I particularly love this sound. Something like this. D minor, E diminished, D minor, G minor, A minor. G minor. A major, D minor. So that was me using the D harmonic minor scale in my left hand. It also sounds great descending. So briefly, if I'm back in C major, just sort of reverse the order. C, G B, D minor A, C G, F major, C E, G D, back to C major. Again, in context, it might sound something like this. But again, the minor version to M ears sounds even cooler. Let's check it out. So we have D minor, A minus C, G minus B flat, D minus A, G minor, D minus F, A E, and then resolving on D minor. So now we're starting to think outside the box a little bit. We're not doing basic cadences or predominance or pre sub dominance. We're taking a concept like having a baseline move through all the notes within a scale sequentially and choosing some chords in the right hand that are more adventurous than just moving up one chord at a time. We're choosing a lot of different inversions and playing around with the one that we like the most to get the sound that we're looking for out of that particular exercise. This is just one example. You could move the left hand by skips and try associating a certain progression with that. The idea here is to think outside the box. So we've discussed line cliches, as well as a very specific set of ascending and descending chord progressions in relation to a left hand that's following through a scale. I would recommend continue to play outside of the sandbox a little bit. While it's important for us to continually instill these fundamentals to the point where they become intuitive to us it's also about being creative and having fun. So think outside the box, feel free to experiment, and I will see you in the next class. 13. Starting off of the I or i: So now you're reaching the end of this third course, and I want to continue to try to inspire you to think outside of the rules. Again, it's fundamental for most musicians to learn these rules, to have them to either fall back on or to know when they're breaking the rules so they can maybe lean in to the rule break a little bit. But in this class, I want to give you another way of just taking some of the information that I've given you and getting the most out of it. So we're going to take a very simple chord progression, like one, five, six, four in C major, and we're going to talk about how chord progressions don't always need to start on the one. Here it is. One, five, six, four. Let's try reordering those cords, so we start on the second chord, which was five, one, five, six, four. So five was our second chord. Here it is. So, five, six, four, one. This time, let's try starting on the six, so we end up getting six, four, one, five, and I will also apply a basic melody in the right hand. So six, four, 05. So we had six, four, one, five, and lastly, we can start on the four. So the whole concept here is that you can take any of the chord progressions that you've learned, especially the longer ones that use, for example, four, six or eight chords, and just start the chord progression on the second chord or the third chord, or the fourth chord. And quite often, you're going to get some other really great sounding chord progressions that don't start on the one. I have a lot of students that will come and ask me based on certain songs, why the chord progression works, even though it's not starting on the one. I wouldn't worry too much about the why and just focus on the fact that if it sounds good, it sounds good and work with it. But quite often when we're not starting on the one, reshift the chords, and eventually you might find that it's just a permutation or variation of some other chord progression. In other words, it's a really basic chord progression starting not on the one chord. So that's it. Go back, reshuffle some of these chord progressions. At this point, it's kind of like four for one pizza. I wouldn't recommend eating at a four for one pizza if there's one nearby. But in this case, every one chord progression, if it has four chords, we're going to end up getting at least four different chord progressions out of it. And again, you can even zigzag around through these different cords, try to experiment a little bit, but again, you're going to get a lot of mileage out of just this simple concept of reshuffling the cords to get more and more chord progressions out of the basics that I've taught you within these classes. I will see you in our wrap up video. 14. Outro: Congratulations. You made it to the end of the three oh one Cords and Cord progressions course. If you started from one oh one and found yourself now completing three oh one, you deserve a huge congratulations you've come a really long way. If, especially the one oh one was new material at the time, think about how advanced this material is compared to where you started. Now, if you're an intermediate student that jumped in, I hope that some of the specifics that we went into within these classes help you sort of turn over a harmonic rock or two that you had not yet looked underneath before. In other words, I hope that I've given you either a new angle to think about some of these concepts or just generally taught you some new concepts that you didn't know and didn't know you needed to know. From drop voicings and rootless voicings, helping you either with orchestration or jazz harmony to something like parallel harmony, something that was very commonly used by bands like Radiohead. There's really a lot of material that we covered, and it's going to be able to be applied through a lot of different styles of music. That being do make sure that you start to experiment with how you apply this material. Who's to say pop music can't use rootless voicings? Who's to say classical music shouldn't use more parallel harmony. You get to decide how you wield this instrument of harmony. So I hope you have some fun with it and get experimental with it at the same time. Now, don't forget there is a project for this course. Make sure you go back and check out the class that outlines all the details for that project so that you understand what you're submitting. I hope you had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun going through this material. I hope you were challenged and I hope that you take on that challenge to really nurture and develop this material so that you can use it in a way that best benefits you. One more time. Congratulations on getting to the end of this course series. I hope you had a lot of fun along the way, and you really do deserve a huge congratulations because this was no small feat. We've covered a lot of material, and I hope that at least a couple of the classes resonated with you in a way that you feel really excited about studying harmony further. That's it for now. I'll catch you in the next course.