Music Composition with the Piano

1. Introduction: Welcome to music composition with Piano, the Ultimate Guide to piano harmony and music theory for the modern day composer, songwriter and producer. When you write music, you want to really know what you're doing way. All want the creative process to float, but more often than we would like to admit are writing. Efforts do not go very smoothly, and we can sit in the piano just kind of getting the lock or hoping we chance upon something that works without doubt. One of the greatest things you can do to supercharge your composing, songwriting and arranging abilities is to gain greater facility and knowledge of modern day harmony in music theory. At the piano. Integrating the piano into your skill set gives you intentionality and composing. In other words, you know what you want to create, You know how to create it, and you can execute it with ease at the keyboard. My name's Jacque Bourne. I'm a composer, conductor and arranger, and I've worked extensively in film music from post production. I also run a private music studio and over the last year have taught over 1000 lessons to produces composers on pianists online and in my hometown. Aim of this course is to give you a huge and advanced composition of the cavalry from the ground up and all through a practical hands on experience of music theory at the piano that's accessible without reading a line of music. This'll course was designed with two people in mind. Beginner and intermediate musician for the beginner, this course takes you from literally ground zero into the building blocks of what makes music work and then right up to advanced, harming. You'll learn to write a wealth of material at the piano and start your composing journey off intelligent with powerful skill set at the keyboard. The other person that this course is designed for as much, if not more, is the bulk of students I get in my private studio. Composers, producers and songwriters have been working and studying seriously 35 10 or more years, but feel restricted by never having really gotten their head around. Harmony. A technique at the piano. For those of you who feel your compositional ability is held back by your piano and harmonic knowledge, this is the course for you. The first part might be a bit of catch up, but in my experience, a solid foundation is priceless. So this course has four elements on extensive introduction to piano technique theory and arrangement. Fundamental and advanced harmony and music theory at the piano taught and learned in a practical way that you can start using immediately a look. A powerful compositional techniques and strategies to help you generate material and problems sold when you get stuck, and conventions and structures of piano chords, progressions and songwriter so that you can analyze and continually grow your knowledge of building songs and tracks. At the end of this course, not only you're gonna feel more strong and fluent as a writer, you're gonna be able to solve critical problems whilst composing for using strategies that can help you. You'll be able to answer for yourself questions like Where do I start? How do I generate material? I have a chord progression, but how do I make it more interesting? How can I make my court sound more sophisticated? I have courts. How do I had a baseline? I have melody. How do I had cords? I have cords. How do I add a melody and much, much more. You'll also have the skills necessary to jam with other musicians. I work out the music that you love by here. Once this course has a ton of theory in its goal is not to turn you into a theory monster who composes theoretical music. Goal of this course is to give you more fluency as a writer and ultimately to give you options so that you can open up expressive possibilities and generate endless ideas. Whenever you're feeling stuff, stick around for the next video where I take you through an entire outline, of course, giving you an overview of all the sections on a feeling for what to expect. 2. Overview of the Course: If you've already purchased the course, you can download an entire outline off the course for reference as well as all other resource is at the following link. There are six different teaching methods. I using this course to really help you understand the material from the ground up and get the concepts into your head fully in lots of different ways. The first is 1 to 1 at the piano, and this is just you and me sat by the piano, looking through all of these things where it can really, really explain things and demonstrate things one on one. The next one is point of view over the top of the piano. This is where we have a camera directly over the top of the piano, cutting between the side camera view that we saw just a second ago on this one. And additionally, what you can see over the top of that is two things. We have a central barber. I can add chord names and certain diagrams and other things like that, and also at the top, we have a kind of digital representation of what I'm playing on the piano. So if, for example, my fingers are in the way of what I'm currently playing, or I play it a bit too fast. You can see it highlighted on the digital piano there and pause the video. Method three is really through presentations on This is where you're Not Looking at me, and I'm explaining things in a much more kind of concise way, backed up by language Andi. Different diagrams written on the screen. The other thing I do is go deeper into these diagrams so that we can start exploring music in a visual way that's not related to music notation. At least classic music notation, because the aim of this course is to get you playing and composing music at a very high level without having to read a written line off music anywhere. So we use lots and lots of different visual representations of music to help you conceptualize music more and more. Then we have in practice. So these are examples of us either composing at the keyboard or producing our compositions inside of a D. A w like logic. Then we have six, which is really reference in repetition, and there are multiple downloadable PDFs in this course, which You can download, for example, the outline right now in the top left corner of the screen to give you a sense of the whole curriculum as you move through it, but also kind of checkpoints where we do stage one stage two, stage three, etcetera, etcetera of the harmony cheat sheets, kind of consolidating everything that you know so far and allowing you to remind yourself of all the principles without having to go back to the specific video. Watch the whole thing again. There are five main parts to this course. Part one is harmonic and technical foundations. Part two. Basic harmony. Part three. Intermediate harmony, part for applying your toolkit and part five. Advanced colors and tools. Let's dive into each one of these in part one. Harmonic and technical foundations. We have three sub chapters. Introduction where we get up and running with chords and melodies. Chapter two. Gravity where we start looking at one of most fundamental part of Western music, that of gravity and harmonic centers. Then we have Chapter three, where we really look at piano technique, the key to fluency and moving around with ease and composing with your hands. Then, in part two. We start looking at basic harmony. We dive into the practical things that you need is a writer to start creating music, chords, melodies, progressions and by the end of this section, you'll have really solidified your understanding and access to diatonic harmony, melody and structure. Part three is by far the most valuable and large parts of this course after having gained our fundamental music theory badge in the 1st 2 parts. This is where we really start to spice things up and make things sound more kind of sophisticated. Contemporary, organic, original, etcetera, etcetera rather than the basic sounding beginners block stuff that you'll learn in the 1st 2 parts of the course. We go through chord voicings and arrangement baselines, chromatic harmony, I creating cords from scratch, not attached to a key upper structures and jazz harmony and reading chord symbols. In Part four, we focus down on applying your toolkit. The thing is, once you've learned a lot of harmony piano, getting better as a composer is less about learning new things and actually about applying what you've learned over and over again in new contexts. In this chapter, we get to the nitty gritty about how to construct material, generate ideas when you have none, and also to solve the classic and most common problems we all face. When composing, We go over problem solving harmonic rhythm, melodic rhythm and accompaniment and arrangement patterns. In Part five, our final section, we go over the advanced two colors and tools that you can use the composer. We go over new melodic colors, non diatonic chord relationships and thematic writing on. Then we finally round up with a conclusion. A load of resource is and downloadable guides and then my recommendations on where to go from here also bear in mind that you have full support from me throughout the course. Whenever you have a question or concern or query about any of the videos or the things that you're practicing, you can message me through the you Timmy platform or get in touch with me at lean musician dot com. If you haven't bought the course yet, I hope to see you on the inside. For those of you who are just starting the curriculum, we've got one more preliminary video just too tight a few things up before we get started. 3. Resources: For all assignments, support, and questions you might have. You can chat with myself and other musicians in the lean musician community. That's community dot lean musician.com. I'll be there to support you with your goals, your work, and I'm excited to hear what you come up with. At various points in the course, you will be prompted to visit a certain link to download a resource. In fact, if you visit that link that will have hopefully all the resources. So you can download them all at once. But if you just want to download one at a time, you can choose the one that you want and then click on Download for that particular resource. This contains everything from the PDFs to midi and anything else that's relevant for this course. The final thing I'd like to say is really trust the process of this course. If you are a beginner to lay the foundations really, really well, you do have to go through quite a lot of groundwork. And that means that the sounds that you're making in the piano on amazingly inspiring, however it stick at it and keep applying your work in compositions, whether it's with other musicians or in your production. All right, let's get started. 4. The Grid: so welcome to the first episode in this tutorial, Siri's where we're introducing the fundamental idea of how music works on have called it the grid. When I get students in my private music studio who have never learned anything about music before you may have. Basically what we look at is a grid like this. What? I want you to think off his music in terms of time and going right on the X axis and then going vertically on the Y axis in terms of pitch so down at the bottom will have a beat going all the way through, on on on and on and then going vertically, weaken place different notes to represent the pitch spectrum. Now it doesn't matter necessarily what scale if you know already this grid is in. Don't think like that at the moment will get into the details of that later. Just know that it's going higher and lower, so if we combine those, we have the grid at the bottom with the Metrodome and then have notes. We can visualize music quite simply before we even start learning any theory or even touching an instrument. So thinking like a grid is a really, really important way to understand about how music works, whether you're playing a trombone, a church, organ, piano, violin, cello, singing, composing a symphony. It really doesn't matter. Everything works like this. Grit and thinking in this way allows us to do a number of things. Music becomes mathematical or logical. It's very understandable and quantifiable, and you can digest it therefore. So it's like a Lego like way of thinking about music. And ultimately we can think in patterns. So having a framework like this allows you to put your ideas anywhere. And if you understand the fundamental pattern behind an element in music, that really is mastery over that piece of material because to reach mastery, you really need a simple framework with simple parts that you can then build greater parts like like Lego. As I said. So everything that we do in the future through this course simplest is key. Think with everything. How does this work in the grid? Whatever you're learning, it will be describable in that grid small block component way the great news, Of course. Full film composers and anyone who's worked with a D. A w like logic or reason or anything like that is that this is kind of how you think about things with the piano role. As an example, I'm just gonna pull up a video of me playing very, very simple music from the first part of this course on Overlay the piano roll on top and you see that what's happening is that from left to right, obviously the piano roll is scrolling along and mapping what I'm playing up and down on the keyboard. Or you can phrase it another way that the music's going up and down vertically on the d. A W on I'm going right and left on the piano. Either way, we've got this relationship with the piano of up and down and then the actual visuals off the piano roll. And thinking like this is quite intuitive to most people who have worked with the AWS before. So actually, you may have thought that this was kind of cheating before using the piano roll, whereas it's actually more truthful toe how music is actually working when you're listening to it. Compared to, say, music notation, which is a bit more of an abstraction. That being said, we do still need to learn piano, and it will give us a huge amount of dexterity and ability to compose and expand our compositional vocabulary and learning it is absolutely the right step to improving your skill. 5. The Chromatic Scale: So in the previous video, we looked at the grid, and I explained that it's one of the most beneficial ways to think about music and how it works. We presented time on the X axis, going continually from left to right on, then pitch on the Y axis, going up and down in this video, I want to take pitch and make it go horizontally. So we take out the time component and can start understanding something about the way that harmony is constructed, or at least the back drop off this grid and what it's made out off. So instead of being it vertically, we're gonna view it horizontally as a line of dots. Uh, what you just heard there was the chromatic scale and it is every single note in order in your d A w. It might look like this. Every single note in order is called the Chromatic Scale, as I said, and it is the background structure off the grid at its most basic level in Western music. As a little aside here, of course, you can bend between notes, but certainly when you're learning the piano and learning about harmony, it's important to think of the background structure of the grid in quite a strict way. Going downwards, it sounds like a cartoon of someone falling off a cliff thing. And then if you play random notes from it, it's not particularly usable unless you want to create avant garde contemporary classical music, which we are definitely not doing this course. So let's have a look at that piano when you say your finger and put it on one of the white notes and push it into the piano bit more. And the reason I say that is so that you then start. If you go left or right encountering the black notes. Eso here I'm moving up the piano right on. I'm encountering white, white, black or white. Why black, etcetera, etcetera? What we're doing here is we're playing the chromatic scale, which is all notes in order. We're not missing any hour. If I was to just play white notes will be doing is I've been missing out all of those black notes and I wouldn't be playing all of the notes on the grid, So get ready. Good. Applying this, you don't have to do the fingering that I'm doing here. You could just do this, wander around a bit and get familiar with it once you are. What we can start doing is playing with something that will look at later called intervals and intervals is just created by using spaces in the comm Actiq scale. So, for example, we take this note. When we go, let's say four notes away or four gaps away. One gap to gaps. Three gaps, gaps. That's a state of or gaps or for semi Tens will come to know what that means. Like to run as well on. Then try and do that space from another note. Perhaps this 1123 That's also four gaps. Now don't get confused here. It's very easy to in the beginning start on another and count one. But that's not one, obviously, because it's just a specs. That's like saying this is a meter. But it's not me that you need two things toe measure to get good at moving that around on. What we're doing here is we're just touching on one of the most important things in music, which is the idea of patterns against the backdrop of harmony or kind of the structure of the grid for us, which is the chromatic scale. Because when you get really good at understanding cords and shapes and composing essentially, what there is is just understanding the core pattern behind music. So you could take a pattern like this, which is a voicing of any move it somewhere else. Will you take a nice melody? Oh, s And just everything sort of drops away and you can start playing with patterns themselves to get to know the chromatic scale. Start planning with a few little simple patterns, like a space of four or a space of three or two or maybe even a melody, very short one and move that around across the great. 6. Creating a Major Key: So now that we understand the structure off the grid, which lies behind all music in regards to pitch, what we can do is we can learn the formula off different patterns or bits of material like the major scale. And then once we learn that actual formula, we can apply anywhere. So, for example, if we look at this, this is the chromatic scale. When we understand the structure of the major scale over the top of this will be able to play every single major scale. So we're going from first principles. So we're gonna play a first note on then. If we skip the next dot, which would be this note. We don't play that note and we play the next one. It sounds like this on that gives us a step of two semi tones between these notes, the 1st 1 on the 2nd 1 So I'm gonna gray out the notes in between as we do this. The next note would be another two steps, and then the next one is one step on. The next note is two steps, two steps, two steps, one step on that sounds like this. And we have created our major scale. Now, if you've looked at this before, you may know that a group of two semi tones so stepping past two notes in the chromatic scale is also called a tone and one step in the chromatic scale is called a semi tone. So if I put those on here, we've got a gap of a tone between the first and second and then a tone between the second and third on, then a semi tone between the third and fourth tone, tone, tone, semi tone, understanding. That formula allows you to move the major scale any way you want. Let me show you by zooming out a little bit. Here's our major scale, but because the chromatic scale is a perfect grid, we can just move it'll up. So now that we've looked at the 10 10 semi tone on the grid or on the dots, let's apply at the piano will start like everyone does in these kind, of course, is at the C major scale and then we'll go into other keys so that you can kind of understand the principle in a number of contacts and apply it wherever you want. Eso. Let's start here, we're gonna go past the first stop and then to the next up. So we've skipped a tone. Now we've got another turn to do. So we skip past the next stop on get to the following dot after the 1st 2 turns, one tone to turns Remember, we're counting the spaces between these. It's very easy for people toe when they start, let's go toe But that's not a tone. That's like saying this is a meter. It's not a meter. You need two things toe measure a meter between. So we dio Ugo semi tone and tone tone tone semi to go over that again slowly. So from here to hit turn from here to here that a semi tone, then a turn, then atone Benneteau in a cemetery and that gives us off. I'll see Meteo, that's a C major scale which we can do tons of stuff in, which is what we're gonna discover in this course. Let's do two more scales, the two scales that we're gonna work primarily in in this course, let's go to G. Okay, so his g and let's do the same thing. So we skipped past the first stop gets the next. That's a tone skip past the next stop, good to the next. That's another turn. Then we have a semi time, then a tone that a tone and then a final tone now really important here to realize that when we're going from this note here up a tone that's not own, that's a semi tone. So we have to go to this one here on then one final 70 s. So it goes like this seven tone, tone, tone, tone semi 10. And then we have the major. Let's finally do f major way. Go up a time, then a turn, then a semi tone and hear this semi tone leads us on to a black man monotone, monotone, then a turn and then a senator. So it looks like a semi tone Teoh semi turn as a major and how to create your three primary major scales that we're gonna use inside of this course. I would really get to know this like the back of your hand. It's an incredibly important tool, and not just to be able to work it out on the spot, but then toe learn those skills and embody them so that you can do what I was doing. They're just playing different patterns, which is essentially composing inside of a key, really, really important point playing around with its try and other keys that aren't just C, J and f other ones. Maybe Cem scales beginning on black notes or some other ones that getting on whiteness. And these are all major scales. Remember, you've found out the fundamental formula for the major scale. It's a first step. 7. Creating Chords Inside of a Key: in this video, we're going to go over how to create cords inside of the major scales. In the previous video, we looked at the structure of the major scale of turn, turn, semi, turn, turn, turn, turn, semi tone. So then when we've got those notes that we filtered out from the background chromatic scale , what we can start doing is building a cord from an initial note. Now, this is the route No, off the scale, as you know. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a cord from the same note. So this is gonna become the root note off that court and the shape goes like this. You play the first know, obviously, because that's the note that we're building it from. You skip the next note of the scale and go to the third note of the scale. And then you skip one more note and you go to the fifth and we call these, of course, 13 and five or the 1st 3rd and fifth. But we can take that pattern and build that cord from another note. So let's now make that note the root of the court that will be one, the three and the five or the route, the third in the fifth over. That's court. We still have the root note of the scale in place. We are still in, for example, the scale of C major with the scale of G major, but we're building on a different route note. So there's two layers of numbers here that you need to be clear about here. We're building it on the third degree of the scale and it's the same structure. 135 As a little aside here, the astute of you would realize that when we played this first court due to the pattern of the major scale, the space between the first and the third i e. The root note and then the third off that chord has four semi tones in between it. Where is when we played the 2nd 1? It had three semi tones in between it. And whilst this is a bit to advance to go deep into right now, just know that that's the difference between major and minor sounding courts. More on that later. So this is the root of this scale, and we call it one and That would be a second degree of the scale third degree, 4th 5th 6th 7th and then actually would get back toe one again. And if you're not sure why, it's because the chromatic scale on any instrument has 12 notes on. Once we get past 12 note, we're back to the same one. So if we'd started on, see, as one see would be one again, right on the right hand side of this page right now. So if we build a cord starting on degree two of the scale, that's the root note of the cord built on degree to scale. So we call it called to, but it has its own root note. So that's the root off that chord, the third off that chord on the fifth of that court. And if we move that here, it's the same wherever you move that structure. So I hope that's helpful. I wanted to make this really clear that differentiation between the degrees of the scale or the key and the degrees of the cord on both of them are working at the same time. They're both true. You just need to understand them At the same time, or side by side. So let's take that chord pattern and will apply inside of your three scales that you've learned so far. So we're doing here. What we're doing is we're skipping one note. It's a bit like when we took the 12 notes of the chromatic Scale and we skipped some of them. In other words, with filtering out stuff again. It's another layer of filtering here, so that's the shape on the way that it works is we play one now We skip the next night off the major scale, play the next note, skip the next night, play the next night, and that gives us a C chord. We won't go into whether it's major minor diminished, that sort of thing just yet. In this video, we'll do that in later videos. For now, all you need to know is that this is built on the spot of note, and this is how you should think about harmony. Harmony builds up from the roots like a tree. We don't build harmony necessary that way, what you do much later on, but something called negative harmony, but absolutely not within the scope, this course. So we build up again. This is our secret, said if we just take that pattern like a kind of cookie cutter mold right way, apply it there. On our route of D, we're now playing a D chord, e g a B C, and this is super easy inside of C Major right, which is why everyone starts with C major cause you can understand this assumes we play other keys. You can see that there's a little bit more thinking going on in there, but the principle is exactly the same. You create the scale regardless of the fact that you don't necessarily know that yet. It's still just going like this. Yeah, OK, so that's what C major scale. And that could be called C D E F cords. But it could also be called cord one called to Court three Chord four chord fire, Code six, Code seven and then called one again because we're always thinking relatively to this root note of this scale, wherever it is. Yeah, on It doesn't work that way. We don't go 12345 when we're going down. It's always thinking up. So this would be called one because it's C and then this would be called seven because 1234567 6531 That's how we think about the cause inside. See, Major, let's apply exactly the same thing inside of G Major and F major. So here's our G chord here because I g major scale goes. What we're doing is we're going play one skipped one play one skip one play one, and that gives us our triad shape. Try out because it's three notes. It's a standard form of harmony. Really, really. Courter. Basically, everything that you will learn in music that would be called to now called three here would not be this. Now you're wondering why, but the main reason is basically because we've already worked out the scale and we realized that that major scale structure does not give us an F normal there. It gives us a shop again. Don't worry about the names. It's more about the shapes, so that doesn't go there. It goes, but that she sounds a lot better similarly here. Would it be that chord? It wouldn't because we still need to integrate this F show up. This note here into the key on. Lastly, this chord here it wouldn't be built on F because we don't have an effort in this key. We don't have a this note in this key, so it can be built on that land. So I play again called one called to a Code three code Full C Code five D called six e called seven F sharp 176 etcetera. Let's lastly, do NFL was through this one because you probably know this by now is your f major scale created from the tent and semi tone pattern. We play the first pattern built on the F second pattern built on the G. Integrating this new note. It's not that one, because that's not inside of scale. So get to know all the cords inside of this. Can you play them? Sorry in all of the key, So in G f on D. C. And be able to play all of them away through going up and down, and you'll notice that you can start creating your nice chord progressions, right? You come up with little ideas. I mean, it doesn't sound super fantastic were amazing at the moment, but this is the building blocks will get to the nuance, the arrangement and the voicings later on. But it's really important that at this stage, you don't necessarily skip through. Too much is that you can at least play every single chord inside of those three keys really quickly and be able to go okay called to off F Major called five off C Major caught two off C major chord five off g major. I'd be able to do those quite quickly, so that's you practice, see in the next video. 8. Naming Notes on the Piano: so so far we've been playing around with patterns and filtering out notes from the background of the chromatic scale. So and we took that pattern, turned and semi turn and created a major scale. And then we took this pattern and moved it around that major scale creating courts. And this is a theme that you'll come across again and again in music, that you take patterns and filter stuff out and you move them around basically now, theoretically, you could keep composing without ever learning any note names. Because really, there's nothing inherently see about this if I kind of explain what I mean. If you imagine that all humans disappeared off the planet, Andan Animal came over to this can play this this? There's nothing around this note that is inherently see, and it's really important to realize that the sound and the effect that we're hearing is not see. It's this shape against the backdrop of semi tones, which is really important, However, especially in a course like this, it is really beneficial to be able to talk about harmony and give things names rather than to say that. Note that so it's in this video that we're going to start learning all of the note names so superimposed over the piano at the moment is the standard note names A B, C D E F G, and you can see there goes on up the piano fragrant on. It's really important for you to start learning me so that immediately when you play a chord like this, you know it's some type of D chord or is it some type of G chord? So we'll start with this natural note names first. And the best way to learn this is simply just to decide to learn one of them at a time. So you play day and visually that's in between the group of two black notes. Because obviously on piano we have this 3 to 32 thing going on with black notes. So you just play oldies on panic by this and out of shot, I'm playing all of them as well. Up here is well, and hopefully even after sort of 10 seconds of doing that, that's gonna be really clear in your mind. Maybe even if you say out loud and then you try another neck G d and do that with all of the note to the outfit and then come back 10 minutes later or the next day and see how good you are going G straight to. And the thing that you want to be aware of is whether you're counting up or down from other notes. So what I mean is, if I say, Where's d and you in your mind go B c d. That doesn't count. It needs to be what we call an orientation point is really key. So that note there is your starting point a bit like a landmark in a city, you know, immediately whether is, rather than having to find directions to get to that place. Otherwise, everything that we do later, when I say player see major seven chord, you will be like, great where see again, ABC and it will slow down the whole process because you'll have this tiny little step that you have to do all the time before everything. So go away, learn all the natural notes and then come back to this point in the video and learn all the sharp nuts. So I'm assuming you've learned all off the natural notes. Every city FG across the piano. Let's talk a little bit about how you name the shop and flat minutes. So if we take a really simple example like D here in music, we always have a sharp and a flat version off every natural note on the piano. The natural makes it really easy to see because they are just white. But really, if we were to think about it more theoretically, the natural no is just a or just be without any modifications of sharp or flat. So if we play D it and we go in between these two black notes here, if I go down one that's going flat. So we call this note in relation to this one. We're calling it D flat or if we get up, we're going t o shop. Now, obviously, the astute of you will realize, or you'll know already that if we go to see and we go up one night, that's going shop. That's the same night. So the important thing to realize straight away is this is just names on the black notes have two names, right? So this is C sharp or D flat, and this is the sharp or e flat. So try and name some of the other notes on the piano aan den. Pause the video now trying name seven minutes and come back, and I'll explain one final little confusing thing. So the confusing thing that you probably discovered just then is. What about the shop? See Flat ish up on F flat? There's no sharp or flat well, kind off. That's kind of true, really. I want you to think off sharpened flat. It's not necessarily going from a white note to a black man, because if you think about it, if you're playing trumpet or violin would be no baby, no black or white element about this. And in fact, when you play on the piano, the fact that it's white or black doesn't matter to music, right? So the way that we go sharp or flat is from a natural note down one semi turn on a semi tone, just as a little reminder is that tiny little step that we learned when we did that chromatic scale. So, technically speaking, hello. This is something that you don't really come across too much. If you go from this F down one little semi tone. Yes, that's E, but you could also call it f Flat on. That would also be f sharp. So E shop would also be f e flat would be that Similarly, here's a B. It's very obvious that we can go b flat, but when we go be sharp way, get to this minute. So this is called C usually, but you can also call it be sharp again. Don't worry too much about that. You probably won't use it. Certainly not in the rest of this course, really too much, and you probably won't need it to even compose. But it's there in the background of your logic and understanding of the way that music works so that later on, you're not like hang on, what enough is that No will also encounter in the chapter where we talk about the circle of fifths. Okay, hope that was helpful. I'll see you in the next video 9. Ambient Track Assignment: So I'm big on assignments in this course, and in general, it's really important that as you're learning stuff, you really try and apply it. So not only in these assignments that I give you, but in your own work. Try and take what you're learning and apply it straight away to composing your own work as a suggestion, because we don't want to be too complex. If you're kind of beginner at this stage, what we want to do is we want to do a simple ambient track. So if you're not sure about ambient music, it's kind of basically really slow. There's no tempo. Therefore, you don't really have to fit things together in the kind of the rhythmical grid. In such a you had to spend too much time thinking about it's quite floating. So what I would like you to do is choose a pad or some kind of like instrument that's synthesizer or strings or whatever, and try with your left hand playing simple chords in your D. A W. So you just hit record, and then you might set these cords, make sure you're performing or composing in a key. So here hopefully realized that I'm in the key of F major B flat and you just hold these cool. It's for ages. Yeah, And then So we move around to other ones and then go back and record over the top inside of F major again. A really nice slow melody, probably on piano, with a nice bit of reverb on. You'll get kind of quite cheesy, but maybe quite lovely film it sort of quality. And this is a really good starting point for you to realize that you're writing inside of a key and just spend a lot of time almost a bit like a meditation, really kind of getting to know the quality of the key. What notes sound? Well, what sound? Don't what? Don't sound so good together. Just create simple ambient track. You don't have to do anything with it. It's just kind of a bit of play. So I see in the next video with a quick example 10. Ambient Track Example: so we'll start this video at the piano. Just a simple example off the ambient track and how you apply what you've learned so far in a compositional process. And then we'll go into theatrical d aaw logic and look at what I've done that. So one of the things that people often ask when they are thinking or evaluating whether they need to learn piano in order to up their compositional skill set is really that if you understand the theory off, just the fact that we've got a chord here on the court here and I'm playing next. But surely you can program everything inside of logic. Well, yeah, that's true. And actually, depending on how what you prefer, you must absolutely feel free to do that. But also don't underestimate the power of having this at your fingertips literally at your fingertips rather than at the end of the fingertip of a mouse, or whether you call it. It's a bit less of a musical feeling when you're kind of clicking and moving things around and on doing things like that to be able to just kind of yeah, and you can actually be more intentional and as you build up your ear, your aural training, you can start hearing the lines that you want and hearing the cords that you want. And it's a kind of a really nice process where everything starts to come together. Planning also away from the screen is a lot more creative. I find I get stuck very quickly if I'm set of the screen, whereas if I come to the other side of the room where the piano is, my dear W's over there, I kind of get out of my kind of producer mindset into the composer mindset. And then I can go back and get my producer mindset. So anyway, you saw I was going to funny stuff there. Let me just make it a little bit more simply, I'm gonna play a chord in my left hand playing Melody Oh, we owe See, Major, Let's try in G Major, we owe So unlike some of the other tracks in this course, this particular example took me only a minute or two because it's super easy to write atmosphere music if you hadn't known this already. Basically, what I've got here is one core track. This patch here which is basically just playing chords now, If that looks but complex to you, let me zoom in. Turn off this view here as well. What we've got is our simple triad shape going on there that you saw me playing second ago and then this one here. Then one of the notes carries on because it's the bottom of the next chord and then the next court and then the next court. There's a tiny bit of complexity where I'm just changing. That's a bit before in a bit after, but basically what I'm doing is that Triad. That three note chord shape you can see changing every kind of, uh, well, there's no bars, really sort of just changes every now and again. Onda. What then? I've gone over the top of that. It's just me wandering around on the piano inside of the key. Just see Major, and then all I've got at the bottom here, we'll hear those in a second is just some notes backing up exactly what this is doing here , and you'll find that, especially if you put a loader reverb on your on your instruments. Everything kind of just gels together, pretty well and it's a very easy way to write music by putting on a lot river from writing something that's quite atmospheric, which is why I put it as our first exercise. So let's have a little listen and I'll open up the tracks and look at different things that are going on as we listen way. 11. Establishing 'Gravity' With Keys: in this video, I'm gonna talk to you about a concept which is absolutely core to understanding and using harmony and you composing pieces that make sense to you and also the listener that is about gravity. We thought about the grid, and we've placed pictures vertically with a chromatic scale and then moving forward in time . What I want you to do in this episode is to think about the major scale transposed vertically onto this grid so that we can play melodies in it and think about where the center of gravity is now. Be aware that it's not. The chromatic scale is the backdrop of the grid now, but the grid is now made up off the major scale, so all of those notes that you're seeing there are now transposed to an equal grid. If we play the first note off a major scale, let's say it's this one. It's called the root note or note number one. And then if we go on up through the scale way, get to number one again. What we have is another route. No, on. This creates a center of gravity. So note number one in the scale wherever is, however, highly low is are resting point. It's like arriving home. So if we play a melody, this will be quite evident. Uh, and then if we move that somewhere else moved the entire major scale up a few steps, then that center of gravity arrives somewhere else on again. If we moved the major scale to a different key. So obviously I'm just introducing the concept of this at the moment on, If you're a complete beginner, it's gonna be a bit hard to understand. But I just want to sow a seed here and get you thinking about how harmony really works behind the scenes because you'll have experienced this sense of gravity in music, even if you've never been consciously aware of it. And now you're gonna be learning about theory. So let me give you some examples, which you don't have to follow exactly. Theoretically. But for example, if we're playing here at the center of gravity's, that's a center of gravity. We feel at home there like we finished. And if I carried on playing, you're getting a bit bored now, right? Because there's this sense of we're just we're just there and obviously this is planning stage. We're just at the piano. Nothing's making sense yet in terms of the full arrangement. But there's something lacking there in terms of the harmony, especially if I was to carry on doing that sort of like two minutes or something like that , because our sense of gravity is just in one place and we like gravity to move. So is an example counter to that? What if I did? We've got this new center of gravity now. It feels a lot more like we've lifted. We've done something different, and again we did the same. We then were established here. There's something different now. We've moved back into another area. Now again, you don't have to understand this totally. But the whole sense of or part of this chapter The purpose of this chapter is to get you understanding the idea of gravity inside of major scales and minor scales which diatonic harmony. And this idea is really, really important as we go forward. So I hope this chapter is useful to you and I'll see you in the next video 12. The Circle of fifths Major Key Gravity: So if a major scale creates gravity on their 12 different notes in the chromatic scale that we can start that major scale on, then that means that there are 12 centers of major scale gravity on one of the best ways to visualize and use these different centers is through something called the Circle of Fifths . Now, initially, that probably looks a bit complex. So let's take it away. Why are we learning this? Well, the circle office is extremely powerful. Please don't be overwhelmed by the initial complexity. It allows us to make harmonic decisions when we really understand the circle of fifths. So you could kind of see it like our musical compass. It allows us to move and modulate and use different keys in a very effective way, and we're absolutely not learning it. For the sake of music theory, that is completely not what is courses about. This causes a very practical course, so I'm giving it to you because it will enhance the way that you think about writing music . But the complexity for you, if you've never read music before, will almost certainly be coming from the bunching up of all these different notes and Sharps and flats signs, particularly these which are based on the Stave with the treble clef on the different sharp signs on different note places. Now let's just look at the top three keys. The's might make a bit more sense to you because we've done these major scales. We've done F on the left, which has one flat, and you can see this one flat sign G on the right with one sharp and that has one sharp sign and see up at the top. There doesn't have any sharp signs because there's no Sharps or black notes on the piano in C major. So even though we're going to try and stick in these keys for most of this course, I still want to explain how the rest of the Circle of Fifths works in this video. So I'm gonna make it a lot simpler and build the whole thing up from scratch. Here. We just have a circle and the musical alphabet, and this is the best way to start thinking about it. We're going to snow at sea because it's our starting that with no or are starting key with no sharps or flats will put out the top because it's the most simple. Now, if we count 12345 starting from C, that's gonna get us 1/5 away from C. We need to count upwards as well, by the way. So we're gonna start at sea and we're gonna go through the musical alphabet, which is known as otherwise known upwards in music C one D to E three f or G five. That's 12345 Now be aware that we started at sea, which is 12345 which is very different to what we did when we counted the spaces between the notes in the chromatic scale. Don't get confused because that will really, really, really not work if you count the spaces between notes you see here I've counted the spaces between notes and it's gotten us to a which is very different. So we go see to G is 1/5 12345 on. Then we put G around the circle of fifths. At the next point, let's do the same from G 12345 gets us to D. We put that on the circle. If it's seem with D, takes us to a a Texas to e e. Texas to be, and then we fill out the rest of circle, etcetera, etcetera. If you weren't sure what happened at this point around the Circle of Fifths just then, don't worry about it too much. It's a bit more advanced for now because we've got flat signs and we have to think about kind of the rial interval structure of what it fifth is. Don't worry about that. For now. Just think about the letter G, not the f sharp and know that G is fifth away from D 12345 and in D Flat is 1/5 away from a etcetera etcetera as we go around. So let's talk about key signatures now these things on the right. Basically, they are just telling you which notes of sharpened or flattened as you know from your G and your F scale. So let's look at how that is built up. So if we start the major scale structure on G, then we end up with one sharp as you know our f sharp. And that's why G major on the circle fits has one sharp sign like that. If we do the same with D, and you might want to pause the video and do this yourself. Now you'll discover that D major with the major scale structure ends up with two sharps. See shop in F sharp. And that's what we have seen with a three shops. And that's what we have on the key signature. We do the same left around the circle of fifths. We end up with flats. F Major has B flat and then be flat has B flat, obviously, and E flat and B flat has e flat, a flat on B flat, and it goes on round. So this is how the outer part or the major part off the circle of fifths works on what we're covering in this video. Hopefully, that makes it a bit more simple, But let's talk about the practical and a useful function of thinking or using the circle of fifths. And that's really about this, that the keys that are next to each other are most similar because nearly all of their notes of the same C and F only have one note that's different. That's B flat. Similarly with C and G, they only have one note that's different. That's f or f sharp when you're in G, and this makes it particularly easy to modulate or use notes or share gravity points with another key. That's closest to it because you're only moving gravity of short distance on. This is the really important point that I want you to start thinking about. That modulation is really moving gravity to a different place. So, for example, if we're using just our G, C and F keys here, we could be playing composition, and I'll stick to really simple triads at the moment. I'll try not to do any fancy voicings that confuse you, so I'll go up here will sound a bit boring. Our center of gravity is very much and see there. But then, if we change it to G, we've got a center of gravity now arriving at G and feel we feel like we're happy toe end there. So later in the course, we get into modulation and shared keys, which give a kind of a kind of a much more interesting feel. But just play around with this idea off being at this certain point in the circle of fifths on, then suddenly deciding to be in another key and creating the sense of gravity. And half of it comes from your mind as a composer. But half of it also does get through to the listener that we are all unconsciously hearing , even if we don't know about music, where the center of gravity is and the kind of tension and resolution around when we resolved that where we push it around. So, for example, if you're in major way suddenly moved to D Major and then to see way create a kind of interesting shifting off gravity moving to different places now that will probably be a bit overwhelming if you're a complete beginner. At the moment, however, watch this video a couple of times. Try out performing and creating court in one key and then suddenly moving to another key and just get a sense of where that gravity is lying on the circle of fifths always printed out. Perhaps be a good thing and put it on the top of the piano and play around with it. There 13. Creating a Minor Scale and Key: So now we're gonna look at the minor scale. If we were able to create such interesting kind of shapes and chords and melodies inside of a major scale, the minor scale is just basically giving us the same set of ideas. But in a different flavor gives us a different quality of sound. Let's see what I mean here. Now, I could start with a line of dots like we did the major scale and say, This is the chromatic scale and we're gonna play this one. Play that one, filter out that one in the middle, go to this one. But actually, there's a much easier way of doing this rather than learning a new formula entirely from scratch. Actually, you've got two for the price of one here because theme minor scale is contained inside off our may just go. And you already know this formula. So let me show you exactly what I mean. First here in the presentation, and then I'll show you at the piano. So firstly, onion, zoom out and we're looking here with the orange arrow at our root note. So that's the root of our scale where we started our formula from If we extend this obviously down. So we're going now down through the scale, which is repeating what we see on the right hand side of the screen. There we go down two steps and then we superimpose the C major scale over it. So if you've done that in C major, that would have gotten us from C B A. And if we decide to treat this a note now is our center of gravity. Just like we treated the C note. When we're in the major, this becomes our relative minor scale. Let me show you this at the piano. So creating a minor scale isn't too hard when you know how it relates to the major scale. So to kind of reiterate what we just looked at on screen there, Let's take one of your scales. Let's take the G scale on. So long as you're comfortable and familiar with that scare, well, you need to do is go down to notes and start on E. All right way haven't minus go now this is called the e natural light. We won't go over the other types of minor until later part, of course, But suffice it say Natural is exactly the same as the major, but we've just shifted gravity to another place. So in a way, like when we were moving gravity of a major scale around inside of a major scale, you can push gravity down to a different place. So here we have a way. But now we just decide. And again it's about intentionality is a composer. You decide to move to a different place, and now we are saying with the claiming that is our center of gravity and that really, really affect the sound of peace. It's sadder to put it really simply on major and minor. To put it really simply is happy and sad. Onda, if you're if you're not quite sure what something's major or minor, you can always ask yourself what kind of question with this work. Well, at a wedding, if someone was playing, it wouldn't work so well. You want sanctity, major major sound right, so play around with a minor scale in terms of finding it from the relative major of G, C or F on. What you'll find is you'll be working out three relative minor scales, so the relative minor of C major is a the relative minor G major is e minor on the relative minor of Major. It is a demon now. You can also, if you want, if you prefer to think in a different way. So this is one way. The way we're doing here is we can't with a major scale without formula, and then we find the relative minor that belongs to it. But you could also then just learn the formula for the minor scale, and this is the really important point. This is why we started with a chromatic scale. If you can understand the structure, any content, any piece of content, whether it's a nice voicing or a scale or a melody, if you can understand it against the backdrop off the critic scale, you can apply anywhere because everything works on the grid system. So the minus go. You could learn us 71 tone tone, semi tone. So if you want to do it that way, then you can start on any note and you can play that any way you want. You're playing the natural minor scale. So have fun with that Integrated Understand the relative minor of major and how that works . And maybe try learning the minor scale in different places as well. Not just your your three relative miners as part of this course. 14. Circle of fifths Minor Key Gravity : So now you know how to create a minor scale. You take your major scale formula and you go down to notes to what we call the relative minor. Then we basically decide to create gravity at that point. Oh, so we already know from a previous video that the Circle of fifths is every major key laid out around a circle. But also inside of that key are the relative miners on the inside of that circle. Let's look at that now. So see majors. Relative Minor is a minor G majors. Relative Minor is E minor and F majors is D, and they share allow same notes. They're exactly the same notes, but they're just played starting from a different point and where we treat gravity from a different point. And the other thing is that the the relationship of fifths de to a a T E to B B to F Sharp is still in place. We still have 1/5 between D. N a, n e e and B, etcetera etcetera. This basically allows us to do the same thing with the minor keys because it's easiest to modulate to the closer keys because you're only moving gravity a short distance. So here A. If you're in the key of a minor, you can move to E minor or D minor and use all the courts from Naqi on This kind of answers . One of the major questions that most people have when they're trying to compose in the beginning is like What chords do I use? How do I move to a different place? How do I create a new section? How do I make something sounds similar and work, but also be exciting and moving onwards? And this is one of the core elements of how you do this with harmony. So the closest keys to e minor are A and B, and saying would be which B F sharp E f sharp miners relative or close keys are C sharp, minor and B minor. So really don't take my word for it. Go and try this out now and then I'll show you on the piano. So with see, the relative minor is a on inside of the circle. Just below it is a on into the right. We have G on the relative minor of G is on underneath G. Inside the circle a tree. We have e so we can do the same thing that we did in that little exercise where we decided to write a piece of music that was using the cords off G, C and F or rather the keys of C, G and F. We could do the same with our three relative minors with a minor d minor on also e minor. Okay, so you can write a piece of music that starts off in the key of a minor on. Then you can move to e minor on. Then you can t minor. Okay, now you saw me do unconsciously a few little inversions. They don't worry about this for now. You've You stick with your reposition chords in these compositions that be fine, but just it just realize it's exactly the same. We're deciding to treat gravity in a different place and by moving gravity in the course of our composition, we create quite interesting harmony. I'm sure if you've studied piano just for a little bit even may be just the 1st 3 videos. You've realized that compositions sound a little bit static if we're just inside of one PP all of the time. We don't do anything that's outside of the key on. The word for that is non diatonic. So we've been writing stuff inside of the key and then shifting the center of gravity to a different key. But the important thing to realize is that you can't just go toe any key, not not easily anyway. The best case to go for in the beginning are the ones to the left and right or clockwise and anti clockwise around the circle of fifths. So because we're working with C, G and F Major scales and their relative miners, they share a huge amount off notes. Right? If we look at C major, there's only and then we look and we compare it to Jean Major. There's only one note that's different. Okay, G major shares all of these other notes, so it's actually quite seamless to move between these centers of gravity. If I was to do a scale like F Major and then F sharp major, it's it's still can. You can still make it sound good. It is a very different quality, and you don't necessarily. It's not as easy to write good music have to think quite carefully. We will do that at some point, but devices say stick with the three keys wherever you are. But if you notice that if you were kind of a bit further around the cycle of fifths and you were doing for example, D major right D major is very similar to G Major and it's also very similar. Teoh the one on the right of it. So which would be a major anyway? A bit too much for this part of video in this part, of course. But explore what? We've just gone over there and I'll see you in the next video. 15. Learning all Keys: So hopefully by now you've gotten to know your G major, your F major and obviously or C major scales and their three relative miners. And hopefully you're writing some more stuff in some of those keys with the cords on DSA melodies on it. In this video, talk about kind of beyond the scope of this course goal, which is that you learn alot major and minor keys. Now, before you kind of think that's kind of too much. I don't need that. Let me give you an idea that there's only basically 12 notes right when you think about a 123456789 10 11 12 before you get back to the same. So remember, if you understand that part of the piano between my hands there, then you understand the whole of it, right? So if there are only 12 notes, there are only 12 major scales. And if they're only 12 major scales, that's gonna be 12 relative miners of those majors, and that's the primary kind of realm of diatonic music. That's the bulk of stuff that you hear on the radio on Spotify or whatever. It kind of doesn't necessarily go into the film ground. Some elements of filming music don't use just start on it coming. Certainly, jazz, uh, definitely uses a lot more. And of course, you know there's a very big genres there. They don't really mean anything. But at least for the first part, this course diatonic harmony is the best thing to understand. But for your six month goal of learning kind of those, all of those keys. What that's gonna give you is the ability to not only go through the rest. This course when we start doing by tonality, modulation, upper structures, all of those in court relationships, all of those things that require a knowledge of different keys and scales. But it's also gonna just mean that the whole thing of theory the whole the whole obstruction of theory drops away, and you can start playing around with patterns like you would in the piano roll or on some kind of like iPad app that allows you to make music really easily. But it's just coming from you at the panel. That's the goal. It that the theory and the keys dropped away, and it's just the music in your content which has left. So just take your turn, turn, semi turn and start on any note Or if you want to make it a bit easier in the beginning to get to know these keys, you could follow the circle if it so we're going clockwise around the circle of fifths and we've done G right. The next one is gonna be 1/5 away. So that's gonna be D So you play D major scale and do these for two actives Just like I'm doing here. You can look up the fingering online If you just put in d major fingering piano or something like that. You might get some not so reputable sources. But you know, there are There are plenty of things online. You can buy a scale manual from a BR salmon on Amazon has a good one. So on then, downwards as well with the major scandal get really good and then more around the circle of fifth. So the next one round would be a major, etcetera, etcetera if we're gonna go left run second, if it's going down from effort, be the major B flat major, right, and get to know all the cords in those scales just in their simple, reposition voicings. And then try playing your chord progressions that we've done so far. Things like 1564145251 Really, really simple bits right inside of her ski. So here's 1564 in B flat major way. I'm doing really simple voicings here and here it is in a major on. Then here it is in F sharp major and then start playing around with simple ideas inside of all those keys. So, for example, here's a simple idea in D minor, right? And then here is in a mine. Here it is in e flat, minor, right? So these ideas air translatable, immovable. And when you move them, that's composing, you know? So six month goal, Lionel Keys and I'll see you guys in the next video 16. Assignment Transposing Chords & Melodies: So in this assignment, you're gonna get really good at moving ideas and patterns into different places. So first of all, start off in C major to get used to this and take a pattern over a cord. So the way that you want to think about this is in relation to the root, not off the scale. So that's the route that started the scale. But cut the root of the current court that you're on. So here you are on a D chord on the root note is D So your melody could dio 12321 Then you move to another court in this key. So the court five for three and some things will sound better than others and just come up with patterns, maybe make more adventurous patterns. So, like 51 high three low to 1513 to 1. And I'm calling that one because you have multiple ones in different octaves. So once you've done that for a while, then take patterns and move them into different keys, so you'll transfer you. What you're doing here is you're transposing into another key. Have you heard that word and wonder what it meant. It basically means taking the same pattern and moving it into another key. It's a really simple example inside of C major. 12321 If we get into the major, it's gonna be once a 3 to 1 in F major. 12321 But what I want you to do is to transpose your chord sequence. So say you're playing chord one five six for a very famous cold progression. I want you to be able to then do that in two of the keys. So in G major would be one five six an f major b 15 six. Over the top of that, you could maybe add a little melody. For example. You could be like Maybe your pattern is 3 to 1 over the court that you're currently on. So 3 to 32 Then move to another key F major on. You see, we're starting to compose, right? So this is a very simple sounding, but it makes a bit of sense, right, because the ear is hearing a pattern moved to different places. And actually, when you start to analyze good melodies and good songs, that you like. This is quite often what they do know all the time like that. If we just kept on moving that pattern around all the time, everyone, even if you've never studied music for we'd find that quite boring. You start to realize it, but with a little bit of it. It had some A certain sound come sense of cohesion in your music. So it's a good idea to kind of start using this to play around with this in your different keys, take your patterns and move them to different places and thinking about these two layers. You've got the backdrop of the key itself Thistles, your root note of the key. But then the current court that you're on also has its own, so want, even though we're in C major and hopefully that'll yield just a few interesting results and some cool ideas. But you can see that we're on our way, and this is the important thing. To think when you're composing is think off stages quite often, the the illusion or the kind of temptation when you're working with the D. A W. And you have loads of amazing synthesizers and production tools is to believe that you can throw some stuff down and it will sound amazing straight away, especially when you're using loops. But this is an iterative process. You add stuff together, so trust the process. Learn this Onda play around with it until it becomes really comfortable. 17. Get Composing!: So at this point, in the course you've done a lot. You've learned about major scales, minor scales. You've learned about circular, fifth and gravity, and you've learned about chords in their scales and you've moved patterns around. So that's a lot of stuff to be doing already. And hopefully you've been coming up with some interesting compositions or stuff in your work that uses the material we've done so far. What we've also done is later, fantastic foundation for all of the many videos that are to come all about more extensive, interesting harmony, fewer compositions. But what I'm gonna do in this video is give you a bit of inspiration and say that what we've learned so far is kind of enough to be doing a lot with. If I can kind of explained by doing this video. Basically, what I do in the following video is show you call a simple composition that I've done just using the principles that we've done so far, so diatonic, so inside of a key, just using those cords and playing patterns inside of that. But I use a few techniques that I'm sure you will be aware of. A producer or a songwriter that basically pull those chords and melodies and arrange them on different instruments in interesting ways. Now, arguably speaking, what I've done here is I've written a piece of music using pretty much only the harmonic knowledge that we've learned so far. It's in the key of D minor, and it only uses the key of D minor on the notes in there, and it pretty much just uses route position chords. There are a few things going on, like long held nodes that join the cords together. That's a principle that will learn later on in the course. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play three first and then we're gonna rebuild the track so I can talk you through the whole thing. - Okay , so it sounds may be quite complex. If you're beginning, let's dive in and show you exactly what's going on. So, first of all, let's start with this felt piano here, what I've got going on and this is the thing that I'd invite you to do if you're working with ah dear w like logic, which has midi effects like arpeggio haters. What I've basically done is I've turned the arpeggio later on and done the settings that I like. Obviously, it's not within the scope of this course to talk about logic or RPG. It is. But you can find many things like that on you, to me and other on golf course, YouTube and stuff like that. So basically all the arpeggio hater does is take the note that you're playing on notes you're playing and repeats the minister in order. So here I'm just holding D. And what it's doing is it's playing it in 16th notes, and I've changed the velocity a little bit. I'm gonna close that now so doesn't confuse us. But if I now play other notes, I bring up my little app here. My Cordy app. You'll see what I'm doing way now. If I move to another court, Theo, that sounds pretty close to a piece of music or part of a piece of music. At least this is the important thing. As a producer and composer, what you need to realize is that you actually have lots of things in your d aaw often that can help you compose. I you just create the cords and then it kind of lays out roughly what you're doing in an interesting way. That's particularly good with arpeggio haters. So that's what I've got going on for the felt piano here. And I've combined that with a clock sound. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna build I'm just gonna copy that clock sound across, put it here and then I'm gonna perform the piano over the top again, which I kind of just did by improvising. I think this is doing is particularly this is quite filmic track. It's creating kind of sense of attention underneath because I'm playing different modes is enough kind of like differentiation. It's kind of creating the sound of another court, especially if I want. So that's basically what's going on underneath there. We're gonna leave the brass and strings for a second. The other little aside, that it's worth mentioning is of course, of course, you need to have a sense of production skills and also some good instruments. And I'm using trustee Spitfire audio orchestral samples here, which I find absolutely amazing with just a simple you know, just a simple note Utkan get the sound off eyes Most beautiful performance on trumpet so really, really good stuff to be using there. So I'm gonna go straight up to these tracks here because that's the bulk a bit if you remember in ambient track. What we did is we played certain chords over with a pad that's essentially what we're doing here, but with a string pad. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna hold a d minor chord here. Five changed to Cordy. You'll see what I'm doing and then up to court for So when I show people this for the first time, it's kind of the first thing should be, Hey, it's quite easy to compose. Yes, it is really easy to compose music like this. In some ways, you're just building on the simple blocks and thinking about patterns. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna lay that down. Now I'll try and keep Corti outpost. I'm doing it so you can see what I'm doing. Occasionally, I might change one now in the cords like a might move down to G, just add a bit attention and then I'll move up to the G chord way on Booth. Now, I'm just leaving out the A from the top of that chords. And then I'll leave out the earth so we just end on a long day. So that's what's going on there. I'm gonna leave this secondary, Evo. I kind of did that for various reasons. And then I'm just gonna add in. Oh, no, sorry. We got the brass and string. So basically what these guys are doing, we just solar them over here. Is that kind of adding rhythmical tension on essentially all they're doing If you combine them both together, I've arranged part of the chord in the strings and part of the chord in a brass. What you end up with is the same chord of that that's being played in the strings. So the cords of kind of following each other, So here I can't remember exactly what I did. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rough idea the same thing with string. So it's following what's going on, e believe it. They're just not do the whole thing just for your sake of time. Let's try and do the same of the brass. Let's leave that there as well, then all I'm doing this is all in the scale of demon. I know what you know so far. I'm just gonna play random notes in the trumpet inside of D minor. Turn off this match name and you get the idea. So it's really, really fun to play around with. It's kind of the next stage. We've got some rhythmical content. We're thinking about the grid of rhythm here, and we're a bit more clear about where, while not in this one here, but bit more clear about where with changing chords. So I was changing kind of every two bars there. So But compared to our our Ambien track, we're just a bit of a step forward. Now you can see how it's kind of coming together. So if you could create kind of attract like this, that be really, really useful to you at this point, I think I kind of feel a lot more confident that, you know, all this stuff that I've learned so far is directly applicable. You don't have to do in a filmic style like I have. That's just my natural tendency. You do in any genre that you're after. Of course, you're instrumentation. Your rhythms gonna change. But the harmony. Arguably at this stage is going to be basically the same idea. You in plain triad chords inside of these scales and playing, playing a melody on top of that Cool. I'll see you guys in the next chapter. Have fun. 18. Technique & Fluency at the Piano: So when I was putting this course together, I was wondering whether I should actually include this section, which is on technique of piano, because this isn't how to play piano course. This is a how to compose with piano and use harmony in your compositions and your work. But the more I did this course and more planned out, the more I realized that actually a bit of fluency and physical kind of technique at the piano helps you compose. Yes, theoretically, you don't need to know how to really put your fingers on the piano in the correct way, right? Not that there is a particularly correct right. There's just a easier way of doing it right. You don't necessarily need to. You could go to a D a W on because you know, the theory of piano go right those three notes on my first chord. And if I do that, I do this and then I'm playing a melody and but you see, right, this is really awkward, The way I'm playing a moment, especially from doing these funny things in my fingers here like this looks rubbish. And actually, if you try doing what I was just doing there. It doesn't feel good right on. The main thing about composing is that you feel good when you're doing it, that it comes from flow. Most frustrating thing for all of us is when we're trying to do something. Come I like this is not working. This doesn't feel good. It sounds rubbish, you know. And so in all areas, you kind of think of this Noah's technique. But like ergonomics, just like setting up your studio correctly with the mouse in the right way, you know, this is this is the same thing. So anyway, there's only a few short videos on, So the primary thing to think about when you're sat at the piano first and foremost is when you sit when you sit down is that you're kind of upright, right? Like if you're on a whole soul on a motorbike or something like that. Maybe many bikes about example actually hopes so on. If you see on the camera above, I've got both of my feet firmly planted on the ground. So it's like I'm this this tripod, right? Your bomb on the chair in the two feet on the ground that gives you a core, this real sense of stability sore about my squeaky chair in the background, right, and that gives you the ability to move around the piano. Well beyond that, though, when we're playing the piano, the most important thing to think about is really how we impact the keys because we're impacting the keys a lot, right on the most common way to describe that most people would describe playing the piano would be We pressed the keys, right? Just like you press the keys on the keyboard. But I want to frame it in a slightly different way and that we actually fall into the keys on the piano. That sounds like really weird and like, you know, kind of really strange kind of difference. But basically we're using gravity all the time, right, if we're just if you just hold your arms above your legs like this, if you sat down and then just drop them, I went too much because the camera's gonna go right. You'll feel that they have a huge amount of weight in them, right? And so if we using that way, well, we never have to press the piano again. In fact, we never have to use effort to play the piano. This might sound like a little bit esoteric if it is a really good way to start playing on the reason why there is a reason it's to do with relax ation. So when you're playing anything on the piano, it's got to feel nice and relaxing, even if it's like, really heavy in life. So it could be really hard as well, right? But the main thing is, relax, ation, because you're falling through your own. So is the first exercise. What I want you to do is just play a few notes and rate to yourself out of 10. How much my pressing life on a key using your fingers like this and how much a my dropping using my arms weight, right? So if you imagine a scale here, if this was a scale like weighing scales and this is the key here and you just put your hand on their nothing's happening and then you just drop your weight through and the scale gets heavier and then you lift your weight up, the scale comes up. That's kind of what we're doing. The pianist and nothing's my fingers touching the piano. Women. Nothing's happening. And then I dropped weight through and something happens. So a really small distinction here, but has powerful consequences because what many people find many my students find is that if there composing or they're jamming with people that get really excited into it and they're kind of going like, you know, over and over and over again 10 minutes later, they're like, How how this really hurts, right? And it's because doing that their president, I supposed Teoh drumming sounds exactly the same rights. Know about the sound. It's about you at the piano keeping, keeping care of your taking care of yourself at the piano. So that's number one. Relax ation and the idea of weight. But of course, our weight has to fall into something right. And if we're playing like this with our hands really spread out when we get like that's like hitting something, imagine you're trying back, sank into the ground and you went to It's really stupid. It's a really inefficient way of doing. You bend your arm, you go like that right now, give a really much more powerful things. So the same thing with our hands here, and I'll just close up shots of this as well in post so that we can really see the shape of our hands here. So what I've done there is I just relaxed my hand, really, and it falls naturally into this kind of round shape. Right? You could do this if you just hold your hands like this open and then if you just turn your arms over. But don't flop your wrists like that to turn your arms over, and then that's usually what's called your natural position of function. That's the right shape for your hand when you're playing a piano. So if you watch me play a scale, that's kind of going to be the most natural way for you to fall and play around with these now that doesn't stay the same all the time. Of course, if you're doing big spread out chords, you have to do that kind of spreading with your hands. But as a central place that we always come back to our kind of core technique, it's this position of function with relax, ation and weight through our hands. So in the next video, we'll talk a little bit about how to move around the piano efficiently with our fingering 19. Hand positions & Fingerings: So in the previous video, we talked about the core idea of piano technique, which is about the idea. Relax ation on weight. In this video, we're gonna talk about how to move around the piano effectively because, actually, that's the way that you compose. This is your tool, and it's kind of an extension of your thinking. It also enhances your thinking. This is the other principle inherent and why you've decided to learn piano always, he recognized that piano will help you think about how to compose better. And if we're moving around, can emit an awkward way. Then our thinking is gonna be hindered. We can't play stuff at the speed that we're thinking. You don't want to, like record something like 60 BPM in your D A. W and then, like speed it up later and then think that's not quite right. You want to be able to play and think roughly at the same speed with your musical ideas. So there's two core ideas in this video to cause of your ideas, which is that off hand positions and finger rings right on a hand position is basically roughly where five fingers covers on the piano. Sometimes that could be five notes, or it could be a bit wider than five notes and fingering XYZ. Basically, how we go between fingers. So we'll start with hand positions if we take a C major scale, right? And I'll do this in my left hand right now. If I put my thumb on C, my second thing is going to be My third finger's gonna be on a my fourth finger is gonna be on G and fifth on F, and that's because my natural position of function roughly falls there. You might find if you have smaller hands on me, that you end up like that. If you look at the piano at the moment, my fingers a kind of now sort of bunched up over four notes. If that's the case for you, spread them out a bit so that each finger has a separate note. And with that natural position of function, feeling in your hand. Now just play a single 12345 and you'll be going downwards if you're in your left hand. If we do it in the right, we're gonna be going upwards. 123 and this is just a really, really obvious thing that you probably knew already. But I'm just a kind of framing first and foremost. So what I'm doing there is employing music inside of one hand position for each hand. Then I can move that ham position somewhere else. I could be that anyway. Right? But that's not the whole picture, right? Because we don't just play piano like this. We don't go wave our hands alleles. Move it somewhere else. Actually, we do this, which is traveling, which we've done in the scales a little so far. And if you've looked up fingering online, you'll know that's what starts to happen is we're going Think of 123 and then won again. 234 and then won again. 12 people fight and this is called pivoting, right? So if you look at the piano at the moment, my first finger goes down. One, 234 and then I can bring my thumb under 123 could bring with them on the three as well. 12 and I could bring with them under two. So these or pivots 1 to 1 Teoh, this'd using now three fingers on 12341234 So I'm pivoting with the phone. If I come back down, I could bring my fingers over the phone booth. Same with the left hand over. Now it gets a bit confusing, actually, because the hands are mirror images of each other. So when we're going down in the left hand, the thumb is coming under. When we're going down in the right hand, things over, you might need to watch this video again if that's a bit to give using view. But hopefully it's very simple. So the principle the first rule, is that we never pivot our fingers over our fingers, right? Because if you try and I think don't go that way on their own very well, obviously we need to move our riffs to do it. But on their own, they're very good at going that way, right? So that's why we kind of go thumb, which is incredibly malleable, right? Comes underneath or our fingers go over. So number one rule is fingers. Every fingers on the second rule is that we never pivot on the fifth finger so we can go 1 to 1 to one to get 23 with 31234 once before. But we can't go what we can, but it's just awkward. 1 to 515 You can do it. Course you can that you end up with that which is not very comfortable. Right and again, we're all about relaxation and comfort. And when you start moving at speed in scales, absolutely doesn't work to be going like that because it's a tiny bit of tension and a tiny bit of tension at speed over and over again is bad ergonomics. So what do you do with this, right? Well, I would say a really good exercise for you to start doing. To start moving into the round improvisation and generating ideas without necessarily having to think about those ideas is something called the wandering hand exercise where basically you playing random notes inside of a key, right? If you played random notes just on any no, it's great fun to do. Actually, it's a very good way to kind of get moving around the piano and understand. Get your fingers knowing stuff, because what you'll find is if you just watch now, you might end up doing things like this by accident. My fingers slip for that between because my finger, maybe at that point wasn't aware of where that finger was. Sorry where the key was so you could slow that down. But you're really not trying to think about what you see right now. I'm talking to you. I'm just kind of let my fingers do what they want. So kind of who's playing my fingers right there, just playing the feelings that they want to play. I'm not composed, right? That's a really good warm up, but doesn't sound. Break it. So let's move inside of a key. Really. All improvisation is is kind of a slightly extended version of what we're doing here inside of a key. So let me explain if I do that wandering hand exercise again, inside of safety, minor right center caves and sound amazing. But if I put some chords with it eyes, amazing ideas, but it starts to sound a bit like music, and potentially there will be some. The nuggets in there actually kind of works like, Well, hang on, what does that go back? Most of that was ramble, but it was that one moment where I went like I like that as a melody. Let's see what we can do with it. So that's the wandering hand exercise inside off key. And this is something that I'd like you to try and will do in a later video as well to start composing with. But basically you got to remember your two rules, which is fingers never over fingers, right, cause he might find that you're doing it. And you're like, Hey, this is great. I'm enjoying this and then you're going You're trying to do stuff like this and you're trying to do that and you'll find yourself doing this and your elbow comes up in the air and it's all going wrong, right? Try and stay with the technique element of this exercise while also enjoying the fact that you're starting to improvise and I'll see you in the next video 20. Wandering Hands Backing Tracks: So at this point in the course, we've got some more downloads. If you just head over to lean musician dot link slash LMC three, you'll go to a Google Drive folder, which will contain a number of different things. All the things you need for the course, including some backing tracks. You click on that folder, you'll see three of them, one in C major, one in F major, one in G major down like these Jam away and kind of get really comfortable moving around inside of the harmony of each of those major scales. 21. Assignment - Wandering Hands Track: so we're kind of at the end of this chapter about technique. We've already covered diatonic harmony and cords in a key in the sense of gravity. So you've already been composing. But I'd really invite you in this one to take the principles that we've learned so far and really write something that you can kind of really start ranging and enjoying in your work . So the point off the wandering hand exercise and what we've done so far learning the kind of color palette, if you like off these different keys is to really take off the pressure for you as a composer and writer and producer to generate material. Really, the point of this is to just start throwing ideas down going. That's OK. Try that. All that's better. Yeah, let's throw some of this. Okay, that's cool. I have some of that. And what if I put that with that? There's no ego there for me as a composer rather than me thinking than sitting there going . I must write something that is incredible is totally not the right way to compose. In my opinion. Anyway, you should just kind of play around with stuff, then put it in your dear w kind of go. Okay, that's good. Listen to it. Put a groove on it. Come back to the piano, maybe play over the top of that a little bit. But the whole point is having a kind of a way to write with the keyboard. Onda production Sweet. So basically, my assignment few, if you choose to accept it, is to write a piece using wandering hand exercise on different courts inside of one key or potentially two keys. If you want to explore that idea of what it sounds like when you move directly to another key, just with F, C and G or with E. D and a miner's So whichever one do you think Just express kind of what you're after at the moment is composed inside of this paradigm that we've learned so far on Gus, I'll see you in the next video for a kind of short, simple response. There were example off that 22. Wandering Hands Example Track: in this video, we're gonna take a simple, wondering hand exercise. Turn it into this. Let's get started. So with the track, you see, before you hear, all I've done is I've played some random cords, insider key on the top track, and I've played a wandering hand exercise in my right hand on the bottom track. Now, this is absolutely not the way I usually compose, but I want to kind of inspire you to explore if you're a beginner, what we've done so far and show you how easy it is to start generating ideas from just simple chords and simple melodies generated by the wandering hand exercise thing about it is it doesn't sound particularly amazing. But it works, and this is the idea that we're working with here. We're working with a key on the key takes care of a lot of things. Pretty much everything sounds harmonious. Way have to think about. It was phrasing on how we're working with underlying cord, but the some ideas in here that may have some legs and that's the point to draw out this is a kind of sketch and then pull ideas from it and see what happens. So in this pre recorded session of me kind of extrapolating on these ideas and putting different instruments to them, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fast forward certain sections and then continue the video again and speak over the top so that you can miss out kind of the boring parts of me finding the right instrument in sound and kind of get a summary off the composition or production or creation process from these initial ideas that we've put down. So my first step with any kind of composition is to think about the group, even if it's not necessarily a typically groovy track. It's something that basically binds all of your rating together. I think is really, really important here. You see me finding out different groups, just things that I might not use in the end, but something that's gonna create a backdrop that I can kind of frame all of my writing around. Wait on. The next stage is to start finding some kind of arrangement for this. Some kind of other instrumental orchestration. Michael. It on three important thing is to be kind to yourself at these moments. I know that sounds funny, but here you can hear me trying out a slightly cheesy 80 sounding spacey instruments on. Really, it doesn't work at all. But the important thing is to just try out ideas, try stuff over the top, work out different flavors and then you can make more distinctions about what you don't like what you do. Like if you're not sure at this moment, just put something down, Decide. Does that work? What doesn't it? And then you can have it from their work out what's right after that. But don't hang around worrying about whether you're doing the right thing on what to do next. Just put something down, see whether it works and then move on. So this is where we get to the interesting point of this exercise. We start pulling apart what we've actually done here. I'm taking the first phrase which I kind of like part off on dstets thing to think right? How can I use that as a melody? How can I sort of define it rather than just a wandering hands kind of ramble? How can I take a little part of it and put it on another instrument? So here I'm copying over to the string, climbing over on putting in the background right and thinking about how it might all go together. Now when you double something with another instrument, as I am here. So we've got piano, and then this instrument is coming from my illness. Very patch library. You can start making a melody. Sounds like a little bit more intentional because you've got two instruments playing the same thing. It's a great starting point because it makes you feel a little bit more confident in your maladies rather than just sort of this slightly kind of weak piano line. You've actually put it on two instruments and it sounds just immediately more composed. So here I'm thinking, Right. Okay, so I've got a little sort of define motif here. Let's repeat it so we can make it into more of a thing so that we can kind of extend that pattern or idea and move it around the grid of G major, which is the key that we're in. So this is what I start doing now. So we've got this melody here. This is our motif. One of the beautiful things about W's like logic is that you have something called scale quantities, which is what we're doing here. So here are making sure that the scale is major and I'm changing the key route to be G on. What happens is that the system Kwan ties. Is all of the notes in my melody to be inside of the key. That's what I can do is I can experiment with moving that pattern down and not even bother thinking about what the key is, or rather not spend too much time worrying about each individual. No, I just think more about the gesture of that melody. And then, of course, if there are individual notes like that one, I want to know that I can so bear in mind that we've moved around the melody. But we also need to make sure that our cords still hanging around in the background so that we have a background harmony to think. So that's what I'm doing here. So we're getting somewhere. It's all really early days with this composition in a moment, but the important thing I'll always say this in these tutorials is just to keep the faith for your composition, because the problem is that as you can hear right now, this does not sound particularly sophisticated or interesting. And you might just lose faith immediately and think I am a bad composer. B. This is rubbish. See, basically all to do with Oh, I don't know what I'm doing. But the thing is that I remember someone saying to me once that the best part of projects are usually the last 20% where everything starts coming together. Remember that this is kind of your in the middle of creating the project of the moment, and it won't be clear what it's becoming until later on. So here I've repeated a few sections on never repeated the melodies or I'm just doing that . Now I'm moving those across, and then we're gonna think about how we can extend those melodies rather than just the kind of standard copy paste feeling that goes on. I'm gonna move these up higher and lower and use the scale Qantas feature to give us something that's still in the key of G major but gives us a higher pattern and then another higher pattern so that there's variation in here, and I'd really encouraging, especially if you're a beginner with this to really play around with scale Qantas feature makes things a whole lot easier. Obviously, though, as you learn and progress, you don't wanna be doing these things because it doesn't give you a massive amount of intention out. You want to be able to understand what the scale is on, move your patterns all around. Which is why, of course you're learning this course and studying piano. So know all the elements in your wondering and exercise is gonna be actually very good. This section right here I'm listening back to and thinking pretty much useless, at least for what I'm doing at the moment. I don't like the sound of it, so just cut it away, get out your way and start focusing on the elements that you actually find inspiring or potentially useful for what you're creating. The other thing that might start happening when you're kind of playing around and cutting bits up is that you start accidentally or inadvertently in a good way, defining sections in your mind. Here I'm realizing that this little section here is a different part. Even though no one's told me that that's what I've just decided that's the presence of opposition. So I take this little bit, look to the right and then move this forward because I want to hear it earlier. I'm or interested in kind of creating something with this little sort of motif at the moment than I am with the other part will just leave that for later. So here I'm listening back to the entire thing, getting a kind of emotional on emotional sense off the piece on whether this new Moti, which I've just across there, is actually gonna work. Thea. Other thing that you could consider what's your writing is to actually cut up in spice and paste different parts of the cords rather than just the melody. The cords are definitely no off limits. So here what I'm doing is I'm not changing the court necessarily. But I'm changing how many times the court is said so that it sounds a little bit more percussive. Interesting. Of course, when I say interesting, it's interesting in the back of my mind has done composing. Right now, it's just on a simple piano inside of the W. It's not produced are arranged really properly at all but the rhythm is a good idea. If you had, like an amazing orchestra playing, there are a huge band doing that kind of like that rhythmical idea behind it. It would really work. So your trusting, these little forces, little ideas, thes ostinato these rhythms and keeping going keep seeing them through to see what they'll become so later on in this course, if you've looked at the curriculum, you'll see that there's a whole chapter on how to create baselines. Now we won't go into that now. But what I start doing here is looking at the cords that I've got underneath and thinking, OK, what's the root note? What's the bottom note of those cords? And how's my baseline work here on? Actually, at this point you might not have a good idea what baselines me and I don't. So I leave it on. I move on to another element of the composition and a background RPG ated thing. So this is where I'm skipping through so you can start adding in elements now. So so far I haven't really played much on piano, right? Pretty much everything has been created from the MIDI file that I didn't wanna hand excites , but you can start playing stuff and you can see down here. I'm now playing stuff on the keyboard with an arpeggio later to kind of make things a little easier for myself and create some really interesting, rhythmical stuff in the background, adding sort of deeper layers to the composition. That kind of allowed the production a little bit about the arrangement. So then we put the basin that sounds like this on that down for the first section as well. And now I'm playing around with rhythmical idea. That's just thes percussion that sounds like this. That's a little bit sort of more interest in the background, something that you don't really want the listener to be aware off. Now we get to an interesting point where we start adding some sheens and nice kind of string sounds to the music thing is kind of a moment that I really love where you start adding the instruments and the sounds that really start making the kind of the thing kind of come to life. So that's good. I like that section, but now what we want to do is add a kind of really nice long note for the end, that kind of gels altogether. Eso usually at this point where I need to step back, listen to the whole piece again on just get that sort of 10,000 overview of the season what you're trying to do because you might listen back in you. And you kind of realize that the small thing that you were just working on a second ago isn't actually contributing to the way you want a piece to go in the direction. Now this is a short, simple exercise, and I don't actually necessarily know what I'm doing with this piece, but it's yielding. Some results on it could potentially come becoming a composition that I'm kind of interested in and want to take it further. Things is really the sketching stage. So one of the things I've found over the years is that if you add percussion as well as drums, it really, really helps. So here I'm using logic built in drama percussion library to just add into interest again. This is making it super easy for me, and I might change it later, but this is starting to make it sound a little bit. Mawr what I was having in mind. That's just great interest. - Nice and easy. Something we've created from a simple, wondering hand exercise that could potentially have some legs. Certainly sounds like we've composed right now, doesn't it? 23. Introduction to Chords in a Key - Diatonic Harmony: so so far, we've created a major scale. We've understood the structure of the tone and semi tone in that major scale, or major key, and applied it to different places on the chromatic grit. We've also then found that each of those major scales has inside of it a relative minor scale on we've learned how to find does. And we've also learned the structure of the minor scale so that you can find that from scratch without having to find a major scale. Once we have found those scales, what we've done is we've understood that there are different degrees of that scale on their on each of those different agrees we can apply a chord shape which is old wise, known as a triad, and that basically builds on the first note. Whichever note we choose off that scale on, we build up skipping and know each time we can move that two different places as well. In this video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at each court inside of a major scale and then a minor scale, and we're going to discuss and get to know the qualities of each chord because they're slightly different in a major key chord. One is always made now when I say always, I really do mean always. Because remember, the background structure of the chromatic scale is a perfect grid. So when you move the major skelter, different places, the same structures live. Their so called one of every major scale is always major. Co two is minor Court three. His minor, called four Is Major called five Is Major. Six is minor on called seven Is Diminished. Don't worry about what these mean. We'll get to them later in the course. But for now, let's just talk about the qualities. If I say something like the major chord is happy, bright, positive, uplifting. Those are pretty general and generalizations. You might not agree with it totally. And there are plenty of places in music where a major chord sounds really ominous and maybe sad on a minor chord sounds particularly happy or hopeful. That's a very, very different kind of thing. We're talking very plainly in generically here, but there is some truth to it, so let's just stick with this for now. Minor chords are, to an extent, sad or empty. Some people said that dark atmospheric called three has the same quality on then as we get to court for its major. Five is major sixes. Minor again on, then called seven is I don't know. Let's call it creepy, distorted, funky or just quote. It's not quite minor. It's not quite major. It's a bit different. So that's a major key. Let's look at a minor key. And just to remind you, the way that we find a minor key is by this page here. We either start on a note and think of tone, semi tone, tone, tone, semi tone, tone, tone, which gives us the minor scale that natural minor or we find a major scale for our normal tone tone, semi tone, tender intoned, semi tone on, we find the relatively. Either way, it's exactly the same. Natural minor scale has thes courts called one is always minor. Two is always diminished. Three major, four minor and then we get called five, which is an interesting one. You'll understand a bit more why, this is a bit different called five in a minor key later on in the course. For now, I'm just gonna say it could be minor or major. It's minor when we just do cord inside of a key, but sometimes called five is altered more on that later. Court sixes major and cord seven is major called one is sad, Empty Dog Minor. Then we have diminished straight away for two major, three minor, minor or major major major. So maybe you could pause the video now and go and understand these inside of the skills that you know and see whether what I'm talking about actually makes sense, and whether you agree with it, you might not. Which is also great. Get to know the sound off your color palette, which is the major and minor scale. You must really understand the qualities of these chords, and the more that you connect your feelings or emotions to these cords inside of different keys that greater your skill and connection as a composer or writer or songwriter will be so in the final part. This video. What going to talk about is how to name cords. Naming cords helps us understand their function inside off a key, but you absolutely don't need to know them. This is just something I'm including in a course for comprehensiveness on because it will probably come up. So we look at the same scale. Now. This works in both major and minor. We call them exactly the same. It doesn't matter whether it's a major or minor scale cord one or note one are called the same thing. The tonic, chord or note to is super tonic, then medium sub dominant, dominant sub median on, then the leading note leading court. Now this is a funny one. Many people call it the leading chord or note. I actually prefer the subatomic note or subatomic name makes more sense to me because it's sub to the tonic. Anyway, these aren't super important. You don't necessarily come across them all the time. And like I say, you can create music without them. However, there are three that I want you to be aware of, particularly these ones, the tonic sub dominant. The reason is it because they're known as our primary triads, and the reason that they're called primary is because that they're particularly powerful in establishing gravity of the scale or the key. So let's look at this at the piano. So I mentioned that about the power of establishing gravity in a key. So you understand the idea of gravity so far. But the cords that create gravity are not created equal in the sense that some chords create gravity more than others. Right? And those primary triads called 1 45 almost classically, the ones that we can establish gravity with. So if we start off by playing this chord here, it's an F court. Right? But because we know a few scales now we know f major on. We know C. Major. We also know D minor, the relative minor of F major. Also a minor discord right now. Could be in any of those keys, so we don't know where are home centuries I, where our center of gravity is is what I mean. So as soon as I play, called one and then four and then five of F major way have a sense now, not just theoretically, because we've got this note in it, which we know only belongs in F major in D minor. But we have a sense because of the structure of those chords that we're now right, and this is a really important point because we played called one five on. It's created this sense of homeless, right if we did it in another key like G major, what's called 145 g major. If you want to pause the video now and work it out basically what they are G is one c is for deace five on. Now we're happy to land that G. So if I do that again from F major way now, feel that is our home center. But if I do the same now in G major, we suddenly feel that GSR center. So this touches on a principle which will learn later, which is about modulation. But for the moment, just know that your primary triads, both in major on minor, create this real strong sense of gravity. So these names will help you understand and familiarize the feelings of each of these courts inside of these keys. So, whilst I said, you don't need them, I personally find them quite valuable, because when I put a name on something, it allows me to label it and then kind of that locks it in my mind more as a composer, I know that OK is a bit like saying, if you're a painter, and you didn't call it red, pink blue. But you just used the colors right. There's something useful about calling it red, blue or pink. And that's what's going on here. So you go. OK, so you think OK, well, we've been using cold one for a while. The tonic, maybe I want to move to. And now I want to use the primary Triad state to establish the key. And now I'll go to the sub medians because I know that's the minor sound and then go down to the primary cord for one. So experiment with these names and get to know them a little bit for the sake of theory and some stuff that we do for this course, but also because it might be beneficial for you in the way that you compose and I'll see you in the next video 24. Analysing 1000+ Tunes: So two quick resource is that I want to share with you at this point, while really one resource, which is hook theory dot com. And then the first of those resource is is this theory tap here? So this is a really, really useful way off understanding the theory behind songs. If you've never looked at this sort of thing before without going too deep into kind of music theory and stuff like that, you can visualize it much like we have the piano role in Idea W. And we also start to have the numbers of chords underneath here. Except they're written in Roman numerals here. So Roman numerals. If you're not sure about them, you can look them up online. Basically, it's just a way of counting in symbols. Makes it a lot clearer in some ways on. Then you've got the actual names of the cords here as well. It's a really, really useful resource. You can just click on one of these songs and go even deeper with it and let it play and understand what's going on Now. If you're unsure, a theory tab is, they've got really helpful explainer video on this home page, which goes through it. And I would explore the different things they have in their library. Some things here that somewhat less applicable to some people, maybe, and then some other ones, for example, for film composers, actually a lot more interesting material, and you start to realize that, actually, even though Taylor Swift sounds like Taylor Swift on Game of Thrones sounds like Game of Thrones underneath, the harmony is doing similar things know exactly. But it's not necessarily the harmony that creates the genre. It's very much more the all of the other stuff, so harmony can be learned universally, even from songs that you might not necessarily like. The other resource is something from their blogged. This is done quite a while ago by Dave Carlton, but basically what he did is here kind of basically crunch numbers on over 1000 songs and kind of basically looked at the data of it and asked certain questions like Are some chords more commonly used in others common cords and what corn is most likely to come after this chord? What the most common keys really, really answers a lot of questions that I know students have in the beginning about Hey, what's what's my basis? What's the standard stuff? Because it's not like we're trying to be standard. But if you know what the kind of central core styles and conventions are, what you can do is then build upon them so you can find them by going to the Earls. In both of these pages, this one's a bit of a long one. I just actually found it by searching Google. I analyzed the 1000 cords, and even though that's not 1000 there, it found it. But really, the most important principle that I want you to take home with this Blawg article in particular is not that you need to just read this blogger article. It's that by analyzing hundreds of tunes, you gain more perspective. As a composer, you build up more material and more conventions and understandings about the way that harmony works. Unfortunately, just reading Dead Cartons article isn't going to give you a massive working knowledge of harmony. You're gonna see a few conventions. Absolutely do read this. It's very useful. Get your head into it. But one of the most important things, just like learning all keys, was a long term assignment that I've set you beyond the scope of this course. Also, I would say that learning at least 20 or 30 different songs or tunes that have different types of harmony in it would be it's gonna be super valuable for you because then it's a bit like learning words and language and stories that eventually you become more and more articulate. So really, really put that as a goal. Unfortunately, I don't think I will give you the right songs to do, because that would just be wrong. It won't make sense because the right songs for me might not be the right language for you . If I'm telling you to learn loads of Spice Girls or whatever like that, then you're gonna be not learning the right music for you. So basically don't necessary. You don't need started yet. Carry on through this course and you'll understand how to learn and find all the cords to the all the songs that you're interested in on. Then, by the end of this course, then you can start really kind of making a practice off learning more and more tunes, so hopefully one day you might even know upto you know, a few 100 tunes. Not necessarily that you can do off by heart but are in your unconscious and therefore will be coming out through your compositions. Hopefully, that's useful in this stage on. I'll see in the next video, we're going to start talking Maura about common chord progressions at the piano. 25. Common Chord Progressions and Conventions: so two more resource is from hook theory dot com. There an absolutely brilliant website with just just so much good stuff has come from analyzing this huge database, and this is exactly what I was saying it will. This kind of knowledge will become natural to you once you've studied lots and lots of different songs. But for now, you can actually interact with this database on kind of make some of the distinctions that would come after learning many, many songs yourself after a long time. So it's really, really useful. So this this one, which you can see him hook theory dot com slash trends allows you to ask the question What cord is most likely to come after this one and you can choose which key? So we've been working in C, G and F, so you could choose those. And as you learn more scales, you can change here and it allows you to say OK, well, I've played an e minor court, which is called three. What's most likely to come after e minor and what's less likely to come after him? Owner. So here, the most likely called to come after e minors we've seen so far is F And then you can actually click on one of these songs here, and it will show you the analysis off that song and you can see it in action. So here we are at E minor, in the second in the story, in the fourth bar of this song, going to F and then you can listen to it there and then you can play it equals seven. Change the key of it and learn that in all keys, so absolutely brilliant resource to get sort of contextual advice. So, in other words, really, really non theoretical advice. It's not just abstract from songs. You get to listen and read the songs and understand how the cords work in context and why they work. The other one is the common chord progressions page, and you can find that under the software and then progressions. Or you could just find this through the Earl up on screen. Now, now, there are four different tabs here. We have beginner level famous chord progressions into media intermediate to advanced. Obviously, these ones, at this point in the course there gonna be a tricky few. But by the end of this course. My aim is that you'll understand everything in this whole thing's whole page here. So beginning. If we open that up, what we see is there standard player here where you can interact with the actual chord progression. Andi, all of the songs that use that progression. So here we have the 1564 progression, the really, really famous one. And then we go down and we can encounter Pac Bell's progression 15634 and then many others . So I would get into this page and really, really understand the cords that are in this beginner tab. And as I say, by the end of this course, hopefully you'll be able to understand all of the other ones inside of intermediate and advanced. So hopefully by now you've been getting into the hook theory block and also the different chord progression or the standard chord progressions that I showed you in a previous video . I want to add just a few of my own notes as well, because there were some progressions or principles that weren't covered in the standard chord progressions, understandably, because what they've done is they've derived those those distinctions from a large database . But there a few more things that I think I can add so that the core thing that that's really, really important to understand when you're working inside of a key, which is called diatonic. So if I'm inside of C major, anything that I play outside of the key, like these banknotes most obvious to see with C major, that's non diatonic, whereas if it's diatonic, it's in the key. Similarly, with G Major, that's all diatonic. But if I play that note, that's non diatonic because it's no in the key. So with all diatonic kind of harmony, the most fundamental kind of progression is called one Chord five and then caught one again . It's this relationship between one and five, and you'll hear the word dominant sometimes, and that's because we go. We call this route and they miss the dominant. So 12345 and you hear it all the time. So, for example, if you end and a concert that's going five one very important relationship, let's go back in, see so you can see that that's 151 inside. See, Major. The other one is one for one on these cords. 14 and five called out Primary Triads Triads because there are three notes built up of thirds on primary because their most important, in a sense, you could say important in inverted comments. But they call the primary Triad off a scale, and it works the same in a minor scale. His a minor, his Court one at Court for and Cord five for various reasons. I'm not gonna play that if you know a little bit about theory. Sometimes we do that. Let's just call these are primary triads for now. So inside of all of your chord progressions, thinking about one foreign fire is quite important that really, really powerful cords. But beyond that, for example, the 1564 progression our 1st 1st note goes or sorry, our first and second court go 1256 on. Before you could also do one six. That's another famous one. And again, I'm keeping my playing really simple at the moment. When we get into the voicings and everything like that, it'll sound a lot more interesting. Everything's a bit more. That's just because I'm making sure that everyone can follow stuff. So the other thing to think about Final thing really, for common chord progressions or conventions is not just the 15 relationship in the 14 relationship, but also the circle of fifths relationship. Because if we go around the circle of Fifths, for example, from we go from D, which is two steps to the right from see if we're staying in C major, It was 1/5 away from D left around the circle of fifths T g and then back to see what we're doing is a secondary fifth. So yes, AGI is fifth away from sea, but also D is 1/5 away from G. So we have this kind of fifths movement. So we get 1/5 away from G on, then 1/5 away from C. And that gives us if we stay diatonic. So all the all the cords, not D major, but D minor. We play this. It sounds like this. Okay, on. That's called a to 51 because that's called to in this court five, and that's caught one. And this is just hinting at something that will get too much later in the course, which is called secondary dominance. The secondary dominant allows us to get a dominant G and then a dominant to see So D is acting as a dominant gene. And then Jay is acting is dominant to see, and that gives us a really nice sound. So that's the circle of fifths and how you could think about that. If we extend that even further, we go right around the circle of fifths all the way to E. Don't worry too much about trying to understand that and don't make it more complicated than it is. Really Just see is going around the Circle of Fifths, And that would sound like if I put some nice, interesting voicings to it. It would sound like final thing that I just want to reiterate about the principles that came from the hook theory. Research is that Chord three is a tricky court to manage and you'll notice from the data when you read those articles is that Court three is quite tricky to move from Court three to another one. It doesn't often sound as good as you might hope. Some court some songs really make it work, but just be aware that the Court three is a bit tricky if we if we go from seeing for me, that Corbyn question really doesn't work. It's a bit what it's a bit weak from here to here is okay from 1 to 3 is fine on bond. That's kind of a bit of a let down somehow. Again. That's just my opinion. You gotta use your own here, but just be aware of that. Managing called three is quite important and certainly caught seven because what we've got is it's called a diminished court. Don't worry about what that means yet, but it's a bit of a strange shape there. So 1245 and six your kind of real standard cords When you're writing diatonic Lee, I wanna add one more thing here, which is about tension and resolution on that principle in composition. On writing anything is really important. It's also important in any other type off art that uses time. So, for example, of film, you have a character who starts out and she maybe has an event. So it starts out OK, and then there's an event that happens and inciting event. And then she goes on a journey Andi kind of finds find something, has some struggles and then end. So you've got tension on the resolution of the big story arc. You have resolution at the beginning or kind of ease its intention, and then it results. That's the classic story arc and in cords and harmony, that's often what we're looking for if I just have. If I just play the song all the time, that was, like, ever and ever it would get really reborn because those cords called one import. Three Quite relaxing, right? They don't feel like we're going anywhere. Whereas if I if I do this called 1 to 2, we feel like we're about to travel somewhere else and particularly with Court five. If I suddenly stopped there, you're like, No, I need to something else to happen. It's about an expectation. So it's this balance of attention, attention, resolution, but not totally on a bit of attention, cause we want to be, oh, back here to resolve to be thinking about that when you're constructing these component parts from the standard things that I just went over and also present in the hook theory pages. Andi, think about tension and resolution and how effective that is for what you're trying to do is a composer 26. 30% Different - Changing Standard Chord Progressions: so a quick principle here about changing standard chord progressions. Because if I was you and I was just starting out when I was just hearing me speak about all this, I'd be thinking, Why am I learning all these standard chord progressions? I kind of want to get into kind of more interesting stuff. Or how is that me writing my own thing? Well, like I said, once you internalize these, you end up putting them in your own order. And as you see, there's only a limited set of court. So actually, everyone does repeat and copy each other. But one idea, if you're still not satisfied with that that will help you is the idea of changing something 30%. So let's take the 1564 progression right if you just change maybe one part of that right? So instead of going to five, let's go to to write. That's suddenly different now. Obviously, someone will have written that chord progression before you can't get away from that. Your uniqueness and sound does not come at this level. This is like the building block off how the piece works. All of your nuance comes in arrangement. You know, production, vocals, everything but it. Making this kind of difference is more satisfying to you because you know that you've done a bit of composing rather than like taking a block and going book. I'll use that standard chord progression, this idea of 30% difference. So if there's a song that you really like the sound off like God, I really like that sound will keep the elements of it that you really like. The sound off, right? Say it's one six, right? See you like that bit. But you don't want to get five because that's like the standard 1645 progression. You could try something else. Just change the five. Now don't worry too much about what I was doing there. If you're completely generate piano, we will cover everything that was just doing in terms of voicings later on. So it. But what I was doing was I was very much playing 164 and then won again, right? But I just did a different arrangement at the end. But you see there I'm kind of taking something that I really like in an existing song, turning it 30% and making it my own. So that's your assignment for this. Part of the course is take a number of songs that you find or a number of these progressions on, then change them roughly 30% and then make it your own. 27. Chord 5 in a Minor Key: So when you're playing courts in a key and you're in a minor key, one of the things that often gets bit confusing is what to do with Court. Five have probably mentioned that in a few videos before, because it can be a minor chord or a major chord. So let's look at that. Now let's look at it in a minor, which is the relative minor of C major. We're gonna get caught. One, 23 There's Court five if we're playing it purely in the diatonic way, I only using the notes from the scale. But I probably mentioned before that what you can do with court finds you can take this middle note that gives it a slightly more powerful sound when you're moving between chords and eyes, a centimeter away from the root note of the key, so it gives it more power. Moving that cord one. If I play chords 145 with the natural version of Court five. So where we don't change the middle name. I'll play that fast and listen to sound. Still, a great sound is many, many change that used that, but if I do it now, way uh, something about the preparation of that last chord that has more attention, which then results in a semi tone. So what we're doing there was, We're turning it from Court Five being and Lina Court. You will learn exactly how minor made records working throughout the course of a major. Yeah, let's do it in the other two keys. Let's do it in D Minor Way play chords 14 and five in D minor in e minor. That's what it would look like if it was in our standard, my now with natural way. And you'll see this in the common cold regressions that I give you in the harmony Cheat sheets in this, of course, and also beyond outside of this course in kind of court analysis, and you'll see I'll teach you how to read all those. But the thing to realize is that when you're on Court five, which is often written with a V, it will be written with a Capital V if it's the major or a lower case, if it's the minor and it creates a very, very different sound. So if we one of the corporations we study later on in the course is Hans Zimmer's time, which is a piece from interstellar. No inception. I get confused between two. So it's a really, really great progression, and it goes like this. What that's doing for in the scale of a minor is were playing called one five in its natural form. Without that note that and then we go to court seven five. I just really, really lovely sound. If we were to change that to a major court five, it wouldn't work. Maybe, but certainly no, it's no, it's no good for the time progression. The time progression is defined by that feeling of going. Thats kind of empty floating Court five. So that's a little clarification to realize that that chord can change, sometimes in minor keys. 28. Harmony Cheat Sheet: Stage 1: So this is a quick video to explain the resource that's downloadable at this point, which is the stage one. Harmony, Cici. This pulls together everything that we've learned so far into something that allows you to just keep on your computer desktop or even print out. If you want on, just remind yourself rather than having to go back through the videos. So if I scroll down here, what we've got is everything that we've done in order, the fundamental points and the formulas. So we got the major scale formula relative major, minor relationship, minor scale formula, etcetera, etcetera. We go all the way down with the circle of fifths. Some hook theory resource is links and also some common chord elements and progressions. And I wanted to talk very briefly about this. This is absolutely not exhaustive and is absolutely only my opinion. I can't make something super objective here, but over the years is a piano teacher. I've learned a ton of songs, and I've taught a number of people, and I've kind of distilled the most essential chord progressions here. Now it's really imperative that you take these elements and then build upon them and mess around with them. So what I'm essentially saying here is all of the's work well, but I'm not saying that these are the best ones or anything like that. Far from it, these are the building blocks. So, for example, as we start getting to the longer progressions down the bottom here, whether it's in major or minor, what you can start doing is changing these around. So instead of 1564 here, you could do 1456 and see what that sounds like. Similarly, with all these here, instead of going 651 you could try going one, 56 or whatever trying these out but ones at the top here, where we just have chord relationships of one to the other. That's kind of a fundamental relationship, and it's often called the cadence. In some ways, it's just a kind of slice of time in music where harmonically, those two chords work particularly well going next to each other. So try these out, build your own chord progressions and maybe keep this on your piano or by wherever you compose. I hope it's useful to you 29. Tension & Resolution: So in this section we're primarily looking at melody over the top of harmony. But before we do that, I want to introduce a contact which is relevant throughout this course and how you compose , which is tension and resolution. It's a bit like the idea of gravity and a key. It's kind of loosely connected but mawr granular and more detail into how you are actually constructing your melodies and harmonies. Basically, it's not necessarily the only way to think about how your composing. It's one way to frame what you're trying to create with the idea of how much tension and how much resolution. Because depending on your taste in music, we like a certain amount of tension resolution. So let me show you what I mean. So this chord here, relatively stable. All right. But if I had one, maybe something about this court that is making us want to move to see memorials. And if I resolved that, that means things kind of essentially resolving attention, finishing attention. Now we finished right, and that sounds a bit classical and obvious there, but essentially, when you do called one, that's tension that wants to be resolved, Teoh resolution One of another word. And as you're writing, but your melodies and your harmonies, you want to be thinking, Well, how much is this tension and resolution working? In a sense, it's if you're finding that sanctions are working, you could kind of just ask yourself the question. Okay. What's the balance of tension and resolution? Have I got enough tension? Have I got enough resolution? Is there too much of one too much of the other? Because if you're writing a piece of music, I'm just gonna go in C major, that's like this all the time. Okay, two minutes later, right? It's very boring because we're just in this feeling of resolution, but if you add some of this stuff, right, this some kind of mixing of stuff going on in there. So let's have a look. That was with harmony, right? Then we'll get Maurin toe What cord to create. What kind of attention? You kind of already know that we've been looking at so far. But what about Melody? Right? You've got something going on here that there feels like it's not quite a stable is the first to so that melody is leading us up from resolution in detention and into resolution. So in this whole chapter, we're gonna look at particularly melody in harmony both court turns and non court turns and mawr. But the whole time be thinking, right. How can I use this in my work? Going apply. Make a little little sketches after each episode in this part of the course, kind of taking the idea of like court turns, non core turns non diatonic turns as well and see how you can start constructing melodies with these different flavors and feelings under the whole heading of tension and resolution on what's right for you and your style of music. 30. Chord tones: So let's start with the feeling off resolution. If we're playing a chord is f major notes off that chord work particularly well inside our melody. So we've got this chord here and then the following notes are the cord turns. So, for example, if we created a melody that's made entirely of those core tens, I think this sounds really plain and a bit boring now. But if you had someone saying this amazing gospel singer on, then you know you had someone just doing some or interesting voicing and they're going, it would sound good, right? So don't underestimate at this point, you know how this simplicity of this will sound actually quite good. I want to arrange it properly, so planning at this point doesn't have to sound good, but it's quite logical to use notes from the cord. But then, if we change chords, so his for two and then we highlight all the court turns of that chord, which is basically these notes all the way up the piano, then our melody could use court turns from that court so we could write a melody, really, simply that would be right on that is actually a really good first way of composing. So if we do that inside G major again, here's court to, uh, it's very similar to Mad World. They're actually, if you had to, so play around with court turns inside of your keys. Also your minor keys as well on try and come up with the melodies. What you'll find immediately on. We'll discover this in the next video is that almost certainly want to move to notes that aren't just the court tens. And this is where you have that kind of tension and resolution thing coming back in because court turns a quite static. We don't want to move anywhere necessarily. Yeah, there really is no to quite static. But if I play a non cord tone said like this one, it's beautiful. I absolutely love that, and I could stay little day. I love that sound, but you kind of have to admit from a really kind of standard theoretical perspective that this wants to move somewhere else, which is classically speaking to a Court 10. So you want to resolve it. Another one here would be his. Our Jeanne made a court on our court tens and then we want to play this note, which is a non core tone, and it wants to resolve up to that G, which is a chord. So I see in the next video where we do known call it turns. 31. Non Chord Tones: so we're still diatonic were still inside of a major or a minor key. And yet we still have a huge amount of expression whilst using this tension and resolution principal melodies. So I'm gonna work inside of the scale of e minor. Just the relative minor off G. Major. I'm gonna write out the cord turns that the court tends that we had before on the piano, and then we're gonna talk about the non core turns. Okay, so obviously, if these of the court way have four other notes that are non core turns, right, it's this one, this one on this one, Anil service Ansari. Let's look at that in C major, if that was a bit too hard for you. So see, major, here our core turns. Eso are non core turns our And if I play those of record of C major, listen to what they sound like. Each of those if we're thinking really classically here, gives a certain amount of tension and it often wants to resolve to one of the other notes. So I can a simple way to write a melody would to be to go to mix and match those notes. So let's try an E minor again. Now you can decide to begin with 10. Journal, begin with resolution here. I'm gonna begin with. Resolution. Intention, intention resolution. Attention. Resolution, Resolution! Attention! Resolution! Resolution. You get the idea. So use this and all of your keys to start creating some interesting melodies. Then if you combine that with your chord progressions, you get some really useful stuff straight away. So let's get back into C Major. So you can really see this. I'm gonna do my core progression of 251 and I'm gonna do these ideas. I'll talk you through it. So resolution attention Now, because I've moved on to court five. This is now a resolution resolution. So you have this interesting relationship where record to hear this news was tension. But then when we change the court underneath it, that becomes resolution. And then if I keep that, it becomes tension again. So we'll get to this later on in further chapters. That what I was doing there was called a pedal note and it joins chords together and makes them kind of interact and be almost compared with each other side by side s. Oh, yeah, that's useful. Enjoy your composing and I'll see you in the next video. 32. The Feelings of Different Intervals: So obviously we've worked on a major scale and many times you know exactly what's going on here. I'm gonna take away the details and put the numbers on, because what we're gonna do is play a long cord and we'll start with cord one so that we can play these different notes of the scale over the top of it and get to know a little bit about their character. Now, this is not really an objective thing. It's a very subjective thing. So I'm not gonna tell you how I experience those notes too much. But I'll start you off so that you can then let your imagination run wild when you're listening to these notes. Basically, you need to ask yourself, What does this note feel like over Cord one and have an emotional connection with it? However small and whatever comes to your mind is almost certainly right for you. So listen to one. It's quite a static, stable, home like note because it's obviously over its home court two has a kind of character of leading. It's right, it's positive for me. Look for maybe a little bit more dissonant, perhaps not sure for you but obviously for me, it is a tiny bit more distant and wants to resolve back to 37 also is quite a tense note. Wants to resolve up to one again. So let's now change the court on Let's play some other notes over the top of that way. So those all create very different qualities. And what we're looking at is a slice of time on what music is creating for the listener in that slice of time. And it's important for you as an exercise to go through all of these all of the cords on all of the notes and start to understand for you personally what each one represents. Now, if you're not sure and you're kind of playing in your life, I don't know, Jack. Come on, you're reading into this way too much. Find that's totally cool. But it is a good idea to start understanding the structure and the feelings that come as you play these different notes of the scales. However small and minimal, you don't have to do it with every court, every note and as you do it just as a little reminder, there's two sets of numbers going on this, the numbers or the degrees of the scale or key that you see in front of you here, but also the degrees of the cord that you're currently on. So let's talk about intervals now. Intervals are really important to understand theory off because when we move away from just playing one static note, we have to describe things in intervals. So what we're gonna be doing here is diatonic intervals and let me explain what that means . Diatonic is basically inside of a scale or a key. An interval means the space between two notes. So a diatonic interval is the space between two notes inside of a scale or a key. Let's take a scale. So the difference between No. One and No. Two here is called a second. You may have already known now or thought about that, but think about this. If we go from note to to note three, that's also a second on No. Three. To note four is a second, but we're not talking about turns and semi tent it. We're talking very simply as degree kind of the space between degrees of the scale. So if we then go backwards as well. That's also the same. So if we went from 4 to 3, that would be a second. Now let's look at the next interval space of 1/3. If we go from 1 to 3, that's obviously 1/3. But if we get from 2 to 4, that's 1/3 or from 3 to 5 or 5 to 3. That's also 1/3 which we can move anywhere else all the way up through the scale. So then we have 1/4 which is this space. We can move that two different places, and then we have 1/5 on, then a sick on, then 1/7 which I won't show all the options off, either because it won't fit on the screen. Each of these played from any note, has its own sound, And that's another thing viewed. Start playing around with over cords because these are the minute little building blocks of melodies that give something color, character and shape as an example here to melodies that use small intervals like seconds and thirds and then the second melody, which uses bigger intervals like fifths and six. So I hope what I said there was kind of useful to you on. You kind of understood most of it again. Some of it is a bit tricky, potentially for the beginner at this stage on, Don't worry about it too much. Come back to this video and watch it again as you go through the course. In fact, I'd advise that with a lot of these videos that this is not just a course that you go through to get to the end and you like boom, done. This is like a library of principles that you can kind of draw back on and think. OK, OK, so I'm not so good at that anymore. Should go back and visit that video. What was it? He said again about, like melodies and tension and resolution? I'll go back to that part. Certainly you'll need to do it for the later stages and use this as practice, but to supplement what we've just done there. On the presentation, I would recommend a guy called Holistic Song writing. Or rather, his YouTube channel is called Holistic Song writing, and he's got some fantastic analyses off just simple melodies from major artists that you'll have heard of. Not necessarily that you will like but artist that you will definitely have heard off. And it will get you thinking about what we've just looked at, theoretically, on how you apply it to thinking about other people's melodies and also your own melodies. So is a quick example. One of the things he's talking about with certain ask this artists is that they use certain intervals. So if we look here at my I'm gonna play in G major hearing a stop in court five right again , this is not fully fledged arrangement. This is just us planning out the harmony in the melody. So there it's like, kind of that's not so great Jack. Again, we're planning it, but imagine you arrange that fully. There was an amazing singer of the top of that great groove, everything that you could make that sound easily good in a number of different genres. But the core of it here is that that movement of a second inside of the scale and then right so this that singer will be going dirt and try not to think too much in this course. But they basically create a certain quality because they're not jumping. Teoh high, right? And then that one also that that creates a certain feeling, whereas if that singer was instead going right, you'd have a certain feeling their that's way bigger, more expensive and gives a certain sound on what holistic songwriting goes into is, for example, certain artists prefer the sound of 1/3 so you'll be like in one King you'll be like, So that was based around the third. The primary thing that gave that melody it's character was there, right? Yes, I did some other stuff, right that wasn't third, but the primary part of it is that third sound in the melody and then another artist might use a forthright. So if we're in, let's go in tow a minor. There's a different quality. Obviously, the harmony creates a certain quality. But even the melody on its own, primarily based around the fourth is a certain quality. So dive into his videos. There's some really good stuff in there and start applying that thinking to your melodies in your writing 33. Layering & Overlapping: so a couple of videos ago what I mentioned Waas, that we can create resolution on one chord. And then that resolution, if we stay on that note, becomes tension on the next chord. So what we're doing is we're changing in context for that note on one of the most amazing things that you can do and I get students to do this is actually create a melody with one note, and I mean, how do you do that? Well, it's kind of a title, really, rather than a technical explanation. What we're doing is we're changing the harmony underneath. So only at the end there did I change the note because I just really felt it needed to change. Don't worry about too much. What I was doing in the left hand essentially was basically cords, but I was doing those voicings which we're gonna come to later on. So that's one thing that you can try as an exercise. Change the harmony over one note and see what happens. And the thing to realize when you're doing this is that some chords share notes with other chords. So there this is resolution for both of these cords Now it's attention on there. That was almost that was just actually a reasonably satisfying melody. And I was only using two notes, and that's because the cord underneath shifted our feeling of tension and resolution. One final principle to think about is something called Voice leading on. This is kind of a very simple way of looking at voice leading when we get into the harmony and voicing chapters much later on will really take a deep dive into voice leading. But as an example, Here we go. So he is called to called five Chord one Court six called to five Court One. Now, if you go back and watch that video again, or that section of this video, I'm going up in a scale right on time, making sure I'm going up in a scale and only choosing the next note off the cord that we're currently on. So here we're on the fifth, of course to, and we're on the third of court five. Them were on the roots of cold wind. Now, when I went to Court four here, I can't go up because that is not in court for so I decided to stay here. And then I think I went to court six. Next. I can't really remember actually something like this. So all the time I'm making sure that my melody note is in my mind relating to the court. There on the voice is leading through the courts. So that's another way to think about your melodies is to decide a cable for this partner malady. I'm gonna make my scale go, or I'm gonna make my melody dio like that. So I'm gonna make sure that my chords of fitting that melody right? So say you, Millie, that does do that. So that would work my next chord. It could be called six because that would work. And then what chords use. See? Well, four does, but also wonders So used one, and then we'll call to use B. Well, let's try. Let's try six again. G. Hopefully that makes sense. So, in a kind of simple filmic arrangement, really what? We've got up at the top here. We've got kind of that long held a note orchestrated with two different sounds. We've got a kind of this kind of bowed guitar sound. We've got the piano over the top as well. So already it's quite film it that creates a huge kind of atmosphere on its own. But then underneath what we've got is we've got the cords changing, and I've done my trusty kind of arpeggio hated thing going on here kind of recently sore three. New Blade Runner on de. So it's kind of in my head on, and I guess I'm going to sound like that. Core change Core change Call change, Court change change on We've just got a long held pedal note holding that together underneath men, some ominous brass as well, filling in the cords underneath and all together. That kind of makes this so the melodic content there is really minimal. Basically, it's one held in a way up to bar 14. Then it changes than these thieves to ending notes in the piano at the end of the tiny little change in the sign lead there. So hopefully that's a useful practical example of playing one note and changing chords. Very, very simple. Just three chords underneath there. Go have fun. Try something like that out in your own production 34. Non diatonic Tones: so so far we've looked at diatonic tones. Yes, they might not be a member of the cord, but they are all diatonic in the key. Now we're gonna add another level off tension, which is non diatonic tones. Again, let's be simple of stance. I see major eso here all our diatonic tens and very simply you can see all the black notes are non diatonic, right? And they really, generally speaking don't work at least in the way that I'm playing in a moment with simple root position triads voicings kind of a bit funky in a bad way, but you can make them funky in a good way if use, they're in the right way. Okay, so one of the things that will look at in a later chapter is kind of ornamentation, which is basically, instead of playing a melody like this, you could add, say, thes two notes. It's a very simple example that these two notes, just short grace notes. We call them before those notes, and you can use grace notes with with non diatonic tones because they happen very quickly. Right? So let's say our melody goes Ugo, right? You see, I I slipped past and played that non diatonic tone on that one works particularly well what we've got. There we go 123 and then we get down a semi turn to be. It's called a minor third. You don't necessarily need to know that. But so experiment now with your melodies and seeing whether some diatonic toe, non diatonic tones work well in this grace. No, you do get quite jazzy style when you do that semi tone one there, but you might find some other ones like this one here. It's quite creepy. One. You get a very, very different sound when you use non diatonic tones, but you have to learn yourself. Which ones work best, As I said, the one with a major chord there where you take the third note and you go down a semi tone gives us jazzy sound. What I did just then was I played a minor chord. His d minor and I played the note, which is a semi tone below D. We'll get to what that's actually called. It's called a major seventh in later chapters, but you just think of it. The pattern here I went to number five from D when I went down a semi tone, and that is not in this key. Similarly, wouldn't be in this key for inside C major and there I played, which is a 17 above. You have fun with that and see if you can come up with some more structures and flavors. That ad difference to your melody, but probably a word of warning is use it sparingly. 35. The Pentatonic Scale: the pentatonic scale is a really useful scale in that it's incredibly easy to write good melodies with it. I often call it the full proof scale because it's virtually impossible when using it over good harmony to not write a melody that sounds good. Let's look at it and what it means. Penta means five and Tonic is relating to the first degree of the scale. So essentially, when you take a major or a minor scale, what we're doing is we're filtering to notes out to create a five note scale. Let's look at that with a major scale. So let's start with noting of one way miss out note number four and skip straight to five way Miss Out Number seven and go back to one. So that's the major pentatonic scale, and it sounds like this. Let's look at the pentatonic scale in minor now his on minor scale and let's start filtering out to the notes. It's different in this one. We start with no number one on Miss out, no number two straight away. Go to three, miss out no number six. Go to seven on, then up back toe one. That's the minor pentatonic scale, and it sounds like this. Let's look at that now at the piano in context. So let's take it in G major first, right? So there's a jet made of scale on Let's Take Note number 1235 and six, and that gives us the headstone. Ex g o. Really, really lovely. Let's do that in minor. So the relative minor G major is e minor and let's take note. Number 13 That's the scale, and it sounds pretty cool. See that briefly inside of F Major and then we'll finish up the video. Take the 1235 and six notes off the scale, and we get the F major pentatonic, and then we go to the relative minor of F major, which is D Minor way. Take note number 135 and seven. Uh, so you don't necessarily need to use it exclusively in your melodies. You can just use it as a basis. The pentatonic scale note often worked really, really well over the basis court of whatever the rumor is, but you can use other nights from the scouts. Say, for example, here you might want Tokyo 135 and then bring in a tiny bit of this note, which is outside of the pentatonic scale that's still inside of the minor scale that spends tonic for you guys. I'll see you in the next video. 36. Patterns - The Way to think about your music: So if I haven't made it clear already, what we're trying to do is think in patterns on the theory of the keys goes away. We don't think about anymore, I said in the previous video. Probably that there's nothing inherently see about this. No, or in early G about this. No, it's not the cord. See, that gives us this feeling. And it's not the cord f minor with ninth. It gives us that feeling or the fact that I'm moving here. It's not the careful to see that gives us that feeling. It's the patterns behind the names, if that makes sense, which is why we start this whole course with the idea of a grid where you can move things around. So patterns are the key to music, and it's something that cohesive eyes. That's definitely not what I don't think, but anyway, I'm gonna leave it in the the stuff that you were arranging right, so it makes things more kind of like they belong together. So for an example, right so you can go. Let's take this really, really simple melody inside a G major. So So the character of that is, let's move around to different places. So is that pattern. I moved to different places. That gave it a sound right Also. Similarly, if you've got kind of a core pattern, this is in a key that you don't necessarily know right where we're going. It is the pattern of my accompaniment, which will get to voicings and a compliment in a later chapter that makes those cords doing together. If I was then to move to another section of my way and then this section and on and then I went, I mean, it sounds cool, but it's and it's also very much a different pattern, right, So you're going, think a bit weird. But then Ugo on it feels like a different section similarly with melody. So let's go back to that one. I think it was this so you could base your whole verse on this with subtle differences. And then you get to the chorus, which would have this pattern, Let's say right, so that's it. And then you go back to the first already roughly see the idea that I'm getting out here thinking patterns and overlay that what we're thinking of his layers that we go okay, right layer one. Let's think of the harmony layer to Let's think off the pattern or the melody, right? And then we change the layer and maybe keep one of the layers. And this is a principle that will come back to in this course as we move forward, both with the voicings and the way that we structural composition structure are harmony, which is really about these ideas of layers. So in your dear doubly, you've got the layers of different instruments doing stuff. But you've got behind that in the way that you think about composing, composing theme, kind of different ways off, layering up how it works, right? So the kind of method organization of your compositions, if that isn't too pretentious So if it is basically that is that is that the way that we want to think about music? His patterns 37. Assignment - Melody Writing: So we've done a whole ton on melody, and I hope it's been useful to you. What I would suggest is that you put all of this together now everything that we've done in the last few videos and put it into a song or a piece of music, right? So choose a simple chord progression in your left hand or actually record this and put in your w. Don't think too much about the courts. Do something really simple like 15641345 16 That sort of thing. Make it really, really simple. But make sure there's more than two chords, right? So 1564 would be super simple to do this with and then a make a melody that uses everything that we've done in the previous videos, so that we, with chord tones, notes inside of the court non chord tones, notes that on in the current court that you're currently playing held shared notes. So to redirect what that is basically, I mean, I go over this in the next video, in an analysis of one melody that I put together, a held shared no is basically a note that is in the first chord and also in the next court . So if I play a g chord, top note, that court is the right. And then if I go to de cored these indie, obviously. So my melody could be like on a long note. And on that D was held over from the previous court. That gets the lovely sound. So that's that's Number three held Shared knows, then patterns. Obviously gonna be creating patterns anyway when you do this, but take a kind of conscious hold off your patterns that you're writing music with and try and gel your melody together so it feels like it belongs together rather than, for example, the opposite of patterns would be the wandering hand exercise, just something that goes doing something random. Yeah, then use the pentatonic scale, which we've looked up and then also one diatonic note. That's quite a lot, but you can definitely do it, and I do it in the next video. So that's chord tones use court turns, non chord tones, held shared notes, patterns, pentatonic scale and one non diatonic tone. And obviously, if you want to, you can think about the note characters, the characters, you know, for example, staying around with Second for is part of the core of humanity. Or the fourth is part of the core of your melody. Whatever you, whatever you feel like you don't have to use that last one necessarily. But trump it all together, and I'll see you in the next video for analysis off a malady which incorporates all of these things. 38. Example - Melody Writing: - Okay , so let's analyze what we did. Just that. So we're in G major and we start uncalled one with note one that we immediately go Teoh tension with No. Two on the resolution on the three. So another court, I actually think of it a lot more simply than that. What I was thinking Waas Sorry, Pentatonic scale said. My melody starts with the first part of it on Mrs the Sick. But on this note we changed to court five, right? And what that does is that we start on attention note and then resolved to the third of that cord and then we moved to court six. Can you see what I'm doing? There is the melodies slightly lagging behind the cords, which gives us that layering over the top of each other, feeling on these notes, a kind of non cord notes. But they sound quite nice, and it gives it a slightly more contemporary feeling than if I was just going, which is a super boy, that there you could see it like attention. No, but for me, in my head I'm seeing is anticipating the fact that we're about to move back to court one, and that's how my ear hears it. So on now becomes a resolution. And then I did something like this on. That's a really nice jump when you do in melodies. If You Listen to Blackbird by the Beatles starts with a huge jump. And actually we were so used to hearing melodies that used the step all the jump. Actually, we really love it when we go Way did it all the time. It wouldn't work so well. It's not great for singers. It might be good for instrumental music. So here I go on, I'm repeating as well. Just the other thing to mention is that I'm still thinking about patterns, so I go back and repeat, but I don't do it exactly. Do that again. Would be to risk, you know, repetition. We want this nice amount of like familiarity and then newness in our melodies. So the second time around it goes, that's anticipating the next chord on. Then we go into kind of a chorus type thing where we have a pedal note right with tiny non court note before it, and that's talking back to them on. I'm not sure that I came up with an exact ending. But hopefully that makes sense and is useful. Teoh give you a kind of formula with those those things that you did in your assignment really do go together to make great melodies in both major and minor keys. 39. Roman Numerals in Analysis: So at this point in the course, I thought would be useful to go over a little thing. Gold Roman numerals, which is basically an analysis, a way to look at the structure of harmony. It's quite a traditional way of doing stuff, and it's not necessarily the only way. But it's beneficial to be able to think about the relative relationship of cords inside of diatonic harmony. I inside of a key or a scale later on in the course. What we'll do is we'll go through this again and in much greater detail when we look at how to read chords and chord symbols. So let's first look at a scale in Roman numerals and let's start with the first chord, which is called one now for the top. There we have an upper case, I and at the bottom we have the number one on the bottom. Numbers are just gonna be me explaining which number were on. So one is I. If you put two eyes next to each other that represents two and three eyes, represents three. Now, number four is a little bit different. So we're going to do is I'm just gonna skip past it and go to five, and you can see that Number five there has a V and V, and Roman numerals means five. So if we go back to for a second, we can see that there's a one before the V, which is kind of explaining that there's the one before the five, which is four. So you can think of it that when the eyes to the left of the V, that's one less than V, which is for then we have the which is five. Then we have one to the right of the which represents six on, then two to the right of the represents seven. Now, this should be fairly straightforward. If you kind of hang around this a little bit, it'll start to make sense. But why on earth do we do this? Why do we not just use 123456 and seven as the numbers? Well, the reason is to do with major and minor. So if I show you a Roman numeral in minor, it looks like this. So it's a lower case. I so one in lower case means one minor, but one in upper case means one major and similarly to lower case ice means to minor on to uppercase eyes means to major. Similarly, if we look at these courts here, we've got three in the minor form and then in the major and then five in the major form and then six in the minor. And you can see that in the six minor. The V is lower case in the eyes lower case indicating that that court is minor. Now don't worry too much about if you're still not totally sure about Major, and minor chords were going to go over those totally on how to create them from scratch later in the course. But for now, I'm just introducing it so that you can understand my analyses and my explanations in the following videos. However, you may have already gotten a grasp off major and minor chords inside of the skills that you already using. So with that in mind, let me just go over the Roman numerals inside of a major scale. So called one is an up case I called to is minor, so it's to lower case eyes. Court three is also minor, so it's three lower case eyes Court for is a major, so this is upper case I and then a V and then called five is major. So it's just another case V called Sixes Minor. So it's lower Case V and I, and then called seven is diminished. But we kind of also draw that like it was a minor court as well minus girl looks like this 123456 and seven. So don't worry. We will come back to reading cords in a later chapter. But for the next video, this is going to be quite useful in our analyses of the structure of harmony in music. 40. Harmonic Structure: like stories. Music has beginnings, middles and endings, but they're not necessarily just called beginnings, middles and endings. They're called sections, and we label those sections in our analysis of tunes with usually letters. A B C would be beginning middle and end, except tunes don't necessarily have that simple structure. They could have structures like ABC, and then they might repeat ABC again. That might be verse bridge chorus, first bridge chorus, But you could have another structure you could have like an intro and then ABC, ABC and then an outro, where you could have a different structure or a different structure. But what's defining these sections? Well, in truth, it's everything. All of the elements of music together go into, creating a new section, the groove, the production of singing the lyrics, everything but also the harmony. And this is why you've probably picked up this course because you're realizing that you want to understand the harmony behind music and to be able to structure it and create it in a better way. So in this tutorial, and for the rest of this series, were primarily thinking about the structure of music via the harmony. So I'm gonna look at two pieces from Hans Zimmer's repertoire that are very different. That give you an indication of how harmony and structure of harmony, as well as the production effects your composition. So the 1st 1 is handsome Time, which is from the movie Inception is the theme tune. Basic and structure of that goes like this, too. Six 15 on That just repeats over and over again throughout the piece. So, really, the pieces not necessarily being structured or differentiated via the harmony the Harmony is repeating over and over again, kind of imitating this idea of a dream or dream within a dream. It's this repetitive, repetitive structure, but it builds up on up throughout this theme of hiss. If we take another one of Hans Emma's tunes, for example, now we're free from Gladiator. We can see that the structure of this analysis is far more complex, both in the actual amount of different chords that we have and also the length of each little section. You see what we have some shorter ones and longer ones. They're also just as an aside, the analysis of this here is incomplete. It's a bit more complex than this, but I'm keeping it like this for the moment. So have a listen through to both of those tracks. Time and now we're free and have a think and listen to the harmony changing underneath and try and extricate it from the whole production. So I either melody alot, different instruments that playing and really, really try and hear the harmony changing and listen to the difference between the two tracks and what it is about the repetition of time on the kind of fluid, constantly changing structure of. Now we're free that give each its own unique quality. And I'd invite you to keep doing this with all of the tracks that you're learning all of the tunes, whether they're more production song waste, tunes from any kind of chart or their film, music or anything else really understand the structure of the harmony and start integrating and assimilating those structures to actually bring them out in your own compositions. So think about the harmonic structure behind everything that you learn 41. Repeating Harmony: So in this video, we're gonna start with me playing a few things that might go over your head. If you haven't covered the whole of this course or you're not one experience pianist on, then in the second part, we're gonna make it gonna break it down a lot more simply so you can understand the principle that I'm talking out about. And so the principle is that you can keep the cords the same, right? But you just change the arrangement and we'll talk more in a later chapter about arrangement on voicings. But for now, I just want you to look at this. We're gonna do the 1564 progression. I'm already putting a bass note in here because it's very, very straightforward. It's no, no what we've done so far so much, but it gives it some weight down the bottom. Now imagine a singer is singing on You're playing this behind most standard corporation and sound ever right? No one's really listening to you that actually asked me to the single. But then the chorus comes to be Oh, on your back to the first. So what I did there was I just added a bit more arrangement, played it a bit louder at its and more bass and some notes that weren't in the cord, to put it really simply and that's one of the things that a lot of pieces do. If you actually analyze the harmony of her entire piece. Actually, it stays the same all the way through, but it changes. Stevie Wonder does that quite a lot on certainly a lot of film music. If you think about Ludovico Einaudi, his stuff is basically in a minor key called 17 Six, and he just doesn't over and over again so it might start out with, Like on. Then it builds up and up, and it's been going trying to be bad Einaudi on the spot, but you get the idea that the cords stay the same, but the arrangement is different. This is what will get into later, so let's make that a lot more simple. Now, If you're a complete beginner, let's do the 1564 inside of C. Major is all this. Now I'm playing that in my left hand. What I'm gonna do in my right hand is I'm gonna hold one note we mentioned pedal and overlapping notes before is a great way to gel your courts together. It's like that they can breathe into each other rather than being these separate blocks of harmony. Basically, what you allow the courts to do is connect and speak to each other, and the whole thing becomes connected. So I'm just gonna do on C. C or the root note of the cord. Sorry. The root of the key is often a very, very good pedal. That and also the fifth. No as well. So I'm gonna do on the way. Sounds good. Hey, so we've got the votes. It's relaxed. And then the chorus thing on this is just a compliment. You might have the singer or the solo violin or whatever is in your arrangement. This is kind of another element, so you could have say, no strings down here. You may have oboe playing that or you could have you know, your guitarists playing this and then you're lead guitarist playing that or, you know, backing Singer singing away through that sort of think it's another element inside of your harmony which beefs up the peace. Excuse the expression which makes it more, which makes it more full. Yeah, so you can also do this with a baseline. So if we got 1.64 why don't we just keep a pedal notes? So that was an inverted pedal, which is a high pedal, and let's have a low pedal. Uh, let's try on another notice. Try to Fifth. Like I said was quite good. He's a really good for buildups. Actually, wear this. Things about to happen that way waken push into that chorus by bringing in a law roots again and taking away that pedal. So this video is just about arrangement, realizing that it's not necessarily about creating entirely new harmonies. Remember, this is the background. You can almost create any chord progression into a different genre. It's really most most the time, non genres for Smith specific, unless we're doing things like Kind of Real Jazzy Corner, which kind of really do push us into the kind of jazz genre, because jazz is defined by its infrastructures, its extended harmony. So play around with this and try and write and actually produce a tune which basically plays the same court all the way through. I mean, I an Audi has made millions off of it, and many, many records just go for it 42. Repeating Harmony Example: So let's look at this in action. What we've got here is an arrangement off a simple chord progression stated up here in my Marcus, a minor F g a minor e minor f, and that just repeats all the way throughout this piece. In the first piano section here we have just the cords voiced with a tiny bit of voice leading. Something will cover later on in the course. And then I bring in a more in depth, higher part, which has got kind of pedal notes repeating and changing ever so slightly. But the cords that underlie are exactly the same all the way throughout, and you'll hear the variation that comes from that. - So you here already that there's a huge amount of variety that comes with almost, well, pretty much satisfied that this is a different section here, even though the harmony is still the same underneath. Now let's zoom out and have a little preview of what else thes pedal notes conduce. So in this next section, the courts repeat exactly like we had before. I simply copied and pasted thes 1st 2 regions here on, we start bringing in some long string and also some kind of synth settle synth sounds they're going on. Let's have a listen way have going on. Here is a long string sound, a few different notes inside of the granular guitar line under the way. And then as we move to the next section, the pedal notes in the strings changes behind. And then those two repeat. We're building up this kind of texture. Here we bring in a symbol on which is doing a very similar thing to piano. It's kind of acting like a pedal, but it's using two notes, and it's kind of a lot more organic. Feeling is it's not so much connected to the temple. Then, of course, the symbol of moves up a swell to get that sense of left. But it's still the idea of just goes on and on, and then we just bring in a whole lot of other things, like base and strings cool . So hopefully that gives you an idea about arrangement. Obviously, the more complex sections in the APP educated stuff will cover later on. In the course on, I'll be including the MIDI file up in the corner of the screen over here for you to download now. You won't obviously have all of the instruments necessarily that I have. But you'll be able to look through and pick through the MIDI files to understand what's going on with the notes inside of the courts. Great. I'll see you guys in the next video. 43. Small Changes in Harmony: So in this video, we're answering the question. How do we change our chord progressions for later sections on in the previous video? I said, Basically, don't do it all Change arrangements change small little things on you don't necessarily need to to create variety in this video. I'm gonna talk about very small changes or additions to chord progressions. So say your chord progression is Let's take the chorus from Hallelujah, which would be called in C major court for six sounds. Now, instead of, say, say, your verse was going called for see, you've decided to steal those two chords. Quote steel, right? Say your first you're doing that. That's why I am fine. Say you want a bit more variety and movement inside off the chorus. What you could do is add what we call second record. So you keep the structure of one, Thio added in secondary courts, so that they will talk about this later on. It's called harmonic rhythm so that the harmonic rhythm speeds up, so you have now accord on every two beats. So let's try that. So we owe. So we still start on with first bar and start any second But halfway between each one, we do another court and it gives us mawr excitement, and you could still sing the same melody over the top. It's just adding in a second thing. So let's try 145 again, super cheesy sounding stuff will get to the arrangement stuff later on. So let's try now, adding in a second record here. So wait, adding in a second record before going to the then I had an sick there as well. That said, The background structure you're still aware of is one for five, but squeezing in between them, you're adding these other courts. You could also do it where you just change. One court if we take 1564 progression I've mentioned is probably already but Ugo back to one. Or you could go changing the structure as well. And there's not many variations that you can make that would be entirely different to something that someone has somewhere written in time. What I'm saying is that you're always gonna be writing a core progression that's the same or incredibly similar to something that someone else's thumb, as you know, having looked through the hook theory website so many things share the same stuff, so it's not about that. But it's about you knowing that you have control to shift it around as much as you want. It's a bit like saying, Well, everyone uses drums. Everyone uses guitar everyone uses since strings, but about the bar. But you as a producer can make that sound just a little bit more your own or very much your own. By doing different things to it, you're still using the fundamental component. 44. Varying Your Bass Lines: So we mentioned in the 1st 1 of these videos about changing our baseline. But we just use the pedal right now. Let's change that. So let's keep the cords of the same. Or maybe even just one chord and let's change the baseline. And there's a really famous tune that does this. You recognize this Feeling good? Eso that one. Basically, if we look here, we just got a D minor chord. We're going down the d minor scale, right? And that creates tension and resolution. Right attention because we're going somewhere else again. Tension, attention. And we expect the resolution. Right? So you could do that in a number of ways, right? So you could and you don't have to have just one court. You could have just two courts. Let's go from Court 1 to 2 inside of G. Major. So I'm keeping the bass note here, but I'm changing the court, and I could change the base. Now, keep the same courts. Let's get that one. So maybe you change one of the notes, so that doesn't sound good. Maybe change when other notes and see what that's better, right? So let's try that eso there we've got basically got G E and then see is based in it. This little notification kind of makes sense, right? You could also have a full on progression, like 1.64 and then just find a baseline that works with it but isn't necessarily in your head connected with 1564 Let's again do injury major. So let's start with Court One. Right, But let's not have a bass note. G. Let's have a bass note. See? Sounds all right. Let's go to court five. I quite like that base now. Record five as well. See what it sounds like? A six way didn't like that. Let's just change the base next to another one that works. All right, so I got that wrong. It's OK, Yeah. So you're experimenting with these different layers of stuff here where you're changing the basement, but not necessarily records, or that the cords don't necessarily have the right bass notes. But the basement sound good on. You don't necessarily know or need to know the exact reason of the theory behind why it's working. So you don't need to, For example, if you know a little bit about theory there, you don't need to say Okay, well, you are a suspension going on there or you're playing the ninth in the base whilst you playing the tribe don't need to worry about that. Just think about the simple chord progression and that you're changing something over the top of it. And this is the point about composing that you don't need to go to the 10th degree and understand everything about what you're doing. It's about having a bit of a foundation so that you can then explore ideas on the top without that foundation. If you kind of just try things out, you don't know what's right because it's not building on top of this core idea of, you know, harmony drives on it cords or triads and simple things like that. 45. Modulation - New Centres of Gravity : so to finish up our section on extending our chord progressions for the first time, what I want to talk about we covered already, which is the idea of gravity or creating new centers of gravity inside of your composition at different points. So what I've done is I've actually changed the piano sound to road sound for this video just to give it some variety. Because as we move forward through the course, I want to inspire you by the fact that if you're working with the DEA, W you, of course, have access to any virtual instrument that you have. This is why the piano so great to be alarmed. So basically, the 1st 1 I want to talk about is hallelujah, right? And then we'll talk about and anyone her song, which is called stronger than me. Before that, I wanted to explain really what I mean by new centers of gravity. If we're writing inside of G major way Very simple, obviously, is just nothing of the Hominy sounds like an exercise, but we're very clearly in the centre G that went on in the relative minor of me. But if I started again and then I'll kind of in my mind think of e minor as the next center of gravity. So his G the Center of Gravity Way, way Chorus Center of gravity is now mine right on. Then maybe we get best divers in our chorus on our versus in G major again. That's what I mean by shifting centers of gravity. And it just helps you map out what you're thinking about. Maybe the minor choruses. More inappropriate feeling in the verses, a major rather than necessarily having everything with that minor sound and center of gravity. So let's look at hallelujah and how that does It must stay in G major, so we've got no way. So that's very much in the key center of G major or eternal center is the major part of scale, right? We do go through court six. Then it goes. Major primary triads take us back way really established that center of gravity right on. Actually, if you know this song well and you know any of the theory behind the chords and lyrics, you'll notice that actually, he talks about the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift, which are direct references to harmony inside of a key intel inside of a major scale. So s So I think it would be really good some for you to learn and think about all these things. So I'll just play through again and we'll get to the O way. Get to the chorus, which goes like this between Court for and Court Six on Court six now feels to me anyway, like our center of gravity on, I like to think that maybe that that's how he thought about it. That feels like a slight resting point. That's not the end of the piece, but it's a sort of mid resting point finishes way using the primary triads to really actually say no, we are major key When NOAA minus, he were a major key. So that's how the loo you're in the different centers of gravity. Let's look at the Amy Winehouse, so I'm gonna play the simple chords first, and then I'll do the arrangement, which will hopefully make it sound a little bit more like any White house. Right? So here in D minor, right? And it starts on Court two, now called five are altered Chord five, where It's not a minor, but a major and all you do to do that as you change the middle own 7 10 So we're going from Diminished. Don't worry about too much will go over all this later in the course, but had to create courts from scratch and had to really understand what's made on what's minor. But basically this song. So that's the first. It just keeps going around. That's very Mina sound, very much. But then we go into the course major on a really interesting happens. We play Teenager, which is definitely no in the key of D minor because B flat in it on G major has a B natural. It said that there is pushing it outside of the key so way Ueo chorus, new center of gravity and then pushing outside of the King were reading affecting our gravity. So there's two principles in there, one going from major and minor. You know, verse and chorus sort minor major, which have way. When do you want dio on also another one, which is borrowing cords from other keys and maybe even for the course if you can make it happen so far with the theory that you know, going into an entirely different key. So, for example, we start off in C major less debate. Minor Stop doing major case doesn't work, right? So you have to think probably a little bit lightheartedly about this at the moment, right? Because some of the theory that you know won't go all the way to making these cords work immediately. Another keys, because there's something about that one that really isn't sound too good. Let's try to go T o G major again. The way you think about that has legs. So don't worry too much if you come up once and it really doesn't work, you'll understand why. And you have the skills and the tools to be able to make those things work. Like to run but use. It kind of is an experiment now to create new sections in your pieces and extend your chord progressions 46. Assignment - Composing 3 different sections: so an assignment for you to put into practice what we've just done in the last few videos. So we're gonna take the idea of pedal notes right over cords. We're gonna take the idea of changing the baseline slightly. We're also going to take the idea of a new center of gravity either within the key or an entirely new key. And I want you to write a piece of music that's not necessarily gonna end up as a fully fledged piece of music that you'll show people, but more as an exercise. Remember, this is how we we have to practice his composers. Why don't why should instrumentalists to be the only people who have exercise is we have to practice these things. So don't worry if it sounds a bit weird or funky. Whatever. Just just try out. And that might be some useful stuff in there. But you'll then have the skill of doing this in your tool set so you can pull on it later and go. I think this needs a new center of gravity or I think this needs a baseline change under cords, for example, so right. Three sections in this piece a section using diatonic common cords inside of a key, but changing it by a pedal know either with a base or an inverted pedal. So remember, pedal notes are these long held notes over the courts or under the court of its base Now, then it will be baseline changes. So, like think baseline changes over one chord right on then or maybe a few courts, and then the final would be the final section would be a new center of gravity is and remember that this is planning out. So you're planning this out of the piano? It probably doesn't sound really good because you're planning it, and this is the structure of the harmony behind it. But you know roughly what's going on. Then you go on, arrange it, and that's where you can really hopefully make it shine 47. 3 Different Sections Example Track: So let's listen to this. Arranged Quite simply, What we've got here is an adaption of one of the wandering hands backing tracks. If you've heard this before and what I've done is I've changed this middle section here to have a different center of gravity. So we've got our first section, which is in the key of G major. And we've got the next section, which is also in the G major key, but has a different baseline. And then we have our new section, which has a different center of gravity, and I've written out on the top here. So, G Major, do you measure different base and then d minor center of gravity underneath is the chord sequence. And so I'm just gonna zoom in so you can see that a little better on I'm gonna play the track through so you can hear, - so it makes quite a nice effect. I mean, it's quite a genre specific. That's kind of a bluegrass e change there, but you notice it creates a very, very different quality. So I'd really invite you to start exploring this in your compositions, creating a different center of gravity and asking yourself is this the sound lime after it gives a sense of freshness and openness, definitely. But sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it does, so use it with caution. 48. Introduction to Voicing: so welcome to this part of the course where we're gonna be talking about how to voice your cords in a different way. So a very simple way of saying it would be It's not what you say by the harmony or the court underneath. It's how you say it. You the voicings. So you've heard me a few times in the previous videos. Say you'll understand what I'm doing here later in the course. This is where we stuff to kind of explain how I'm breaking up these courts to make them going from Bristled a bit plane to making to become those are still based on going one before those seven chords of a diatonic key. But they've got some other things going on in there. So this is kind of a way to think about your your writing as a composer, as a like a pipeline. So you start off really at the simple planning stages of harmony and melody. Right? Then you go into the second stage. This is just the way I look at it. The second stage of voicing invoicing is the way you explain or play chords on whatever instrument it is. It might not be planet might be guitar as well, but primarily a lot of composers will be working at the piano. And this is why you're taking this course, Obviously. Then, after voicing, you get into the arrangement. So which instruments playing? What, you're gonna split that part between these two instruments? Does that one go on the higher No or the low? No. And then finally, it's the productions of getting all the sounds really good. We haven't touched on like the rhythm and the drums and all that stuff yet, but really, just in terms of the writing of the musical part of it pictures part of it, it's goes how many, then you're voicings. Then you're arrangement, then your production, and I think that's a really good way to think about it. You might dot in and out, but usually it's good to start at one place and go through. Otherwise, we get a bit lost the amount of times I found myself sitting in front of my computer for, like, hours not getting anywhere, and then I've taken five minutes to go with the piano and unlike oh yeah, that's great. And then I take it back and it's OK, so this is kind of why I have in my studio, my piano over here. It's connected, obviously, to computer under the floor because this is an electric piano. And then I have my dear W over there where I work because it's like I shift my mind. I go to the piano, work on stuff here. It's quite open, organic, and then I'll come back to the D. A. W. And I sort of start piecing stuff together. So in this chapter, we're gonna look all about how to play voicings or change your voicings from simple things like this stuff that's like That's quite straightforward, but there's gonna be more exciting stuff to come. 49. Arpeggiation: so one of the first simplest ways to start arranging or voicing really, your court is something that you probably already aware off. It's called AARP agitation. You ever used MIDI effects inside of your w and logic has one, definitely is where you basically play a few notes just hold him down, and then the instrument many synthesizers and keyboards have. This makes your notes like this in different ways, so it kind of could do way could do it down. Or it could do many other things random notes and stuff like that. So appreciation is basically taking the harmonic part of Accord basically notes at the same time, vertically happening at the same moment on making the melodic so one after the other or or any other kind of thing. And it's also the ability to kind of push that chord different octaves, so it could be So. What I'm doing here sounds rubbish, because I'm kind of explaining it not playing it properly, but let me show you an example of what I do at the piano. If I have the 156 more progression inside off G major, I'm going to a different production right, So already it sounds like a really cool and well, I mean, it's not amazing, but it sounds way more in depth. It sounds like you've composed something already. Or at least you're on the way to composing rather than mapping out stuff like we've been doing so much so far in the course. So basically, start playing around this AARP education pause the video. Now get to know inside of all these different keys that you've done the miners in the majors and then come back and watch two sessions that I've got in logic where I take you through doing this appreciation for strings and also kind of like a dance CTM appreciation thing. 50. Examples of Arpeggiation in Context: So here's an example of using our pagination in a kind of orchestral film accepting with strings. - So what I've got here is I've soloed the top string line on Dive, written the cords in markets so that we can see what's going on. So it's a very simple chord progression in the key of a minor that we know about already. But we don't know about the cords in this section, or at least I haven't done those in the course. You could ignore that for a moment and just focus on this area D minor, a minor e minor, then back. So what we've got is this played in in an arpeggio hated way over the course. So our first court is a D minor court, and I play the notes pay then D then a over again on our next chord is a minor and the closest voicing that I can have to these three notes here or there or rather the closest voicing of a minor that I have to the voicing of D minor that I have here at these three notes here, a minor in route position, and this is again what I'm trying to explain Their very inarticulately is trying to. What I'm trying to do is make sure that these voices don't have to jump a long way to move into the next court. You see, here all we do is we move these two voices down a step in the scale, and then we're in this voicing and this bottom voice stays the same. So we get this sound on to add variation. I change cord here, even though it's the same court. I change the voicing rather or the inversion on that also allows us to pull it, then voice e minor quite closely again. We've got limited movement that we want movement from here to here because we're on the same court. And if we just stayed on the same voicing like this post, just repeat this by then. We're kind of the some part of our, especially if we're just listening to this part on its own. That's kind of saying, Hey, you've been doing that for a little while now, so it makes sense to change the inversion there to give a little bit of interest. So that's essentially all that's going on in that part. Let's look at the next part down here. If I scroll down a little bit, you'll see that we've got the same chords, right? But arpeggio hated in a slightly different way, giving a different rhythm that's still exactly D minor. That's still exactly a minor, a minor in a different voicing and then e minor. But together they sound like this. And then I'm just doubling that with, I believe basis. Yeah, so well together. So let's see what else is going on. Let's scroll down here. So next we have another part further on down the score here, and this sounds like this if I just meet the other ones and you can hear that it's doing a more in depth pattern. But it's still playing just the cords that we have before there's and the occasional note that is not necessarily the same, but it's being arpeggio hated by an arpeggio later, so we get this lovely, lovely combination off the kind of thes, thes ones up here which is slightly slower, and then this one, which is slightly faster. So this is obviously familiar to you. If you've watched any kind of dramatic film score or action film school. It has a lot of this kind of fast paced arpeggio hated movement in what's called Speak Otto Strings on I'm using Spitfires Staccato Sorry, staccato string articulation from their symphonic strings library. And we'll say, using a couple of other things. So all together, that's the string section. But then, if we add in a few other things so, for example, really exciting brass trombone. In fact, if we look at the brass, they're doing a very similar thing in terms of AARP education. But just changing the rhythm a little bit, and all together it goes together. So that's it, Really. These cords up the top here are paginated in different ways that support the whole track. All right, so here's an example of a track using our pagination just to add in some more interest. So this is something I'm working on at the moment so you can see it's a little bit messy in terms of the labelling slow. Ignore that, but just give you a quick idea what's going on so you can hear. We've got kind of a lot of bleaching going on possibly too much. I think I got excited, but anyway, to stay with that, I thought this is an appropriate track to mess around with appreciation. So what I've got here is I've got this kind of lead sound, which is quite nice on what I was going to do was add in the arpeggio later and just show you how easy it is to mess around with stuff. So I'm gonna bring up Cordy. You can have a little lesson, Teoh, and see what I'm doing at the same time. So So you get the idea. So I was messing around Tonnes them's way, way too much. I'm just just creating too much noise, really. But there's definitely gonna be some ideas in there have been generated from the arpeggio later itself. Now, just to be clear, what's going on here is I'm playing in a slightly more advanced key here that we haven't done so far, so don't worry about that. I know. I said at the beginning, this course we're only gonna work inside off the keys of C, F and G. Sorry about that. I'm kind of moving away from that. But essentially all I'm doing is on playing chords. For example, if we're in C major. I was just playing chords on adding different notes in his Well, I'm just messing around inside of the key, so that's another example of AARP education, and it's uses. 51. Closed & Open Position Chords: so you can see the appreciation is a really, really useful tool for composers. Basically, it takes the court and it pushes it through time. So it kind of makes it half about harmony and half about melody. So, really, it's not your classic explanation or it's not. Doesn't exactly mean voicing. Voicing is basically about everything at the same time. So if I take this cord on, then I change it to be that that's that's a different voicing because I'm playing that court at the same time. Appreciation tends it slightly into melody because it's moving through time. So the simplest way to think about voicing or changing a voices in the beginning is doing something called closed or open position voicings. So we've been doing so far, closed position voicings as much as possible, the exercises and simple things I've been showing you in close position. His C major in closed position. His a includes visiting a minor G major, close position, minor G minor, closed position, beef major, closed position that all closed, and the reason that closed is because we can't get them in that order. Be on the bottom D in the middle from the top in any other order. So you have to have them like that, right? We could do this. I thought this reach eso That's B flat D and then f in the same order. But now that way spread out right. Whereas here we can't get them any closer in that order. So that's the difference between closed and open positions. And the thing to realize is the only is only one caused position version of cord right before we get to inversions, we'll get to that in the next video. So a position called There's only one closed position, but there are many, many open position voicings that same Chorzow way Dio. I've got the route on in the fifth in the base and then heard a top. That's another voicing of B flat major. Another voicing might be this like that. Another one might be to base notes, probably offscreen at the moon, but I'll do it here. So then a day here and then half up here and there may be another B flat that's still B flat major, but these are all different open position voicings, which give it a different character. So what? I'd like you to do is just play around with these different open position voicings inside of simple call progressions that you've played so far. And in the next video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about inversions. And when you combine inversions with open position chords, that's where the whole realm of voicing starts to open up. 52. Chord Inversions: So, as I said in the last video, this is where stuff really starts to take shape. Everything that we've done so far with this simple sounding, basic kind of chord sound that you heard from kind of begin a piano lessons is gonna now start opening up and you're going to start thinking, Okay, I get this piano, I can start making stuff Sound how I wanted to. So in the previous video, we looked at the close of open position idea. And in this video, we're gonna look at so called inversions. So if we look at a simple court again, like a minor, right, we're in closed position there. We can't get those notes any closer to each other, but a is on the bottom, and a is the note that we've built that cord from. It's called the root of the court Right on. We call this the third Miss the fifth, as you know already. Now, if we put this a productive, it's exactly the same court. It's made over exactly the same material. It's still a minor. This same court that we had back down on You can tell that by its sound, something about it. It's slightly shifting. The way I think about it is it's like, Well, it's still the color blue, but it's just slightly lighter. Right way. Do it again. If we take this note that's now on the bottom, which was the third before, that was three. Now it becomes the bottom. No, or the base. Now, right, we do it again. Move that up to the top. So C is now at the top. We've got another quality, but it's still exactly the same court built. How we thought beforehand the root position Triads on what we're doing when we do this is we're inverting the court. So this is route position because we built it up from the routes and the route is at the bottom. This is the first inversion because now the third is in the base. It's at the bottom, and this is the second inversion because the fifth is in the base. Okay, route first inversion, second inversion, and then we get to reposition again. First inversion second, etcetera, etcetera on up. We do this with another court that might be a bit harder to see. Let's do G minor, which is called to the super tonic off major, we take the G and put up adoptive. We get that which is the first inversion. And if we take this beef like we've got a productive way, get a second version, which is that right? Even with that tiny little thing that I just did, then you can see how if you've got one long cord and you want to make it sound a bit more interesting, you can work with inversions, right? So let's do that. So there I'm changing the bass note on the voicing in my right hand on each inversion version is defined by what's in the basement. Okay, so if we combine inversions with the open and closed idea, what we get is a whole different sound. His F major in reposition closed position and here it is in open position first inversion, because we've got the day in the base in a C and then another. It's not closed position, and it's not root position its first inversion because that this note the third is in the base and it's open position because we could get these knows notes to be closer together. In this order, a on the bottom, See and way could play like that Now is the closed position. So if I play the 1564 progression inside of our inside of G major, But I make the cords open position on de Inversiones, it's gonna get a totally different sound from the ones that we've been playing so far. Get a really, really nice sound going on. So explore this at the piano. As with all these exercises, and write something that uses inversions and open positions as well as close positions on route positions that makes sense. 53. Doubling Notes: so you'll have seen me in some of the videos before. Doubling up some of the notes inside of the court on this is kind of deceptively simple because you think, Well, yeah, of course I can put more of these, but actually, I don't need to underestimate how powerful that is, particularly when you get to the arrangement stage here at the piano. A simple and most obvious example of doubling would be if I take a cord like a B minor and then I put it in a way, think of that as a baseline. But actually, technically, it's a voicing on. If it's just you on the piano, you're putting a B minor in a different voicing right. And then if you kind of doubled up the sea, which is the third of a minor, that's a doubling right. But it's a basement, so that's it in the side of the baseline, right? We're doubling with the base, but we could also do stuff like if I play B minor right in first inversion close position. But I can double some of the notes up at the top. It is a quality if I double these notes instead. Or if I double the DEA's eye gives a different sound, right? Let's try it with e minor as well. If I double basically let it to the court on then D major double loads of the corner, we're making it fuller and richer sounding so very, very short video here to explain basically the difference off or that the application of doubling at the piano. But I'm gonna show, you know, a few things inside of an arrangement and how this really starts to add up inside Europe. You're W productions. So what we've got here is a fairly simple the chord progression inside of C major. You could see that written in the market section up here on that. I've just played it in three parts on some strings Now we looked at a couple of videos ago . The idea of inversions on I've done a few inversions of these cords here just to make it blend a little better on that. Blending between different inversions and the kind of choice of different inversions is something that we call voice leading saying that will look out later on, but it just makes the movement between chords sound a bit more natural and a bit more composed because if I was to play this chord progression without that, it would turn like this s so it doesn't necessarily feel like those lines. Airil joining up on merging between each other because I'm playing this route position court around the piano doesn't work as well. So let's have a listen to this with a tiny bit of voice leading. And then we'll talk about how doubling effects our arrangement. So necessarily when you're arranging anything that's for more than one instrument, you're going to have to think about how you share these cord notes between different instruments, and that is basically doubling. And the most obvious thing with doubling is playing a baseline. So let's start with that now. The cord notes here. Typically, what you do with the baseline is you follow the bass notes or sorry, the route notes of the chord. So I play in A and E and F and N, e and F, but you don't have to do that. You can choose other notes from the court, so I'm gonna do that now and you can watch a real time and then we'll talk about what I'm doing. Okay, so what I did there is I played notes from the cord that was currently happening. So let's zoom in a little bit here, and we'll open up the market section in here so that we can see what's going on with the cord. So here on the court A in my base, I am playing on a, which makes total sense. Let's move on here and playing a G, however, but G is the third or the middle no off the court of E minor. So that's OK, That's allowed, and it gives a certain effect, giving it kind of a sense of an inversion. Then on F, we're right next to the F, so we may as well play the F. So what I'm doing is I'm doing a nice long line that moves between these notes. I could have done this. I move this down to an E here on the sound would have been like this if I played just the root notes, which also works fine. But I wanted to kind of give a kind of downward movement in the baseline, and again, we're thinking about this merging of the court said that it doesn't feel like this blocky kind of feeling. Now let's continue from here. So this is a long ball. I just decided to hold it for now. Here again, I moved down on This is an E, which is inside of the court of a minor. So that makes sense on then. What's really useful here is that the e can then stay on and become the note, the bottom note of the next court. So this kind of interweaving of Kordell stuff is something that we'll look at more and more in this course, and it's what gives something. So what gives particularly things like string arrangements a really real lovely, composed and full sound? Sounds like you properly arranged it. And this whole baselines moving by step, all using doubling cause obviously, we voiced all these notes already up inside of the strings. Let's do the same with maybe on upper line and have a think about that. That was okay. I kind of just improvised that one. I think it would probably be improved, but let's dive in to see what I did and see what we can improve from that. So one called one. We have a C, which is the third of the court. Let's have a listen to that on. Then we moved down to be because again, we're wanting to do this kind of stepwise movement that keeps everything nice and fluid and be works inside of the minor. And then I just go back up to see again, which is the fifth of court F. So that gives us now here instead of going and staying on C, I decided to go up, but I don't know whether that works too well. So let's see what not what other note inside of a minor can we have here? We could go down to pay and see what that sounds like. Now here that can't stay the A because it doesn't belong, at least for this exercise. Of course it can stay. It's your composition. But just for the sake of this exercise here, what we're gonna do is we're gonna change the cord. Sorry, Changed the note on the B works because it's inside of the minor. And let's see, what could we do here? Well, be is right next to see which is inside of the court so we could stay with that stepwise movement. And let's see whether we like this out, see, doesn't have to stay on C. It could go down to a actually, which is another note inside of quarter bath. So that's a little bit about voice leading. You see that we've got this nice arrangement here that on its own in the middle is just the cords with a tiny bit of voice leaning. And we've got the double bass at the bottom. And then the doubled melody up at the top. And it gives a really nice open texture this space between these three kind of sections of the string orchestra, and it gives it a full ish sound. Of course, there are many, many other things that we're gonna learn about to make this a lot more full of it. You can see that if you've got good samples like I have here from Spitfire Audio, you can make something that sounds quite nice, but simple very quickly 54. Dropping Notes: so. Equally simple is the dropping of notes from the court, which creates quite a powerful sound, depending on what genre and what you're trying to do with your harmonies. The most classic example of this is the power chord on the guitar. Basically, that sound. All it's doing is we're taking a triad with dropping. The third played on piano. It doesn't sound so good, right? Sounds better. Medieval, right? But then, if you play this on guitar, this really works that way. Dropping the third from can create or from a court can create already powerful sound. But let's try some other ones. Let's try now dropping the fifth So this I'm thinking off as B minor and it still works without. If you drop the third, you get back to that power chord again on its This on its own is ambiguous because it could be a major chord or a minor chord you don't really know. We'll learn about how to create major and minor chords immediately from scratch, if you don't know already wait for that one. But basically what I can do here is way. Don't know whether it's major or minor on. Then I can make it major and you got eyes a major. Or if I'm playing the same thing, I could get minor because that middle no is the thing that changes the sound of it. So dropping notes from Accord, whatever your voicing or inversion, can actually yield some interesting results in your arrangement. And if you're not wanting to go for that particular sound of life or he know so it's a really obvious harmony. Sometimes you want stuff to not be particularly harmonious. You want it to be more like those until you with suspensions and leaving out the third, which will come to suspensions later. But for now, if you want to kind of pull out that harmony side of stuff, which is often created by the middle note, thank you can kind of experiment with creating some new sounds that a pact of it more sparse than the harmonies you've looked at so far 55. Voice Leading: So we've been thinking a lot about different ways to voice our cords to do with inversions . Open close position appreciation. Dropping those things so far can give us quite an interesting color palette and wait a very records that we already have. But to take it one step further, we can think about cycle. Voice leading voice leaving is most typically thought off in kind of orchestral arrangements, particularly string writing or vocal parts in kind of in 45 part harmony. And it's where you take each note of Accord and you think about it as an individual voice, like an individual singer and how it moves to the next point in the next court. If I show you what I mean that the PMO way take a really simple court like let's take d major right way, move up to say cord one again. So we're going so called five of G major up to Court one g major. I could play like this, obviously, and I could do some other things with the voicings we've done so far. But it kind of much, much more kind of interesting or nice wayto voice it would be to go from this root position cord to a second inversion of tomato. Receive this. This is a first inversion on then. This is the second version, so D major to a second inversion of G major. And the reason why you can see is that the voices, this voice on this voice I only have to move. One step on this force stays exactly the same. So there's a kind of two principles there that mainly good voice leading has this thing that happens where you have some of the voices stay the same and some of the move. But when they move, they move a short distance so that you get instead of corporations that sound like this very kind of Konkey and moving around quite a lot. You get things that are more like, Uh huh, there's a three parts that moving together, and if we break it down, If you were a singer and you were singing, say that part, you'd much prefer to be oh, eyes. It's just a small movement in your voice, and it's easier to pitch and harmonize with other people. If you're singing in small intervals. It's very difficult. As a singer to sing with other people, stay in tune and go. And it's not naturally how we sing. We don't think in terms of lines, and it doesn't give that smoothness. So how do you start climates? Well, you kind of store a little bit of it there you've gotto take. Just if this is a bit tricky of you. In the beginning, take two chords that aren't right next to each other. So, for example, I for In F Major and I did this called one and court. They are kind of right next to each other. It's good to choose a cord like Court one and called for or Court One called five, called Friend Court six. It's something that has a bit of a distance away from its roots. And then I think, OK, right, so I'm going from Court one in F major chord five or less than called for in F major. So play them both in route position and get to really know what all of the notes are in each courts see and in court for it to be flat D and and try and get really good at moving on, understanding the difference between those two chords and then think it was the closest way I can move to be flat with the most minimal amount of movement. The closest way, from my perspective here, is here by taking these two notes and moving them up so that way get a B flat major court. So if we took that effort, the bottom there moved up and active. You know that that is that only a B flat, major chord. So if it doesn't make sense, kind of watch the video back. But basically then the next stage to get really, really good at this in terms your practice is to do this exercise, which I call restricting to adoptive. Right. And you basically are playing through all the cord in a key here. We're doing the court in some major right. But instead of playing the position, you're saying to yourself, Okay, I'm gonna put kind of like an imaginary wall from this, See to this be so I can only play these notes, but I've gotta play all of the chords of C major. So it's really easy in the beginning because you can just start here. So let's imagine, I'll puts icon screen now so you can see the wall. Basically, you've got C E and G. That's fine. You can do that. D e s r E D f A. That's absolutely fine. And this is the last four we can do in route position here now, because we're past the wall. I can't do this cord, right, Because we need that. No. So I need to put this note down inside of the active that we're currently using. So that's still left, Major. But it's now in an inversion that allows me to fit inside of this space. Now, this isn't to make great music. This is to practice being able to move through chords and inversions and start to do voice leading. So then the next court would be, which is G major. If we bring that back into reposition, it would look like that way. Can't play that. So we do this when the next chord would be a minor, which would be those three notes. But we can't do these two notes, so we move them down and active. And then the last court would be that way. Can't use these two nights we put those down, so the whole thing again doesn't sound very good, but it's a very good exercise. So hopefully that makes sense to you. And do that in your three medication, your three minor keys and then take a simple chord progression that you're working on the moment and think about how to voice lead that and move that into different locations, perhaps with four voices. So there you saw me doing everything with three voices but typically good voicing usually has four or more voices in it. Three for three Voices kind of feels a little bit Finn, so we could go Court six court for demanding a voice that Sorry six Court five court sex. Let's do that again. But I'll change the inversion so we're gonna go, Uh, - so some very, very simple examples or voice leading with four parts inside of C major there. But you comply those in different keys and get really, really practice that doing this and we'll see that later in the course. What we can do, Then we can take the simple sound there and apply that inside of an amazing string arrangement and start doing much more interesting stuff. But what we're doing here is we're building in layers again. Sounds simple at first, but then it starts to come together into a fully fleshed and solid kind of compositional skill that you can apply in many, many different areas. 56. Grace Notes: so you're armed with quite a lot of stuff now that you can use to create really, really good voicings. But there's one little icing on the cake, which is to do with Grace notes, and I'm sure you've seen or know exactly what's going on here. What we're doing is we're adding these brief little notes, which add texture and kind of an organic feeling to the cords. That is to more today with the playing style, the way that you're kind of going through the courts than it is to do with the actual harmony. But it gives it a bit more by in a bit more interest rather than just going like that. You can go. Just add a little grace note that's going on through that. So that's the most simple example. I could get straight with a simple May try it. What we're doing is we're going down one semi tone with the middle Now we're starting here on you just slide through and you could do this in lots of ways and you could just add in some little notes and just see what it sounds like. So all together. Then if you take what we've done. So phone, we take like, a kind of nice progression. We could be like so all of those things together, the kind of starting from the basics of the root position triads that we started out with. The Harmony been taking the kind of the voice leading the kind of inversions that kind of open close positions and then finally adding in a tiny bit of kind of grace, note place, um, just brief notes, stuff on top of that. What that does is it just creates a really sort of full sound. And you start sounding like, hopefully a bit more of the Penis that you were hoping Teoh in the big in the beginning. And this kind of imbue what you're actually writing a little bit more with kind of just more interest, really. But it's built on this foundation of kind of tragic comedy, which is what we've been learning so far. So I'll see you guys in the next video where we do a little exercise in a little assignment , just kind of put all this stuff together for you in inside that you could be working on 57. Accompaniment Singers Assignment: So this exercise is relevant for the kind of producers among you. The exercise in two videos Time is really for the film composers, the media composers who will be doing kind of four parts string writing. You welcome, obviously, to do both. But this one's really about the bulk of kind of creating a Kordell keyboard based accompaniment for a singer, which I think is really relevant for a lot of producers. So we're gonna just take a really simple tune. You can choose whatever tune that you want, or you can follow this one up. The score up in the resource is folder in the corner of the screen over there, and you can download that and learn this or find your own. But it's mad World, if you don't know. Okay, he seemed only darker. You probably know. So Theo, aim of this is to not accompany the singer like this. It works for a little bit, maybe the intro or something. But after a while throughout the song, you don't create kind of shape and interest, and you're not doing all that you could do for the singer. So there are a number of things using all the things that we've done in the previous videos about voicings and changing stuff up. What I want you to do is create a sense of shape through your accompaniment so you could start really slowly like you hear. Then I'm back on the a minor chord. But I'm doing a different voicing now in that a minor chord. Okay, on rising up pious and my voice is getting higher off key Booth on. Now they're going down on a quiet so all of those things together give a sense of shape to it one more time. - That's the kind of idea that we're going for here. We're creating shape, using these voicings that you can even use things like AARP education, for example. - So those kind of things add interest. There's one thing that people often do, which is they if they're accompanying a singer and they forget where the singer's ranges, where they're singing and this thing will often be singing around this area on if you're playing chords and you're going, 00 you're all up in it that you're gonna be covering where they are and sometimes that works well, but sometimes it gets in their way and actually can kind of confuse them. So you can kind of think of one way of doing it is by ghosting the singer's voice in your voicings. So if we take this here, we use the idea of inversions when we move up through the inversions of the cord and use that to help us ghost this melody lines Watch this. We've got a minor first. So what we're doing theirs were playing the chords in the different inversions, and they fit really well with the melody because the melody is based around kind of the court notes of each of each chord. So you can think of that ghosting them early, or you could just create sank underneath form extra first. But if use those ideas and in the next video, I'll show you kind of example arrangement, which is just one way of arranging, um, a piano part for a singer in a song like this 58. Accompaniment for Singers Example: 59. Orchestral String Writing Assignment: So this assignments really for the film composers among you. Of course, if you're produced, you can do as well. But it's more prevalent to the film and kind of more involved composing skill set. What we're doing is we're taking these chords and we're having kind of roughly about four parts. And we're gonna move those voices through the courts in quite a smooth way with this high, this idea of voice leading that we've looked at. So we're gonna take the progression from Hans Emma's time, which is from the film Inception, which goes like this. We're in the scale of the key of D minor, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna write those courts on strings, but we're gonna use voice leading in an interesting way. That means that those parts move together. So let's have a little look at this one. So sounds starts down a lot better, obviously, with voice leading and obviously on string, sounds good string sounds. But this one more little thing that we can do to really take us to the next level, which is taking one of the voices in the middle on letting it move around a little bit like a melody, not the top part at the bottom part of a middle voice. This really, really gives it some character. No. - So you can hear that. It's kind of what's time kind of improvising that there are some ideas in that I could really put into a fully fledged kind of string, part writing composition. So this is kind of your goal in this one in the next example or in the next video. Sorry, I'll show you an example of this. 60. Orchestral String Writing Example: 61. Example of Voice Leading: Here's an example of voice leading, which hopefully, at least in my opinion, create enough interest so that we don't really even need a melody or rephrased that it stands on its own as a kind of melody. Let's have a listen to this section, - so there's a lot of stuff going on in there, so let's break it down a little bit. We essentially got the main Kordell part going on with the roads in these, too. Let's have a listen to this 1st 1 Then if we combine the piano with that, the piano is free not to necessarily hold the harmony, but to express its own interesting voicings. Let's have a listen to that, - adding another layer of interest in the voicing here. We've got a kind of counter melody going on, even though this is this top piano line is not strictly a melody. We've got this line going on in the second roads. Let's have a listen to that now in the mix so that goes in and adds more texture and more beef to the kind of the sound which is going on all supporting this top piano line, all going together, creating this sound 62. Harmony Cheat Sheet Level 2: in the top left of the screen. Right now, you'll be able to download this PdF, which is the second cheat sheet that we've had in this course. And this covers everything that we've looked at so far since we downloaded the first CiCi, including concepts such as tension resolution going over and reminding you about intervals and characters of notes in the key. Going over the theory of Roman numerals and various other things, hopefully is a very handy reference that you can have on your phone iPad, or maybe even print out if you want, or just keep on your desk top to remind yourself rather than having to go through the entire course again. There's also a whole section on just reminding you how toe think about voicing on the various different things that we've looked at, like open and close position chords are pagination and such like so I hope that's useful to you guys, and I'll see in the next video 63. Bass Lines Introduction Supporting the Harmony: So by now, you probably already picked up quite a few things about how to voice baselines. The most obvious thing would be playing the route No, in the left hand. And you've obviously been looking at me playing and probably trying out some things and certainly watching things on YouTube and other places and applying that what we're gonna do over the next few videos is really, really unpack those principles about how to create baselines so that you can kind of right baselines, either whether whether it's at the piano with you accompanying someone or actually in your compositions so that you can write baselines with a little bit more flair and kind of compositional intention. So let's take a simple chord progression in a minor key E minor. We're gonna do you call one Court six called three and court five. So that would be E minor. C Major G Major D major. Okay, so forget kind of a little bit what I'm doing with my right hand. Just focus on the left hand. The most obvious one would be to go like this, and you heard that a zillion, bazillion times, right? So that's just basically I'm playing the room knows this is obvious to you, right? But you can do so. Ankle rocking, which is used quite a lot. And this is between the root and the fifth of the chord. So let's take Court one, which would be E minor. That's the room, and that's the fifth we're not playing with. So we're just gonna get on. You don't have to go Route five refighting you go 55 and that's discounting whatever you're doing with your right hand, because you could do more interesting things like Change. The inversions on this lends itself to the genres that aren't just kind of a straight kind of ballad, that we were just kind of doing there. You could do with more jazzy version, so I run cold oppression. So that's rocking. That's one way Teoh kind of enhance your baseline other than just doing route all the time . And then then a natural extension of that is using the other notes from the court so we can use the route on the third and the fifth. And then later, when we start understanding seventh Harmony, we can start adding in the seventh and maybe even other ones as well. So we take that same progression, and I'll do it in a kind of jazzy way. So forget wondering, with my right hand understanding in seventh will learn those later on in the course. But just look at my baseline. It doesn't necessarily need to be in a Jersey style. It could be in a kind of more appreciated classical start. So all of this again Sounds plane because it's kind of planning at the piano. You put those into other instruments in different baselines. It's going to sound really, really interesting, depending on kind of what your arrangement actually is. So that's really the idea we've got rocking between the route in the fifth and then walking bass lines, either in a jazzy or another style kind of walking bases. Most naturally associate it with jazz because you've got that sound, that sound, which will look at kind of the passing notes and stuff in a later video. But play around with those and kind of xcor your compositions with the baseline that uses rocking and also walking based through the court 64. Voice Leading & Passing Notes : So in the previous video that I gave you the idea of walking bass lines walking through the courts. But one of the things that can happen with that is that we don't think about inversions with these. So let me explain what I mean. What we're gonna take is court were in E minor. We're gonna take one court, six e minor and see Major. Right? And if I just have a simple ignore what's going on in my right hand, If I just play a simple baseline that uses the walking based principle, this is gonna sound a bit boring and simple way. Reason that doesn't sound very good is because one it's in rude position all the time on the patterns exactly the same. It's like just moving up, down, up, down. And there's no variation. So just like we like to have different voicings like, for example, if you were playing that corporation in your right hand, you might go well with variation in terms of your inversions, just like we do that with chords in the right hand, we need to do the same thing often in the baseline. So let's rephrase that now, with a bit of voice leading, if that's the right term for this, with its way you. So they're not the most marvellous thing in the world, but a little bit more interesting. And you find that with these tiny little bit of added detail underneath the texture, because that will be often a baseline that people won't almost be consciously aware of, but unconsciously underneath the texture of whatever is that you're writing above in your composition, people will just get a sense more of a sense of quality because you thought about the cords and the base line in a little bit more detail rather than sort of plug in and play through all the courts. So that's the principle off voice leading, all kind of like making your cords work well together through a baseline. It doesn't always do root position on that same pattern all the time, but in this video, also, we're gonna look at the idea of passing notes, which adds another level of detail, your baseline. So I guess, in a similar way it would be like with voicings in our right hand. We had its own grace notes the those things which add some nice interest in the mix and kind of make it more genre specific. So that was quite jazzy. There you could have some other things that make it sound in a different way, Maybe some kind of tension and resolution stuff as well. Whatever works for you, but with a baseline. What we do is we do passing notes. So passing notes you can think of has really non core notes. So we're gonna go back to those chords again, e minor on, then see Major right? And we're gonna do a baseline, which plays non court notes as well as court notes. Uh, so they're playing notes. For example, outside of the quarter B minor, like F Sharp, A, C and D. I'm playing those as well as the coordinates Now. The important thing here is that you still prioritize. The court turns right, because otherwise the baseline tends to create a different chord underneath intensity sort of mess with the harmony a little too much. So use these lightly and sparingly. One of the things in the classical tradition that they talked about quite often is taking the non core turns and putting them off the beat So, for example, we dio Cortona on non turn off or turn on turn off. So this is on the way. We've got those three notes on the being in those three notes of those two notes off the beat says one way of thinking about it. So play around with those we got passing notes and in kind of inversions or voice leading inside of your baselines, and those will really, really create kind of more interest in your baseline. Underneath will give you a compositions more quality. 65. Bass Line Riffs : So sometimes the baseline takes kind of center stage on harmony takes backstage when we're on, say a damn like we're on the same court over and over again. Say it's like an e minor court what we might have. It's just the baseline. That's kind of and then over the top of that, all you have is just caught on those going together. So the thing that were really listening to that point is the baseline. So let's have a little listen to this over a composition. - So you get the idea that basically what's happening is we've got more of a melodic kind of content going on in the baseline. Which means that our is not really worried about what's going on in the harmony. Its kind of very, very background kind of almost wallpaper on this is this is a very different way of composing, and you might use that within a composition. Sometimes you're thinking more about the harmony and that the baseline supporting it and another time do you flip that round you've got No, it's about baseline. And what called We go with this well anymore. Yeah, that sounds fine. So that's the kind of different way of thinking about these. Sometimes, however, though it is good to compose a baseline with harmony in mind, but not necessarily play lots of nice chord over the top. It's really just that it helps you design a good baseline, so you could decide to create three chords there. So, like, for example, I did you mind a d major c major? But my sound wasn't particularly kind of like a like a really kind of. I didn't have that sound going on. It wasn't it was. It was a lot more. It was a bit cool in that. Basically, that's that's all we're going on in. This video is just taking the idea of a baseline, making it more prominent than the cords and maybe thinking a little bit about harmony that structured behind that baseline. 66. Introduction to Chords from Scratch: so new chapter. What we're doing here is we're talking about courts from scratch, as opposed to cords inside of a key, which is what we've been doing so far. The word for that is diatonic. You choose a scale that's cheesy mind on. Then that scale dictates the courts themselves. You can't really change them. Apart from maybe called five that we've seen, we can change in a minor key. But court from scratch means that you can just start on a note like D and say, Well, I want to play D minor. Actually, no, I want to play d Major. Actually, no, I wanna play d diminished No on a play D or commented on. And then, as we get later on D dominant theme major seven minus seven minor major. All these different different chords which give all these different flavors. But more important, Well, as important is that what what is happening is that we're able to look up cords online and learn these chord progressions without having to say Wait, what he is this in? Or because core progressions online, as you'll see, basically didn't say, Hey, we're in the key office, Apart from maybe hook theory dot com They do that, and you might want to look up these chords and work them out. You'll just see in a with a little em by and then a minor. Well, how do you make a minor or if it's g sharp, minor or be dominant seventh? That sort of thing is what we're gonna be covering in this chapter. So I'll take you through now just a really simple screen presentation about how to create the theory or had to understand the theory behind these cords, and then we'll apply in the following videos. 67. In Depth Chords from Scratch: in previous videos. We've taken the major scale and we've put a chord shape otherwise known as a triad on top of that scale and we've moved it to different places and this has resulted in different courts, major and minor. We haven't quite looked so much in detail about how that court is structured in terms of its intervals. For example, between the first and second of this court, we have four semi tones and between the second and third note of this cord, we have three semi tents on that results in a major chord. Before we go on, I might just clarify one little thing that can confuse people is that I said the 1st 2nd and third note to this court, which makes total sense. But they have other names as well. That's just mean numbering them. They have theoretical names. This is the root note. This is the third and this is the fifth, which is why I have those numbers there as well to remind you and those terms are used interchangeably. So with this structure we could say that a major chord is created with four semi tones between the first and second notes otherwise known as the root or third note and three semi tones between the second and third notes. Or you could call that the third and fifth. If we take degree two of the major scale on, we place the triad shape. On top of that, it results in a different set of intervals. Between the first and second notes, we have three semi turns on between the second and third notes. We have four semi turns on this results in a minor court. So we could say that a minor chord is created by three semi tones between the first and second notes on four semi turns between the second and third notes. Hopefully, that wasn't too much of a mouthful, but basically what we're talking about here is intervals, something that's gonna be the topic off the next section. And they're really, really powerful, theoretically, to help you understand court creation as well as a melody creation 68. How to Create Triads from Scratch: So let's take a look at this at the piano. Let's take something like a here on. Let's move up a semi tone. We know semi turn because we've done our chromatic scale are greater. That was the way we started in the whole of this speaks the the whole of this course. So two semi tones make a tone three semi tens making my and four semi turns make a major third. And that, for the moment, is all you really need to think about those intervals. In fact, really, For most cords, all you need to think about the thirds. We've got a minor third on a major third. Eso get good at playing that interval. All those intervals from anywhere that you want. Major third miner major third minus that and think about them down as well as up. So, for example, a major third down from this F sharp would be 1234 And remember, we're coming the spaces between the notes, not the notes themselves. Otherwise you end up in a wrong place. If we dio one, that's not an interval, because that's one note that would be like saying this is a meter. There's a nor meter. Is it? You need two things to measure a meter between. And then there's one measurement in between them, and that's how we think about intervals. So the space between here and here is a total. It's not one of those notes. Okay, so 12347 tons down is a major. So let's make our major court on any night. Let's start with a flat eso. We go up 1234 to get our major third and then plus, on top of that, a mine effect. There's a major chord. Let's do that on D Flat. Let's do it on F 1234123 Let's do an E flat. 1234123 And then, of course, you convert these on dual the stuff that we've looked at so far. So that's major court from scratch. Mining calls from strokes from scratch. If you ever forget these, by the way, if you ever forget the formula, go back to cords inside of a key in your thinking. I diatonic harmony and play, for example, through the scale of C major, we know that see his major. It sounds Major. We know that core to of C major D is a minor chord. So if you forget the formula for a minor chord, go back to one that you know which you'll know. Certainly inside of c. Major on. Then analyze it. So you go Okay, right. I know this is a my record. It sounds like a month According play before how Maney semi turns other between the root and the third we go 123 Okay, so it's a minor 3rd 1st and then a 123 Major the second. So we've now got off formula for minor minor court. So let's do it on G shop. 123234 And we can do minor chords anywhere that we want. And if we start stacking these or rather putting minor chords together with other minor chords not thinking about what the key is necessarily you can come up with some interesting sound. Kind of really, really quirky, interesting, quite creepy sound You wouldn't get diatonic Lee. You wouldn't get that sound ever inside of a key. So this is where harmony starts to get Dittemore full of flavor when you play around with stuff outside of a key, as well as in a key good two ways of thinking so major and minor. Let's talk about the diminished ones now. The diminished chord occurs naturally inside of a major scale at number 7123456 So? So let's analyze that. Basically, what we've got is we've got 123 and then another 123 So we've got to minor third stacked on top of each other from there to there and from there to there way play that starting from, say, E flat. 123123 We've got E flat diminished court or the shop, depending on how you thinking about it. Let's do it with G Sharp on D flat and then D Now I'm just moving it down through old notes . It's a very closed, dark, sound diminished court. Now let's look at the augmented, which is the opposite. So instead of two minor third stacked on top of each other, it's two major for so it's a much more open and bright sound. So lets you on C one major third above gets us to e and then another major third above that gets us to G sharp, open, spacy sound. It's often used in film scores. The cliche or trope of film scores is to go every time you even just face on. That's that argumentative sound that's coming in through the harmony there. So let's do F sharp augmented courts made 1/3 plus another major third gets us that Oh, I think I did the wrong thing that sorry I played a natural fit. So this is the thing so good learned by my mistakes you. So what I did was I did the augmented chord up here and my fifth note, obviously at the augmented chord is it is now this all right. But what because I'm so used to doing kind of a simple rocking bass accompaniment in the left hand? Well, I ended up doing is I ended up going Route normal fifth on, then route again, which doesn't sound so good. Why I needed to do was change that Teoh that let's do that and see may just kind of explain a little bit. So So we've got augmented Major Third, plus, another may 3rd baseline would need to be because that no clashes very much with this one. Okay, so that's major, minor augmented and diminished chords. And a later chapter. What we'll be doing is seventh chords when we get to the upper structures. 69. Suspension Chords: So we're all about adding a little bit more detail to our chord progressions, which their router quite simple and plain. But as you add these things like voicings and kind of upper structures and stuff that we can add more interest to them on one of the ways you can do that assigned called suspensions. So with the simple triads have been looking at particularly major and minor, what we can do is we can take 1/3 which is the middle note on moving up or down one night s . So there we have a suspension off 3 to 4, and then we can result. So suspension by nature or classic a speaking, we have to result, right? You don't have to resolve it at all. It's just in the kind of classical tradition of music we resolve a week. So those there we have suspensions 4 to 3 and to go that one last time. His are simple reposition seem a court on. We've got 13 and five. We change three to up to four on, then full comes back down to three so we can play instead of C major. Going like this way can play. It's a suspension cord, and it gives it a bit more floaty nous. It's less obvious sometimes in our harmonies. Teoh, if we want to put some kind of a little bit more interest in less clear that its major online and we can kind of go. So let's do this simple core progression to stand on 1564 So there are Manning in a few suspensions, which just adds this kind of interest or something that's not quite so cliche about stuff. So that was from 3 to 4. But we can also go down and never to suspension, Right? Let's try that now. You probably don't want to use it on every court because you get this thing, which is called very obvious parallel fifths, which is going on that. But we could try doing on some, so it was okay, Maybe let's just keep it on the 1st 1 No, the second. Maybe do a full one on then, eh? To play around with suspensions inside of your heart and your your harmonies in your core progressions to add a moment where say it sounds a bit cheesy or something like that, pull out the third and adding a suspension to make it sound a bit more kind of sophisticate 70. Working out the Key of a Song: So I've said before that your goal is a composer to really, really increase your harmonic vocabulary is to learn as many tunes as possible, most particularly tunes that you really like. So this requires, in part, obviously listening. But looking at the courts to things online now, sometimes it's not there. We'll get onto the training stuff later on how you can work stuff out here but say you've looked online and he worked out kind of, You know, this too, right? You worked. Okay, there's an a chord sort his name. I records a D major court, you my record. It's helpful then for you to contextualize those court inside of a key. So we've kind of got this from the second angle. We've gone court from scratch. We've gone. Okay, here's a minor. His d major, his e minor. And then we have to think Okay, what key through all of those cords belonging, Or do they belong in a key? Because actually, it's really helpful for you to analyze the peace and think OK, they're using cord to five and then six, for example. So let's go over that now. So let's say, for example, that the first court in this song is a minor. So you start playing that cord than the next quarter's a d major, and then the next one is this what you should be doing in your mind is thinking, Okay, right. I've played one shop in f sharp on, but I don't know whether I played any other shops. In fact, the rest of the cords don't show up any sharps. So you read through the whole piece and maybe some other courts, like the minor on, then see, Major. And then that's it. There's no more chords. What you should be thinking in your mind is Okay. That gives me all of these notes. One sharp f sharp. What key do you know that has one shop and you go back to your idea of the circle of Fifths . Anything. Okay, it's g major slash minor. And that then allows you think. Okay, right. So what they're doing here is they're doing that core progression of to five one or 256 and you can start understanding it from a kind of relative level. So what we've done just to recap is we used courts from scratch to be able to look up cords online, where it says a minor D major b minor and you've played those cords using the formula of thirds that we've looked at. And then after you've gathered all of those chord in that song, you stand back from it will look at it and say, What Kiwi in what scale we in? And you put them all together And you think, OK, we're in the scale off the major or whatever, and that's when you're thinking about key signatures in the circle of Fist. Now what might happen hopefully will happen because this is more interesting is that you'll be playing so I don't even like. Okay, well, by a mind of their, which has a scene at right in D major and then the next court is ah f sharp minor. Wait, Hang on. See Shop. I've already played a C natural on. Now I'm playing a seashell as well. So we must be going outside of the key because remember to be inside of a key. We have only one note of each letter of the alphabet. So if we're gonna have a c n a C sharp as well we're probably going outside of the key, and this is where you can start. Thinking probably bit is a bit difficult in the beginning, if you haven't done much theory thinking, Okay, where are we moving, Howie? Modulating We cover modulation, which is moving between keys later on in the course. But this really this video is just to invite you to look up a chord, progressions online, learn them and then analyze them inside off or your understanding off. What key is that? You can start thinking of things relatively, as in court to quarter five. Chord one, etcetera, etcetera. And if there are cords which are outside of key, that's great. Try and explain them just in your own simple way for now. And if some of it you can't quite context rise, that's fine. And I'll see you in the next video 71. Modulation & Secondary Dominants: in this video, we're gonna be taking a key and changing one or two of the cords in that key to push out the harmony from that fundamental scale or key. So by now you're very familiar with taking a scale and putting chords at different points in their scale. But if we take, say, this major chord, which is built on court one of the major scale and now knowing your courts from scratch theory, you change it to be a minor chord. Suddenly, this note here means that we're outside of the key. So what's happening here is that that note is giving the ear and the theory a sense of another scale. For example, it could be this scale that it's matching up to, which would mean that we're moving from a major scale in do potentially a minor scale. But at this point, it's really not clear. All we know is that it is pushing out of the key. Now let's take a step back a second on review. These here are names off either the notes of the scale or the cords, particularly of a diatonic key. The reason we learned these is not just for the sake of naming, but also so that we can start thinking about chord relationships. And if you remember, we looked at three of these, in particular these ones. These are the primary triads because they're very powerful in establishing gravity. If we look at them in a major key, they're all major chords on. If we look at them in C major, we get C, F and G. Now there's an interesting thing that happens in relation to the circle of fifths. If we look at sea, we have see there, then we have a G and then f just like we have here C, F and G. Now, obviously, you know that the 51 relationship of G toe See is a very powerful one, and that's because it's a 51 in the circle of fifths G to see. It's important to know, however, that it's not just that it's 51 It's that it's five major to some kind of one. It's really important that you realize that dominant chords have to be major 5 to 1, but the one could be minor. So this really powerful relationship of 51 or the dominant could be used to push harmony out off the key, and you can do this either in modulation or through secondary dominance. Let's look first with modulation so moving from one key to another. Let's start with C major here and let's say we want to move to F Major here. Both of these keys have a 51 relationship in C major. It's G to see and in F major, it's C to F. And if we look closely, obviously the C major key has a C medical, and the F major key has a C major chord as well. So this court is shared between keys so we could play see Major in C major and actually be thinking in our minds that were playing Chord five off F major. So then this C major becomes the dominant to F major Now, if that went over your head, let's look at it again in another key and try and explain it more clearly. We're in C major on. We're moving to G Major called five off G. Major is D major, and that has a 51 relationship to G. Obviously, because it's the dominant of G major, let's say we're in C Major in C major. There is a dick ord, but it's currently D minor, not D major, which is what we need to move to the key of G major. Remember, secondary dominance must be major, so we can take that D minor chord and make it major. And then suddenly it becomes the same as Cord five in G Major Return court to into D Major and then we're suddenly in G major at Court five on. We can execute our 51 relationship That's modulation using dominance in a very simple example. But let's explore it now with dominance staying in the key, and this is called secondary dominance. So let's stay in C major. We have our 51 relationship, obviously, but let's look at the Circle of Fifths again and think of what are kind of secondary. Dominant would be inside of the key, so g to see his 51 But what's five to G? Well, it's gonna be D so we g o d g c d is five to g g is five to see. That's what a secondary dominant ISS. So we go D G and then back to see. And this is where we get our to 51 relationship, a chord sequence that hopefully you've looked at so far, and it's because we've got this implied secondary, dominant feeling inside of it. However, strictly speaking, as I said, secondly, dominance must be major. So let's do that. But stay in the key of C major apart from one chord. So we're on D minor. Let's change that to be the true dominant of teenager and make it D major. So D is now called Five of G. And then we moved to G. That's called five, and then we moved to see So we've got a still the 251 relationship. But we've made cord to a major chord. And, of course, after you've done this and you're staying inside of C major, you can just change D back to eight D minor court. It's kind of a secondary passing chord. It's something that you can do just briefly during the key. You don't have to change that chord all the time. It's just one moment 72. Pushing Out of the Key Example Track: 73. Introduction to Upper Structures: So with everything that we've done so far, you can do a lot. You can do so much stuff with what we've done. In fact, you could probably stop here in the course on have enough material to be working with, so long as you're applying everything that we've learned so far. But if you're particularly interested in greater colors and more interest, you can learn this section, which is all about the upper structures off cords, which generally we associate with the kind of jazz language. It's something that sounds a bit brighter, stuff like kind of interesting cause that I find quite bright on, and you wouldn't necessarily sing along to them. They wouldn't be in a folk song, for example, that quite modern in that sound. So if you're interested in those stick around for the next few videos. But what we need before we do those is a bit more understanding about intervals. What we've done so far is the tone semi tone, the mind that a major third and while strictly you don't need them. You don't need to know any other intervals to be able to create these courts from scratch. It does help to kind of contextualized them a little bit. So what going to do now is I'm gonna give you a little presentation on the sounds of those intervals. In a previous video, I said that diatonic means in a scale or a key, and that interval is the space between two notes diatonic intervals, therefore, are the spaces between the notes inside of a scale and as a refresher, let's have a look at them inside of a major scale or a minor scale we have between the first and second note a second. And then it becomes 1/3 between the first and third on, then a 4 56 7 But we're now working with non diatonic intervals, so that means all intervals inside of the chromatic scale. So let's look at the chromatic scale on a grid, just like we started this course between the first note and then the next no up wherever you start is a semi tone. We've looked that before. So a semi tone obviously is one senator. A tone is two semi tones thin. You get a minor a major third, 1/4 on, then I'm gonna skip this next one and go up to the fifth here at seven semi tones. So between the fourth and the fifth, we have something that we could either call a sharp or a flat five. Don't worry about it too much. Just get to know these interval names and they'll slowly start to make sense the more that you use them going on up. We have the Maya sick eight semi tones major 69 minus 7 10 semi turns major, 7 11 semi tones and then the active, which is 12 semi tones. Now you could keep going and say Minor knife, which is 13 semi turns, made a knife, etcetera, etcetera. But we won't because once you get to the octave, what you can actually do is kind of draw a line in your mind and think that really you could just repeat everything that you've done so far. So everything from that note that the arrow is pointing out could just be thought of like you did, but one octave higher 74. Creating 7th Chords from Scratch: in this video, we're gonna be looking at upper structures for the first time, and we're gonna be looking at the three primary seventh chords as an introduction. So let's look at our intervals again. We looked before at the semi tone tone Minor, third on major third, and then we went on up. But I'm actually not gonna go any further because all you really need is theme, minor fed and major third. So let's look at the major third. That takes us from Note number one to note number three or the root and third of this chord because we're creating cords now. Now we stack a minor third on top of that, and that takes us to the fifth of the chord. Root third and fifth gives us a major triad if we stack another major third on top of that , starting from the fifth. What that gives us is 1/7 chord, and it's called a major seventh chord, and the reason why it's called a major seventh chord is because from the route to the seventh is a major seventh. If you remember from our intervals video, that creates a major seventh chord. Now let's take a minor chord. This is thes structure, as you know already for a minor try at Let's Stack a minor third on top of that from the fifth, and that gives us a minor seventh chord. It's called a minor seventh court because from the root toe, the seventh is a interval of a minor seventh, which is 10 semi tones. So we have a major seventh chord and a minor seventh chord. Let's take the major seventh chord and do something different with the top interval I e. From the fifth and the seventh. Let's move that down to be a minor third. Now that gives us all together a dominant seventh chord. Dominant seventh chords are interesting because they have a mixture of major at the bottom and minor up at the top. So there are 3/7 chord types, our major seventh chord, our minor seventh chord and are dominant seventh Chord. Please be aware this is absolutely not comprehensive. We will be going through other court types in other videos on this course is not exhaustive . Of all court types, there are many, many different ones, but those three ones that I've just introduced you to now, and at least in the realm, off seventh chords are the most popular and actually most useful and practical most of the time. So despite having learned all of those intervals just then, you really only need that. I've given you those into parts of it, really, for comprehensiveness in this course, and also that this kind of fits together under an understanding of the fact that there are other intervals on that you could build courts out them. But the most standard cords to build a rather the standard intervals to build courts from is the Fed. So let's take this and look at the seventh hole, which is the first up, a structure really above the triad. So we have our triad, which would be, say, an a minor chord way. Stack another third on top of that, inside of the key of a minor. Right? We get this, but this is diatonic seven. It's right. If I'm in C major or a minor seventh, it's not seventh chords from scratch. We've got to think about the majors in the minors, so let's go over a major seventh chord. First I made 1/7 chord is constructed off a major chord of the bottom, which is, you know, already from your court from scratch with triads as a major onda mind. So there's a C major chord and then we need one more third on top of that, starting from this top note, which is another major third. So it's made 1/3 on, then made that creates and made 1/7 quarter Can't bright open sounding jazzy type court. We put that somewhere else That's a flat major seventh or F major, seventh D flat, major seven. And of course, you could do this in inversions as well. You do all of these, you do anything Inversions. So there I was doing the mall in route position, right? But we could do you think this take a room up? This is first way. Take the bottom note there, moved out. This is second, and now we have 1/3 inversion because we've got four notes. If that makes sense on here, we have the seventh on the bottom. And just to recap the names of these notes are group. If we were to do the same with the major court, be major seventh chord rather route, supports video now and play major seventh chords all over the place and get to know them really well on do inversions off. So let's have a look now at minor seventh chords, we start with a minor chord, as you might expect. Let's take C and create a minor See Triad. We need a minor for first as you know, and then a major on. Then, from this top note, the fifth to get our seventh. We got a minor third, which is different to what we just did with a major chord. Major. Let's do G sharp minor seven D minus, G minus. So go now and take the formula for minor court and minus seven goals and apply them all of the piano. Now let's look at an interesting chord, which is quite a floozy court. Both of those courts. I kind of think of us jazzy cords. This one's more of a bluesy when it's called a dominant seventh chord. It's also used all over The place. Doesn't have to just be blues, but you'll know what I mean when you hear it. So what we do is we take the kind of minor sound that we have from the minor seventh chords without minor seventh of the talk, and we combine it with a major tried in the left hand. Sorry at the bottom. Left hand s. So let me show you what I mean. We get C major, try it on. And then instead of putting a major, try it. Sorry, major my words Relieved place. Now, instead of a major third top here we put a minor. So the structure of this court goes made up my mind to mind kind of a real bluesy sound in there. And actually, if you do cause 14 and five of the key that make them all dominant seventh chords you get the blues have a C donut seven f, dominant seventh and G dominant self. So that's how to create your three primary seventh chords. Take those away and kind of play around with them and get to know the next video will do slightly more interesting. Kordell sounds with seven chords 75. Diminished & Augmented & 7th Chords: So before we get into the upper structures beyond the seventh, like the 11th 9th 13 things like that. Let's talk about diminished and augmented seventh chords. They're very, very exotic textures, which you might want to throw in occasionally if you're doing abstract kind of strange film music or if you really know what you're doing cords or if you just want to experiment, sometimes it just adds a real interest in color. But they're not the easiest courts to write songs with eso just go with caution with these ones. So if we take our diminished chord, which, if you remember from a previous video, is too minor for stacked on top of each other. So if we take our see diminished chord to mine efforts and then add a major third on top of that way, get a C diminished seventh chord now you can also get another type of diminished chord, right, And we can add when we do that by adding on minor Third from this note here. So there we have three minor third stacked up on top of each other, my head, my mind really, really tense sounding chord or if you want to talk to the slightly less tense sounding diminished court. You can have a major third on the top, minus third mine. Efird major third. I kind of like that sound. It's a little bit less intense than take that and apply that in different places. For example, G shop diminished. Seventh. You could either do this feel diminished. Seventh away after many seventh. Don't worry about the words. Just think about the intervals. And, of course, you convert these. You can make interesting sounds of them are projected. It's often used, you know someone goes into a dream. That's the way that's the sound that you often hear often played on harp going up and down as the screen wobbles in a raid. Cheesy eighties way. So then we've got ornamented seven. So let's take our dominant seventh right dominant seventh sound, which we did in the previous video. But instead of having a major third and then a minor, we're gonna have a major that so way keep that one the same. So these two are now a turn apart from each other, so this structure of an augmented seventh chord goes major, third, major, third and then actually a tone now. This isn't exactly called an augmented seventh chord that doesn't necessarily exist. It's really called a dominant seventh sharp five. Don't worry about it too much. Just think. Okay? So those of the US to kind of like a slightly more sophisticated, weird sounding courts to play around. But you might want Teoh. You might want to use this in your compositions. 76. Creating 9th Chords from Scratch: so the night there's a different sound. It's on top of the seventh. Usually in that we build 1/7 chord and then we add another third on top of that. So let me show you the theory of it. So e minor on our seventh to make a minor seventh chord and then way had a major third. On top of that, that gives us on nine thistles a natural 19. Get flat nines, shot mines and stuff for that. Don't worry about that moment. Just think of it, Diatonic Lee, to make it a bit simpler. Scale of the minor way Plano 11357 And then we go to note number nine or two, depending on how you look at it, we call it nine as we're passing the active way. Could also think of it is to down here way and you can see that we're building on stacking these thirds even more right, and you'll know that in the next videos, guess that we're gonna do is keep stacking those That's to get more, more interesting colors. So that's the ninth over. A minor chord, right? Let's do over another minor chord. So Let's to a minor. Tioga seventh minus seven. Let's do e d sharp Minor night. Usually, when someone says The minor night for D shot my Tonight, they're usually meaning that there's the seventh in there as well. It's like shorthand so that we don't have to go d minus seven plus nine, which is a bit about what we just do demonise that occasionally you won't want seven. For example, you could have just a D minor chord. I don't know which is without the 70 a little bit more empty seventh, and that makes it a bit more contemporary in my mind anyway, right? So that's minor sevenths with the nine founded on the top. Let's look at our major seventh with the ninth on the top. Let's take F major seventh night, and you might find yourself accidentally going like think that doesn't quite work. Well, the reason for that will be that you were no using a minor third or any major Third needs to know. Find which one works. You could also dio interesting color. They're playing around with the ninth here Let's do the dawn and seventh court and then we add the night of that. Let's do a flat, dominant seventh and at night through these nights, just to be super clear, where they could be a major third or a minor fed above it. But you have to think of it inside of the key. For example, if you're in G major without minus seven, we're not going to be playing a minor third above this seventh here because that note there is no in Tokyo, more likely that it is. I don't seven plus nine. Take all of those. Apply them in different areas of minus seven, major seventh chords and also dominant seventh chords, and get the ninth sound into your voicings and your harmony. 77. Creating 11ths 13th Chords from Scratch: So you know the deal. By now we're adding thirds on top of each other. Done seventh nights. Let's now do 11th and 13th. So let's look at this simply inside of C with a C major seventh chord regard. We've got a night there and then we if we stay diatonic, that will be our 11. Sounds funky at the moment. Stay with me. Sorry, that would be yet 11 on then are 13 would be that right? So you're thinking diatonic lee there. But you have to think a little bit more carefully now about which type of food you add on top. And for me personally, this changes with each minor or major court that you have. So, for example, when you have a my major seventh light we have here what you want is then to do a minor third on top of that to get a night and then a major third on top of that to get the 11th and then a to get the team. If this all seems a bit complex, don't worry about it too much for back to the presentation where explain it Well, they're basically we're just adding these thirds and thinking about it in the context off that court. So here you can actually think of this in a much simpler way. You could say, OK, let's do a C major seventh chord on, then a d major court above it because we got team any to the D major putting together. You get an incredibly rich sounding chord, and those two chords are C Major and D major, which are a tone apart from each other. Now that's rewind a little. That because that might be a bit confusing. Let's do it in another court. Let's do it with F Major seventh s. So we've got a major seventh chord, which we know the former there off so far, let's add our ninth, which would be the second degree of the scale or a minor third away from the seventh. Then we do our 11. We like this one to be a major on a then minus way really, really open sounding right court loads getting on and it seems ready, complex, and to be realized that you could have built this by just playing the non court turns down here I g on eyes one way of thinking about it. It's not complete theory of how to do it, but I don't want Tokyo deep, deep, deep into the theory, too much in these videos by the piano because I'll just be yammering away. Go away now and create some kind of chord with 13 and 11 in them. And see if you actually like this texture or whether you can kind of dispense with it. The one final thing to say is that this is very much we're thinking about the harmony of this. You can still use the 13th Cent Elevens and all that stuff, but without thinking that that's your stock standard chord. So what I mean by that is say, you're playing a chord. It's D minus seven. On your melody. Lemon goes like this and say, You hang around on that court in the melody. Sorry. You hang around on that note in the melody that is technically 13 but if a singer is singing it, we're not going to necessarily here. That is the harmony, because it will be the melody line thistles, harmony and this is melody. So it depends on the way that you present it, but of course, if you've got Singer singing and you're going, there's a very much the kind of 11 sounding chords there I may have said 13 11. You can see even I get confused by this. Have fun with this and don't spend too long. And I remember that simpler your harmonies. And the more you understand the foundational stuff, the better it always, and this stuff is just kind of nice little Sprinkles on the top. 78. Upper Structure Assignments: so good to assignments for you. Number one is create a tune which uses chords with loads of up structures. Just really is an exercise, but you might find that you want to bring it into your voicing on Listen to tunes for this upper structure stuff it be quite hard in the beginning. But if something sounds jazzy, you might be thinking, Okay, right. Let me work out. What? The core diamond. You can look at these up online and let me see what the infrastructures are and then integrate those chord if you can, into your composition. If you're not sure about stuff in your ear, training is not so good. Don't worry about it. I will be creating a course at some point soon on air training. So you should be a message and I'll let you know about that. Or look at my courses on you to me, and you'll see it there, hopefully in future. But the main thing is to really use thes cause and create your own composition. First, get, get, get practical, then the second assignment, or you can do both of these, obviously, or you can do. One of them is to take a standard tune like beetles that year and something like that that uses very, very simple chords that we've all heard and used and people have used many times before and spice them up with upper structures. Right? So you might have your simple core progression being six one. And instead of doing it just with Triad a comedy, you get out all thes kind of structures toe. You kind of make it a little more interesting, adding these kind of nights and 11th and stuff like that. So explore those two exercises and come back in the next videos. I'll show you my responses to those two. 79. Upper Structure Composing Example: 80. How to Read Chords and Chord Symbols: so we've looked at Roman numerals already, but for the sake of completeness, let's go back over them. For this video, lower case eyes or lower case letters rather designate the minor form of accord and upper case letters. Eyes and V's usually designate the major or augmented forms of courts, said the cords in a major scale in Roman numerals would look like this, and the chords in a minus girl in Roman numerals would look like this. That's Roman Niro's Let's go to court symbols, the more common form of reading cords, especially if you're looking up anything on the Internet and let's start with the minor. Try it. The minor tried is the most and pick us one because there are so many ways of drawing it, which is why I've started with this. It actually gets a bit simpler later on, but you can see there. We've got a number of forms. We've got the A minor A M. Amen and a minus. And then on the right hand side, we've got those again. But with a lower case a Now, strictly speaking, this is the better way to draw mine accords with lower case letters because they're different from upper case letters, which are major chords, and writing it this way means that we can then just right in a on its own, which is, of course, a minor chord. Let's go to major chords. Major tribes could be written in the four following ways thes of the primary ways that you'll encounter major chords on the simplest way. Usually the most common is just to see the letter in capitals written on its own. Then we have diminished triads. These will be written a diminished, a dim on a minor flat five, and that'll make sense to you. If you've looked at the diminished Triads video and how to create those, then the final one is a with a zero, and that zero doesn't necessarily look that big when they draw it. Sometimes it's quite small and up to the top of the A something I couldn't do in this. This slide presentation augmented triads could be written like this a augmented a or a plus , a sharp five and a plus five. They all mean the same thing. Suspensions are typically written, a suss and nothing else on a suss on its own will nearly always mean suss four knots. Us, too. But if you want to be really unambiguous than you would write a cess four and then if you see in eighths us to that will definitely mean access to power chords where you miss out the third of the cord be written like this a five or a No. Five major sevenths like this, the one that is at the bottom. On the left, there is a triangle, and again due to the word processing in this slide presentation, I can't make that triangle quite sit by the A in the exact place. But as soon as you start Googling jazz chord symbols, you'll come across this and you'll understand what I mean. The one on the far right there. I've left on its own because it's sometimes used, but I don't like it at all. It's very, very ambiguous because it could mean a minor seven, but they're using a capital M to designate the fact that it's a major M. I don't really like. That's a bit confusing, so try and ignore that one. But if it comes up, you have been warned, minus seven to look like this fairly self explanatory on the left. And then you see the reason why I didn't like the previous one, which is on the right there. You could have that written like this, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes is capitals. Hence the ambiguity and why I don't like it. Dominant seventh could be written exactly like this, a dominant seventh, a Dom seven on also a seven. So this is a really important one here, because sometimes you'll see a seven, you'll think, Well, what type of seven is it? Whenever you see a and just a seven, it will always mean a dominant seventh. You have to write the other forms of seventh. The ones you saw in this one, and this one here to get those chords a seven on its own is always dominant, half diminished. Seventh could be written like this. We have a weird circle, which has got a cross through it, showing that it's half diminished. Or it could be a minus seven with a flat five, which would make sense theoretically, if you put that court together full diminished. Seventh are just a dim seven or a on that circle we saw with a line through it in the previous slide without the line through it, showing that it's a full, diminished seventh. So that's Roman numerals and chord symbols. Let's now look at inversion, and we have to look at these in conjunction with Roman numerals or with chord symbols. So let's set stuck with Roman numerals, I, on its own means root position. You can sometimes see I A which would mean root position, but usually you don't see the A form, and so you just have I on its own, and that means a reposition. Then I be means first inversion. I see second inversion, an I. D third inversion. I'm saying I hear, but really it means 12 would be the same. Let's look at that with chord symbols. Now, of course, with these, we can't write a B A C A. D. Because that would get really confusing, because the B's and C's from the alphabet start getting confused up with the A's and B's from the notes off the scales. So what we have here is the note that is the bottom of the cord off the inversion after a slash. So if you think of an a major chord. The second of that cord is a C sharp, so that implies that we're in first inversion. Then the second inversion cord has an E at the bottom of yet on. Then, if you had 1/7 chord like a seven, its fourth note or its seventh would be at the bottom. So technically, that's in third inversion. So we've covered Roman numerals, chord symbols on inversions. There is something else that you may come across when looking up inversions and cords online, and that is figured bass. However, we won't be looking at that in this tutorial simply because it's a bit archaic and makes it really, really difficult. It's more for classical musicians now. Of course, this isn't an exhaustive tutorial. There is much that I've missed out on stuff that I've gone over very, very quickly, but hopefully it will start to filter into your understanding of the cords that you've already started looking at. And, like any slightly lazy teacher would tell you, just look on the conjugal for these things. It's really a reference, not a tutorial. What you'll find is things like this. If you just type in chord symbols jazz chart or just called symbol charts. You'll get tons of different things explaining how courts work. So let's look at a few simple examples that you'll probably come across. So looking at this June here, we've got the lyrics that say these words here. And then as soon as we hit the word running, that means that we've got a D sharp minor chord because we have d sharp. The note and then an M by it, then see shop on its own implies that we just have a C sharp major chord. And that's everything that you really need to know here, down here is that be major chord. And here is a D sharp minor court again. In this piece, we have four chords at the intra e minor than a C major than a D major than a D major on. These calls are quite simple. They're not telling you the inversions, but other chord symbols might. Here's an example of a jazz Lee Chee, which shows you seventh chords on also one inversion. Here we have a C dominant seventh chord over G, which would mean that it's in second inversion. Finally, there's one little thing here, which would be additions the sharp nine over here, these air additions to the cord, and we cover the theory behind that in this course. 81. Harmony Cheat sheet Level 3: So you've come a long way now we're at stage three on the Harmony Cheat Sheets on this section contains a lot off the summaries on what we've gone over the baselines, The complete guide to all of our intervals that we've gone over and just is basically this This whole guide is much more of a reference manual for you to keep on your desktop or wherever and had to create basically every single court we've gone over, certainly the most standard chord types and also a few things at the end. Talking about are pushing out the key on the kind of encouraging you to write music that pushes out the key. So this one's very much Maura reference guide, hopefully quite useful. If you ever forget how to create one of these courts, you can dive back in, so download it now and keep it somewhere useful. 82. Where do I Start? Generating material with rules: so the way I think about composing is essentially problem solving. When you sit down at the piano or the D A W, you essentially have limitless opportunities or choices, things that you could do and that can be quite overwhelming. So one of the most creative things to do is to actually restrict yourself. If you ever thought, Oh, I want to try and sound like that person and you write something that's like them like a pastiche Composition is what that's called, then you essentially restricting yourself because you're listening to that artists and thinking, What did they use? What do they sound like? What material do they use on? Even if you haven't done this, you might be doing it unconsciously. You might be saying, Okay, wanna stick in this key with this kind of shape? I'm gonna use that kind of voicing, but we re really come unstuck. Sometimes they are composing. If we kind of basically don't think about these things were not aware of the kind of rules quote that we're using. So let me give you an indication about some kind of examples that you could use, particularly when you get stuck when you're either in the middle of a composition or you're trying to work on a particular element. And you like, where do I start? What we do really, really important to think about rules when you're trying to work out where to start and how to continue. So first example would be using kind of intervals of seconds and forth. Right? So you've got, say, are voicings, right? We could think of some voicings and we could think, OK, well, I'm using the interval of a second and then fourth up to this note here, Onda second up to this, this voicing is created from seconds on force. And then maybe my melody does the same. And then I moved somewhere else. And then maybe some other stuff as well. So, uh, let's try this. And so you already creating some nice, interesting stuff from just these kind of ideas Seconds and fourths way Got two chords and you're trying to come up with a baseline. An example very, very simple. First example would be to say Okay, well, the baseline, I wanted to move up for roughly two octaves and then down directives. Now, that's not necessarily gonna create an amazing musical result, but it's gonna kick you into action. You're gonna start writing something, and that's the point. So let's let's do this is an example. So, uh, so that it's not necessarily an amazing result, but it's kicked me into action. It's got me to think about voice leading and some certain lines in there, and I might actually Ben decide to break my rules. This is the really important point, almost more important than coming up with what, as important, coming up with rules is come up with rules and then break them quite quickly, because then you actually breaking a framework that you've already established. But if you don't have a framework already, you don't really know what you're doing. Unconsciously and for me personally have struggled for years trying to write stuff, and then when I realized that if I could create a rule and then break it and then create more rules than break that, you end up with a lot more satisfaction, you're writing cause you kind of unconsciously know what you're trying to do. So you could, for example, kind of go Ugo, you could not go up two octaves. You could go. OK, well, that first part baseline I like on then you've already started writing. Then the next time you get stuck, you come up with another rule and then the other thing would be patterns. Right? So you take an idea that you like, uh so like that And you think, OK, well, moved up through different courts, Teoh. Yeah, it's nice. And then you kind of maybe move that up further through the courts. So instead of starting here, you start here on that first, and it gives a sense of cohesiveness. So another example of rule be kind of harmonizing a melody, right? Often we've got melody line kind of doing something really simple like this on. We're thinking, OK, we got cords, got bass, drums, everything like that or string section of whatever. I want another line underneath this one to harmonize it on. The dangerous is obviously moving in thirds and six all the time. So you have a melody that goes like I mean, it sounds quite nice, but actually, sometimes we want to do more interesting things about harmony so you could create a rule which says Okay, So the lower voice not the main melody line. Always has to move up one, though. And then down to the next one. Whatever. Harmony. No, I'm choosing. It has to move down then down then up. Let's look at that. So we've got our melanin in the right and harmony now in the left. So let's start like this. So there I was roughly following this rule of the left hand melody. No harmony, no going down. Up, down, up on the second. It doesn't work the second you find yourself kind of going Oh, that's quite nice. Oh, but it breaks my rule. Who cares, Right? Break the rule. That's a perfect opportunity to then break your rule and there may be returned to the rules . So Ugo break the rule and then returned to again. Uh, that sort of thing. Yeah. So that's harmonizing melody. Another example would be voicings, right? I don't know what voicings to use. Okay, fine. We'll start coming up with ideas. You could say something like right at the top of the court. That always has to be a cluster of a few notes. That sounds nice and crunchy. So you got like on that? If you like one of those voicings workout, theoretically, what's going on in the voicing and then move that to another place? Uh, that's an idea for a for creating voicings with rules. The other thing would be about progressions, right? One of the things we often get stuck with this keeping with a standard set progressions like the ones that are provided with you, provided you in this course, come up with more creative and kind of restrictive rules that actually end up freeing you. And that's the paradox. This so one of the ones I often like to use because it's called It's kind of called biter by tonality, which sounds a bit complex, essentially, what you're doing to creating cords from two keys at the same time, which you know previously in this course upset. Don't do stick that sonically. Now we're getting to more advanced that start experimenting. This is like your little lab where you can you can try all these things. So that's, for example, stick in either key of G major or the Q e major and choose cords from each right and you could say so. For example, this one this is cord three and in court to off a E major. And then you do cord Teoh and then one that's to five. And then one G major gets quite nice. It's like one of the major and say our center of gravity is now in G. Major called for and then called one of e major. That's always nice. Getting to here is something called before Relationships will have another video on this later on. It's where you have this really interesting sound like you couldn't get this diatonic. This is no sound that you get one of one key have to borrow from two kids, so that's that's a kind of example of creating rules. And again, the second it's not working, break the rule and go back to diet on economy, for example. So the idea of all of its restrictive stuff is to actually free because, unconsciously, you're actually creating rules all the time. If you're writing a composition, which and you're kind of stuck with this, try addic sound that you're going on your like. I hate this tragic stuff. It's really, really boring. Well, essentially you're in rules that you're not breaking there. You're saying okay, well, my melodies new didn't hurt My my voicings have this kind of third root position thing. And also, my harmonic rhythm is once every bar. So you need to unpack these elements palm apart, create new rules, break them, and then come back. All these things go together to create a really satisfying process for you as a composer. 83. Patterns, Patterns, Patterns: So in the previous video, we looked at a few ideas to introduce the concept of rule setting and generating material with rules, which is an endless topic which we could go on about forever. But I'm I'm just touching upon it for a few videos in this course. One of the things I mentioned which I've mentioned before is patterns absolutely key, obviously to music. So this video I'm gonna go over a number of different ways to hope, hopefully help you stimulate your mind and think about how you can start creating patterns inside of what what you're doing, essentially what patterns you can use. So the simple, most obvious example is to take pattern and move it up or down the scale, right or up or down. Whatever you're in that sort of thing right on it can yield some really interesting results on That's pretty boring pattern, but, you know, if you arrange that right, that would be okay. The other thing would be patterns across cords, because the 1st 1 is a little simple. Patterns, cross chords. We've looked at a little bit before. Essentially, you're thinking of a cord like this. E minus seven put on your thinking of 1234567 notes in that court. And then you say Okay, well, my pattern is Well, let's stick with that same pattern. 123 Make it really simple. 123 actually, three. So our patent is 3 to 1, and then we moved to a different chord and we're doing 3 to 1 on every one of those chords . But then obviously remember this idea of breaking your rules. Because if you do it so much like that after a while, everyone's like, Okay, they're doing some even if they don't about music, that kind of like they're doing that thing which goes down and, uh, Nona, right? So you change it a little bit. That's just improvising. But, you know, you can see that just with a few little shifts and changes from those, you can start creating kind of interesting melodies. The next one would be merging patterns. So you take one idea, let's say right. So if you're getting used to moving that cross court so that and you're thinking actually, let's take another pattern like and let's merge them together so wait can yield some interesting results. You know, this endless stuff here? Essentially, you can think this is a modular kind of thing, that you kind of you go right, I'm in this key. Then I've got this and then I'm gonna put this pattern on, and then I'm gonna introduce that pattern, and I'm going to kind of break that rule and then pull that back and then great, that looks fantastic. Let's move on to the next bit more jeweler thinking. Now we get on some slightly more advanced stuff, so those are probably enough to be going on with that for now. But if you're really kind of interest in this topic is I am basically you can think of inverting a pattern. Now, this might be a bit tricky for you, but if you've looked at the intervals chapter in this course, it will kind of start to make a little bit more sense. Because what we do is we take a pattern. Let's take that one that we just did way. Think about the intervals and we inverted that way, right? So we would go up a tone, right? So in this case, we go down a town in the next one and then we dio try, turn right way get down and try to on down a semi turn. So a semi tone. Hopefully this is making sense and then down a major third. So we get up a major for so we owe on. We've got our inverted melody. So you kind of going It's hard for me to work out a moment with courts, but you have to do anything about the harmony underneath and stuff like that. But you see that this gives you an endless variety. Oh, I got a new thing. Never think that your poor in terms of material or things to use right. It's just you're not using your imagination to kind of transfer all this stuff transmitter and turn into science kind of more interesting. The feeling What I mean by poor is that it's very easy to feel that when you're kinda I have nothing to work with. Was nothing here, right and what you got to start doing? It's like throwing some things down, pulling some things out of it, changing some rules, breaking it all of that stuff, you know, I'm becoming a broken report here Well, so we got we got back to front as well. So you just go backwards as if you were rewinding the melody. So you've got that's another way of doing it on then. Finally, this to kind of little areas, which is about ornamentation and ornamented chord tones. So this kind of refers mortar the planning stages of composition that hopefully we spoke about a little bit before, which is that you kind of you think OK, right. I'm on this chord, which is an F minus seven chord, you say? OK, well, at the beginning of each bar, I want to land on the third, right, So 1234 and then the next court would be a B minor chord. Right? So you say at the beginning of each bar, I went all out on the three on. Then in between, you sort of planned those two hit points, so to speak, and then in between, you kind of create stuff. And this is very easy to do in your dear W because if you've got, like, a whole chord sequence, you could say, Well, I'm gonna land on the first of every bar or just after the first be if you kind of thought about the kind of rhythmic and melodic written side of things you could then fill in the gaps in between. So so no great idea. But you see it. What we can start doing is planning stuff. So, working from a kind of harmonic standpoint and then getting more more granular in terms of the details on, then you could just do simple ornamentation. If you have a simple melody that goes, you could go on. Then it gets a bit more jazzy if you start bringing those diatonic things and have that swing, so the final little idea to think about would be the defining patterns of your piece. Often this comes from the cords or what we know as ostinato, which is kind of a repeating rhythm, often accompaniment. You've got something like It's the if the eyes, the thing that's kind of creating. And then you move that to other chords and then you want to think about OK, well, OK, say the verses got that kind of ostinato patterns, feeling that's going on, and I'm putting that pattern of ostinato through the different chords. Then when you get to the chorus or make the bridge or a section where you want to really make it lift or feel different. You change that ostinato so you so there's less kind of repetition. Remember, there's all these layers underneath music that kind of. We want to be aware of what's happening for the listener on that they're getting enough variety as well as enough kind of familiarity, depending on your style in your job. So with the verse, you might be kind of like on when you get to the chorus and you might be just, like, completely changed the ostinato. And then you go back to the verse and you're going that sort of thing slightly cheesy. Example that, But I think hopefully you get what I mean. And this can happen with much more interesting. Ostinato is kind of our paginated stuff or more jazzy. Got awfully sort of think anything, any genre, all of this stuff applies. So have some fun with that. Hopefully, it's kind of open your mind a little bit what you could be doing and just be really creative. Think of all the elements of music rhythm you got, Melody voicing is the kind of primary ones. But they're all these other things that can create patterns as well and just generating these little rules for yourself. I'll see you guys in the next video. 84. Problem Solving: So the last two videos have been about getting you really course strategies to be able to sold these problems. When they come up on when I say problems, I mean, as in moments where you don't know what to do next or don't know how to progress or what to do with that or that doesn't sound good. Or how do I even come up with material in the first place? And I want you to distinguish that material so that technique from genuine inspiration say you wake up in the morning and you know exactly what you want to write. You heard it in a dream or you listen to music and you know what you want to do. Kind of similar to that. Then that's fine. You go ahead. But 10 minutes later, an hour later, the next day you might be like, Okay, what do I do next? I'm stuck now. I don't know how to progress from what I've done. Then you go into your kind of lab and you kind of take all the things that we looked at in the last two videos, and problem solved. You say you have to define the problem. What is it that I can't do right now? You can't just sit there and go. This sounds rubbish again today because you'll kill yourself. It's horrible. It feels really, really bad because you sat there going. I'm a rubbish composer. I'm a rubbish producer. I don't know what I'm doing. Actually, just that's all junk. You need to go. What is the problem right now? I need to create a melody line. That's more interesting because this one just follows only the court tents or my baseline is following any because tents or my chords only land on the first beat of the bar. So I need to change my harmonic rhythm. All these other things you have to define the problem. So in this video, I'm gonna give you, for example, problems really, really classic problems that composers and producers come to me with lessons they say, kind of Okay, I have court. How do I add a baseline? That's the classic one. We'll look at that. First I have melody Haddaway chords. That's a really, really important one. I have courts, Haditha, mentally melody, and we kind of looked at these. We've looked at things that would help you to do this, but I wanted to make a chapter or an episode that was really, really tired to these particular issues. And that is one more Have a baseline, Hattaway at court. So let's look at those in terms of the 1st 1 I have cords had away at a baseline. We kind of looked at this in the baseline chapter, right? Way take, like, say, are cord is a B minus seven chord. You could use this idea of the walking bass buildup for the cord turn buildup. Those core turns gonna work really well in the baseline. So you kind of say Okay, Well, those Michael turns, I'm gonna work. But what's my pattern on? What's my rhythm? Okay, well, I'm gonna take a pattern, which would be like, uh, that pattern, right. So you could be like on. Then the next court would be, let's, say, an E minus seven chord, and then maybe the next court B B seven. And then you kind of, like, break your rules as well. So we took this pan on. We were thinking about the court tens, and then we moved on to another court thought about their school tends to happen. And then we moved to this court way broke the rules at the end. They admit kind of round it off. That's one example of a baseline, but you could take any kind of pattern. That's genre specific, because that was kind of a bit Boston over a jazzy, quite quirky, so that defines a certain genre. But you need to listen to the bass lines that you're interested in and think about what patterns and rhythms to find them and then sort of transmute that or internalize that and then create that in your music. So that's I have cords hardwired baseline. Fairly straightforward. We covered those ideas before. It's about thinking about the harmony, thinking about patterns, passing those things like that. Number two is I have a melody. How do I add cords? And we haven't looked at this one so much. What we've done is we've done it the other way around. We thought that cords and defining melody, but all you really need to do is reduce that. Reverse that process right? Right back at the beginning of this course, we looked at sort of diatonic chords in a key and then creating an interesting melody. If you just reverse engineer, it should make sense. But I'll take you through It is an example. Seeing my melody, I'm just gonna make this up, You know, I'm gonna do here is something like that, right? So you have to think essentially what this melody is describing what harmony this melody is describing. And you can look at it first most traditionally, right, Which we're gonna do, and then you can start abstracting from it and thinking, Well, what other courts could I did. So there, that melody. Immediately, as I started playing it, I realized what I was doing was I was outlining a on e minor chord in second inversion right on, then in the back of my mind as well. And this will come the more you study cords and stuff like that, I can see that that is called five in some ways, right? So you could go right. But that sounds quite standard. So what else could we do? Well, okay, let's try instead of e minor. Let's try doing Not that one. That sounds rubbish. That sounds a bit more interesting. So what? They're got there is a G seven chord which still works, right? If you think about these court tens and the key that you might be in, we might be in G. Don't. We might be in C major here. We might be an e minor here. We could be in a number of areas, but it's sort of thinking about always options on these air. A bit dissonant. But remember, if you're moving through these court ends quite quickly, it will be okay. That could work as well. So I've got a G seven chord moving down a semi turn to an F sharp seventh chord. That would be another way of doing it right. And you just expand this over and over again. Thinking about my melody goes like this. Uh, Okay, well, that could be a number of things. We've got those five notes. What cords could accompany those five. Next, what? Most obviously d major. That's what I was thinking about when I played the melody. But it could also be f minor. That would sound okay. And then you could start experiment with some other ones more interesting ones like and then some really interesting ones. Perhaps a C major one where you get this? No. Interfering a little bit on another way of thinking about melodies is trying out these options, right? You know, I think we did a video quite a while ago in this court's where we harmonized one note with different chords. Kind of create a different context for that one. No. Think of this now with your melodies instead. So you've got you just keep playing that portion of the melody and trying to work out what chords going on, What could go underneath it. So here you go. That works. That looks well, that doesn't like that one. Okay, fine. We won't do that one. Let's try this one. That works. You're trying all these options, then you think. OK, well, which one of those two way, Like In which one? If we're moving from, say, a melody with a cord underneath it had G major, you could say, Well, try that 10 I try This one. I prefer that one. So it's an iterated process here where we're thinking, Okay, I have these cords. Those work well together, then what's the next morning to be trying out over that part of the melody on this one. Okay, so now got three chords for courts. So it does take time. There's a lot of planning in this, but this is what the R in the craft of composing is. It's thinking about these modular bits that fit together. So next we have courts had aware create melody. This should be fairly obvious to buy Now. Essentially, it's creating thinking about the court turns that are going on here and using the principles that we had in the last two videos to create patents over the top of those courts. Fairly straight forward. I'm sure you already guessed that on baseline. If you have a baseline, how do you add courts Very similar to what a melody is doing in the in the sense that if you were listening to a melody and you're trying to work out what the cords you're thinking ? OK, what is that melody pointing to what chords or harmony on What you can do is you can do the similar process that we just did there with the melon. You can have a say, a baseline that's going you could be like, Well, okay, I'll try this court. That's okay. Let's try another one. Maybe less. Good. Let's try this one. Um uh and you're thinking about the cool tens that this might be implying and working out what court tones or cords that could work with that one. So hopefully that's, um, useful for examples of kind of key moments in compositions where you run across an issue where you go, How does this work? What about the next but problem solved every time you think I don't know what to do next, think define what's going on as the problem and then use all the material that we've looked at so far on your framework of theory to basically provide yourself with the solution. 85. Introduction to Harmonic Rhythm: harmonic rhythm is one of the most neglected tools in most composers. Skill sets. It's the structure off harmony as it relates to rhythm. Let's think off this in four for because it's most simple. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw a grid showing the four beats of the bar across four bars. Most chord progressions tend to fill up one bar at a time, so each lasting four beats. And if you troll through hook theory and look at the structures of many, many different songs and even compositions film music, anything like that, what you'll realize is that a huge amount of harmonic rhythm follows this pattern, and it's what we're most used to. But you have other options, and the way to think about these other options is in terms of subdivisions. So divisions means thinking about how many other rhythms you have within the bar in which to place your courts. So, for example, you could do to cords per bar, and you could also do four chords per bar, which would mean that each chord lasted one beat on. Of course, you could go even faster, but that's pretty unusual to get harmonic rhythms that are that first putting together different combinations of these options can allow us to create really interesting and fresh harmonic rhythms. Here's some examples. - Harmonic rhythm can also give the sense of speeding up a piece and making it more exciting without changing the tempo. Let's have a look at this example. Bear in mind that the harmonic rhythm is only one component that goes into a track. You can actually keep the cord the same throughout the piece and maybe change it a little bit later on. In fact, this is one of the best options. Often in tracks is too. Keep Accord long for a long time and then introduce greater variety in your harmonic rhythm . It creates an undercurrent that most people are unconscious off and really goes together in enhancing your composition. So here's a quick, simple sketch example of a track which basically keeps the same cord all the way through. But the arrangement hopefully does justice enough to it so that actually we don't mind too much. We have just a court of F major, a fundamental court of F major going through the whole off this sketch, which is one minute long on Day three. The one thing to say, though, is that when we get to this second section here, the court does change ever so slightly. But it's still based around F. Major. We just have a few suspensions going on. If I zoom in here, you can see what's going on here. So let's have a little listen to this track, which is basically based around F major on the point about of me showing you all this is that if you have a static cord going on the tracks kind of reasonably exciting. But then when you start changing a few things underneath with the harmonic rhythm, it really, really changes the quality of the track so static chords and then changing underlying harmonic rhythm. 86. Passing chords & Reharmonisation: playing around with harmonic rhythm requires that you come up with more chords than you originally have in your structure. So if you plan out your cords bar by bar, so one called one court one cords. It's quite simple, and you want to make it more interesting. You need to think about how to insert cords and what one's work. Well, one of the things that you can think about asides from just thinking of other chords inside of a key is passing chords. Unless this particular area slightly more advanced harmony on piano playing that we're gonna look at now. Now, this is absolutely not an exhaustive video, because it's a lot of this is to do with jazz and advanced harmony, which this course only sort of briefly covers. But if you want to get into more of that, there's plenty of stuff online. I'll be doing a course on kind of real advanced jazz piano practice at some point in the future, so check back when you to me your message me if you're interested. But I'm gonna go over four things. We're gonna go over chromatic passing chords, secondary dominance to five ones and then the back door progression always to kind of enhance and make your harmonic rhythm a little bit more faster or interesting where you can insert courts. So let's look at the 1st 1 which is chromatic passing courts. We're gonna take our cord, uh, progression, which is just gonna be a B minor chord, a minor chord and then a d chord. So we're kind of going three to my in the cave, major. Okay, so the 1st 1 would be a chromatic passing chord, and that is either approaching from 1/2 step above one step half step below the court that you're about to play. So for example, Ugo, let's try that again. And you add in kind of this falling down motion, it starts to sound really jazzy. Obviously, I'm playing seven accordance of that. But you could do it tragically as well. You could go. Let's try this. Concerned about interesting wasn't best voicings that I did that, but you get the idea. So that's from the half step, Bob. You can do it from the half step below, right? So we start with being minor chord, but we're gonna go up from a B flat minor chord. So that's chromatic passing courts. The next one is secondary dominant chords, right? We've looked at this before, and you just need to refer back to the idea of the Circle of Fifths. But these are true. Secondly, dominant chords. What we kind of looked at, I think before was basically staying within a key and thinking What's 1/5 away? So when, with diatonic secondary dominance in G Major was make it even easier. Let stand C major. I've got only play whiteness because we're in C major. If I'm going from a Court five called one, we have to think around second Cliffs and think, What's five to G five g S. D. So we dio that gives us a five relationship to the five. So it's called secondary dominance. But if we're to make them true secondary dominance, secondly, dominance or all done dominance have to be dominant. Seventh chords, right? Or at least a major. So Ugo like that, And if you to do another dominant to that, you move. What's the fifth off D? Well, it's gonna be a seven. There's a second retirement, so if we do it without progression, which is 3 to 5 on we give a second re dominant to each of those the dominant of B it's gonna be Oh, sorry is gonna be f Andi dominant is gonna be Oh, dominant Dean. That makes sense. So we are still playing these three chords. Each of them in front of it gets its own. Secondly, dominant. So let's have a look at that now. So the next idea is to 51 So we do a to 51 You've seen that before, obviously. And see Major, to be called to Court five called one. But here for your court structure, which is what we're doing is we're having a to 51 in front of everyone of those courts. So we think what's called to be minor Well, let's say it's this. Yes, So there we've got C sharp, diminished f seventh mind. So we get this really nice progression if we do that only to the courts. It sounds like this. And we've suddenly got this a lot more interesting or kind of full progression. Weaken speed up or slow down the harmonic rhythm with those extra courts that we've inserted. So finally, a similar idea to the 251 is something called the Backdoor Progression. It uses two chords to lead into the final chord. Except it uses Caught four, then flat seven and then one. Let me go over how that works in C major. Okay, we're in C major. Instead of going to 51 we go to four. And really importantly here. It's not the natural kind of major, for it's always a minor for right. So we got called for and then the flat seven. Remember, the seventh is this. And if we go down one semi tone that gets us to the flat seven. So wait And you probably heard this sound before. Have a listen, that sound. This is what I love about harmony has. Except before it's like, soon as he learned these things, yeah, that's where I hear that thing. And next time you hear it, you're like, Wait, that's the backdoor progression. If you kind of learn, it's a little bit. So if we're to apply that to this probably kind of mess this up, let's give it a go. So we've got this court, this court, Miss Gordon. Each of them needs a backdoor progression before it. So we're gonna go and all of those court for words need to be minus. So it's gonna be What's it gonna be? It's gonna be this, Uh, that's the back door progression. So some ideas there to help you kind of extend your harmony using passing courts and re harmonization. But it's a vast topic on this is just scratching the surface. 87. Reharmonisation Assignment: so another suggested assignment for you guys. Take the principles we've looked at in the last two chapters, which are about harmonic rhythm, Andi, structure of harmony and then also the passing chords in the last video on re harmonized a piece that you've written or a piece that you know so that it sounds a lot more interesting . Change the harmonic rhythm and adding these passing chords, That's it and I'll see you guys in the next chapter. 88. Melodic Rhythm: like harmonic rhythm, melodic rhythm can go to the back of our mind a little bit as a composer on DWI. Just create melodies that sort of come to us. But actually unpacking where the rhythmic placement of our melodies goes and how it works against the back drop off the time signature is quite an important thing to do. So let's dive into what melodic rhythm means and how you should think about it. Let's look at simple time signature that you're probably almost certainly aware off for four in any time signature. We have strong and weak beats. The beat that starts every single bar is always considered the strong beat or the strongest beat. And depending on the time signature, you may have other strong beats inside of that. So, for example, beat one is strong. Beat, too, is weak. Beat three is stronger beat for his week, and then we get back to beat one again. Let's look at 34 in 34 Generally speaking, we consider beat one a strong on B two and three as weak in 68 We have a strong beat of the start of every bar, obviously, and then halfway through. We have a slightly strong beat as well, and in between the weaker ones, with time signatures like 54 you condone decide where the stronger beat is sometimes. So, for example, we could have this stronger beat in the middle here on beat 41234512345 Or we could place it on the third beat 1234512345 Let's go back to 44 now, Andi, think about our melody creation against this most common backdrop of the time. Signature, an example of a melody that doesn't employ any kind of interesting melodic rhythm would be something perhaps like this, where we start at the beginning of every single bar, emphasize only the strong beats and only really played crotch. It's with a few cuevas that don't add that much Syncopation. What I'd like to inspire you to do and think about in this short video is to think about expanding your horizons when it comes to melodic rhythm. For example, in 44 we don't only just have the strong and weak beats of the bar to start and end our rhythms on. We have all of the subdivisions as well. For example, here I've shown in gray the quay vers inside of each beat and we could start our melodies on those subdivisions and also referenced them inside of our melody. Given greater Syncopation and interest. Take this melody, for example, which definitely doesn't follow the straightforward beginning on the first beat of the bar pattern we saw just a second ago. Once this is somewhat jazz related genre example, this kind of technique off expanding your melodic rhythm is relevant, really to all genres. So I encourage you to explore this in your writing. Think about beginning on another beat of the bar and ending on another beat of the bar to that that you usually do and also referenced the subdivisions underneath and inside of the normal time signature that you're writing in 89. Phrasing & Space: so a concept around music that we haven't discussed yet. Something called phrasing and praising really relies on space. So when you talk, if someone's talking about this all the time, they're telling loads of interesting things about this and why did yesterday? But you're, like, kind of shut up a second. I want to just wait. I'm trying to understand the first thing that you said. I don't know whether you have had a lecture from someone like in university or school or whatever, and you just like, Shut up. Just do one thing at a time kind of in music, depending on the style of genre it is, you want either things that really, really fast. It's so exciting or super slowly or kind of like, really relaxed or kind of quite intense. You play around with this phrasing to kind of create different effects, and phrasing really relies on space, right? So if you say something like I do in these lectures, you let something land and then you say something so kind of music would be like, so that's kinda really relaxed phrasing there. But obviously, if you wanted to push the intensity a bit more something like that is less space, and it's moving faster. It's like if someone's really excited, so make sure that you play around and understand this in your compositions, particularly or melodies. But it's also to do with your voicings in your accompaniment on what's going on with those things. The idea of phrasing in space as it relates to tension and resolution. Here's a quick example off space in phrasing and this flugelhorn and flute part coming up right now, - so we have really spacious phrasing of the beginning, and there's a zoo. We moved towards this next final section, the phrasing gets a little busy and speeds up and prepares us ready for this final section . 90. Phrasing and Melodic Rhythm Assignment: so another quick video if you guys just a quick assignment if you choose to accept it. As with all of these things, these are just suggestions. They're not things to kind of required to complete the course. But I kind of want toe inspire and kind of make you think about how to apply these things. Because, I mean, say you sat down on this sort of weekend and watch the entire of this entirety of this course, you wouldn't really have mastered much of it. It would be a great overview, but you need to dive back into it again and actually give the piano and trial of this out on actually dio and compose and do all of this stuff. So when I suggest stuff, don't think of it like I'm nagging. But think of it is like suggestions for you to kind of toe actually start implementing these things. So the thing that I would say from the sort of last 3 to 4 videos that we've done all about this idea of melodic rhythm and phrasing is taken the principles that we've learned on right, a melody or piece of music which has a melody which for you is non standard. And when I say for you nonstandard, I mean not in the phrasing that you might normally dio. This is one of the things I've tried very much to do in this course is to bring all the elements of music that a usually unconscious in our writing to the surface so you can kind of look at them ago. Hang on. Do I like that? Or what is it about that artist that I like with that particular element? Music. Did they do that really well, What is it that they do that then goes into the whole greater picture so kind of push your skill, set him push your vocabulary by doing a kind of phrasing that's kind of different to something that you usually do. 91. Standard Accompaniment Patterns (with commentary): So one of the things I knew I wanted to do was to put a few standard of continental patterns down on video for you guys. This is really because it kind of will help you stimulate your mind in terms of how you put things together with courts. So we've looked at different ways of going through chords here. I'm going through block chords in the right hand. And then I do block chords in the left hand. Those the most obvious ones right on these actually sound quite nice was rebuilt in So some voice leading. They're simple triads, but they were quite straightforward. And this is the most standard way to kind of a company music way. We have the same idea in both hands, left hands, block chords on the right hand is blocked. Courts. Now we get into the realm of baselines are just have a baseline going on at the piano. I could just be your only accompaniment has absolutely fine. It does still help, but then you can bring in the block chords in your right hand with a baseline in your left on. Then you can enhance that baseline by turning it into octaves and giving a lot of weight in the sound. Then we can take that block chord shape and turn it into a kind of interesting pattern of alternating pattern. Left hand is just simple block chords of the right hands, giving a kind of interesting because if rhythmic now here we can bring in extra cords, which is a bit like re harmonizing. But it still follows the baselines primary cord. It's kind of maybe a suspension chord in the right. Now. This is an interesting rhythm. Both hands are kind of connected, very much so. It's called the kind of club rhythm it's used pop music Moment 2018. So this really plays into the piano's percussive power, where we've got no opted baseline. You've got this kind of repeating six, a pattern over the chords. See, I'm changing a little bit, essentially falling, trying. Next we have the same again on the left Hand is just for the small little grace notes, which kind of going very briefly before the way we've got a very rhythm in the left, which is what creates that really interesting you're comfortable is when you put these cross rhythms going on the baseline, kind of pushing out the rhythm of the right hand, which is quite standard. So this one's quite in depth baseline, at least rhythmically. Anyway, on these things. Quite get when you got them. You've got something that's just going on and on. It's the same thing in the right hand, but different kind of baselines in the right. So now we've got an interesting thing with a right hand. It's got kind of two chords in ostinato left hand's doing very simple, active thing with a few grace notes here and there on now, the left hand does kind of block chords or an alternating pattern, so you can see how we're layering up all these options between the two hands here and starting to make stuff that sounds kind of really quite in depth. So now we get into the world of AARP education, which is a really, really important one for you to kind of explore here. I'm just taking kind of simple chords and arpeggios, eating them in the right hand, and then we bring in the left hand. But it's just doing the bass notes of the chords is not appreciating yet on. Of course, we can do the left hand only with appreciation. Waken do both hands in octaves, the same notes but the O but appreciation. Congar. Beyond this here we now have both hands doing a slightly more independent thing. Whilst it moves up, they move up together kind of speaking to each other through one pattern. They're not playing the same thing. Uh, and we can take this, of course, further by turning in tow and then taking that idea of melodic right hand even further. And then I was our final example. We have a slightly jazz related kind of thing. It's a classic walking based on the left and blocked seventh chords in the right note that the right hand is doing a kind of Syncopation when it plays chords often not similar block court starting on the first day, hopeful that was useful. You guys I'll see in the next video 92. Standard Accompaniment Patterns (no commentary): 93. Musical Layers & Alignment: in this course. We've looked at the idea of tension and resolution as it relates to harmony and melody particularly. But now I want you to think about it in terms of structure where the alignment of different sections or different component parts of your composition creates a kind of resolution or safety in your composition and misalignment. Had a bit more interest intention if we take the most standard structure in the world a beginning, middle and ending typically, what we think off of defining these sections is the harmony. But bear in mind that we could have different elements changing a different points. And in fact, that's what's quite interesting in our compositions. To have, for example, the drums changing here, the baseline or guitar part changing here and then maybe a string part coming in just before the final section. All of these things go together to creating mawr depth, interest on kind of an organic feeling in our compositions that doesn't feel too blocky, like we've composed it using copy paste. Now we don't want to go the whole other way. We don't have everything completely misaligned because sometimes the composition doesn't feel totally connected to itself and all the parts might feel a bit separate. For example, if we had cords like this each defining their own section drums that changing in very different ways, and then a melody, which is changing at different points as well you could. I know this is a very kind of basic example. Here, have a diagram. I'm leaving most of it to your imagination, but you could say that this would be a bit unclear on a little bit rambling because nothing is necessarily matching up with each other. At the other end of the spectrum, we'd have something like this where everything is pretty much aligned with itself or with each other. The majority of kind of popular music is written this way, and also a hell of a lot of film music. It's not a bad thing at all. Complexity is not necessarily what we're after. What we're after is a balance of tension and resolution in this case, alignment and misalignment, and what you can do is you don't have to necessarily change the melody and the cords and the overall big structures that you see in front of you. Here you can have little nuances, like the melody coming in just a little bit after the start of the bar of the next section on, then the same here. And then maybe the melody for the final section starts a little bit early on, then leads you in to the main part of the final section. We could add a kind of supplementary element to the drums, where it's like a constant loop that goes throughout the piece, which kind of gives us a core sense of the groove whilst the drums underneath it free to change and do lots of different things rhythmically. To make it more interesting, we could drop out bits in the cords so that we have a sudden moment where there's no harmony and everything drops from beneath us. That's a common element. We could also add a higher Kordell part or perhaps a pedal note in the final section, and we could maybe push that further back so that that covers the moments where we've dropped out the cords. Also, before the final section, we could drop out some of the drums, so there's an even bigger gap. We could do this same thing before the second section so there's nothing there anymore and there's more of a jump into the second section. We could add even more drums underneath and something that kind of displaces the feeling that say We're in 44 For the majority of the peace, we could have a drum part that kind of has this sense of 34 going on over it, and we could apply that throughout the sections. At the end of this composition, we could add something like a counter melody, which was that looks aligned in this diagram here could very much not be aligned with the original melody itself. And then finally, if I cords were very standard were just simply changing every bar. You could mix that rhythm up and make the harmonic rhythm very different. All of these things go together to make something that was very aligned in the beginning to something that's a lot more interesting with a lot more overlaps on, perhaps a little bit of misalignment in places. So as you continue writing your compositions, I'd really invite you to think of all the parts of your composition, like I've drawn it here in layers and ask yourself, Do I want these layers toe a line or miss a line, and how do I want them to interact and support each other? 94. Musical Alignment Example: So to illustrate this idea of avoiding layers aligning, we're gonna take a fairly simple track that was heard at the beginning of this course from our wandering hands exercises and then also kind of re harmonization in two different keys . This track, when I player you'll notice, has a fairly straightforward harmonic rhythm. In fact, incredibly straightforward. We just change every bar that standard way. Let's have a listen to it again to remind ourselves and you get the idea. So we're going to do now is I'm gonna go in and recompose this with this idea in mind of making sure that the layers are a little bit more interesting. And don't line up all the time. And remember that these layers can be anything in your track. They could be absolutely anything. Don't limit yourself to thinking, Oh, it's just the harmony or just the drums or just the melody. There are so many other elements that can come in as hopefully you'll see in the later parts of this video. So Step one has been to actually address the drums, which were really, really contributing to the kind of static, straightforward feeling. So we've gone from what it was before, which is just this precept from logic. And I've added in my own thing which haven't titled properly. I'll just call it drums for the moment, which gives it, hopefully a bit more off beat sort of thing. Let's have a listen to those on their own, and at the moment, if we listen to it is the whole track. It doesn't add much, but hopefully once we start playing around with the other elements to do with alignment and offsetting, it really will make a bit of a difference. So I've gone ahead now and change the baseline because that was a major culprit in making everything feel quite static. Even though the base is not often consciously hurt by your listeners, it's very much unconsciously heard, and it's under everything, making everything kind of framing it quite a lot. So if you have a very repetitive bassline hitting the route notes on the first beat of the bar, you get quite a kind of boring feeling. So I've added in some Syncopation and made sure that my bass notes and not just taking root notes, but also implying inversions. In addition to that, I've also rewritten the guitar, which instead of following the sixth pattern that we looked at with the piano, which sounds like this. What I did was a completely different thing, which has a kind of syncopated opening where it comes in, not on the first. Beat the bar and it sounds like this now repeats. And when we get to the chorus bit, I've obviously written a new bass part here. Kept everything else the same on then change the guitar. That kind of rolling line in the guitar is very much offsetting the rhythm. You can see that kind of sometimes we're learning on one, and most of the time we're not on the top notes, so it gives a different phrasing over the top. So it's got this nice of interference pattern. Lastly, I added in two new instruments were doing, which is doing very much the same thing as the guitars here. Or rather, this one is doing very much the same thing of guitars and that it's kind of playing slightly syncopated things in the background to offset the 44 feeling. So let's have a listen to that on then we've got this new part coming in to add in a different element of the rhythm for this chorus bet, because we've changed the guitar part, we want something else in, and that also is a kind of new bit of rhythmic material. So I hope that was useful to you, giving you a small sense about how to kind of offset layers. It's not necessarily that we've got these regions doing things like this kind of wrapping around each other and offsetting like that. It's more that the phrasing and you're off beat nous and kind of the little little nuances of your parts kind of offset the 123412 feeling that could be very, very present in your planning stages of composition on Once you pass that planning stages of composition, what you want to do, you want to kind of abstract. You're writing from that point into something that's a lot more stylistic and interesting to the ear. 95. The Chord Progression Bible: So in case you hadn't noticed already, I'm obsessed with making things easier for you in the process of composing. So two things that I'm gonna give you up in the corner of the screen right now some resource is to download are basically a kind of a cord like a Bible, basically off kind of different chord progressions, not like how to create donot seventh and stuff like that. That's the later on or earlier on in the course I can remember at this point. This is kind of the most standard chord progressions laid out in a kind of kind of a grid. Basically, you could just have as a reference, that kind of got a draft version here, which I'll sort of make a lot neater for the course, which you can download. That, combined with a summary of our standard, a complimentary patterns as well. You have two things to be able to sit down with and do some momentum out of creativity with stop. Because of what I've done here, it's because it's about what you're gonna be able to do with just the simple patterns and expanding upon them. So, for example, you'd have on the right hand side of the left hand side, One of them and you'd say, like, standard progressions on the right and you find when you be like Okay, fine. So I'll choose the 564 So let's look at that. Okay. Right. I like that one on. Then let's look over here. So my voicings all my kind of a continental patterns. Well, let's do the alternating block one. So what's all right? Okay. What about right hand up educated. All right. So way of doing it all like the pop club rhythm on. Don't be afraid. Also to throw ins of infrastructures and other things and stuff like that s So this is all these things. Then you can start combining several. Great. Okay, fine. I've written my verbs, right. What's another chord progression? Let's look through here. Let's see what else works in the key or the scale I'm actually in. Let's try 1364 So we're going one. So you've got Maybe they're put put Klopp carve a plot pop club rhythm in the first bit, and then you go to the chorus and you're like, on. Then you can add in your kind of suspension corporate you can add in the passing cause that we don't hear serves a whole load of stuff. So basically not just with these things here the kind of chord Bible and then the standard of complimenting patterns. What I'd like you to do is just kind of scroll back up through the structure off this course or look at the index of this course, which you have right in the beginning. But you can download a pdf off Andi, think about all the elements that we covered and maybe even list them out for yourself so that you can think of them all those thes modular components that you can then have in front of you and go. This is my tool set. This is how I compose. I think of all these elements and I do things with them rather than sitting at your d a w and going, you know, and that is just the most painful way to compose a lot of the time. What you have to do is think about your skill set and all the different components. So download the core Bible and also the quick reference for the for the fundamental patterns. Have fun and think about your composing. Is this modular system that you can have loads of fun with? 96. What Scales go with What Chords?: So in this section of the course, we're gonna be going over advanced melodic and harmonic colors. Things that really, really start to kind of add in some real interest. But you can compose with everything we've done so far. You don't necessarily need this chapter. It's just kind of from or interest and clarification. Speaking of clarification, let's answer a question which often gets asked by composers and anyone trying to understand a little bit more about theory, which is what scales go with what chords. Now we've kind of come out a little bit, and I'm sure you've what you've become aware by now about the major minor components. But what about just from scratch? If you've got according you're trying to think, what scale could go with this? Well, we're gonna get into things like that in this chapter in the different options that you have. But the simplest thing that I want to introduce is this idea or tones past cord turns. Let me show you what I mean. So if we take any court like, let's take a C major, let's use upper structures. Let's take a C major seven chord were playing that we already know we have these core turns , right? But I want to introduce this idea, which is a tone above a court. So these are the extra notes that you add in. So we play the first court turned on. We go up one tone way, use that one. When we get to the next court, turn on. We got one tone. From that way. Get to the next court on we go at one time. From now on, then we get to the final court own way. Don't need to go out one court from one time from that because within back to the roots. So that gives us the scale of on those are really, really good notes to be working with. If we did that in, say, D major and this I kind of actually prefer from the major scale because the major scale has this. No, I don't really like that. So if you think of just court turns from the triad here and then going up tones from each one from that you get this really nice scale which is called a lydian scale. But don't worry about what that means just yet. We will go over modes later on in the course, let's look at a minor chord now C minor C minus seven. This'll wonderfully works exactly the same. Even though we're in a completely different style of court Minor. So called turns are these. What you do is you play this'll and you play this court turn, you go upto on you go to this court, earn you go up the tone on you got to this quarter and then we're back. So it works in exactly the same way. And you get this. You get this lovely Dorian sound, which is a type of mode will cover later on in the course. But you've created this kind of complex jazz scale just from thinking court turns plus a tone above each one. Let's plant it somewhere else that supply that on f sharp Minor And let's do it on the flat Minor Really, really useful. So that's kind of an introduction to Major and minor. It also works on some of the other courts as well. You have to experiment a little bit, and I won't go into it now because we'll be stuck too much on it. But that principle really, really will go far in a lot of your cords. And in the next few chapters or videos, what we're gonna be going over is a number of more exotic scales that go with the cords in your compositions. 97. The Blues Scale: So we've already looked at Pentatonic Scales, which create really soulful full melodies that very, very hard to not write a good melody with, if that makes sense, so the blue scale is based on the minor pentatonic. So let's remind ourselves, have a minor pentatonic wax. Let's start on D. We got a minor third on a tone on tone. Mind that that's the structure of the pentatonic scale that we've done so far. Now, the way that this kind of originated really the blue scale, you could say it like this is a very classic kind of school definition, but I kind of like it doesn't make kind of sense. Is that, you know, people were singing this and then they'd bend through that. No messing it. I won't sing for the sake of your kind of sanity, because I'm not the greatest thing. If you imagine bending up through that notes there, you'd hit this one, which is our sharp four flat five. And that's the blue note inside of the blue scale. So it's a minor pentatonic with a blue note, which is your shop. That's it in D minor. Let's dio finally e minor and It's really, really good as a scale to kind of incorporate that inside of your court. So instead of just going reminder, you can go on those blue notes inside of those scales. Slash chords really create some nice crunchiness. So that's the blue scale. One of things you can do at the end of it is due a semi tone just below the route. So let me show you that version. See you guys in the next video. 98. Harmonic & Melodic Minor Scale: So we've already looked at the minor scale in natural minor scale, which is kind of derived from the major skeletal East. That's the way that we approached it. That's a certain color. It gives a certain color, but there's another minus girl. In fact, there are a few months scales, but the one we're gonna look at the moment is the harmonic minor scales on, then the melodic Moscow, too. So the harmonic minor scale adapts just one of the notes from the natural minor scale to give a kind of a lot of attention and interest in its sound that can create some really interesting colors. So let's look at it at the piano we take a e minor, which is the relative minor of G. Major. We found this before on we just play the scale to remind ourselves how that works way Take the seventh No. 1234567 And instead of playing that that we know, we raise it by a semi time. We get a scale of sounds like this. I think it's a really, really lovely quality, actually, because instead of just the scale being all turns and semi tens. You've got this tiny little minor third up at the top between this C and this. The shop is a minor third, and it was a really interesting sound. No, particularly Western in some ways, but we use it, so that's the harmonic minor scales. Supply in a mine is a natural minor. Find the seventh note, which would be G raised by seven, weighed in D Minor Way found The Seventh Night, which is C raised by a semi tone. Let's have a look at the melodic minor now. Now Melodic Minor is a kind of a strange one because it's a scale that's different on the way up as it is on the way down. Let's try that now in e minor. That's the natural minor. We take note Number six, a note number seven, and we raised them both by semi time. Way Get this sound, But then all the way back down, we put them back down to the natural for experiment with those two minor scales, and I'll see you guys in Expedia 99. The Scale Omnibus: So this whole chapters really been about extending your color palette on one thing that will absolutely, massively and hugely extend your color palette is diving into the scale. Omnibus by Francesco Bolena. It's an amazing, amazing guide and resource toe have on hand to explore different scales. And if we just dive into it now, if I just scroll down a little bit, you'll see that there are just so many scales, each one with its own character and unique kind of feeling. So I'm just gonna go through three of them that you see here first. Let's start with the Lydian augmented. So when you open up each entry page right up at the top, we have the stave, which shows you how it's written in music. If you don't read music, don't worry about it too much. You can think about the numbers that we have here. Route major 2nd 3rd shot for shot five. Or we can look down here and we can look at the intervals. So we have the interval between the first note in the second as two semi tones, then two more than two more than two more than one. Then two then one, and you can think a little bit about the cords that would work well underneath it. These air some that kind of get you going here and they're relating to it when it's expressed in CIA's The Root and underneath that you see all these different scales. Basically, that's this structure, but starting one every note of the critic scale. So here it's the Lydian, or rented scale, starting on C. Then it's on D Flat, then D an E flat. So this gets a really nice color. Let's have a listen. So next we have this one, which I don't quite know how to pronounce. But it's a rocker, so really, really interesting quality here. We've got sort of minor seconds going on, and then a mind third and then turns to really, really create a really nice sound. That's definitely no Western on with many of these scales from great, incredibly different characters with so something that's quite fast and exciting or something that's a lot more atmospheric way, they lend themselves to a lot of situations, and then our final example would be the gypsy minor. So get going with scale on of us. A free resource, which you can find by Googling it or going to Saks a pd a dot com on many thanks to Francesco Molina for creating this for free for everyone. 100. Paired Pentatonics: if you're like me and you really like the pentatonic scale, you're gonna love paired Pentatonix, but it's a little tricky to get your head wrapped around it. So we're gonna go over in a presentation and then at the piano, hopefully to help you master this really lovely sound. Let's look first at major pentatonic pairs. We know that if we take a major scale and we filter out notes 1235 and six, that gives us the major pentatonic scale and obviously say a C major pentatonic scale would work over the key of C. Let's talk about the upper pairs. Now if we go back to the circle of Fifths that you know, we can start at sea, our cord or key that we're currently on and go up five notes not gets us to G. So what we can then do is play the G major pentatonic scale that will work over the C major chord or key. And that's what it looks like. Theoretically, let's keep going. Going up another fifth from that G 12345 gets us to D on. We can play the D major pentatonic scale that will also work over C. Major, and that's what it looks like. Theoretically. Next, we can go up another fifth on that text. A. So the a major pentatonic also works over the C major court key any further, unless and stuff starts to sound a little bit weird. So we'll stop now and look at them all together. That's what they look like side by side. But if we take the first column here and we're line all of the notes or rather all of the seas together in that column, it looked like this. You see that there's a lot of overlapping note. In other words, there's a lot of shared notes between the keys. Here's a shared section. The DEA's of those keys are shared. Then all of these easa shared these F sharps thes G's all of these days and then these bees here, so the keys have a lot of similarities to them. This is why, when you're playing, say, the G major pentatonic scale over a court of C major or the D major pentatonic scale over that same C major chord, there's a lot of affinity with that scale or the home key of C Major, and yet it gives it a different sound in a different flavor. Let's look now at minor Pentatonix, and we'll start with an A minor pentatonic. Let's go back to the circle of Fifths and started a here. We go up four notes this time, not 1/5 of fourth that gets us to D, and you can also think of this is going Andy clockwise around the circle of fifths. For example, if we take this a here and we g o anti clockwise one step, it takes us to D so we can play the D pentatonic scale. But here's where it gets a little bit interesting and slightly confusing. I'm afraid we have a home key of a minor or a minor pentatonic central key. When we play the D pentatonic over the top of that, a minor central key. It's a D major pentatonic, so the D major pentatonic also works over the A minor chord, or key. Really be aware that it's the major form over the minor that works. That's what it looks like. Theoretically, let's keep going. If we go up 1/4 from deep anti clockwise around the circle of fifths That gets us the G. And if we play the G major pentatonic over the a minor chord, it will work as well. That's what it looks like, theoretically. Finally, if we go up one more forth from G, that will take us to see. And if we play the C major pentatonic over the a minor chord, it will work. This is what they all look like side by side. Now this has been a little bit complex. I know you might need to watch this video again, but let's look at the piano now. So let's have a look at that piano. Let's take the F major pencil neck scale So way do is we go up 1/5 to see, and then we play the C major pentatonic scale. 1/5 from C would then be the G. So let's do that one on. Then let's go up from that one. Which B. D. This is where it starts to sound a bit more out there. That's about as far as I can go before I can start really noticing kind of a real It's like dissonance. So let's go to this one. Sometimes it works, though, if you've got good phrasing, right? And let's go one more just for the sake of this tutorial up 1/5 from a T o d. On That raises working too far out, but we get back to beginning. We have that pentatonic sound, which is way can apply that with at least three kind of extension. So let's do that now. - It's really, really interesting colors that coming in there with our major pencil necks. Let's look at the minor now. Ondas. It's slightly different this one. Let's do it in demon So D minor pentatonic scale. Let's then go up 1/4 takes us to G and now play the major pentatonic scale. This one's slightly different. If you remember, you can move that between the two scales there I was kind of thinking g and then, uh, move between them both as well. And half of this is actually for your brain to think of things rather than necessarily something that will be directly heard immediately and obvious lead by the by the listener. So once we've got up the fourth week of another fourth and we play that major pentatonic scale, so it will be see on one more fourth BF on one more fourth would be And this is where stuff starts. They're gonna come on down a bit, as we found with the major skill there. If we go out one more, it would be e flat if we play that eyes sound. So we kind of extended this rule a little too much. But as you see with pair Pentatonix, you can keep on enjoying the pentatonic scale in the feeling that it gives with extra colors without becoming monotonous over just simply one chord. 101. Modes: you're quite used to the idea now off taking a major scale and going down to the relative minor. So going to the sixth degree of the scale and playing that as the root? No. But what if we chose other notes of the scale and treated those as our route notes? What would happen then? Well, this is what modes are. Let's zoom out a bit and take a major scale that goes past the octave. So we've got the first octave of the major scale and then continuing on up the major scale . Let's keep that they're on. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw a duplication of that same major scale underneath in yellow. You see that with one or the first note of the scale were lined up on the two and the three etcetera, etcetera Keep an eye on both of thes because as we create modes, these won't align anymore. The first mode of the major scale I The major scale is called Ionian. Try and bear that in mind that whenever I say I only in that means the major scale. But what happens if we move everything up and start on the second degree of the major scale and treat that as our root note. Now we have the one off this new scale, aligning with the two in the original major scale, the structure of semi tones and tones. Is this still the same as the major scale? But we're starting at a different point. This is called a mode, and this particular one is called Dorian. Let's keep going and look at the other ones. If we move it up again, we get the fridge Ian Mode, which starts on the third degree of the major scale. The Lydian mode, which starts on the fourth degree of the major scale mix, led in Alien. And it's worth remembering that Alien is exactly the same as the minus Cal because it's the sixth degree of the scale, the major scale. If we go back to this image again here, we've got C here, and if we go down to seven and then down to six, we get to A which is our relative minor, otherwise known as Area. The last one, then is La Crean, and that begins on the seventh degree of the scale, and we'll play these at the piano in a second so that you can get a bit more of a practical sense of it. The other thing to remember as you play around with these modes is that modes actors, keys as well as scales so that you can play chords on them and do pretty much anything that you did with major or minor scales previously. So, for example, if we took the Lydian Scale and we played Accord on Degree one, we could also play one on degree 23 etcetera, etcetera. And these will work. They'll sound different to the major scale, but they'll work in the same function. So let's look at those modes now at the piano. Let's treat our Ionian as F. So we have our major scale is the I own. Let's get to our second degree, this girl, which will give us our Dorian's. We start on G treat that is all right, so that's G Dorian. We've come across that before, but never quite so clearly as we're explaining it. Now let's do that when our union is now G major or G, I should say really thought this is G I. Anya, let's go to the second degree of that scale and treated is the room. One of the things that you should experiment with these modes is actually treating. The whole composition is based in a mode or the gravity is in a mode. So here we could say this called one. This is called 234567 So we're kind of going that chord progression they're 1414 is the same as Mad World Peace that we've looked at so far. But in a normal minor scale, you wouldn't have caught one and called for being those courts caught one and court for would always be minor if this makes sense. So the whole the whole really powerful thing about mode is that it creates this different structure and different center of gravity that it's very different to the other Ionian or the alien. So, Dorian, let's move on to Freedy in which is built on the third degree of the scale back in the way to the degree Freedia. Let's have a listen to that, uh, that scale frigid has a really interesting quality, and each one of them has their own character. This one is created from this root note to the second, which is a cemetery on having that so close to our center of gravity gives us a lot of attention a bit like when we did the harmonic minor scale. That semi tone right at the end of it gives it a lot of attention. This time is now right at the beginning of it Really, really interesting sound that moving on, we're on to the fourth degree of the scale or otherwise known as the Lydian, and this is one of my favorite ones. What I love about this one is that it's got a major sound. Fourth degree 123 is an organ vented four very, very floaty sound. It's often used by phone composers in some kind of like otherworldly, dreamlike state used by Thomas Newman in America. Really, really beautiful one. Moving on swiftly, Let's go to the mixer Lydian. This is often used as a blue scale because we got this very much sits well with the dominant seventh chord. So let's start Major, probably playing around way. Start in the fifth degree. 12345 When we get through the same scale way have is our 7th 1 to 7 is a minus seven now, so we have a major quality of the bottom, an a minus seven quality atop, which gives us a dominant feeling. That's a mixture Lydian scale. Next we get to our really are a only in scale, which we know already. We've been doing that for a long time now. This is basically when, right back beginning this course when I said go down to notes in the scale. We didn't name this as a mode, but that's exactly what we're doing. We're playing a mode off The major, essentially is the sixth graders, Carol, but I explained it first in the beginning by going down to de alien or otherwise known as your natural minor. That's what you've been doing in a Finally, we get to the seventh degree of the scale, which is the lot Korean, and it has a very tense, diminished sound. So there's a all the modes there for you to play around with and have some fun that with that in your compositions, treat these modes as actually new centers of gravity where you treat the root of that mode as called one and think about how that impacts your chords within a key. Diatonic Lee speaking, and I'll see you in the next video. 102. Introduction to Chord Relationships: so called relationships are super powerful things. When it comes to harmony, they can give you a flavor that's really not necessarily present in your standard major minor scales. It pushes you outside of a key in ways that really, really create a character. Let's have a look at them. This is particularly useful for film composers because you kind of create the sounds that you've heard many times before in films like these tropes that a used by film composers. Let's start with a simple one here, Let's take a major court. See Major right on. Let's move it up a semi toe right now. That relationship between those two courts doesn't exist inside of one major scale of one minor scale. But it creates a certain sound you know, has maybe sort of, uh, like, I don't know, a feeling of hot desert. That's what that's what comes to me. Oh, I guess is used a lot in Spanish. You take this one thing that really powerful sound. So the relationship between those two men recorded major court, followed by another major chord, and they are a semi tone apart. So that is the cord relationship and describe it by three parts, the cord space between them and the direction that you move in, in which case it was up here and in the final court. Let's look at another one, which is both major chords on either side and a tone in between. So we have that same seem a way that sound is quite a bright sound because you don't often get that in scales. You just keep going on that relationship. It's a very, very bright sound. It's quite quite hard to use sometimes without sounding a bit strange. I've heard at the beginning of audio books and stuff that super cheesy, But you can make it work right, and we'll see it in a minute. Actually, in them, like Howard Shore, a famous piece that you'll know. Probably so. But But it's used. It's not necessarily used to film music like there's a Jacob Collier transcription, which started a while ago, which goes, like, kind of jazzy. It pushes things out and you're moving outside of key, so that's the tone one. Let's try a tryto, which is a shop for a flat five interval. Remember these intervals between these courts? Let's say that seemed same. C Major chord on a try. Turn away would be that shop. So we're playing major corner major. Let's try that again. Very, very powerful film it kind of thing that you heard, like adding lots and lots of interest Intention. So if you have your cords underneath doing this stuff, it really, really creates a great character. Let's try this one. So this is the famous one. So if we play to major courts, which are a minor third apart, so it's a minor third above sea way, get a sound that you probably heard before. Best of the rings. How it short on then that Final Three Cause there those are moving up in turns, right? So we've got to court relationships going on, and we've got this court relationship with Major. They're all made accords such a bold sound, right? That's a minor third apart, those two medicals and then we dio tone step up feeling that we have a second ago. So there was a rule major court right? But you can then do it with minor courts, inaccurate, different character. So let's take, for example, a minor court, followed by another minor chord that are minor, third apart. So let's start with C minor. So then we're gonna go to E flat, make that minor chord. Isa really kind of like eerie feeling. And Harry Culture uses this quite a lot of school for that. Then why don't we try going up a major third from that? So we've got two minor chords, but they are a major for the parts that make above sea is E. So we make that that's often used them. Kind of like, Yes, I'm thinking of Scooby Doo and I listen to this, That kind of walking up to the haunted house or feeling the's, well, cliches that I'm talking about here. But actually you can use it well, right? And I'm kind of doing flurries of stuff, so it sounds funny, but basically those cords can create a huge amount of character into compositions. And, of course, they don't necessarily need to be, As I said in the filmic genre is just what I must associate it with because you're you're trying to deliberately create a failing and film music. You can use it, for example, in neo soul, right? You could be like, ooh, that's a minor second right or a serious semi tones to mine courts, moving a 7 10 apart that's used the lawyer jazz. Or you could say, Right, we're gonna do that same idea. But a minor third party going like that was a minor part between the 1st 2/4 then won t o. And you can just keep going up in turns that that was minor chords in terms, tons of characters of sounds in here and combined with intervals. As we'll see in a later video, it can create some really interesting harmony and melody to create some beautiful compositions to play around with court relationships in your compositions. 103. Chord Relationship & Arpeggiation Assignment: so you've got a lot in your skill set. Now let's take something we did a while ago. It was appreciation and combine it with court relationships. So take some courts, move them to different places via those court relationships. Say, for example, we're taking major chords of moving, moving them around in minor thirds way flat workshop and then say, If we wanted to go up like a tone then so you don't have to just use that one called relationship all the time. You might then realize that you want to use that tone. Relationships were using two types of relationships on all major chords, so that sound gives you really, really interesting. Think and then basically draw. Create a line of the top one long line that flows inside of those courts. So you'll have to think carefully about the court 10. So, for example, if I just played in the C major scale over all of that really wouldn't work, it isn't work, right? So I need to think about the scale off the court that I'm currently on, so here would be a C may just be oh a B c D flat major scale in here would be a G flat major scale. They may just scale and be may just see what I mean that you can come up some really interesting lines that really don't sound diatonic because they're not doctor. So create interesting composition and come back for the next video where I'll show you a quick example. 104. Chord Relationship & Arpeggiation Example: Okay, so here's a quick example. I'll build this up slowly, so it kind of makes sense if you haven't done your so I'm gonna take major courts, right? Let's take Let's start on a flat, major. Right. I'm going to start appreciating them now. We could just start appreciating these will actually start with court. So we've got a flat. Let's move down a major third to E s, we go a flat down to me, and then we're gonna go down a minor third. So we got a major court major chord, major chord, and then we're gonna go up perfect fourth to f Sharp. Make mine. So I'm really not thinking necessarily about what key were in here. It's really important to make that point that it's more about individual moments with each of these cords way. See which one works. Well, so if I was just our Padgett, there's okay, right? If you had something callous over the top like maybe that was the compliment, it would be fine for accompaniment. Right? But the thing is, that's really important to realize is that if you want to write for kind of this to be the main foreground of the sound. Then you need to do something a little bit more interesting, potentially with your our appreciation. So one of the figures that I quite like to use often his way used the 1/5 of the chord root . 3rd 5 and you go up to the augmented fifth. So you get that kind of spacey sound really, really lovely. So if you bring that into your figure, right, if we play this in C major, it would look like this. So if you wanted to play along with their start in C major routes 3rd 5th Shop, 5/5 3rd great on that inside of a flat major goes like this Really, really lovely centers got upward and downward movement so appreciation. It doesn't sound like it's an exercise, but it's actually a composition, right? So let's move that through all the courts. And then, of course, you've got this last line accord, which we don't have to do the same appreciation way back, So that's already sounding pretty good, right? But let's add a line over the top to make this kind of a full peace, right? So what I'll do is I'll record that over the top so that you can see both of them going on at the same time, 105. Writing Themes: So this is an assignment for film composers or anyone really writing thematic material for games or anything that's telling a story is to use chord relationships and also the idea of intervals that we've looked at to create unique kind of characters inside of your music. Let me show you what I mean. If we take, say, a minor scale like F sharp minor, that's the harmonic minor. If we play around with intervals like the sick one sentence large intervals that will create a certain character on its own inside of that scale already. So just working out melody that I'm just kind of playing different. Let's with some ideas, and that's quite their broad. They're large. They're kind of reaching up, stretching kind of. But they're also quite mysterious because it's in a minor key, so that's already giving us some characters right? We could have played around with smaller intervals. Let's combine that with the good relationship of two minor chords, a major third apart, so that would sound like this. Okay, so we still got those intervals in mind as we're playing on top of the courts, and we got called relationships. Some ideas in There definitely is absolutely some ideas in there that we could run with. We could start exploring on. All I've done is I've decided to keep called relationship with some intervals that I know probably go into the kind of more minor, mysterious round. So really, really prevalent form composes here, Let's say the officer end of the spectrum, something that's more akin to like Howard. Sure, Lord of the Rings can really that sound that we looked at with those chord relationships and let's take something like seconds and thirds the more wholesome in intervals and see what we can make with that. So I'm gonna take the chord relationships off, moving up in tones with major courts. So if I started on C e o. Okay and in the right hand, I'm just gonna play tons and thirds already creates a sound. And obviously this is just the planning stage. If you have that own say, you know, brass section really meaty brass section that could and arranged it properly with nice voicings that could start saying, you know really, really good. So this is just an invitation, really not necessarily assignment for you to think about those two things. If you're ever coming up with thematic material, think about quarter relationships, which immediately create kind of harmonic character and interval structures or interval characters inside of your maladies that also create their own characters. 106. Conclusion of the Course: so, guys, a massive congratulations are finished. Of course, there was a ton of stuff in here, especially if you're a beginner. If you're an intermediate. Hopefully it's been a useful catch up for you, but yeah, really well done on finishing what is about probably eight hours of material at least of the time of publishing the course? Well, that you can tell that I'm obviously speaking from slightly further in the future than the course was created because I'm a studio makeover and things like that, continually updating stuff here, including kind of multi camera set up on different lighting and stuff. So hopefully my future courses will look a bit better than the previous course that you've just seen. So just a couple reminders. If you want continued support around this area, you want to speak to other people and myself there to places you can go. There's the lean musician Facebook group, which I've linked to in the course already, and I'll link to on screen Now that's got a really sort of growing, smallish but thriving community off composers and producers who are sharing ideas and also helping each other with kind of their own work, which is really cool. The other thing as well is that there's a number of those people who are helping me build my course, and it kind of slightly select beta group. So people who I'm working with one on one and talking about kind of their struggles, what they're working on, that kind of directly feeds. My next course theater thing is office hours. If you want to contact me any time you can get a lean, users should not come slash contact, and you can book in a free half hour session whenever you want. Really no catch to that. Just it's really useful to me to know my students are up to and what kind of struggling with on. Even if you're not sure what you want to chat about, that's absolutely fine. We can just have a catch up that's really useful today. And then finally, where do you go from here? Because what you've done is you've established what often a lot of my students kind of don't have when they start out composing, which is a real solid foundation in harmony on basic kind of piano skills. You've got that now, but you'll probably still be struggling to write stuff that you really want. At least I know that I was and still do when I kind of just think in terms of chord and melody, because really, the rest of what composing, producing and writing is really arrangement. It's about how do you get chord and melody and turn them into something that sounds really well presented? Andi. Not just well presented. How do you push it into the genre and the feeling and the taste that you're after in your writing? So my next course is arranging music Part one, particularly for the rhythm section. So thinking about Groove Keyboard, Piano Arrangement and then that kind of standard rhythm section off, whether it's a band orchestra or even Elektronik music, there's my phone, good timing. So it's just to say that that is the next one. And hopefully, by the time that you watch this course, you'll Thea other one will be out there. Any immediate part one will be out on that will be your next progression or just get in touch with me, and I'm happy to give you any advice. But the main thing is to keep learning chains keep writing and increase your arranging kind of chops. Thanks for being part of this. And I hope to get you again soon on one of the courses.