Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers, Part 1

1. Welcome and Overview: my name's Jay and welcome to slam a Cat. This is Liam Academy. We're a diverse family of working musicians with one important common bond, a deep love for the creative process of making music. I hate every preset I've ever listened to. I just want to, like, make all my own sounds. You have to have your own son. Otherwise, you're not gonna stick out United by your passion for creating the Slam family exists to educate and support musicians of any age. Any level at an Eddie genre had been more creating electronic music once I stepped into sound design. This is electronica music. This is like what I envisioned it being like our community lives on and offline with Livestream group classes as well as in person programs in Minneapolis. Our instructors meet you where you are and work to accelerate your musical journey to where you want to be. There's like, frustrating and call it being with all the music majors. You know, you had all these classical musicians, and I'm like over here making beats and I come here and I feel like these last nine months I've learned more way more for what I need to be doing with detailed courses in deejay, music, production recording, sound design and more. Slam Academy is ready to show you what it takes to be an industry professional. I was pleasantly surprised with how much I really could take away. After only 12 sessions. I finished up and I am walking out with exactly the tools that I need to finish projects. We want you to become a part of the Slam Academy family. Hey, everyone, welcome to of music theory for electronic music producers the original. So in this class, we're going to be covering everything you need to know about music theory from the electronica music producer perspective. We're gonna worry about notes and all that stuff. We're gonna be using the MIDI grid to cover just about everything. Okay, so whatever software you're working in, that's what we're going to use to learn how to make chords, melodies, harmonies, songs, whole tracks and all that good stuff. We're gonna be doing full analyses of other songs, looking at some other selling, trying to pick apart how they work and look at what they do. There's a lot of music theory courses here on you to me, and I want you to know that when it comes to the topic of music theory for electronic music producers, I literally wrote the book on it to books actually presentation. Second Edition. These are real books. You can get him on Amazon, but don't bother buying these books, everything that that's in those books I cover in this class. So this is just a good if not better in many ways than the book, because in this class you have me as a resource. I respond to all messages every single day. So any questions you have, you can always just write him in a message. And I'll get back to you in a maximum of 24 hours, sometimes much quicker than that right now. In this course, we're gonna focus on a whole lot of things. But by the end, you'll be able to write songs, tracks. If you're already writing songs and or tracks, you'll be able to make them better. By having more thorough understanding of how music theory works, you'll be able to make more interesting chords for progression. Will sections of songs, baselines and much, much more So what I want to do now is show you some excerpts that are of the class. So we're just going to kind of fly through some of the things that I cover in this class. And then from there we'll get started. So I hope you decide to join us. It's a really fun class. Welcome. And here we go. And then the pattern, the second half of the pattern is a whole step, whole step, full step half stuff that makes up the key. Those are all the notes that we are gonna work in this key. They always will fall into this pattern of whole step whole step. Any key is an arrangement of major and minor chords and some other ones sometimes, so a chord, a chord progression might sound dark, but still actually being kind of a major key. Now, that being said, if it sounds really dark, it's probably in a minor. Let's dive in. So in this one ah, we're gonna be looking at a track by dead mouse is a track called Ghosts and Stuff. Let's just here, um, the first part of the track, and then we will take a core progression and find a melody that works on that core progression, and we'll do it both ways. Will also do I have a melody. How do I figure out what chords to put on there? So we'll do kind of the chicken and the egg thing. Uh, okay. Like I'm here. I'm I've written this song. I've got a verse, right. Like, what should I do for the course? Once you know what diatonic chord progressions are? What you can do is you can say Oh, okay. I know seven chords that work in this key just 2. The Keyboard Layout, Middle C, and Octaves: All right. Welcome, Teoh Music theory for electronic musicians. I am J. And this is a slam academy online class. So, um, we're gonna dive right in to our first topic, which is gonna be a keyboard layout finding middle C and octaves. So we're gonna start with some basics of, um, the layout of what we're going to see when we're dealing with theory concepts at the keyboard. But remember I said in the introduction, we're not going to focus on the keyboard too much. We're gonna work in our d A. W. However, our d a. W is actually designed to look like a keyboard, so we kind of have to know a little bit about the keyboard in order to understand what our d a. W is showing us. So here we go. So here's our keyboard. Right. You've all seen one of these. If anyone tells me they have never seen this image, I will call you a liar. Um, you've seen one of these somewhere? Um, it's a keyboard to piano. It's any synthesizer has one of these, and all this is is a way for us to control notes. The only reason that we use so many keyboard based controllers and electronic music is just because the keyboard layout is the most familiar. You can get guitar synthesizers. You can get wind controllers, clarinets and saxophones and everything, anything like that, and you can use them to control synthesizer just as well as this works. It's just that we've we've all kind of grown accustomed to this thing as what we used to control a synthesizer. I haven't played a gig once with a midi bagpipe ist bagpipe ist. Yeah, it was crazy, but he had It was a bagpipe that controlled synthesizers. So people have built weirder things. So getting back to the point, this is what our software is based on. So let's get a little familiar with this. But actually, first, let's let me show you how our software is based on this. So we're going to roll through a little evolution of our keyboard here. So this is our keyboard. We know what this does right? We we press down on notes, weaken, hit these white notes or the black notes and sounds happen. So if we turn it on its side right, so I've rotated it just a little bit. And then now I'm going to chop it off a little bit. So I'm going to get rid of all this extra white stuff. So we just see white keys and black keys. The reason that over here, the White Keys are longer than the black he's is. That's just how our hands work. Our hands sit more comfortably on a keyboard with these white ones longer, and then we can get in between the black nose to get the white notes. That's how our hands work. But when we're dealing with software, we don't need these extra long white one. So let's just shave that off. And now we just have white keys and black keys, right? I just trim the image, and now it's just white kids and black keys. And then when we look over here, we get to our piano roll editor in any almost any D. A. W. Has a piano roll editor. This is a screenshot from Mableton, and this is exactly what that is. It's just her keyboard turned sideways, right? So if you've never put that together, that's what's happening here. So looking at it even deeper, you can see that in the piano roll editor. There are these kind of darker grey and lighter gray alterations that correspond to our white notes and black notes. Right, So the doctor grey ones are on in line with black notes. The lighter ones are in line with white notes. Let's look at the full grid here. So this is the able tune grid can see. White notes, black notes weaken. See these labels here saying, C four C five C six. We'll look at those in just a minute. But as we go across, we see the piano roll grid. So this is called a piano roll for actually a very good reason. Um, in the old days, we had pianos that kind of played themselves. They looked like this, and what they did was you had this role. This, um, is kind of like a giant toilet paper roll, and he punched holes in it and you pedalled it with your feet so your feet kind of moved toe. They peddled basically like a bike. And then it would turn this role an air would blow through whenever there was a hole in the role air would come through. And that would I had to make the key move. So, um, the way the piano rule worked is it was laid out kind of like this where we have, ah, grid of all the notes going. It's basically a piano with a timeline in It just kind of stretched out this way really long. All the notes you just punched out the ones that you wanted. So when we create notes on this kind of a grid, it looks just like an old timey piano roll. I sometimes call these pianos, um, Scooby Doo pianos, because they are, um, have you ever watched like old Scooby? Do they go into, like, a haunted house? And there's like a piano playing itself in. It's really creepy. That's what the's pianos did. They the keys would actually move. And it was all creepy and spooky. They have many ones now, Um, Disklavier, Yamaha Disklavier does the exact same thing accepted except Smitty. So you can basically play the piano with any other instrument. Um, they're sometimes also in the old days called Piano Ola's kind of the same thing. So player piano, piano, ola, modern equivalents, Disklavier piano roll is what we're looking at here. So let's look at our keyboard again. Okay, so here's our keyboard layout. We have white notes and black notes. These are the things that we need to figure out, and the first chunk of our class is going to be figuring out what sounds best together and one way that so the first thing we have to do is figure out the difference between the white notes and the black notes. Okay, so our white notes and we call them that just cause they're white on the keyboard, on the old piano, there's absolutely no reason they need to be white, and the black ones need to be black. It's just the way it is. Um, these are all designated by a letter. So this one's called See This One's D, this one's E, this one's F, this one's G. This one's a this one's B, and then it starts over again. So we have seven of them, and then it starts over right? So 1234567 and start over, file that away for a minute. We're gonna need to remember that. So let's look at the pattern of the white notes So it just goes up through the 1st 7 letters of the alphabet. Right? Um so we're going to start on C. In this case, it's a C D e f g a er g and then it starts over at a B. C. So we never go higher than G. Um, and that continues all the way up and down the keyboard. So this note here take a guess what that one's gonna be called. Here's a clue. It's gonna be D because it came right after. See right, So all the white keys go in order C d This one will be e This one will be f. This one will be G, This one. If we go down from here, this one's going to be called Take a guess. The same is that one B and then we're gonna go through the alphabet backwards a g f e d and then another. See, So they repeat, right, cause there's only seven. So we get even in this little image. We have two different seas. We'll come back to that in a minute. Okay, let's look at the black notes. Now. The black notes happen always in between white notes. Right? So we're going Teoh, learn two important words here to get us to understand the black notes. So let's scroll over here sharp and flat. Okay, This is a symbol. It means sharp. So whenever you see that symbol, we say sharp. Whenever you see this symbol, we say flat this one. Sometimes if we're just typing, we just use like a number symbol. Even though it's a little bit different. It's kind of like a metallic number symbol. Ah, this one is exceptionally hard to type if you don't have a special phone to do it. But, um, if we're just typing, sometimes we use a lower case. Be just toe be like flat, so sharp and flat. Sharp means raised and flat means lowered. Okay, so just remember that sharp means a tiny bit higher and flat means a tiny bit lower. So let's zoom in here. Here's our see. Here's our D, right? So what do we call this note? We could call it C Sharp because it see a little bit higher, right? But it's also d flat, right, because it's d a little bit lower. And in this case and in the case of all of the black notes we can give them to names. They all have two names. They are sharp. The they they are the other note, sharp or the other, The note above it flat, right? So it's kind of confusing. Um, so let's look at the next note. What do we call this one? Well, it's got two names. It's got d sharp because it's one higher than Dee. It's also got e flat because it's one lower than e weird, right? It's just the way it works. So how do you know what to call it? Do you call it C Sharper D flat? Well, the short answer is that you won't really need Teoh because what we're dealing with in this class is going to be what notes sound good. We're not really gonna be dealing with how we say different notes all that much, so I wouldn't worry about it. However, um, it will come into play once we start talking about keys that were in because when you're in a key which we'll talk about later, that's how we know what to call things. So some keys, everything is flat. We just call them flats, and in some keys we call everything sharp and there's a logic to and there's a good reason behind why we do it for now. I just want you to remember that the black notes are all they're named after their adjacent notes. So let's look at this one. This one is what it's g sharp, and it's a flat. All right, so that's what that one's called. It's G sharp or a flat. Makes sense. Cool. Okay. Our next concept that I want to get down is middle C. Okay, Middle C is a little tricky for us as Elektronik musicians. This is a little bit of stumper middle C is the note. See if we go back and look at all these. Right, So there. See here and there. See, here and there Sees all over the keyboard, right, cause it repeats every seven notes. So there are a lot of seize on our keyboard depending on how big our keyboard is. What we do is we locate the middle C so that we kind of served that we kind of use that as a home base. Middle C is Middle C. It's hard for us. to find. It's relatively easy to find when you're sitting at a piano piano as a certain number of keys. Middle C is right in the middle. That's how it's why we call it middle C on our keyboards. We hardly ever have a full size keyboard that we're working with. Sometimes we have, like, one of those oxygen's that has, like, an octave and 1/2. Um, in which case we might not even see middle C like S e middle seat. Um, it might not be showing depending on what are active setting. Is that right keyboard? So, um, if on your keyboard you have an octave button and that is set to something other than zero , you might not even be seeing middle C. So it's a little tricky for us where middle C is actually living. Ah, couple cues you can get is that Middle C is always midi. Note number 60. So if you can look at a midi readout of what notes are coming in, press the sea. And if it's anything other, if it's above 60 than your too high, if it's below 60 year too low, Um, so you can kind of find Middle C That way. It's not super important that we always know where middle C is, but it can be useful. Toe Locate Middle C For now, I want you to remember the vocabulary word middle C and that it is a C. Now how do we find See in all of this stuff? There's a whole bunch of alternating black and white notes, And how do we know which one is C? There's a pattern here, right? You probably already spotted it. So look at the black notes for a minute. We have two black ones, and then there's no black one in between here, and there's three black ones and then no black ones. Two black ones, no black 13 black ones, no black one. That pattern repeats all the way. So if I go back, No, let's go back to here. So if you look on a keyboard, the note, see, is always just underneath or to the left of if we're looking at a keyboard laid out normally of the pattern of to. So whenever you see a pattern a to, you're gonna go just underneath it by one, and that's your C right if you see a pattern of three just to the right of that or on top of the pattern of three is gonna be be and then above, that's gonna be see makes sense. So always watch out for this pattern two and three that's gonna repeat over and over and over looking here to 3 to 3. Here's our pattern of two. There's a C. Here's a pattern of two. There's a C so C is always just just underneath the pattern of two black notes. Okay, so middle C is also called C four. This labelling has nothing to do with Midi. Um, I've seen a lot of people get confused by that C four c five like we saw earlier when we're looking at the, um actually, let's just jump back there really quick over here. C 65 c four c four is middle c. It is the same thing. These numbers don't have anything to do with Mitty. There just, ah designation we use for actives. So we know C four is lower than C five, which is lower than C six and C four is higher than C three. So I'm gonna go back where we were. Okay, So if this is C four right here in my diagram so middle C then this is C five, and this is C six, and this is C three because pattern it to to the right. If we could go up just a tiny bit more, we would see a pattern of two Blackie's and then that. So we have C six, so C 65 C four and C three and it goes all the way up. Um, you could go up to see eight or nine. I've seen maybe, um, and all the way down to see a I've seen. Seen negative two. Comes up a lot. Unlike some big bass synthesizers. Um, they might be listed as down to see negative to you. I don't think I've ever seen one down a negative three. But maybe, um OK, so why do we have multiple sees? Why don't we just count the whole bloody alphabet all the way up? We have multiples of every note, right, cause this is a C D. E f. Etcetera. Here's a c again, which means that's d and that C and that's f So we have all these different sees that we're looking at, and we have all these different D's and E's and F's. So those are called octaves. It's the same note, separated by a register, so to speak. So C four is the same note as C five. It's just C five is inactive higher. So there are similarities between the notes, see, And like C four and C five. Other than just, they happen to be called C. There are sonic similarities for our purposes. Um, one of the things I said we were gonna be sure and cover in this class was what notes sound good together. That's one of our main points and I will tell you, and active always sounds great. Um, it's thin and we'll talk kind of what I mean by thin. We'll talk about that leader. But the key to remember is that, um, you can't go wrong with playing more octaves of notes that you already know work. So if you know a C works in this tune you're working on, you can add sees all over the keyboard and you'll be happy. Um, nothing's going to sound bad, no matter what active you put it in Maybe if you put it like way down in the base and it conflicts with, like, some other based thing you have, Um, But if a C works of C works, the reason for that is because of the wave form. Easiest way to explain this is with a guitar. So, um, here's a guitar string, right? So whatever note is an open string. So let's just say we're on. We're looking at an e string, so if the open string is e string, then we cut it in half. If we go exactly halfway point of the string, we have an octave higher because the wave form is twice as fast inactive. Every time we make the way form twice as fast, we get an octave, and you can imagine that in that situation, the wave form fits nicely inside of each other, right? One that's going twice as fast is going to sit nice and smooth within one that is going twice. Sorry, half the speed that makes for a very comfortable sound. They fit together perfectly. What I labeled here is, if a guitar is 24 frets, it's not really because we don't have any friends up here. But if there were frets going all the way up, there would probably be 24 and the 12th fret on a guitar labeled Always Has an Extra Little Thing on It, like this one does. 12th Fret is halfway exactly halfway between the bridge and nut. That's how guitar works. So 1/12 fret is always the octave because it's half way it's cutting the string in half, which makes it resonate twice as fast from here to here as it does on the same string from here all the way down to here. So we cut it in half. It's twice as fast. That's an active, and that's why it sounds really good. Okay, so here's another way to look at this with wave forms this time. So let's say this is middle C right here. So C four. Let's just go on a limb and say This is the way for him for that. No, we have no frame of reference here. That's why I'm saying it's relative. We need, like a time designation down here. So here's one cycle of the wave for middle seat. In this instance, we go up inactive. Here's C five and the way form would look like this. It would be twice as fast as this one. So here we have one peak. We have two peaks, two of these air happening in the space that one of these is happening. And whenever we have a really direct correlation of wave forms like that, we have sound a harmonious sound, something that sounds good. So this is a 2 to 1 relationship, which means it gives a very pure sound. A perfect sound will be the music term for it. So that's what an activist. So let's hear some. Let's put this into practice next. So what I have here is a whole bunch of seas. So you can see here is the two black ones. So just underneath that, that's a C. Here's the two black ones it's underneath that got to see and that to see if I just scroll up a little bit, we see the two black ones. So there's our see. They're also labeled here, obviously. So I am using here C two, C three and C four just inactives. They're all sees, but I've just made a little pattern here with the synth playing some sees. So it's cool. It's not brilliant, but if I do, it's a little faster. Actually, I really like this sound. You could make kind of a cool grew out of nothing but octaves if you want and you know it doesn't have to be all C's now I'm doing it with all D's, right, because D is the next white key up from C. So now I'm on all D's scroll up. There we go, Right, So these are all D's in octaves, and I've got a cool kind of groove going. You can really use this sound of the active really well could to create textures. Earlier, I mentioned that the sound of the active was kind of empty. And what I mean by that is that later we're gonna look at intervals that might be intervals , just meaning playing more than one note at once. We're gonna look at times when we would create an interval that might have a happy sound or a sad sound, um, or other kinds of sounds. The active really has no a motive quality to it at all. It's just is, you know, wave forms that fit together really Well, so they're really good for creating grooves that don't create really any emotional tension at all. It's just a group back down to see Hey, guys. So one more example of cool things you can do with octaves I have here a mono tribe analog synths, little battery powered thing that I love. Totally analog, Instantly. Well, so well, we've got on here is a little tiny ribbon keyboard. It's gonna kill those for a second. So here's I'm going to do I'm I'm in record mode, so I'm just gonna hold down a c on. I'm just recording a c right. Pretty boring. So now it's looping. Right? But this is my octave knob. So I'm gonna record a C while I'm just randomly flipping the octave around. So all I did was turned the octave knob on place. See? So these are just seized with octaves, which makes kind of a cool groove, right? Totally easy. Nothing but actives. Okay, so closing up this very first lesson of our online class a couple tips, um, when you're playing around with notes, if you stick to all the white notes, they will all sound pretty good together. There's a couple spots where you can get yourself into trouble. Um, but more or less all white notes will sound pretty good. Just don't hit any black notes, and you'll be fine. Um, stick to all the black notes and don't play any white notes on You'll be good as well. Those will all sound good together if that's all you want to do. If you just want to make really plain sounding stuff that doesn't sound bad or risky or weird or anything, just play all the white notes. Just play white notes all day long and don't worry about it. You can sign off from this class. Thanks for signing up. You don't need to do anything else. You're good to go. If you want to do anything that sounds interesting, though, you have to combine them and you have to understand what you're doing with the white notes and the black notes. It's mixing them up that is dangerous to dio not dangerous, like you're gonna hurt somebody or hurt yourself dangerous in the way that, like you know, you could potentially make something that sounds kind of horrible. But if you know what you're doing, you can make things that sound really awesome. So one more time, White notes playing only white notes. You'll do fine, black notes. You'll do fine. You'll sound perfectly boring to make interesting stuff. We combine them and we do weirder things. That's where the interesting stuff happens in music, and that's where we're gonna go next. So I will see you next time at the next lesson, Audio's. 3. The Perfect 5th, and being "In Key": Okay. Welcome, Teoh. Lesson two of music theory for electronic musicians. And this lesson, we're gonna be talking about the perfect fifth and working in keys, so let's dive right in. So when we left the last lesson, the last thing I told you was this little tip of stick to the white notes in your cool stick to the black notes and you're cool. When you mix them up, you enter dangerous waters. In this lesson, we're gonna look at why and how to get around that how to navigate the dangerous waters of mixing up the white notes in the black notes. How do you know what notes work together? And that that's the overall theme of this whole courses. What notes sound good together. So in the previous lesson, we looked at the octave. The active always sounds good. Um, you can throw it active on anything. You can write whole tunes just using actives. We're going to get another one now called the Perfect Fifth. I don't let the word perfect throw you. That's just kind of a terminology thing. We'll talk a little bit more about it later, but for now, let's just think of it as of the fifth, the fifth note above the route, and we'll talk about that word route in just a second as well. So just like the active, the fifth has a reason that it sounds good or physical reason. And by physical, I mean grounded in physics. The octave was a 1 to 2 ratio that we looked at. So ah, another way toe. See, that would be if the fundamental is 1000 the oops, the ah octave will be 2000 going down to the 2 to 3 ratio of the fifth. If the fundamental is 1000 the fifth will be 1000 times 2/3 which is 1.5, which is 1500 hertz. So let's have ah, quick look at how to deal with that and the reason I'm talking about thes and hurts now, Um, in a traditional music theory course would never talk about things in terms of hurts. But since this is electronic music, sometimes we have to dial in a synthesizer using just frequencies hurts. So let's have a look at what that looks like. Okay, so let's demonstrate this thing called the Perfect fifth that we're talking about. Let's hear it. So what I have here is able to live, and I have an operator instrument. This is what it will look like when you dial in. Ah, perfect fifth on your synthesizer if you're dealing with just oscillators, Um, normally we would play it and we'll play two notes. But if you we want to look at it in the frequency standpoint, we could do it this way. So I have this bottom oscillator Ah, set to 1000 or one kilohertz, which is 1000 hertz. So just like my diagram before 1000 hertz, I have this one set to 1500 hertz, right? So that should be a perfect fifth. And if I play it, we hear just those two. And that's the sound of a perfect fifth. It's a little piercing. That's why we call it a perfect fifth, because it's just it's ah, it's hard to explain, but it's got that perfect quality to it. Let's hear it a little bit lower. If I take this down to, let's say, 500 it's a little easier to here and then by our ratio from before remembering the 2 to 3 ratio the perfect fifth of 500. Hertz should be 750. Let's hear that. Now we hear it again. So that is the sound of the perfect fifth. And it's right there. 507 52 to 3 ratio. Okay. When Alice deal was just finding the pitches. Ah, finding the fifth on the piano roll editor. Ah, we're gonna start in the root mention the route before the route is just are starting pitch . Um, it has a little bit more of a meeting that we'll talk about in a minute. But for now, just think of it as note we start from. So we want to find because we're talking about relative pitches here. So the route is the note we start on. If we want to find the fifth above that, we are finding the fifth of the route. So to find the fifth, we counted five notes, not rocket science, right? It's a little more complicated than that, but let's start off with an easy one, counting up five notes. And for now, we're gonna only use the white notes. So let's look at our piano roll here. Let's take a C. So here's my C on this line here. Right? So if I count up five white notes remember, I'm skipping the darker shaded ones or the black notes on her keyboard so we can't see as one. So this is to 34 five. This is our fifth, and this note is a G t. So the fifth of C is G. So now you know when your honesty and maybe you're throwing some octaves around and you want to liven it up a little bit more with more than octaves, you could use the fifth. The fifth is a safe bet. Throw in the fifth cone up five notes, and you get a Jeep through a G in there. Let's try another one. So how about D? We'll start here. This is a D. Remember the pattern of two black notes and white note in between. This is our D, so we start here. So this is one, and we count up white notes to three for five and this isn't it. So five notes above D or the fifth of D isn't a Let's keep going. Here's an E. Let's start in any counting up five Notes. 12 34 five. This note is a B Remember, it's a be quick way to tell that this is a B is that it's right underneath the sea. There's our C four right underneath it. So it's a B. So the fifth of E is be whenever you're playing around on the note E A. B is gonna be a great note to throw in there. A couple more. Ah, don't worry. I'm not gonna go through every note ever. But we're gonna run into a problem in a minute. So I want to point some of these out. So here we are on F. Here's an F. Here's what this is. Sorry, this is one, 2345 and this is a C. So the fifth of C we're sorry. The fifth of F is see. Go up One more. Here's a G kind of five notes. White notes only a, B, C D. 12 345 We end up on a D. There's that pattern of the two black notes. So 1/5 of G is a D. Almost there. Here's an A Let's count up five notes. One. I remember. We always include the first note when we're counting up. Five. So a is one 234 five. The fifth of a is okay. Makes sense. Okay, now we run into a problem. Let's start on B. This is B because it's right underneath the sea. Right there is the pattern of the two black ones. See is just underneath that and R B is just underneath that. So here's B. Here's 12 34 five. We end up on an F Now, this is curious because this note is not the fifth of B. It is if we just count of five white notes. However, unlike our other ones, this note has caused us a problem because we are not in the correct key for this to work. So in order for us to find the proper fifth of B, and what we're going to soon see is that it is not this note, but is, in fact, this note. It's 1/2 step higher. It gets us into a black note to figure out why we need to do a little bit of homework and look at keys. So we're gonna put this all aside for just a minute, and we're going to switch over to talking about keys. Then we're gonna come back. And why that note is an f sharp is going to make complete sense. Okay, off we go on the keys. Hold onto this. Be problem for a minute and we'll come back to it. Okay? What does it mean to be in? Ah kee Ah, the key. The simplest way to think about it is that the key is home. The key is a single note, and it is the sound that makes it feel like the piece has ended. Or we often we just use this word of this music in music lingo. We talk about home like your house home, right? Ah, the key is what sounds like the place to stop. It feels the most comfortable. Um, and it completely depends on the song. Obviously, you might. A song can be in any one of 12 keys or kind of mawr, depending on what you define. His key. Ah, for us. We're just gonna focus on the 12 keys, Um, so we can figure it out based on our here. We can just hear it often. Uh, once we know the key of the song, we can find all the notes that sound good. So the key is a way for us to know all of the notes that sound good, not just the actives and not just the fifth, but find all of them at once. If we know what key were in. We can very easily look at all the possible notes. That will sound good. So ah, finding out the key of your song is important when you're writing, right? Um, let's look at an example using able to life really quick. Okay, so let's look at an example. Here is a simple little melody and let's hear it. And let's just use our ear to figure out what key it's in. We don't need to know anything about what these notes are. Just go with your gut. So first, let's just hear it. Okay, so, um, here's our clue. What if we stopped on this note? I'm going to stop the melody this time right on this note, and then tell me how how it sounds. Does it feel like it ends there? Does that feel like home? As we like to say, I'm making air quotes. Well, I say the word home. No, it feels like one note away when I play the next note. Well, it's played from the top again and home, right, Like it's that last note that makes it feel like the end. And you can see that Ivo started and ended on the same note, which is not always what melodies do. But, ah, it's pretty good clue what key were in when they started to end of the same note. Um, so in this case were in C Major because we ended on C and we started on C. But I just want to reiterate that it doesn't half to end on. See, that's not why we're in sea ice. Misspoke. A little bit were in C because C sounds like home. Let's look at an example that does not end on C. Okay, here's another example. I've taken the same melody and we ordered some of the notes a little bit so that it doesn't start or end on C. But I'm gonna tell you right away we are still in C major and here's how I know. Let's hear it. So I ended on G. As you can see here and that's not great for the way it sounds. It sounds okay. Ending on G G is a pretty stable one, because in the key of C major G is the fifth, which is what we were just talking about. Um, but it would sound better still if I put a C at the end. Now, I don't have to. This is where the melody ends. And that's just fine on the composer. I can do whatever I want, but listen to what happens if I play a C after the melody? It still feels like home more than G does. So I'm just gonna put a c in their hear it again. Okay, So see, still feels like home. Now, that's great. But what if we don't want to just use our year? What if, um, we want a little more systematic way to find this? You might not be hearing this as what I'm calling home, and that's just fine. Sometimes it takes a while to develop that skill. Sometimes we all hear things differently, and that's just fine. So let's look at a little bit more systematic way of finding out what key were in other than just using our ear. Um, there is a pattern to a key, and it's really important to remember this pattern. Ah, if you ever want to find the notes that sound good, this pattern is key. And here it is as a pun, right? This pattern is key to get the key. It reminds. Okay, this is what it looks like. W w h w w W h What that means is w is ah, whole step and H is 1/2 step. So a whole step is two adjacent notes. And now we're including the black notes case. So two notes right next to each other. If we jump up to notes, we've jumped up. One whole step half step is just a single note. It's going to the next possible closest note that weaken, go eso whole steps and half steps. So the pattern for a key is is whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, Right? So if we were in the key of C major, which is what we've been working on this whole time, this will end up being all white notes this end up being See, we go up Ah, whole steps. That's 2/2 steps we would skip over C, Sharp or D flat and we'd end up at D. That's a whole step. Let's look at the ah, piano roll editor to make this a little easier to see. There we are. Okay, so I'm just going to write our pattern here. Whole step, whole step, half step, Whole step, whole step. Whole step, half step. All right, so keep that in mind. That's our pattern. So let's look at Let's start at on sea, Right? So, looking at our piano roll editor in our grid here, here's our C. So we go up Ah, whole step. So we skip over that one. That's C sharp skip over that. So this is the next note in key. Next thing we need is another whole step. So we go another whole step and this is another noting key. And let's put a little dot on C. So I'm gonna put a dot on all the notes that Aaron Key. Now we have 1/2 step right on Lee. One adjacent notes. So there's no note here we can skip over, so we just go up 1/2 step which is our next note. So that's here. That's that half step. Now we need another whole step to get here. Oh, I forgot to put it out here. Now we need another whole step, so I skip over the dark one. Now, I need another whole step to skip over the dark one, and then we end with 1/2 step and we end up there. So what does that get us? Since we started on C. C. Is our route. There's that word route again. We started on C so that got us just coincidentally, all the white notes, including an octave. So we started on see here and we ended on see here. Hoops pen just went crazy there. So that got us a full active using this pattern whole whole half whole whole whole half. Now, we're looking at a major key here. We may also have minor keys. We'll talk about those later, but just for now, file away that we're just gonna be talking about major keys for a little bit if that doesn't make any sense to worry about it. Um, let's look at another one. So let me clear my screen here So remember the pattern whole whole half. Who? Full full half. Let's start on D this time. So here's D We go up a whole step, and then so we have a whole step. Another whole step. This is only 1/2 step here, so my whole step ends up here. Now I'm on an f sharp. That's what that notice f sharp is here. So I've gone up one whole step, Another whole step. Next on my list is half step. So now I'm half step. I'm back to a white key. I'm on a G. So the notes of D major, which is what we're looking at here, are this so far. So I have this plaque note here. So now I'm including the black notes, but in a way that's going to sound good. So now I need another whole step, another whole step, another whole step. So I'm on another black note. This is C sharp here, this black note and then ah, half step. If you do this right, you will start an end on the same note who started and ended on D and I just used that pattern whole step whole step got me to have sharp, half step whole step, whole step, whole step, half step makes sense. Cool. Moving on. So now that we have this pattern down, we actually have learned something else as well. The major scale You've probably heard of major scale. If you ever taken a piano lesson in your life, you know what a scale is Or a guitar lesson. Maybe even, um, all of the major scale is Is all the notes in the key played in order? Right? So we know what all the notes in the key are because we know that pattern whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. That's our pattern. You get really good at reciting that. Playing the scale is just to play all those notes in a row. So let's look at our diagram one more time and let's figure out let's do a different one. Let's do E major. No, let's do F major. So here's our f is there F. So here's our first note. So whole step whole step. So sorry. Whole step here and then whole step to here and then half step gets us to this note, which we could call a B flat or we could call in a sharp. In this case, we should call it a B flat. But that's Ah, story for another day. Then we have whole step whole step on connect these if we want whole step and 1/2 step. So those are all our notes in the key of F F major to be specific. So if we wanted to play the scale, we play this one, we would just play those notes that work in that key. Those are the notes that work in F major. That's all we need to know to understand the key and the scale is just that pattern. So in the key of F, we have one black note here, and it's this one. It's a B flat. More on that soon. Okay, back to our problem with B. If you remember when we counted up five notes from B, we ended at F and this is wrong. This is five notes up from B. Um, but it's in the wrong key, but we really want is f sharp in the way that we know that f is wrong. Is that this pattern of holds a post up half step, etcetera. Ah isn't followed. Let's look at it one more time. Starting on. Be something. Start down here. So here's a B So, B, if we go up a whole step, we end up here. If we go up another whole step, we end up here for Europe. 1/2 step. We end up here and then, Ah, whole step. Ah, whole step. Ah, whole step and 1/2 step. So this is be also so there's our pattern. These are our notes in the key of B. Now let's count up 1/5. Remember when we kind of 1/5? We want the fifth of the notes in the key. 1234 five It's a black note. If we just counted in C major, we ended up on F. We ended up on this one. But the correct answer will be this one. This particular note f when we're in the key of B and we're trying to find the fifth of B is going to be one of the worst notes we could play. So you really don't want to make this mistake? This is called a tri tone. My handwriting is pretty sloppy with his tool, but try tone is bad. It's not going to sound good, no matter what you dio 1/5 sounds great. Always almost always, but a tri tone sounds terrible. Um, you really don't want to make that mistake. Trust me. Okay, So we solved the problem with be right. We found out that it isn't in F. It's an f sharp, because using the pattern that gets us to in F sharp, Hopefully, that makes sense if it doesn't jump back and go through the whole step host of half step stuff again because it's going to be very important. Okay, So why do we care about this business of the fifth at all? Um, two main reasons. One is that it almost always sounds good. Just like the octave. I can think of a couple situations where the fifth isn't gonna be the most perfect note to play. But really, 99% of the time, if you throw 1/5 into something, it's going to sound good. Especially if you're doing a pad or a synth riff. Melody, Something like that. Sometimes when you're making a cord, if you're doing some complicated stuff. The fifth isn't what you want, but almost always. The fifth will sound great. Second reason is when we start to make cords for the basics of the cords that were going to do in an upcoming lesson. Ah, the fifth is really important. We need the fifth in order to make a court. Um, it's might not even be considered accord without the fifth. So we have to be really aware of where our fifth is and how to use it. Also for fifths. Baselines. Baselines. You want to use your fifth in in baselines if you're sick of just playing octaves drops and fits in there and you've got some sweet sounding baselines right away. All right, let's hear some examples. Ah, and lets get used to hearing fifths. Off we go, Strauss. Now, I know this is, but I can't. I would be Ah, failure. Um, as a musician, if I didn't use this piece. Teoh, talk about the perfect fifth. At least briefly. Um, we're not gonna talk about classical music very much here, but ah, all Sprock Zarathustra, which means thus spoke. Zarathustra has this huge thing. You've heard this a 1,000,000 times before Elvis used to walk out on stage to this tune. I know you've heard this, so let's just listen for a minute, - okay ? So the reason I'm pointing this out is, as you may have guessed, those trumpet notes beginning are 1/5 just 1/5 and inactive. In order, it's going see G, which is the fifth of C and then, ah, see again. And then he's playing E. D sharp. So if you're on your toes, you might notice. D Sharp is not in the key of C, and you would be correct. Um, we don't always play notes. Every note doesn't have to be in key. They actually get kind of interesting when they're out of key. And that's why this note sounds really strange because it's out of key, so it gives a little more character. So those notes just going up really simply there's our fist. Here's fifth of that to see again. And then there's that. So all sprock vera doosra. If I heard this song before, whether you know it or not, that's because strings string instruments, not guitars, but string instruments like violins jealous and things are tuned to fits. So the this is a fit. They're all fix. So G d is a bit d 1/5 and a two years. If it so this sound, they're all fits played on top of each other. So fists especially sound good and strength because they're designed to play that very, very efficiently. Okay, here's another example. Um, this is just a little Diddy I put together. Ah, what I've done here is make to kind of chords. I have a d and then I have 1/5 of D in a and then I put another d on top inductive. Right. So we know what doctors are. D and D are octaves and a is the fifth. And then halfway through, I switched to enough and 1/5 of F and another f Then I put in our Pesci ater on it. So I set the are appreciator to play 16th notes Ah, and to play down, up 16th notes. Ah, and that's it. So it's gonna play through those notes one at a time. This is going to result in something that is not immediately. It does not immediately sound like the coolest groove you've ever heard. It's gonna go doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo But it sounds like this This is just cycling through root fifth active and then back down So root fifth octave root for a root fifth octave Fifth root 5th October fifth, but much faster that I could speak, but this can end up being actually kind of really cool group. Let's have some drums. Okay. Okay. All right. This has been a music theory for electronic musicians. Lesson to the perfect fifth. Ah, and working in keys for Slam Academy. I am J. Anthony Allen, and I hope to see you in the next lesson. How do you 4. More with Keys, The Third, and the Basic Triad: All right. Welcome, Teoh. Slimy music theory for electronic musicians, part three. Ah, and this led more with keys. Just a little further explanation and looking at some of the other things we can do. Ah, we're gonna look at the third. We've looked at octaves. Um, we've looked at fifths. Now, we're gonna look at the third. The third is a little more complicated. Um, and we're gonna look at basic triads and the basic triads and the third business kind of all goes together. Try. It is a fancy word for cord, which is why I have that in parentheses there. It's our most basic chord. So let's start off by looking at a Bolton. Okay, so here I am back in, able to live looking at the piano rule editor. So Ah, let's just do a quick little recap, um, and draw out. Ah, the key of C major. So this time I'm going Teoh, just put the notes in here. Something. I'm going to do it like that. Um, it's do let's do that. I'm just gonna make one long note. So here's C. Let's make this a little bit bigger for us. We can see easier. Okay, so there's Air Sea, and I'm just gonna copy this note. Put all the notes of our key up here. So we have whole step, right? Whole step, half step. Whole step, whole step. Whole step half step. So there we have all the notes of C major Ah, laid out for us. Now. One thing I wanted to point out here is that, um we don't have to memorize all the notes of a key because we know the pattern. Right? Ah, we know how to figure out what notes are in the key. Ah, for on on some instruments. And you may have heard this said before When you switch keys, you have to do a lot of really quick thinking on your toes to figure out Well, what note goes here now that we're in a different key and all that stuff for us, you don't have to. It's not that hard. Um, because we know the pattern. The pattern is uniform. So what that means is there's big girls. Think what that means is, let's say we want to show all the notes in D major. So I've highlighted everything I've got, C Major if I want to make it, d major, I just have to move the whole pattern up, That is, um that's what it sounds like when you play all the notes of a key at the same time. Um, now I'm in d major. You can see that Everything went correct. Whole step, whole step, half step. Whole step, whole step. Whole step half step. So it worked. Let's say we want to C sharp major. One of the weirder keys. I put my first note on C sharp and then it works. C sharp d sharp. F f sharp, g sharp, a sharp C C sharp. That's got a lot of black keys in there, which makes it tricky, but that's OK. Um okay, so this technique is called transposing, so whenever someone says we're gonna I want you to transpose this riff to a different key. This is what we're doing. We're shifting everything to make it into a different key. So if I go down to see here's that grow sound Yeah. Um, now I'm on. See, this is all the notes and see, Major, let's transpose this to ah e flat Major. All I have to do is take my first note, which is see here and move it up to e flat. And if I put my first note on E flat and I keep the pattern the same, it will be correct. So now my first note is E flat or D sharp. Same thing, right? And these are all the notes I can use. So this pattern is completely movable on some instruments. That's really hard, because they don't have a pattern that they could just move that have to, like, know every know, and it's tricky for us. We could move it up and down. Guitar players have usually the same kind of luxury. They can usually move things up and down. If you were to play this on a piano, you would not be able to move it just up and down. I mean, you can, but you have to learn what notes to hit, because ah, your fingers have to do some adjustments to get these the white notes in the black notes. Anyway, we don't have to worry about that. We can move it up and down on our grid, and we're happy. Cool. Okay. When we talked about fifths in the previous lesson. There's one thing that I just really want to hit home. Be sure that we all understand, Um, and that is the relationship of the fifth to the key. So here we are in C Major and we have So we have see here. And then we can count up five notes in the key, including the 1st 112345 and we end up on G right, and that's our fifth. That's how we find the fifth. But it doesn't just because we're in the key of C major, that doesn't mean that G is the fifth of the key. That's not a thing. Don't get confused by that. So ah, let me clarify that a little bit more. Um, let's find the fifth of D in the key of C major. So we're still in C Major. Here's D is my screwy arrow and let's count up the notes in C major. We're going to stay in C Major cause that's the key were in. But we're gonna find the fifth of D N C. Major. So 12345 it's a and that's the fifth of D in C major. So just because we're in the key of C doesn't mean that the Onley fifth we have is C. Um, we have a lot of fifth in there. We could do. Let's do the fifth of G. So here's G that note there. But there. Let's find the fifth of G 1234 It's here. It's a D because we need the active. It's an octave higher than this. This note. So it's a D. It's still in the key because the key keeps going up more and more and more so weaken. We have all these notes up here that are just cycling the active. So the pattern start over here. So this is in key. This is in key. This is in key because this is first note whole step between the two whole step half step. So the pattern has started over here, and we're onto a new active. The key goes all the way up and down. All those notes are in the key. We've just been looking at one active, so the fifth of G is D, but it crosses over into the next active, and that's just fine. So don't get the key confused for the root of whatever we're talking about, whether it be an interval like the fifth or a cord like we're going to talk about next cords, many chords can happen in a single key. We'll talk about that more in a minute. Okay, Now, let's talk about thirds. The third is a lot like the fifth. We just count up three notes, so we're gonna start on. See here. This is our C and we kind of three notes, including the 1st 1 just like the fifth one to three. So this is our third not rocket science, right? Once we know how to find the fifth, we kind of five notes, the third works the same way. We kind of three notes. However, there are some tricky things about the third that makes it more a little more complicated. Um, okay, so we haven't talked about minor keys at all. Everything we've been doing so far is in a major key. But, um, one of the main differences between a major key and a minor key is the third. The third has the like magic power to determine to turn a major key minor. So if for in a key our little pattern of whole step whole step half step, that is really important to find the third. For example, here we found the third and it's E. So E is the third of See That's in the key of C major. Sure, that's fine. So with that relationship, what if we found the third of D? So here's D and we go up three in the We're gonna do this in the key of C Major and this is really important. Now our third is going to be f right one to three f. So f is the third of deep Ah, in the key of C. If we were in another key, this would be this might be f sharp, This note. So in the key of C meaning, see is our root note. R. C is our home base, like we called it before. The third of D is a minor third file that away for a minute. The key, the third of see, because we're in a major key is a major third. The minor, third and the major third have very different properties. And so the reason that one is minor and one is major is probably not apparent right now in order to explain it. Let's jump over and talk about cords because this is kind of the central thing about cords is the minor and major third. So let's talk about quarters for a few minutes and then we'll come back to the third and hopefully this will make a little bit more sense. So just file this away for a minute while we talk about courts. Okay, so here we go with cords. The definition of accord is just more than one note at a time. That's really all it means. So right here we have a single note. If I wanted to make accord, I'm going to randomly pick any note that's technically accord. It's going to be an ugly one, and it's only two notes. Sometimes when we have only two notes, we use the word die ad, meaning it's just two notes. That's not a really commonly used word, so I wouldn't go like throwing it around your music buddies being like a rock out on that diet. Uh, no one really uses that term. Um, although technically speaking, that's what it is, um, it's accord. A diet is a type of cord. Ah, cord is just more than one note at a time, so Ah, this is one. Typically, we have three notes in a chord in the or more Ah, the first kinds of chords we're going to look at All have three notes in them, but there's one caveat there. Ah, three different notes. Now, what I mean by that is it might look like there's more notes in the cord. Um, but the cords we're going to look at right now will only have three different notes. For example, let's make a nice little chord here. Okay, here's a Here's a cord. Nice sounding chord. Let's add that note now. There are four notes in the cord. Correct. However, Onley three different notes exists because I have two different seas, and that's okay. Whenever we put chords together, we can add octaves of notes that we already have, right, because we know that inactive pretty much sounds good all the time. So sometimes, in order to make these chords sound a little thicker will add an octave to it just to kind of beef it up. Um, so I might even have I scroll up a little bit. Let's put put another Ian there. So now my court is spelled from top down its E c g e. See. So I have five different notes here or out of five notes here, but I have two octaves of C and I have two octaves of E. So it's really only three notes. So we will eventually have cords that have four notes for different notes in them, maybe even five different notes in them. Um, the more different notes you add to accord, the more complex the court gets, Um, and to be really, really General Ah, we could say the more like jazz that it sounds. There's probably jazz musicians that are out there. Interval. That's dumb. Um, but ah, hardcore jazz musicians probably aren't listening to this lecture, so I don't think that will offend them all that much. So the more notes in the chords, it starts to sound a little jazzy, a little more dissonant, but we do have really good uses for that. Typically in pop music in dance music, um, really, really, in things like like trance and techno and things like that we really rely just on these three note chords. We might have octaves in there to make up some more interesting, but it's really almost always just three notes. So I'm gonna illustrate one more time the three different note thing by looking at a guitar , since I think a lot of you probably know a couple chords on guitar. Ah, the cords, you know, probably only have three notes in them, even though you might be strumming all six strings. Let's have a quick look at that. Okay, so, um, let's look at the guitar. So here's a C major chord. Some of you might know it sounds like this, So I'm playing actually five strings here. Um, but I'm only playing three different notes. I'm just playing a triad. So this note is C. The next note is E, and the note after that is G and then they start over, see again and then e again. So to get this sound, it's got five different sounds in it, but it's only got three different notes in it, but there's two octaves. So those adding those octaves to the cord really makes it kind of beefs up the court a little bit. Let's look at another one. Here's one with six notes. This is a G major court. It's just G B de and then another d and then another B and then another g. So it's got three G's in it to give it a nice full sound. So we have three routes. G would be the root. The route is just what we have named the cord after. So if it's a G major chord roots chief to D major court rutas de that's ah e minor chord root is eat. So the route is the note that the court is named after. So here's a G major chord. It's got three routes in it. It's got 2/3 in it because it's got to bees and it's got just one one deep, which is the fact. So only three different notes were just playing triads. Even though we're playing six notes at a time. Go Okay, so now that we know, we understand that we could have many octaves of the note of our notes in the cord, let's get rid of The Octopus for a minute and just focus on what those three notes are, um because they're not just any three notes. Technically, we would be making accord. If we just put any three notes together, we could do this. This is a chord. Sounds terrible. That's not the cord we want. What we're gonna do instead is focus on specific cords to specific courts. For now, the two most common Ah, major chord and a minor chord. So to build a major court, we take our route. Let's make our route B C. We're gonna build a C major chord. So there's our seat. So, like I just said before, Ah, the route is just the note that the court is named after. So it's our first note. Ah, so another thing that we need our our next note is going to be 1/5. So we know what 1/5 is gonna be right there because major earth Sorry. Whole step, whole step, half step, whole step. We could keep going, but we don't need to, because that could test the fifth. And that's what we need. Those are 1st 2 notes. Now, whether or not we're making a major or minor chord, those two notes are going to be the same. They don't really care if were making a major or minor chord. The route will be the same in a major and minor chord, and the fifth will be the same in a major and minor chord. They'll be different notes because it's all dependent on what the root is. But, ah, the fifth doesn't change whether or not like, if we were making a C major or C minor, we'd still have the right to notes. Here. It's the third note that determines whether or not it's a major chord or a minor chord through in the fifth are always the same. So that third note is the third. Ah, so the third is what determines whether or not we have a major chord or a minor court in the key of C major, which is what we're working in now. Ah, starting the cord on C with the root of C right that will result in a major court. So and that's what it sounds like. Here it is. That's a major chord. You've heard it more times than you even can imagine. Billions of times you heard major courts probably even see Major, so that's a major court. It's the root, the third and the fifth. Another way to look at it would be It's every other note of our key, right? So, like we skipped over this one, the 2nd 1 and we skipped over this one. So the pattern, remember, goes whole step. Whole step, half step, whole step, etcetera. So if we took every other note for the 1st 3 notes, then we end up with the route. We skipped a second the third we skipped the fourth and the fifth. And that's our major chord root. 3rd 5th Get rid of that guy rid of that guy. So that's our major court now. A minor chord has one note different, and you probably guessed it. It's the third, um, the third moves down by ah half step in a minor chord. The third is 1/2 step lower now. This is, um, interesting, because it means the third colds really all the power of the court to determine whether or not it's major or minor. So let's take a quick step back and talk about what it means to have a major chord or a minor chord. Go back to training that major on. Let's just do this. Let's shorten this up and then I'm gonna duplicate it, and I'm gonna change it to a minor chord. Okay, so here we have a major chord. And here we have a minor chord. How do you know if you're listening to a major chord or a minor court? There are three ways to know if you've got a major chord or a minor chord. The first way is just to listen. Um, major chords. And this is This is the way that everyone always explains major and minor chords in terms of way they sound. And it's a super incredibly wild generalisation. But it kind of works, and that's that Major chords kind of sort of sound happy and minor chords. Kinda sorta sounds sad big. So here's C major, followed by C minor. You'll feel that this one has. It doesn't radiate happiness by any means, but once we switch it to the minor chord, you'll feel that this has a kind of sadness to it. It's hard to explain. Let's hear it. It's going to do that a little slower. You hear that? You here's a little bit of the tinge of sadness in the minor chord. Um, there's a whole study. There's a whole science of why this sound sad to us? Um, we don't really need to go into that. That would be the science of psycho acoustics. We're not gonna go into that. Um, that's a whole other can of worms. Um, and it's not my specialty. So major court and minor chords. So the first way that we can identify if accord is major or minor is by listening to it and venturing a guess. Does it sound, major or doesn't sound minor? You'll get good at hearing these out of context, so you'll just hear the cord that sounds like a major chord. Or were here the cord. It sounds like a mind record. Um, so that's one way to do it. The second way that we can determine whether or not we're listening to a major chord or a minor chord or looking at a major quarter mile record is just simply to count the half steps. Um, a major chord will be five. The third will be 5/2 steps, so let's go on to our major court here. So here's hoops. Here's our 1st 1 So here's our route. So one to three for five. So that so that's don't get that confused with the fifth, though. The fifth is way up here. This is just 5/2 steps were counting completely chromatic meaning every note, um, and 5/2 steps away is our major third, the minor third will be one Teoh three four will be 4/2 steps away. So that's a quick way that you can tell if this is a major quarter minor chord discount. The half steps for is 4/2 Steps is a minor 3rd 5/2 steps is a major third. Now there's 1/3 way, and the third way is to examine the key a little bit and memorize yet another little pattern. Um, we're gonna look at this pattern in the next lesson. So hold on to that one for a while and we'll get into talking about this pattern of knowing what chords happen in what key. It's probably the most useful way to think about keys and cords. Ah, that we'll cover. You'll use this every time you're writing a song. You'll just think. Okay, I'm in. C major. Okay, I could use D minor. I could use e minor. I could use G Major. You'll just know them because you know this pattern eso We'll come back to that first we need to get a little north a few more things down about courts. Okay, so we talked about the kind of magic power that the third has to determine whether or not our accord is major or minor. I just want to point out a couple more things. So here. I just want to make sure this is really, really clear when we took our c major chord. So this is C major. We abbreviate to m A J sometimes two c minor, which we abbreviate with a lower case M um, so two out of the three notes are exactly the same, right? This G is the same and the sea is the same. It's only being on Lee the third that changed. And not only that, it only changed by one note. It went from this e down to this is labor early, labelling it as a d sharp. We should really call it an e flat. Ah, but the sharps fine. For now, um, it's going down by 1/2 step. That's the only difference between a major and a minor chord is that the third is 1/2 step different. So to make a major chord a minor chord, we would take that third down. Ah, half stuff. If we wanted to turn a minor chord into a major chord, we would just raise that third by ah, half step, and that makes it a major record. All the other notes are the same. Okay, let's make a couple more courts A couple more triads, um, in the key of C major. So we know that we can make a C major chord in the key of C major. That would be the first, third and fifth using see as a route. But let's use a different route. Let's go up 1/5. So let's start on G. There's G slide up just a little bit here. Case Amon G. Let's make a chord in the key of C major. So the easiest way to think about that is let's just go every other note in the key of C. So maybe I'll just put our notes back down here, put him right here. So the notes of C Major Holst, That whole step half step. Cool. Step to here. Two whole step. Well, step half step. Okay, so these are our notes and see, Major. So keeping those in mind, let's make a g chord in the key of C major. And we don't know if this G is going to be major or minor. Actually, um well, I know, but you don't know, uh, because were in the key of C So we just kind of have to see if the third happens to be major or minor in the key of C for this particular court, Let's find out. So g is our route. Let's add the fifth of G. So if we count up 1234 we need this note here. So let's put our fifth there. So that's our fifth in the key of G or in the key of C. Sorry, but the cord g Now let's find the third. The third is the one with the magic power. Right? So it's kind of three notes. 123 There it is. So here is our G chord in the key of C And is it major or minor. Let's find out first, let's use our ear. I'm going to get rid of my C major notes, so we could just hear this. Okay, so tell me, if this is major or minor, what do you think? Take a guess. Even though this is not interactive and I can't hear what you're saying, Onion, assume that you guessed Major and you would be correct. That is a major court. It has a kind of happiness to it, Right? Because be is our third be occurs in C major. And that's our third. So that gave us a major record, a g major chord. And we know that if we wanted to spell a G minor chord, given this as our starting point, we could do that very easily, right? All we'd have to do is take our third and move it down. One note and then we would have a G minor chord, and it's got that tinge of sadness to it. So key of C making more chords in the key of C. Let's do one more going to get rid of some notes here. Let's go to a deep. So still in the key of C major. Let's see if we have a major or a minor chord when we build the route on D. So again, our notes are major major Earth. Sorry, Whole step, whole step half step horse step for step for step half step. There's R C Major notes. All right, we'll start on D. So let's first find the fifth. So 12345 That takes us to an A. Put a note there. Now let's find our third 12 three. It's F. So there's our court. I'm going to get rid of our C major notes and let's hear this. Is that a major reminder? Cord? Well, we have three ways. Well, we have two ways. For now we have hearing it, which we just did, and we could guess whether or not that's major or minor. So take a guess. I'm not even gonna try to predict if you're right or wrong. Uh, what I'm gonna tell you, though, is that let's do it another way. Let's do the counting up half steps thing. So here we are at D. So here's our first half step. 2234 Remember that 4/2 steps is a minor third, which means we must have a minor chord here. So if this was 5/2 steps Teoh here, we would have a major chord. But that would put us on this black note. And there are no black notes in the key of C major. They're all white notes, so we know that this wouldn't be correct. So we have a d minor record here because the route is on D and the third ends up being a minor third, which creates a D minor chord. And we also know that if we wanted Teoh make it a major chord, even though it would be out of the key of C Major and we will be kind of breaking our rules because we'd be dissonant. But that's OK. We could All we have to do to make this a major chord would be to take that f the third and bump it up, and then we'd have a major chord. Cool. Okay, so now that we know how to make a couple different chords in the key of C major, let's talk about how this is actually useful to your music. Ah, we know we now know of three chords that will work in the key of C major. We know that d minor move this back down to Minor de Miner will work in the key of C major . We know that Jima G Major Sorry works in the key of C major. So let's put both those on here. Let's spell out a G major. There's the third and there's the fifth. So these cords both work perfectly happily in C major. And the third chord that we know work that works in C major is see C, e and G. Excellent. So now we have these three chords that were Conceive Major. Soon you're going to know all the cords that work in a given key. And when you know that, then let's say you're working on a track, right? You've got this cool build happening, you know, based on the notes you've used so far, you know, you're in the key of let's say, C major, just cause that's what we're dealing with right now in the key of C Major And you think OK , where can I go from here? What could the next chord be? Right now we have we know, three things we can do. We could go to either any three of these chords and, like, cool. Those are different roads. Aiken, go down for the next section of this piece of music. So soon you're going to know all the available options so that when you're writing something, you can say, OK, what comes next? Okay, here are the cords. That will sound good. I know. Just off the top of my head, I know all the cords that'll sound good, and I can do something with them. Let's hear what this sounds like. So here we have our first little chord progression, right. We have three chords. A progression is just progression of chords, one court after the other. So here's three chords. They sound nice together because they're all in the key of C Major. And let's maybe get a little silly with it and, like, just throw some drumbeats in there or something. Here it is. That's nice. Let's add some just drums to jazz it up. Okay, Now, this isn't gonna be the most brilliant thing in the world, but I'm gonna add Ah, baseline. So I have ah based synth cute up over here, I'm gonna throw my core progression on it. So now I have the same notes in my base. It's not playing yet. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to get rid of the top notes so that the base plays on Lee. The route notes right for my three chords G, d and C, because I'm playing a D minor chord, a g major chord and a C major chord. So I'm gonna tell the base toe on Lee, play the route notes, and that will sound good. Ah, that's very often with the bass player is doing or with the bass synth is doing is playing the roots of the cords. So let's hear that in little bit of context. Okay, what if I wanna jazz up that base a little bit? I don't want to get into, like, synthesis and stuff quite yet. Let's maybe shorten that and let's have the bass player add 1/5 in there, too. So here's our fifth. We know how to find the fifth. It's shortened up the root of this note and haven't go up to 1/5 of G and are see also, and we'll just repeat this twice. So let's see what our baseline is doing now just by adding the fifth, because we know the fifth sounds good. Okay, Okay. So so far, we've learned how to find those chords that work in a key. A couple of them. Ah, we know that fifths work. So when we add something like a baseline, if we want to just jazz it up and we want to do more than just playing the root of the cord . I know. I just kind of threw that in there. Um, haven't played the fifth also, because the fifth almost always sounds good. OK, moving on. So the next thing we're gonna do in our next lesson is we're going to dive into that third thing, that third way of knowing what chords work in a given key. Ah, and that's called a diatonic chord progression. It's a scary sounding thing for something that is relatively simple. And this will tell us all the cords that work in a key just off the top of the top of your head. If you memorize this little pattern. So I will see you over there. 5. Diatonic Chord Progressions & Inversions: all right, welcome to music theory for electronic musicians presented by slam academy diatonic chord progressions and inversions. So in this lesson, we're gonna look at these funky things called diatonic chord progressions. Ah, which are kind of your super secret weapon for knowing every possible cord in a key. There's a pattern you're gonna memorize, and it's gonna make it. So you're gonna walk into a gig and someone's going to say we're playing in the key of E flat Major and without even thinking about it, you're gonna know seven chords that you could play that will fit perfectly in with what's going on. And we're gonna also talk about inversions, which is a fancy way to say, making it sound less dumb, pretty much that's what inversions air for. Okay, so let's have a look. So let's start by dissecting this diatonic chord progressions term a little bit so that we understand what it is so diatonic means it's in a key. I think we may have talked about this in, like the first lesson or maybe the second lesson, but diatonic means it's in a key. If we are playing Diatonic Lee, we are playing in a key Doesn't matter what key for this word to apply. It just means we're playing in a key. Chromatic is the opposite of diatonic. It means we are not playing in a key. It means anything goes completely randomly. Any note is as important as any other note. Ah, playing chromatic Lee. It's fun. Sometimes it usually sounds like hell, but sometimes it can sound good If your if you know what you're doing or playing in a certain style, I should say there are certain styles of music that rely on chromatic music. Chromatis ism, As we say, um, particularly avant garde music. Ah, things like that, things that, if you are taking this class through some academy, is probably not your main cup of tea. But it can also be a really useful trick to work with chromatic stuff. If you're, let's just say hypothetically. Scoring film. Let's say you're scoring a film and it's a horror movie, and there's something really terrible happening, you know, reach over into chromatic music and you'll be able to make it sound pretty horrible pretty fast. I know that sounds funny, but it's true. That's kind of what we do often when we're working in film. So the word chromatic is also used when talking about color. We talk about chromatic and it kind of means like all the colors, right, So that kind of makes it make a little more sense for how we use it. With music, you can just means all the notes. Um, you'll find that a lot of music terms borrow themselves from color. Um, one word that we use a lot and you might find when ah, you get into programming a synthesizer or something is the word. Tambor Tambor's just Italian for color. Um, but we use it to describe, like the quality of the sound is that bright? Is it sharp is a dark um so Tambor means that we're not talking about Tambor right now. We're talking about Titanic or progressions. So that's where what chromatic means. Playing it means playing any note. Not playing in a key diatonic means we are in a key, and that's what we're gonna focus on now. So diatonic chord progressions, diatonic or progression means all the cords in Ah Kee. So what this is going to show us is how to find all the cords in a key in a systematic way to know the quality of those cords. And by quality, I mean major minor or, in one case, this other weird thing that we'll talk about in a minute, but mostly major or minor. Ah, so all the chords in the key all the triads in the key is what I should actually say. All the triads in the key of blank, whatever. Keep working in. So in order to, um, demonstrate this, let's bop on over to able to live and look at it there. It's a little more easy to explain when we're looking at it on the piano roll editor. Okay, here we are. Over in, able to live. I am going to start us off by first drawing in all the notes of C major again. So here they are. There's a c. So we have whole step, whole step half step. You're totally getting sick of hearing me say this pattern over and over. But I want to be sure you understand it. Whole step, whole step. Whole step half step right There is our notes. There are our notes down. They're the notes are about that Okay, So there's our notes now, in order to figure out the diatonic or progression, Essentially, what I'm gonna do here is I am going to build a triad on every note of the scale. So I'm gonna first, My first chord is going to use, See, as the root right than the route is the note that the court is named after. So the first one's gonna be built on See the 2nd 1 I'm gonna build the court on D and then I e than an Afghan on G etcetera. I'm gonna build all of those chords and then we'll have them all laid out. Now, we don't know yet which of those cords are gonna be major and minor, but that's the pattern. As soon as we figure that out, which we're gonna learn right now, then we know going forward like, Oh, the third cord in the scale is minor, like we just know that. And you you Congar really comfortable this pattern. So let's figure it out. So first we're gonna do a C major. Let's just do it right right here. So I was gonna extend groups extend this note. So our first chord So I have remember, we're looking for the route the third and the fifth of the chord. So in the key of C major route skipped the second. Go to the third, Skip the fourth. Go to the fifth. So there is my first court. Um, that's a C chord. C major chord with the route on C. So it's a C chord gets the next one. So I'm gonna build on with that. A root on D. So there it is. There's my d. So now I need the root third and fifth. But I am sticking to the key of C here, some using these notes. So see, Skip one that gets me to my third. That's an F. So in the key of C, this is our route. This is the second. This is the third. That's what I need. This is the fourth. This is the fifth, So that's the one I need. Root 3rd 5th So here's my second chord. That's my second chord, and that's a D chord. We don't know if it's major reminder yet. Maybe you do, but let's keep going. Next one is E. So there's an E. Then I skip the second of E I Go to the third Skip the fourth on I Go to the fifth. There's my cord built on E e Triad. Let's keep going. Next one. Uh, this court is going to be built on the fourth scale degree of C Major and that's F So here's F Skip the second of F go to the third, skip the fourth and go to the fifth. There's my f chord. Keep on going here to the fifth scale degree. Just G. There's my G skip. A note gets me my third skip a note. There's my fifth. So now I'm going up into the next octave owner for this to work. So let's just put all of the notes of C major again here, But we'll do in the next active. So here's c so I just do the pattern over again. Pull, step, whole step, half step, Whole step, whole step. Whole step half step. We're not gonna need to go up that high, but there they are. So now I have my G chord. There it is. Stretch that one out for us. Okay, so that was my fifth scale degree. Here. Let's go to the sixth scale degree. It's in a So put that there and then I skip a note. I get the third of that. A. I groups screw up a little bit. I skip a note and I get the fifth of a stretch that out. All right, one more. I get to the seventh scale degree. That would be a B. So I put in to be skipping out. That gives me my third of be skipping out on that gives me my fifth of be, Stretch that out and then just to complete this cycle, let's go up one more. This puts us back at sea. This is back where we started, but an octave higher. So let's put that here. See, I skip a note gets in my third. I skip a note, and fifth, we'll stretch that out. So these notes should be exactly the same as my first chord. C, E and G. I go back down to here, C e and G do the same Justin octave higher. Okay, so that gets me That is my diatonic chord progression. That's what we are looking at right here. Still, I'm gonna delete my initial C major scales. We can hear what this sounds like. Get rid of all this. Otherwise, we're just going here. This big cluster. So we call it. By the way, when you play all the notes at once of a key, we call it a cluster. Okay, let's slow this downs we here nice and slow. Here is the diatonic chord progression played in order. Cool. So there they all are. There's all our chords. That's what we need to remember. So next thing we need to know is we need to learn the pattern. Right? So I'm going to draw this on here. Okay, So the pattern is going to be a Siris of minor chords and major chords in order with one funky one. So our first court here, this is a C e g. We are in the key of C major, so we know our first court is going to be a major chord. Um, So here's how we're gonna some common abbreviations for you, By the way, um, we looked at some abbreviations last time, but minor chords, Lower case M. That's what we did last time. Major chords. We do em a J or sometimes we just do a Capital M. So I'm gonna do lower case M for minor capital M for Major. So this first chord is major and it's the 1st 1 So let's put a one in music theory, we use Roman numerals for a lot of stuff. I hate Roman numerals. I'm just gonna tell you that right now I hate Roman numerals, but that's what we use. So the first chord and we call it the one is Major. Look at the second cord. So this is the second cord. It was a Roman numeral two. And now is this major or minor? Remember our tricks? Last time we had two different tricks and I promised you 1/3 1 So we're doing the 3rd 1 right now. But our two initial tricks were one. Just listen to it and see, Does it sound, major or minor? The other one was count the half steps. So 1234 4/2 steps meant a minor. We don't need to count the half steps up to the fifth cause we don't care. All we really care about is that third that middle note, right? That's the one that tells if tells us if it's major or minor. So it's 4/2 steps to that third. Which means it's got to be a minor chord. So we're gonna call that one minor look at three. Is this one major or minor? 1234 It is also a minor. See how I'm getting that? It's the third is all we care about. And we're just finding out this pattern, this major minor, minor pattern, because it's gonna be the same. It's like the fourth chord. Is this one major minor. 1234 five. This one is Major. How about the five chord? 12345 This one is also major. All right, how about the six chord? 1234 This one is minor. I'm gonna write that down here. Over here we have these seven chord and this one is the one that I've alluded to a couple times. That's neither major nor minor. If we look at our 3rd 1234 it's minor. But this one has an extra weird little quality to it that we won't need to go into right now. But suffice it to say it's kind of like a super minor chord. Um, we call it a diminished chord, sometimes abbreviated dim or with a little tiny circle. So the seventh is the weird one. It's a diminished chord. No, to explain that a little more. Um, the diminished chord is really ugly sounding. Let's have a listen really quick. Here. Let me shifted down an octave just so that you can hear it. There we go. It's ugly. It doesn't have a really good use for us for the kind of music that I'm assuming most people in this class we're going to be taking it's best quality is its transitional meaning . It pushes to something else. It makes you it can really make the music like cook. Um push forward in a way. Ah, you don't want to sit on this cord for a long time, but to help you move onto a new section, this court can be really powerful. The diminished chord. Um, incidentally, this cord has an interesting history to it was ah, back in, you know, the Middle Ages, when all music was run by the church playing this cord or singing this cord. If you're in a choir or If you are composer writing this cord would pretty much guaranteed get your head chopped off for doing this court. Um, there's another kind of fancy your term for this cord and it would be a low Crean cord. Um, it's based on a low crean pattern and lo Koreans Not a word you need to remember. But ah, if we get the it comes from the root word Latin for the word is loco where we also know that word. Probably from Latin Spanish in a lot of languages in which Loko means crazy, right? It's the crazy cord. It just sounds crazy. Um, and it would get you killed because it was the Devil Court. Pretty much so. We're not gonna use that one a whole lot, but it's there. So here we are, back with stuff and our last chord here. We know that this cord is the same as our first chord, so we really don't even market in Roman numerals. There's no such thing as eight. You don't do that. We would call this instead one because it's the same notes and it's major because one down here is major, right? So our pattern, the diatonic chord progression pattern is this including this? So that is to say, it is already over here. Major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished. That is the pattern for every key that pattern works. So we did this and see Major. But if we were playing in D Major and someone said, Ah, he go to the third chord of of d major, you know, it's a minor chord because 123 it's It's the third chord. It's got to be minor, right? Okay, let me look at this a little bit differently because I deceived you somewhat on these Roman numerals. There's not gonna be a theory test here. Ah, so the way you write these down, I don't really care. And I don't really care if you write them down at all, but, um, in place. You ever walk into a theory class? I want to be sure you do this, right? So what we do to designate minor in Major, if we're not doing the capital and lower case M is, we use capital number capital and lower case Roman numerals. So Oops. So major, one two is minor. So we use II lower case to in Roman numerals, just with eyes three is minor. So the way that we can see quickly whether or not that court is major minor is because of the lower case or capital letters. Four is major. Five is major. Six is minor. Seven. We write as minor with this circle on it. Meaning diminished. There's are diminished circle, don't that? And then this would be one again. Excellent. So we're gonna try a little experiment here and analyze a tune. So I have here a track called Sleeping In by this band called the Album Leaf. They do kind of no electronic. Ah, down tempo stuff. I kind of dig him. Ah. So let's just here this opening keyboard riff and then we're gonna do a little analysis of it, so here it is. - Okay , so it basically just started over again there with some extra bells and soon drums come in and all that stuff. So I'm gonna try a little experiment, and I just want to look at this intro part. Cem's gonna shortness a little bit to save us a little bit of time I'm going to use, and I've always wanted to do this So I'm gonna try this. I can use able to in lives new. Ah, uh, convert to Midi Tool so we can look at the notes here. So we're going to say, convert harmony to new MIDI track. So what this is doing is it's analyzing all those notes and trying to figure out the pitches for us. So hopefully it gets him right. And then we can look over what they are and see how they're organized. And hopefully, inside this track, we find our diatonic chord progression. It won't be laid out as clearly as we did before. It's not gonna be an order, but it will still be there if they're playing in a key, which I think they are. Okay, so it's done. Here's our notes. Okay, so it zoomed way out. So let's zoom in so we can see what we got here. Okay, let's hear it first. And let's just here the able tens analysis version. Let's just hear this first couple cords. That sounds pretty good. Okay, cool. So let's organize these. So first thing we have is a B and a G. So let's go on the assumption that were in the key of G major. I'm pretty sure we are looking over it really quickly. Um, so just trust me on that. And let's see if our system of diatonic chord progressions work in G. So what are the notes of G? What? Can I lay this out? I want to do this. I'm gonna take everything that slide it forward a little bit. And then I'm just going to write down the notes of G for us. So it's G. Here's our pattern. I probably don't need to say it again for you And let's do Let's. So there is one octave. Let's do another active. Maybe I need to go down another active too, because we're all over the place. So I'm going to start in a lo G and then there's that. Okay, so I have three octaves laid out of RG. So let's pick this apart chord by chord. So here's our first chord on the slide this over so we can look at it right next to our G major scale here. So both these notes are N g. Because they're on our pattern, right? Let's shrink. I'm a little bit so I'm gonna pull this note up, inactive. So now we're right here. So if this was the one chord right, we need we're missing a note. We only have two notes, but we do have. Here's G. There's the second and there's the third. We have the root and the third. We don't have 1/5 and that's okay. We don't need the fifth. We could just have two notes of the court. It's still Accord, right? Remember, Accord means it's two notes. And if it's going to only be two notes, the fifth is the good one to leave off because the route is kind of important. And the third is really important, right? Because that's how we know if it's a major or minor court. So we have, ah, one chord here. So let's let's mark that down. Okay, so here we have in the key of G, we have one. Okay, We'll come back to that in a minute. Let's look at our next chord. So the next thing we have is this note and then these two at the same time. This note this A is not actually in either record. I don't think Well, actually, maybe it is. Lets assume it's in this next chord. They hit it a little early. Sometimes we do that if we want things to sound good. Um, just playing the court, the notes of the chord, one by one. That's fine. We can do that. So let's take all three of these notes. Let's brush them over here. Let's see if they're anarchy. So there's F sharp. That's in key. There's a that's anarchy. There's D. That's anarchy. Let's flip this d up and active. So now let's look at where this lies. And actually, just to make it a little easier, I'm gonna flip this whole thing up another active. So now let's look at where this D is in relation to the key of G. So 1234 five. So this is the five chord. And if this is the five chord we know from our diatonic chord progression, it must be major. Because remember the diatonic chord progression, said major, Minor, minor, major, major minor diminished. So 1234 five must be major. So this is a major five chord in the key of G, and this is still our atomic right? So we have a one in a five. Let's look at what else we've got coming up. Next we have Let's clump these notes together and that's probably it. So these three, these three are not gonna work out as well. I'm gonna call this e not part of the chord because it was a little early. Um, sometimes those early knows are part of the court, and sometimes they're not. If they're not part of the court, we call it a passing tone. Passing tone just means it's not part of the court. It's just a note that we threw in there to sound good. We can totally do that. So let's take this out of the equation. That e and let's just deal with these two. Let's push this over here and let's take these up and active and I want to get this f sharp above G. So I'm gonna go up another active. So we have here is who Accord built on the seventh, Remember? We don't like those. That's gonna be a diminished chord if it had all the right notes in it. But it doesn't. Actually, it does. Here's a little cheat. I'm gonna dio I'm gonna move the upper note down and active, so I just kind of reordered those. This is what we're gonna talk about now I have a cord built on B. So in the key of G, this is 123 It's the third ah scale degree accord built on the third scale degree. So it's three, so it must be minor. We don't have the third here, though. 123 the three. The third would be D would be right here. And that's not in it, but the fifth. This is the correct fifth. So the fifth is in it were left out the third here, And that creates kind of an empty sound when you don't have the third because we don't know if it's major minor, but it could be Okay. Okay, So here's our cords are three chords in order with that. So what we have here is ah, core progression that is completely in key. It is one five. That's the core progression for the beginning of this song. We kind of had to dissect it a little bit and nudge some things around to make it easier to see, and we switch some octaves just so that it would be easier to see. But, um, hopefully you'll get good at spotting these so compositionally when we're working. When we're writing a tune, let's say we're here groups Let's say we've written this much. We've got our first chord. We've got a second chord. We like the way that sounds and then or like how what could come next? Well, we know we're in the key of G. So according to our pattern, we could use an a minor chord because that's two in the second scale. Degree is minor. According to our pattern, we could have 1/3 cord built on the third scale degree, and that would be minor. We could put a C major in here because that's four and four is major in this key or in all keys for his major. But in this key, it would be C major K G. In the accord built on the fifth scale degree would be on D, and that would be major. It would be the fifth. That's what we have here. We could also use an e minor e minor Ah, because it's the six scale degree and we know by our pattern that it's going to be minor. So to some, all that up do you not forget this pattern? Major, Minor, minor, major, major, minor and the funky diminished one. So this is a core built on our first scale degree. His major, our second is minor. Our third is minor. Our fourth is major. Our fifth is major, are six is minor and our seventh is this bizarre, diminished one. That's the pattern that will make it any that will tell you any note, any chord in a given key. What the quality of the court is major minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. Just get really good at saying that I want you to fall asleep saying that saying, Major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished. Um, you should be able to recite it in your dreams. Okay, let's move on to talking about inversions. Okay, so here's what Inversion is in a nutshell. You're probably hearing all these chords laid out and thinking, Okay, I sort of get it that, you know, we put the cords in the order. This is how we assemble on blah, blah, But these still styling, like stupid courts, they don't sound like interesting music to me. Um, that is why we're going to do inversions. Because you would be correct. They do sound like stupid courts. Um, so in this part, we're gonna talk about ah, how to make those chords sound a little hipper. Um, rather than just playing this diatonic chord progression thing, Um, which isn't going to sound really interesting. All the notes will sound good together because they're all in key, and they're all assembled properly, but they're not terribly interesting. Another thing about inversions is that if you noticed ah, in the last section when we were working on the album leave track that last chord, I did a little trick to make it look correct to make well, to make it be correct. And that was I moved one note down, inactive, and it crossed over the other note. Ah, that is an inversion. So let me explain a little more detail. So here we have our diatonic or progression again. Um, let's try to make an interesting sounding chord progression out of this. So let's just pick a couple chords. Let's use our tonic chord. Um, let's use Oh, I don't know. Let's not use the two chord, but we'll leave the three chord. Maybe we'll use the five chord and the six chord. How about that? So I'm going to get rid of the seventh and eighth. Okay, so here we have a four chord chord progression. Let's maybe change the order of these. Let's put are five chord over here and yeah, that works like that. So we're gonna go one chord five Chord three chord Oops, I'm sorry. One chord, six chord three chord five chord. All right, I'm just gonna make these all be get their own beat here is going to spread these out of little bits, okay? And then I'm going to Phil. Okay, so now we have a progression. That is 1635 Right. So this is gonna be a minder minor or are sorry. A major chord are six is going to be a mind record because it is by the pattern by the diatonic or progression pattern are three is going to be a minor chord because it is by the pattern and are five is gonna be a major court. Okay, so here's what that sounds like. OK, so that's our core progression that we're gonna work with here, Um, the thing that makes it sound less interesting. Basically the thing that makes it sound like Moby it is that it? Ah, all the cords are in route position. That means that they're all spelled exactly how we did it before in the pattern of root. 3rd 5th All of them have the route in the bottom. We call that route position. The lowest note is the root hoops. So this is the route of this cord. This is the route, see is the root of that court and G is the root of accord. The route is in the bottom. There's nothing wrong with having the route in the bottom. It's called root position. It's fine, but the cords don't flow into each other. The reason I said it sounds like Moby is because he does this all the time. He plays a whole bunch chords in position. See how different this court these two chords are, You know, they're like miles away from each other. What we'd like to do is make them flow into each other a little bit better, and that's what an inversion is. An inversion means there's something that's not the root in the lowest note of the cord. So right now they're in route position and there are names for the other positions. There's first inversion second version bought a lot. I really care about any of that. All I care about is we're gonna put an input this cord into an inversion, meaning we're going to put either the third or the fifth into the lowest note of the cord. That's the inversion that we're going to do, so it doesn't really matter which one. Um, they have a slightly different sound, depending on how you do it. But if you had a baseline, it's gonna change the inversion completely anyway, right, cause that's now gonna be whatever the basis playing is going to be the lowest note in the court. But for our purposes, let's just make these flow into each other a little bit better. So let's take this E Let's move it down an octave. Okay, so we just inverted this cord all the same notes just in a different order, and now it makes these to flow into each other a little bit better. Let's move this seed down and active as well. Look at that. Now we have two of the same notes between the one court and the six Chord. There's really only one note different. It wasn't is obvious when these two we're up here. But when we take him down, we see that there's only one note different between those two courts. Interesting. So that makes these jail a whole lot better. Because now, on Lee, one note needs to move. You know, we could even do is if we were using a synth that had a lot of sustained, We could even just do this and just let those name that would blend those two together really nicely. This piano doesn't have a lot of sustained, so I'm gonna leave it. So we re attack these two notes here. Let's see what else we could do to make these jive. These other chords job better. So let's try moving this. Be down. Inactive. Okay, that that makes a nice little motion there. That's a nice motion. I got this G chord, The five chord all the way up here. Let's take this D down and active. That's okay. Let's try taking this be down an octave. Hey, look at that. Now we have this kind of neat baseline that just is gonna go between C and B over and over again, back and forth. This G stays the same. That's nice. This e moves down to a D. No big deal, Small amounts of motion. So now this core progression will sound. It's all the same notes all the same chords. If we wanted to get fancy and label it, we would label it all the same stuff. This is still a one chord. This is still six chord, and it's minor. This is still a three chord, and it's minor, and this is still a five chord. But we've reorganized the notes to make them, Ah, little more cohesive, and this is gonna have a little bit cooler of a sound to it. So let's hear that seen now. They blend together quite nicely, so that's what an inversion is. It's a pretty simple concept, but all it really means is to reorder the notes so that they flow in so that the cords flow into each other a little bit better. The position is determined by the lowest note, or sometimes we say the note in the base, meaning the lowest note of the court. So in this case, I have I'm in route position still with this cord, because the route is in the bottom. Ah, in this case, the route is all the way up here. So that's an inversion. And this one, the route is What did I say This court was? Ah, three chord. So the root is here, and in this one, the route is on the top. And that's totally okay. This is when we start to make this stuff actually get musical. You know, it starts to sound good. Not just like we're playing a whole bunch of root position courts, because if we did, we'd sound like Moby and nothing against Moby. But he sounds like ah to me. His music sounds like it was written by Ah, fourth grader. So, um, maybe just for fun, I will do this. I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna let these notes sustain. I'm gonna do the same thing with this one since that. No, doesn't change. Just let that sustain same thing here. Let that sustain and even this one here, check that out. This one goes all the way through. Okay, so now on, Lee notes that change get re attacked us. Isn't gonna sound terribly interesting in a piano going to switch this over to being on a synth That has a little more sustained to it, and we'll see how cool it sounds. Okay, so I threw a really big kind of lush since sound on this, um, and Q tips and drums. So here's what, That same eggs, All the exact same notes. I haven't changed a thing. Sounds like when you put a synth on it. - All right, so now you can see how we're starting to get there, right? We're starting to get to some interesting music. We're not just cycling through. Boring old core progressions were actually creating some stuff, so Ah, we'll get into more and more of that as we move on to the next lesson. Um, so hopefully I will see you there. Adios. 6. 7th Chords: hello again and welcome Teoh Part five of music theory for electronic musicians. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about seventh chords. So what 1/7 court is is Well, you remember triads. We've looked at Triads in several different ways. Um, triads are cords that have three notes. Ah, seventh chord is not accord that has seven notes. That would be weird. Uh, it's a chord that has 1/4 note. Eso What we're gonna do is we're gonna have a little look at the different kinds of cords that are created when you add the seventh and most importantly, why it's called the seventh. So let's pop on over a bilton and the piano roll editor and have a look. Okay, so we're getting pretty familiar with our, um are triads here, so I'm gonna make us a C major triad. And when I do that, I used the first note of the court or the route I used the third and I used the fifth. In other words, I skip a note, So let's do this. Let's stretch those out like we did like we've done before. And now let's fill in the other notes of the scale. So now we have all the notes of C major. Oops. OK, all the notes of C major and we use the 1st 3rd and fifth to make our first triad in C major or are one chord, if you will. Um, another way to look at that is that we we use every other note of the scale, right? Have a note the route. Skip one. Another note. Skip Elin. Another note of the cord. Now what if we kept going Skip one and we added another note. This would be 1/7 chord. Why is it called a seven? It's called 1/7 chord because we are using the 7th 123456 seven. So these cords, unlike triads thes have another extra note. Um, and that extra note is the seventh. So seventh chords kind of changed the quality of the court. They're still major or minor, because the third is what dictates whether or not we're a major or a minor record. So we're not changing the major or minor quality worm or adding to it. So the seventh makes it either, like, really major or really minor, kind of, um But to complicate that little bit, this seventh itself could be major or minor. In this case, the seventh is major, and we can tell that it's major because, well, one way would be its distance from the fifth here. So the same way that we counted half steps down here between the root and the third, we could count half steps up here and say 1234 five, which would be a major third. So a major third away from the G is a major seventh. An easier way to tell if you're in a major seventh or a minor seventh is to look at its distance to the octave. Starting over. It's a major seventh. It's going to be 1/2 step away, right? So here is our root note, but an octave higher right, and we're really close to it, whereas closes, you can possibly be to it. And that means it's a major seventh. The major seventh chord has this kind of lush, beautiful nous to it that I don't know how. Let's do it to explain it. It's, um, it's It's a really beautiful sound, actually, um, probably the most famous major seventh chord is in the song Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Let me see if on cue that up really quick. Okay, here it is. Now when you hear the major seventh chord, it's It's a sound that kind of Mexico. That's the sound. I'll point it out almost there. Sometimes when the base centers is the city, I live in the city of Angels only, as I am right here that okay, so seventh chords have basically three different flavors. There's more than just major and minor. There's 1/3 thing. It's kind of major and minor, but what we have is a major chord with a major seventh. That's one thing we can have. So when we get the major chord with the major seventh, we call that a major seven chord so that sometimes written as I m a. J seven. Sometimes, particularly in jazz, you see it marked as a triangle that's kind of falling out of fashion. I think you don't see that very often anymore, but I M a J seven is a good way to do it, so this would be a one major seventh chord. Um, so that's one flavor that we can have of it. Another flavor would be a minor seventh chords. So if we take any minor chord, we know that in the key of C, the two chord is going to be minor, right? We know that from the diatonic chord progression, Skip one, there's our two chord are minor to cord. If we add 1/7 there's our seventh. So we have a minor triad because this is a minor interval. There's only 4/2 steps here, and we have a minor seventh. Another way to tell if we count from the top to get from our seventh up to the octave higher of the route. That's gonna be this note here, right? So that's two steps away. That means it's a minor seventh from where this one is only one step away. This is two steps away. Remember, we're talking about the root of the cord, so that's a D. So if I flip that up and active, we see that it's two away. This one, the root of the cord, is C, so it's only half step away. So here we have a minor triad with a minor seventh, and this sound is um, it's a little bit jazzy. We don't use it a lot. Um, but it's a cool sound. I tend to like the sound of it. I can't think of a really famous one. So I'm just gonna see if I can play it by itself. That's the sound of it. Meet, um, experiment with it, see what you think of it. It's it's got kind of a nice sound. So that's flavor. To of the seventh chord. We have a minor seven court and we would write that as a lower case m seven like that. So this would be to minor seventh sort of. Ah, we might not write it exactly this way. You might just right to seven, because the minor is implied by the lower case too. But we don't really care about Norman pleasure. Ah, lower case M seven minor seven. And you might be thinking, what on earth could be the 3rd 1? The 3rd 1 is a combination. It would be a major triad with a minor seventh. This could happen, right? And in fact, diatonic Aly on on our diatonic chord progression, it does happen in one place. If we start on the fifth note. So I'm going to build a five chord. So I started on G in the key of C. This is our five chord, so I'm gonna build my try at first. So here's my triad and it's major. We can see because of that Third. Now, if I add my seventh, so this is D. I'm gonna skip that note and add that note something you get over that one. So this is my seventh of G. It's a minor seventh weaken tell, because it's a whole step away from the root and active higher here. This is where the route would be. It's also 123 4/2 steps only. So it's a minor seventh, but it's a major chord. So what do we call this if we call this a major seven? We call this a minor seven. This one is kind of half and half right. It's a major chord with a minor seven. What we call that is a dominant seven or sometimes just a dominant chord. Ah, shorthand way to do it. If we're using Roman numerals is, call it a 57 That's implied because this really only happens on the fifth of our key, the 57 chord. Now the dominant seven Court has some special powers, just like our third. In particular, the dominant seventh chord has the ability to always lead back home. This is like playing the dominant seventh chord is like a big, huge road sign saying you are heading home now. Ah, when you play this chord, it feels like the next thing that should happen is this. Ah, let me play some examples of that for you. Okay, check this out. So what I have here is our five chord are 57 chord actually. So this is a g seven chord. And here I have just a normal old one chord. Not 1/7. I took the seventh off. Justo, make this really hit home. So this is the seventh chord. And what's gonna feel like when we play this sound? This cord, it's gonna feel like this needs to go somewhere, and the place it feels like it needs to go is here to the one chord. It has this pull to it. So whenever we want something to sound like the end Ah, good way to do it is to play 57 and then one, and it will feel like the end. You know all those, like, Well, maybe you don't, But there's, like a 1,000,000 symphonies that end by going. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. That's all just going. 571571571 So here's what that sounds like. Hear how this cord felt like it had to go somewhere If I just play it and stop, right? You want something to happen, What you want to happen is this cord you're waiting for, that there's ah, really famous story that Ah, Mozart's dad would wake him up in the morning by doing exactly this by going and then stopping and waiting. And Mozart would jump out of bed, run downstairs and play that chord to resolve it. Um, because he just couldn't live with that sound. Not resolving to the one chord, it just kind of has to. So one thing we could do is to make the sound even better. Is use what we know about inversions, right? Because each of these notes has its own kind of direction, and that's what makes it feel like that. So I'm going to flip this. See court up inactive. Oops. I'm gonna flip this e chord up. Inactive. Now it's gonna sound even better because it's going to sound like this note wants to go here. And this Snow wants to go here. And this no, just wants to stay where it is. Actually will sound even better if I double Oops, if I duplicate this c and put it down in the bottom again. So now I have an extra c so that it feels even more super special. Let's hear that, right? That means hello. This is the end. So that is a dominant seventh chord. So just to review. So we have three different flavors of seventh chord. We have the major seventh chord, which is a major triad, plus a major seven, and that seven is the seventh note above the root of the cord. We have a minor seventh, which is a minor chord, plus a minor seventh on it. And that seventh note is seven above the route of the cord. And then we have a dominant seven, which is a major chord, plus a minor seventh, and that occurs on the five and five always wants to go. 21 five wants to go toe one, no matter what we do. But especially when we put 1/7 on it. It really feels like it wants to go toe one more than anything else in the world Song and a lot of arrows pointing to one. Because when we play this, we want to hear that if you don't play a one after a 57 chord, you are a jerk or, you know, a freethinker. That's cool, too. Okay, so you might be asking yourself what does this business of seventh chords due to our diatonic chord progression? And that's a good question. So I'm gonna rip it out really quick. So Ah, pardon me. Will I write our diatonic or progression out one more time? Okay, so here it is, our diatonic or progression. I'm gonna slow this way, way, way down. Here's what it sounds like. It will be familiar. Okay. So we can add 1/7 to this whole bloody thing. Right? So here's our 1st 3rd and fifth and are seventh. Here is our 1st 3rd and fifth and our seventh. Basically, I could just make a whole another scale going up from here and it'll work. So there's all the sevenths in the key of C major as they fit into all of these cords. So the way I did that without thinking very hard was I just started on the seventh of the 1st 1 So C major making the seventh I know it to be. Then I just wrote the scale going up, Starting on be so C D E f G A B. That's how it will line up. All of these will do that. So now we have our diatonic chord progression with seventh in it. And what that's going to make is let's have a look here. It's gonna be similar. So if you remember without 1/7 our pattern was major minor, minor major, major pounds. I'm done here. Minor diminished. And then this is the one chord again. So it's major. I'll put in parentheses because that's one. Just add inactive starts with C See down here with the seventh. This makes a major seven a minor seven on minor seven. This one is a major seven, so they're still there. Coral on correlating really directly right. Major core becomes major seventh miner core becomes minor. Seventh major seventh year. This one is our were dominant seven because that's the five chord right that one is the weirdo in the situation here. Ah, this one becomes a minor seventh. Our six chord are crazy. Diminished chord from before is kind of the opposite of a dominant seven. This is a minor third here and a major third there. It's upside down over a minor chord. What we call that is 1/2 diminished, or we could just keep calling it a diminished. So it's just kind of super diminished. Tow us. Ah, half diminishes kind of more technical term. We don't use it very often. Still, collar diminished and then a major seventh again as our route. So adding 1/7 to our diatonic or progression creates really the same pattern major seven miners have mothers have made her seven, with the exception of the five Chord, becomes a dominant five chord. That weird major chord with a minor seven. So we have a minor seventh year and a major third here, so it's a major chord with a minor seventh. Let's hear what are diatonic chord progressions? Sounds like with sevens built in. You can almost feel that it's got a little bit of jazz to it because we're adding these thick records, Remember? Always said earlier in an earlier lesson that once we get beyond triads, if we start adding more extensions to court, extension means like 1/7 and there's more that we could add, Um, it starts to get a little jazzy, but these are useful to us if we want to add a little more color to the courts so that seventh chords Ah, you can experiment with adding them into your stuff there. Cool. They have a lot of fun uses. They're, if nothing else, they're a way to liven up what you've got. If you're getting sick of the triads, try throwing 1/7 on there and ah, you might get a little more color out of your courts. A little more expression, a little more fun with him to try that out. That's it for this lesson. Ah, we will check you in the next lesson. The last one, I think. See, there 7. We Interrupt This Class...: 8. The Other Intervals: Okay, Welcome to music theory for electronic musicians presented part six and this one. We're gonna talk about the fourth and the sixth, and we talk about those together cause they're related, and the seventh in the second. Ah, those are also related. And then we're gonna look at a couple tunes and see how they work. So the fourth and the sixth, these are not, um Well, when we started in this class, we looked at Ah, our main goal was to look at notes that sound good together. So we looked at all the notes in a key. So how to figure out the key? The pattern for that, etcetera. Then we looked at all the notes that sound good when played together in, like, literally together to make court. So we found the pattern for the diatonic chord progression. So we know all the notes that ah conform cords in a given key. And to do that, we made we used the first, the third and the fifth from a given route note in a given keep ah, and then eventually we used the seventh also to add well to show another note that can sound good in the cord but gives it a little bit different of equality, so it might not want to use it all the time. We skipped right over the fourth in the sixth. Ah, because those ones are not immediately useful to us when we're building cords. But if we do a couple things to them, they are actually useful. And the weird thing about them is that we've already been using them to make that a little more clear. Basically, if you invert 1/4 and invert 1/6 you get notes that were already using or not notes. I should say I should say ah, intervals or scale degrees that were already using. So let's head on over to able to live and have a look at how that works. Okay, let's start here like we always do. And let's just draw in the C major scale so we can see it. So holster, post up, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step half step. We're going pretty good at that. Okay, let's say C is our route. Let's drag that out. And now let's look at the fourth. So 1234 Here it is so our fourth of C is F. So what I mean by an interval we've already been using is let's separate thes. Let's just pull these out here for a second. If we go see toe f, we have 1/4. We've just established that. What if we go f to see? Meaning we go, We do this upside down. So let's make that a little easier by just shifting the sea up. Inactive. What's our interval now? One, 234 five It's 1/5 and we know we like fifths, right? It's the first interval We looked at fifth star. Good. We need 1/5 to make a court to make a try out anyway. So what's going on here? The thing is that any interval one inverted becomes another interval. It still makes a chord because if you notice we didn't make a C chord when we did this, we didn't make 1/5 of see. We made us fifth of F. So when it's down here, F is 1/4 above sea. But see is 1/5 above F. So off the interval of 1/4 can be inverted to the interval of 1/5 meaning if we look at the top note of 1/4 and treat that as the root. Then our interval becomes 1/5. So the so fourths and fits, um, get used a lot fourths get used a lot. Um, except they look like fits. They sound really similar. Here's the sound of Ah, fourth our sorry, the sound of 1/5. And here's the sound of 1/4. It has that kind of pure, perfect quality. Ah, in fact, we call 1/4 a perfect fourth the same way that we called Ah fifth a perfect fifth. So are perfect intervals Air Force and fifth, because I have that really open. Ah, at the same time, kind of empty quality to them. So we don't use force to build cords very often, but we do use fifths, so the inversion of 1/4 becomes 1/5. So when it comes to building cords, this is not something you need to think about all the time. You will do it. If you invert the cords like we were talking about in the last lesson, you use inversions all the time to make things flow into each other. Nicer. You've created a bunch of fourths in there, but ah, there really just fifths that are inverted. So the sound is really similar between the fourth and 1/5. And if you invert them, you get the other one eso. That's why we don't use fourths to build courts very often because it's just too darn similar to the fifth. So now that we've tackled that one, let's look at we put these back over here. Let's look at the seventh and the second. So here's a second right, one to two of these. So let's pull these out here and have a look at them, so the same pattern applies here. We don't use seconds to build. Ah, cords. It's it's a little dissonant. Um, seconds can be major or minor, whereas perfect intervals like the fourth. The fifth can't be major or minor, so this is a major second we're looking at here. Sounds like that it's a little dissident. A minor second would be that it's it's a lot dissonant. Let's go back to a major second here. What happens when we invert this interval? Based on the heading and the title of this lesson, you probably guessed it becomes 1/7. So here's a second. What if we put the sea on top? Oops, what we have now. 123456 seven. So a second inverts to 1/7. Remember when we were looking at seventh chords? One of the tricks I was talking about to see if it's a major or minor Seventh was to look at its relationship to an octave higher of the route. So here is the root. If we put this an octave higher, it would be right here, right? So that would tell us this is a minor seventh because it's too notes away from the root and active higher. If we invert it, it's a major second, so something strange has happened there, right? A major second inverts to a minor seventh. When you invert an interval that has a major or a minor quality to it, it's going to become the opposite. So a major second inverted is a minor seventh, and that's true for most of our intervals. If we invert them, they become a different number and a different quality that either become major or minor. The only exception to that rule is the fourth and the fifth. The perfect intervals stay perfect before a perfect fourth becomes a perfect fifth because that's just the way they are. Um, major seconds become minor. Seventh, and we haven't looked at sixth either. Let's have a quick look at six. Let's put these back where they belong in our little scale here, so lets you see as our route 1234 five, six. So now we have a CNN A. Let's pull those out and have a look. So what's the quality of 1/6? Okay, so our sixth here is a major sixth. That's what in major six sounds like. And how do we know it's a major six We could count, are half steps and figure out how many half steps a major sixth is. But there's an easier way. If we invert it, we end up with a minor 3rd 1234 We know 4/2 steps is a minor third. We learned that I think in our second lesson, so 4/2 steps is a minor third, so we know that a major sixth inverts to a minor third. So we've been using minor thirds all over the place, right and major thirds. So we have been using sixths. We just haven't inverted them. So if this is my cord and I invert it and put this on the bottom, I have a major sixth. But it's really just 1/3 and the sound quality is really similar. There's a huge gap here that's much smaller when it's 1/3. But the quality of the sound is really similar, so we can give the same kind of impression of 1/3 through sixth. So here's a major sixth. Here's a minor sixth, and you can kind of feel how, when we were looking at thirds a major third, um, had that kind of happy sound and a minor third had kind of a sad sound. We get the same effect here, major minor. So it does have a little bit of sadness to the minor. Sixth. So what happens when we invert a minor sixth? It becomes a major 3rd 12345 So when we invert 1/6 or third, it becomes the opposite and shifts quality. So a minor third inverts to a major six. A major third inverts to a minor sixth, so these aren't incredibly valuable things for us to know. I just wanted to be sure we touched on the role of the other intervals that we haven't talked about yet. The fourth, the sixth and the second. So to sum up, we use them all the time. 1/4 inverts to 1/5 and 1/5. We use all the time a second inverse to 1/7. And we know how to use the seventh now. And 1/6 inverts to 1/3. And we've been using thirds for a long time. Ah, seconds and sixths can be major. A minor fourths. Can't, um, you can do I should probably just mention you can do some stuff to force and fifths to make them kind of major or minor. Except we don't use that word. And it's a lot different because if you took 1/5 for example and you made it minor by taking it down 1/2 step like we do with thirds, it doesn't just make it slightly different. It makes it wildly more dissonant. So we use kind of different terms for that, and it also takes it out of key. So, uh, it's not something that we deal with all that often. So don't worry about those. Just file away that perfect intervals don't have. Um I'm minor to them or a major. To them, they're just perfect. They're just the way they are. They're just perfect. So Ah, Seconds, Thirds, sixth and seventh can be major or minor. Okay, so let's look at a piece of music. So I have queued up here, um, attuned by the band. One republic, um, called all the right moves. Ah, it's kind of Ah, big rock tune. Uh, so it's not exactly Elektronik, although they have done a lot of electronic stuff. But I have an odd fascination with this tune. I just really like the melody, The groove. I don't know. There's something that's really appealing to me. So let's hear the beginning, and then we're gonna do a little analysis and see if we can figure out what's going on. Here we go. Okay. So, um, let's have a look. So what I'm mostly concerned about is this opening Oregon rift that's going to really clearly tell us what's going on. So here that opening riff is again. Okay, so let's figure out what chords those are. So I've used the, um, convert to new harmony, convert harmony to new MIDI track, and that gave me this. I cleaned it up a little bit when the able 10 algorithms do this to figure it out, Um, sometimes they get some extra notes in there, and some artifacts, like drums might throw it off and things like that. So I thinned out some stuff that just didn't belong, But this is more or less what it kicked out. So let's have a look first. Let's just hear it as is. Okay, so that sounds right. Let's look at what chords we have here. So let's focus on this first chord. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna Just for the sake of figuring out what chords we have, I'm gonna get rid of duplicate notes. So here we have an A. When I mouse over it, we can see over here that it it's in a So I haven't a here I have another A. So let's get rid of this low one, because we only really need the name of the note wants here. I haven't e okay. Here have another A. So let's get rid of that one Here, have a C. And here I have an e. Already had any somewhere. Right? This one. Cool. So now I'm gonna just three notes. If we could organize these into a triad, that sure would be cool, wouldn't it? Let's try taking one of these notes down and active, doing an inversion of it just to get them all clumped together in a nice way. Oh, and look at that. That forms a nice little triad. We still don't know what key were in. Ah, but if we count up notes, half steps. 1234 That's a minor third, right? And then a t e is a perfect fifth, regardless of our key, 80 is a perfect fifth. So we know this is an a minor chord and we don't know if it's the 1/4 the 2/4 3 quarter, the four chord just yet. So let's just hold on to that and snow that our first court is a minor now it's like the next one. So we have a G. We have another Gees. Let's get rid of the slow one. We have a d. We have another G. Let's get rid of that one. We have a B. Then we have another t. You have a lot of these in this chord. Okay, so let's move this Be down inactive. So we get clumped together with everything else. Oh, and it makes another triad. So this looks an awfully a lot like a triad. Let's counter half steps. 1234 five. So that's a major triad and G to D is a perfect fifth in any key. We know that Judy is a perfect with so we have a G major triad. So we have a minor, followed by G Major. So now we could start to make some guesses about our key because by the diatonic chord progression, all we really have to do is find a situation in which a minor and G major happened. In other words, let me write this down for us. So we have major minor, minor, major, major minor diminished. So we have an a minor chord somewhere and we have a G major. So if let's say this was a minor and this was g Major because that could happen, that would mean or sorry other way around. So let's say this is G Major was our one chord. A minor could be too in the key so we could be in the key of G major. That's a reasonable hypothesis. Let's keep going and look at our third chord. There's just too many things that it could be a this point. So let's have a look. Let's see here. It's our third chord. We go all the way down to the bottom here. All right, we have a C, we go up, we have another see. So let's get rid of the slow one. Just look at the names We have another G or G. New 1st 1 for this cord. Another see? Let's get rid of that one and any, I think that's it. Yep. Okay, let's pull that e down to get it in the range of everything else. And we have another triad looking thing, right? So let's look at what notes these are, so it's count half steps. 12345 That's a major chord, and the fifth of C is G. So now added to our situation over here, we also have C major, so now we need to find a situation in which C Major could happen, a minor could happen and G Major could happen. So let's posit that were in the key of C. So if C is one like that, then G is going to be five. So C D E f g k. So G ends up being major. That's good. A will be six because A comes after G and it will be minor. We know from our core progression. So that all works. So we could very well be in the key of C major. We have one more cord to look at, so let's do that first before we make a conclusion. So we have an f. We have another f. So let's get rid of that low one. We have a it looks like that's it. Although we still have this see hanging around here. So the c carries over and that's okay. So let's consider see part of our court here, so we have C f. Hey, so if we can't have steps here, 123456 that doesn't make 1/3 a major or a minor Third, a major third would be five a minor third before six is not 1/3. So we have an inversion happening here. So let's just try this. Let's break this note up so that we can look at it on its own. Now let's see if we can organize this so that we can find 1/3. We can put 1/3 in the bottom. Let's try moving our high note down. Okay. 1234 We have a minor third in the bottom. That could be possible, but is f to 1/5 A is F is not the fifth of a because if we count up just letters A to B to C to D E e is the fifth of F So we discount of letters for these ones and we can also see it here. A t e. That is 1/5 a tow f is not a fit That's actually 1/6. And we know 1/6 inverts to ah third. So our cord properly spelled out. Now I remember I didn't change any notes. I just reordered them is f a c So 12345 a major triad there and then we have the fifth there. So now I've moved all of these to root position and we have an f major. So let's go back and look at her thing and see if our hypothesis of C Major still works so f will be right before G. It will be the fourth chord and it is major. So that works. We are in the key of C major, and our core progression is a minor to G. So a minor is the six chord. So we're gonna do a lower case. Roman numeral six to G, which is the five chord 21 Teoh F, which is 1234 the forecourt. So our core progression in C major is 6514 and then it starts over again. So that works Now here's one thing that's interesting about this is that we haven't talked about minor keys at all yet, and this could be in probably in all likelihood, is easier to explain explaining it in the key of a minor. But in order to talk about minor keys, you're gonna have to wait until the next version of this class when we get into some more advanced stuff and we'll talk about minor keys in that class For now, I just want to talk about major keys. So this does work perfectly well in C major. Any note you play in C major will work Ah, as a sidebar. And you know, you play in a minor will also work because a minor and see major are related. But don't let that confuse you. That is a story for another time. So in this song, we could play any note in C Major. If we analyze the melody, the notes, the guys singing, they're probably all in C Major. If we looked at the chorus, we know that the chorus to the song could go to any number of these other chords. Right? Let's clean this up and have a look at what else he could do here. So according to our diatonic chord progression in the key of C, we know he could do see major d minor e minor. So I'm just in kind of this column. I'm going up by scale degree So C D E f G A B. And in this column I'm going up by diatonic chord progression. So next to be F. And that's going to be major G. is major E is minor. Oops. I can spell a his minor and B will be that diminished chord. And then it starts over with C major. So these are all the possible cords that could happen in the key of C major. So in this song, when we go to the chorus, what do you think happens? He probably I don't know. You could go to e minor. He could go to D minor, you know, maybe he sticks on G major for a longer amount of time. Maybe a made a minor. I doubt he'll go here. Oops. I doubt he'll go to this. Be Diminished, Corp. We don't really do that very often, especially in pop music, so it's not likely. But here are all the options that he could do. And this is why we're doing all this is so that we know the different places we could go into giving key. We know what our all our options are in all the notes. That will sound good. So when you're making a track, you can analyze and figure out what chords will sound good given where you are, you're on this kind of core progression So we know this is the other places we could go or And I can't emphasize this enough You could say, You know what? Screw it. I'm gonna go to a D major. You know, D Minor is in key, and that's the one that we want. But what if I went to a d major? Screw the rules. I don't care. I'm just gonna go to D Major. You're going to break the system. You're going to do something out of key. But if you always do everything in key, you're going to create perfectly fine sounding and perfectly boring music. So sometimes you want to break the rules and were to do something that sounds a little edgy and a little fun. So don't let the rules hold you down. If you find you're in a situation where you're like Oh, man, I really want to go to d major here. But it's just not in key, so I kind of can't. But I really think it would sound good. Then forget the rules. Go to D Major. That's the most important thing. You're the composer. You can do whatever you want. You're the producer. The rules are not as important as your gut and what you think sounds good. All good music throughout history has been good because it broke the rules of music theory . These are really just kind of guidelines for what we like to hear when everything is just fine and normal. So don't be afraid to break the rules. Okay? With that, I will wrap up this lesson and ah, thanks for taking part in the class. And, uh, hopefully we will see you in the advanced version of this class. We still have aton of stuff to cover. We've only scratched the surface. Um, we saw minor keys, all kinds of different stuff. We haven't talked about rhythm or nine cords or 13th chords or anything like that. Um, there's tons more stuff to do. But hopefully this gets you on your way to making some cool new tunes. Ah, incorporating some new harmonies, new melodies and maybe understanding a little bit more about what's going on. So thanks for taking the class, and we will talk to you soon. 9. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.