Music Theory for Electronic Musicians 6: Advanced Harmony | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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Music Theory for Electronic Musicians 6: Advanced Harmony

teacher avatar J. Anthony Allen, Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro v2

      1:58

    • 2.

      Tools We Will Use

      2:16

    • 3.

      How Best to Use this Class

      1:42

    • 4.

      Characteristics of a 9th Chord

      3:20

    • 5.

      The Minor Ninth

      1:39

    • 6.

      The Major Ninth

      1:37

    • 7.

      The Dominant Ninth

      1:13

    • 8.

      The Dominant Minor Ninth

      1:44

    • 9.

      The Dominant 7th (Sharp 9)

      2:04

    • 10.

      The 6/9 & Minor 6/9 Chords

      1:55

    • 11.

      The Major & Minor add9 Chords

      2:07

    • 12.

      Have you Found the Pattern?

      3:08

    • 13.

      Characteristics of the 11th Chord

      2:34

    • 14.

      The Minor 11th Chord

      2:12

    • 15.

      The Major 11th Chord

      1:41

    • 16.

      The Dominant 11th Chord

      1:29

    • 17.

      The Dominant (Sharp 11) Chord

      2:32

    • 18.

      The Major 9 (Sharp 11) Chord

      1:47

    • 19.

      Characteristics of 13th Chords

      3:20

    • 20.

      The Minor 13th Chord

      1:23

    • 21.

      The Major 13th Chord

      0:53

    • 22.

      The Dominant 13th Chord

      1:21

    • 23.

      Lots of Variations on 13th Chords

      4:34

    • 24.

      Can we go Higher? We about 15ths, 17ths, and 19ths?

      2:07

    • 25.

      Let's Listen and Study These Chords

      2:26

    • 26.

      First, Some Definitions

      4:39

    • 27.

      Avoiding Root Voicings

      3:29

    • 28.

      Avoiding Root Voicings

      4:49

    • 29.

      The Chord Voicing Challenge

      3:28

    • 30.

      Playing with Voicings

      11:53

    • 31.

      Warning: These Chords don't Follow the Rules

      2:02

    • 32.

      Fractional Chords

      5:09

    • 33.

      Can you have two Chords at Once?

      3:33

    • 34.

      The Oddly Powerful Half-Diminished Seven Chord

      4:14

    • 35.

      The Even More Oddly Powerful Fully-Diminished Seven Chord

      4:11

    • 36.

      The Neapolitan Chord

      3:50

    • 37.

      The Italian 6 Chord

      4:59

    • 38.

      The French 6 Chord

      2:26

    • 39.

      The German 6 Chord

      1:27

    • 40.

      The Elektra Chord

      3:20

    • 41.

      The Rite of Spring Chord

      3:37

    • 42.

      The Petrushka Chord

      3:41

    • 43.

      The Bridge Chord

      2:47

    • 44.

      The Hendrix Chord

      3:37

    • 45.

      Many, Many, more.

      2:52

    • 46.

      How do I know when to use these?

      3:13

    • 47.

      If I'm using 7ths, do all of my chords have to be 7ths?

      3:20

    • 48.

      Chord Density

      8:17

    • 49.

      Transition Chords & Pivot Chords

      6:28

    • 50.

      Outer Voices and Inner Voices

      4:59

    • 51.

      Chord Rhythm

      1:53

    • 52.

      How to Pick the Best Chord Every Time

      6:10

    • 53.

      What Comes Next?

      1:41

    • 54.

      Thanks for Watching!

      0:36

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About This Class

Class Overview: Welcome to Advanced Harmony, the sixth installment in the Music Theory for Electronic Musicians series. Discover how professional producers use extended harmonies and sophisticated chord progressions to create those unforgettable moments in modern electronic music. From nu-disco to contemporary EDM, we'll explore an encyclopedia of advanced harmony techniques that will transform your productions.

What You Will Learn:

  • Master extended harmonies (9ths, 11ths, 13ths) that define modern electronic genres
  • Explore iconic chord types like the Hendrix chord and their contemporary applications
  • Understand voice leading and advanced chord voicing techniques
  • Create emotional depth through sophisticated harmony
  • Apply complex harmonic progressions in your own tracks
  • Learn the theory behind current nu-disco and electronic music trends

Why You Should Take This Class: Advanced harmony is what separates professional-sounding tracks from basic productions. This course reveals the sophisticated harmonic techniques used in contemporary electronic music, taught by Dr. J. Anthony Allen - the author of "Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers" and instructor to over 1 million students worldwide. Every concept is demonstrated in real musical contexts, showing you exactly how today's top producers use these techniques.

Who This Class is For: This advanced-level class is designed for:

  • Graduates of Music Theory for Electronic Musicians Parts 1-5
  • Electronic music producers ready to elevate their harmonic vocabulary
  • Anyone wanting to understand the sophisticated harmony in modern electronic genres
  • Producers who want their tracks to stand out through advanced harmony

Required Materials:

  • Any DAW with MIDI capability (demonstrations use Ableton Live)
  • Basic understanding of scales, chords, and progressions (from Parts 1-5)
  • Comfortable working in your DAW's piano roll editor
  • Optional: MIDI keyboard or controller

Take your productions to the next level by mastering the advanced harmony techniques that make modern electronic music compelling and unforgettable. Join me for this deep dive into the world of sophisticated harmony!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

J. Anthony Allen

Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Teacher

Dr. J. Anthony Allen is a distinguished composer, producer, educator, and innovator whose multifaceted career spans various musical disciplines. Born in Michigan and based in Minneapolis, Dr. Allen has composed orchestral works, produced acclaimed dance music, and through his entrepreneurship projects, he has educated over a million students worldwide in music theory and electronic music production.

Dr. Allen's musical influence is global, with compositions performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. His versatility is evident in works ranging from Minnesota Orchestra performances to Netflix soundtracks. Beyond creation, Dr. Allen is committed to revolutionizing music education for the 21st century. In 2011, he founded Slam Academy, an electronic music school aimed... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Intro v2: Hey, everybody. Welcome to music theory for electronic music producers. Part six, Advanced harmony. So in this class, we're really going to focus in on that kind of I hate this term, but that jazz sound, right? So that's gonna be using chords that have more extensions ninth, 11th, 13th. These chords are great for getting a more dense harmony, like I'm hearing in a lot of music these days, especially things like new disco, synth wave, a whole bunch of different kinds of trance. And just kind of everywhere, you know, you're hearing people use more thicker harmonies like we're gonna learn how they work, what they sound like, how to spot them, and how to use them in your music. This class is going to go over a bunch of techniques for using these chords that I'm also just going to outline, like, a whole bunch of them. So this class will be great to go through from beginning to end, but come back to it, use it as a reference tool for some of these bigger harmonies when you need them later. So without further ado, let's dive in. 2. Tools We Will Use: Alright. Welcome back to music theory for electronic musicians. This class always has a special place in my heart. The very first class I made was music theory for electronic musicians. One. I've since remade it so that it doesn't look as grainy and bad as it is, and I've gotten better at doing this, I think, maybe. So it's fun to come back to this. I can't tell you how many messages I've had with people asking for a P six. So here we are. We're back. And what we're gonna do is get into some more advanced harmony. I'm really hesitant to say jazz harmony. Um, but we are going to kind of look at those kind of more jazz like harmony. We're going to look at kind of like I hear music sometimes in this vein called, like New disco or something like that that incorporates this kind of harmony. There's a lot of just popular tracks that use this kind of harmony. Basically, all we're doing here is going the next level deeper into the harmony that we've already talked about. Okay, so let's talk about any tools you're going to need. So for this class, we're going to do everything in the MIDI Grid, just like we've been doing for all the other parts of this class. You're welcome to use whatever software you want. I'm going to be using Ableton, but these MIDI grids work the same in pretty much any program. So no matter what you're using, notes are notes. So it's not really going to matter too much. You're probably not going to need anything else, really. You just need a DA and to know your way around the Mi grid a little bit. This is the Mi grid, this thing where we've got individual notes that we can move around in different ways. And we build chords, okay? So I'm going to assume that everyone has watched parts one through five of this series, and we're pretty much on the same page. So, um, let's dive in. Well, I want to talk about one more thing. And then we'll dive in. 3. How Best to Use this Class: Okay, just one quick thing about how to use this class and take the most advantage of it. So we're gonna be talking about a lot of different types of harmony here. If you want to incorporate these chords into your own music, I would encourage you to write down maybe in a separate file, maybe pencil and paper, I don't know, however you take notes, the different options and what they sound like to you. Um, Remember that just hearing a chord by itself is going to sound a certain way, but then hearing that chord in context of a key, it can sound a lot different. So take as many notes as you can about the emotive qualities of each chord progression of each chord, how it makes you feel and maybe instances where you might use it. But keep a list of all of these chords so that you can decide when you want to use them in your own music. Also remember that if there's something you didn't catch, you are more than welcome encouraged to go back and watch again, right? So in any video, the power of online classes is that you can always go back and watch more. So without further ado, we're going to dive right in to ninth chords, which I know we've looked at ninth chords like a little bit back in one of the previous classes in this series, but we're going to go deep into ninth chords now. So let's do it. Here we go. 4. Characteristics of a 9th Chord: Alright, let's talk about ninth chords. So we're going to get in the weeds here on ninth, 11th, and 13th. And the thing that you need to remember or keep in mind that if you remember when we looked at seventh, right? So we had triads, three notes, and then we added a seventh, okay? And you remember that that made basically four kinds of chords because the triad could be major or minor, the seventh could be major or minor, right? So could extrapolate from that, that the more extensions you have, the more types of chords that could have you could have because there's more options. You could have a major or minor triad, seventh, ninth, and every variation they're in. That is mostly true. We're going to talk about six different kinds of ninth chords here. But at its core, the ninth is just the next note. Let's look at let's go to C three here. Here's a C. So we know how all this works. C, E. Let's go major, G. Okay. Then we get to our seventh and let's just say we're in a major key. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay? Now, if we want a ninth, we're going to go, This is eight, eight is the octave, okay? And then we're going to go up to nine. Okay? It's going to be a D. Now, is nine the same as two? Yes, it's the same note, but it's an octave higher, and that is important. If this chord looked like this with the octave down. In this case, I would call it some sort of C, add two. Okay? Because we're adding a note right around the C in the E, right, right in there. But in this case, it's at the top of the chord. I'm more inclined to call it a ninth. Okay? So the ninth is the two. We've circled around again, right? Just remember eight is the same note as one. So if you go up from there, ninth, you get two, basically a two, but higher octave higher. So a major nine like this tends to have kind of a nice bright sound. Let's hear it. Right? It's like the major seven, right? Major seventh was this. So it's got that major quality, but then, like, it's a little bit brighter. We get it even more. Right? It's just a nice sound. It's great. Alright, so let's dive in first to a minor ninth. And 5. The Minor Ninth: Okay, so let's look at a minor ninth chord. Now for this one, the minor affects two places. Okay? So when we just say minor ninth, what we're looking at is a minor triad. So let's take our third and lower it. Okay, we now have a minor triad. We also are going to have a minor seventh in there. Okay? So a B flat is more appropriately what that should be. An E flat there. And then the ninth. Okay? In this case, if we just say minor ninth chord, the ninth itself is not minor. The chord is minor. C, what we have here is a C minor ninth. So it's more that it's a C minor nine. Then it's a C minus nine, right? It's not that. It's really a C minor with a ninth. So C minor ninth chord, Very nice sound, right? Okay, so let's do this. Let's fill this out. And then let's name this one C minor nine. That's how we would write it. C minor nine. And then let's go on to major nine, which we already looked at, but I wanted to look at minor so we could change it back to major, and it would make a little more sense. So let's look at a major nine chord. 6. The Major Ninth: Okay, so now to get a major nine C major nine chord, we have in a similar way, we have C major. Let's take that back up. Major seven and a major nine. Okay, so we have a C major triad, a seventh, and a ninth. Now, if you're wondering, if I make a ninth chord, do I need the seventh in it? Technically. Technically, yes. If you're worried about technicalities, a ninth chord is root, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth. You can leave the seventh out, but it gets a slightly different name. We'll talk about that in a minute. Okay, so a major ninth chord? That's a pretty good sound. Oh, I forgot to duplicate this clip. So let's do this. Let's duplicate this. Okay? This is a major nine. Let's turn this one back into a minor nine. I just want to have a little catalog of all of these. Okay, so here's a minor nine. Here's a major nine. They kind of sound good back to back, which normally, when you alternate modes like that, major to minor to major to minor of the same core, it doesn't sound that good. But in a ninth, it kind of does. So weird. Okay, now we start getting into some of the weirder ones, okay? So let's go to a dominant ninth. 7. The Dominant Ninth: Okay, now let's talk about Dominant ninth. I'm going to duplicate this clip, and oops, we forgot to rename this one. So this is just C Major nine. Now, C Dominant nine, also known as C nine. This looks a lot like C seven, right? C seven was the way we wrote Dominant seven. And if you remember what a dominant chord was, dominant chord was a major chord with a minor seventh. So let's make that part of it first because that's still true. Major chord with a minor seventh. Okay? And then our nine is right where it needs to be. Okay? Now, this is a C nine, just nine or also known as dominant nine, right? It's got that dominant sound to it. But with a little more brightness because of that nine. So a dominant nine chord. It likes to resolve the same way that a dominant chord does, which is a fifth down. 8. The Dominant Minor Ninth: Alright, let's move on to the dominant minor ninth. Now, this one is a dominant chord. So when we hear dominant, we know that it's going to have that flat seven in it. Okay? That's just, like, what that means. So here we have dominant. Let's duplicate this before I forget. Now, this one has a little bit different name. So instead of C nine something to indicate what it is, what we're actually going to call this is C seven. So C dominant seven, we know what that is. CEG B flat, and then we're going to add a flat nine. So it's going to be called C seven flat nine. And what that's going to be is a C seven chord with a flat nine. Now, that's gonna give us, this minor two feel, right, C against C sharp or actually, technically, C against D flat, but we won't stress we won't sweat those details. So here is what we got. Right? Pretty dark. You really feel that dissonance right there. We'll do all of these back to back in just a minute. But I want to get through a few of them. There's a few more. So let's get through the rest of these ninth chords, and then we'll talk a little bit about them. 9. The Dominant 7th (Sharp 9): Okay, we can also have let's duplicate this clip and go here. We can have a dominant sharp nine chord. So let's go C seven, sharp nine. So these are falling into ninth chords because, you know, we're using the nine, even though we're calling them a C seven. So in order to get the title, we have to kind of step back one. So we're going to step back to C seven and then add the nine after the name of the chord. So with this one, we're going to go back up to our nine. Here's our dominant, and then let's turn this on. Okay, here's our dominant. And then our nine, we're going to raise it so that it's sharp. Now let's look at what that does. Now we've got a D sharp against an E flat here. That's going to be a little hairy. That's gonna add some crunch. So we have a major third and a minor third at the same time, right? CEG It's a C major, but also C E flat G is a minor triad. So this is sometimes called a major minor triad. This is also sometimes called the Jimmy Hendrix Cord, which we'll talk more about later. But Jimmy Hendrix made this quite popular. We'll talk about the Hendrix Cord near the end. But it sounds like this. Oops, wrong one. Now, why the Hendrix chord? I know we're gonna talk about later, but I just want to do it one time. If we move it to the key of E, we get this. Which is happens in a bunch of different Jimi Hendrix songs. So there you go. 10. The 6/9 & Minor 6/9 Chords: Okay. Alright, next we're going to get to we're gonna do two cords and one in this one. We're gonna talk about 69 cords. Okay, chuckle all you want. Let's get that out of the way. There's a major 69 chord and a minor 69 chord. Now, here's what those look like. So major 69 chord is gonna be major. And then we're going to add in a six, which is going to be an A, and then we're going to add in a ninth. Okay? It's quite nice sound. Let's duplicate and then undo this to get us back. Duplicate that. Okay, so here is our major 69 Alright, so we're going to call this c69. So it's got a six in it and a nine in it. I'm It's a fairly common chord, especially in jazz. I see This is a ord that can get used to replace the tonic chord. So if you're just doing a C major and you want to give it a little more life, try doing a c69. Now we can also do a minor 69, which all we have to do is lower the third. And now we have a minor 69. It's still a pretty nice sound. It's got a little more crunch to it because of this E flat against the D, but not bad. Let's leave it as a major for now. One more, and then we're done. 11. The Major & Minor add9 Chords: All right. Let's do one more. There are probably a few more variations, but these are the most common ones. Rename this one, we're going to do a C add nine cord. Now, there's a difference. In an add nine cord, what we've got here is just a C chord. So what this says is C add nine. So that means the first part of the cord is just a C. No No, seven, no nine, no nothing. It's C major. Okay? And now we're going to add a nine. So that's here. So the difference here is that I don't need the seven, right? Because I'm not saying C seven add nine, but in this one, C add nine, we just have a C major, and we're going to add a ninth to it. It's rather nice. It's nice sounding. There's not a big clash here. There's, you know, no big clashes. You could also do this, and we would call it a C add two. But up here, we call it a C ad. You could do a minor add nine. In fact, let's do it just for fun. So we would call that C minor. And then we might put in parentheses add nine. Sometimes we put the extensions, which is these things in parentheses just to make it more clear. So C minor add nine. So that would just be C minor. No seventh with an added nine. This one is going to be a little more dissant because of that E flat and D. What's a nice sound though. Cool, right? Okay. Now, let's talk about what's really going on here in the next video. 12. Have you Found the Pattern?: Okay, let's take a step back. Do you see what's going on here? You may have heard me say earlier in this class that there are millions of chords, right? And that is true. There are millions of chords. You'll never memorize them all. But you should not try to memorize them all. And if you're trying to memorize these, that's not the right approach. The right approach is just to learn how to read the name of the Cord. The name of the Cord tells you all the notes in it once you memorize the couple of conventions, right? You read it from left to right. And so, like any of these, we could say C seven, flat nine. Well, we know we need a C seven chord, right? And that's going to be a CEG B flat, okay? With a flat nine on it. Okay? That's going to be a D flat. So we learn to read the name of the chords. Don't memorize all of these. That's a waste of time. You can get good enough at this. And in all hubris aside, I think I am good enough at it, actually, because it's not an incredibly difficult skill, where I could sight read these chord changes pretty easily. So if I was reading a piece of music and it just gave me the names of the chords, which is often what I get when I'm playing jazz, I might not know the ord, but by the time my fingers get to my fretboard, they're going to land in the right spot just because I know how to read the chord. I know, Okay, a seventh is going to be there, my root is going to be there, my third is there, and I can figure out what ord it is just based off the name, and I can do it on the fly and sight read that way. I can do that because I've been practicing doing that for like 20 or 30 years. You probably can't do that because you're new to this, and you probably don't even need to develop that skill if you're trying to use these harmonies to make tracks. So what I would encourage you to do while you're writing is find the chord you want. In this case, you know, is it C major? Is it C minor? Is it C dominant? Find that chord. And then if you're bored with it, say, Well, I could add a nine. I could have sharp nine, I could have flat nine, I could add a 69. I could just do an Add nine chord. So there's a lot of options to it. I'll talk more at the very, very end about how I actually use these in practice. But for now, let's move on and go over a couple, not all of them, but a couple of the 11th chords and then 13th chords, and just do kind of a similar rundown of those just to introduce them, get them in your head, and even a little bit of practice for reading the names of them, and then we will continue on. Alright, off we go. 13. Characteristics of the 11th Chord: Alright, let's talk about 11th. I'm sticking a toe up. So 11th. Okay, so first thing we need to figure out when we think about 11th as cords, what is the 11th? Because it circles around just like the ninth. So if D is the ninth, then E is the tenth and F is the 11th. So in other words, the 11th is the fourth octave displaced, right? So it's up an octave, but it's the fourth again, at the top of the chord. So that's interesting now, isn't it? Because that's going to give us a little bit of a different sound because you can see here that fourth Oops. That fourth is going to clash often with the third. So in the minor third, it's a whole step away. So think of this as E flat against an F, that's not bad. But in any of the major situations, we have an E against an F. So that's going to add a little crunchiness to it. Mm. But mostly works the same. So here is minor 11th chord. Right? So thicker, right? Because in the minor 11th chord, we bring the ninth with us. Okay? So in an 11th, we have the triad, the root, third, fifth, and then we have the seventh, and then we have the ninth, and then we have the 11th, okay? We have a lot of notes in these chords. They're getting pretty thick. But it's a nice sounding chord. Let's compare it to a minor ninth. Right? It's a little bit bigger. So you can get some interesting clashes out of 11 out of 11th cords. But essentially, it's going to be a thicker cord. A lot of the qualities that we get out of a ninth are going to come with us to the 11th. So it's just kind of adding a little bit more. So let's go through some of our cords. And let's start with the minor 11th. 14. The Minor 11th Chord: Okay, we just kind of talked about the Minor 11th, but I want to give you a fun fact about it. If anyone ever ask you if you're ever at a party with a bunch of music nerds and you want to try to stump people, try this. Say, Hey, everybody, here's a trivia question for you. What is the most commonly played chord in all of music history all the time, you know, for the last hundred years. What is the most commonly played chord in any song in any key in the last hundred years? This is a bit of a trick question, and I don't have evidence to back it up, but I'm nearly positive it is this chord, the minor 11th chord. You might say, Well, Why? How is it not C major? This is why. Let's transpose this a little bit. Just go with me on a little adventure here. Let's go to E minor 11. Alright, so if we look at an E minor 11 chord, we have the notes, EGB, D, F sharp, and A. Okay. So what we're going to do here is we're going to kind of just cheat a little bit and sneak that F sharp out of there because we don't need it. But this chord, with the seventh and the 11th is, in fact, all the open strings on a guitar. So whenever someone does So that cord is getting in there all over the place. And it is all the open strings on a guitar, it's a minor 11th chord. E minor 11th. And we just kind of leave off the ninth in there. But there it is. That's all our open strings. We have a little bit of octave displacement here, too. This is down here. So our voicing is a little different than this. We'll talk about voicing shortly. But there you go. All the open strings of guitar, E minor 11. 15. The Major 11th Chord: Oh. Okay, let's go back down to C because that's easier. And let's copy this and put it here. And let's do a major 11. So we're going to take this up to be major. We're also going to raise our seventh to be major, D F. So we have C EGD F. Now, that's almost every note in the scale, right? We have C, D, E, F, G. There's no A, B, C. That's six of the seven notes in a C major scale. It's almost a whole scale. But here's what that sounds like. So it's a little crunchier, right? Because of that 11 against the third. Here's the major nine. Age of nine here the 11th. So again, it's like it's like you take a major cord and put a little extra paprika on it, and that gets you the ninth cord. If you want you want to get a little gnarlier with it, put a little that Cajun spice on it. Give it a little spiciness. Now you got your 11th cord. I didn't want to tell you what we're going to add to it to make it the 13th cord. We'll get there. For now, let's keep going. So let's do a dominant 11th. 16. The Dominant 11th Chord: Okay. All right, let's copy this and go down here. Now, for the C 11. So that's a C dominant 11. Tell me what notes go in it. C? Yes or no? Yes. E. Is E natural in it, or do we need an E flat? E natural. Very good. 'cause this is a major chord. G, the fifth of our chord. That is good right where it is. What about B? If you said we need to take that down to B flat to make it a dominant cord, then you get Gold Star for the day. Good job. D is our ninth. It can stay put right where it is, and our F can stay put right where it is too. This gives us our C dominant 11 chord. It's going to have that crunchiness again. Compare it to a C dominant nine chord. All right. So crunchy. Here's our 11th ud. Yeah. It's got a little more a little more of that cajun spice on it. Man, I'm hungry. Okay. Let's Let's do two odd balls, and then we'll move on. 17. The Dominant (Sharp 11) Chord: Alright, we're going to do something similar to these two over here where we're going to go, Let's make a dominant sharp 11 chord. Okay? So this is going to be so we've got to kind of go back if we're going to manually add the 11. Let me explain this again. So what I'm saying is that if we want to do like a C nine sharp 11, okay? What we need to do, we're going to add the 11th with the extension kind of in the cord. That's like the numbers that come after the main chord. So if we're going to add that there, then the actual base chord that we're going to use is a C nine, not an 11th because we're going to add the 11th with this. Oh, C nine, Sharp 11. So it's a dominant ninth chord, CEG, B flat, D. And then we're gonna give it a sharp 11. Okay? F sharp. So where our clashes now? F sharp against that G right there. That's going to be a clash. So let's hear it. Yeah, real crunchy. Let's compare it to the C seven Sharp nine and C nine Sharp 11. That's quite a bit different, actually. It's very. It's very kind of piercing that clash in Now, why don't we have a flat 11? Can you see why? Here's my sharp 11. Let's take it down to a natural 11. And now let's go down to a flat 11. Look at that F. If we go down to a flat 11, what do we get? We just get the third again, right? So we can't go down to a flat 11th. That would be a tenth, right, which is just the third again. So there's no flat 11 chord. There's a sharp 11 cord, though, and we can do a few more things. Let's do one more. 18. The Major 9 (Sharp 11) Chord: Alright, let's look at a C major nine sharp 11, okay? So C major nine, CEG, and then BDF sharp. So it's basically a C major 11, but we're sharping the 11. That is a nice sounding chord. It's a nine sharp 11. Okay, now, there is not things like a 69 chord. That doesn't really happen. There's not like 11 something cord. You could do an Add chord. You could do C Add 11. That's quite uncommon, though. I'm not sure why. I just don't believe I've seen that anywhere. It's kind of nice. Simplifies that dissonance, but not a very common chord. You could also do let's do this. Let's do just one more. And I'll just smush it into this video, which would be a minor nine Sharp 11. C minor nine sharp 11. Yes. There you go. That's interesting. Alright. That's enough for 11. Let's go on to 13th. 19. Characteristics of 13th Chords: Alright, up next. 13th chords, ten, 11, 12, 13. So let's figure out what a 13th chord is. So the first thing we need to know is what is that interval of a 13th? What is the octave equivalent interval of a 13th, which is another way to say, if we go up to that 13th and we take it down an octave, what normal interval is it? So let's see. Let's go up to an octave. We can think of that as eight. So now we're just going to count chord tones, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13. It's a sixth. Okay? So in order to get to a 13th chord, a proper 13th chord, we need a triad, and then we need a seventh. No, ninth. So we need a ninth. And then that would be a tenth, 11th, 12th, 13th. Okay? Now, why isn't there a 12th? Well, 'cause that's a chord tone, right? That's a G. That's the fifth. That's already there. You know, that's why we're kind of skipping over some numbers because they're already in the court. At this point, we have a full major scale, I think, octave displaced. So C D, E, F, G, A, B, C. So we have the whole scale in a single chord. Hear what it sounds like. Okay. There it is. Now, this one has a couple This one has one oddity to it, which is that it because this is all the notes, it's very easy to confuse this for another cord. So if we did this in a different inversion, let's say I took, I don't know, these three notes and took them down and put them at the bottom, right? Still a C 13 chord. But when I look close at this, or major 13, in this case, I look close at this, the first thing I'm going to see is D F A. I'm going to be inclined to call this some kind of a D chord. There's a seventh, there's an 11th. So most of the time, when we use 13th chords, they're in root position. Not always, by any means. But when we start to switch the inversions around, it starts to get really hard to tell what they are. And the sound of them gets really ambiguous, too. But they're very popular in jazz. And a lot of different genres. It seems like a crazy, huge chord, but it does get used a lot. So let's dive into the different variations of it right now. 20. The Minor 13th Chord: Okay, so these are all the notes of the 13th. Let's turn this into a minor 13th. So we're going to need to change how many things. Think about it. We have a C minor 13th chord, okay? So the first thing we need is a C minor chord. So that tells us one note has to change in order to turn this into a minor chord. But there's a second note that has to change. So if we have a C minus seven chord, what are the notes in a C minus seven chord? CE flat, we lower that third. We also are going to lower that seventh to make a minor seventh chord. Okay? So we have a minor seventh, and then we leave the rest alone. We leave the rest alone. Kind of chewed on my tongue for a minute there. DFA, okay? Minor 13th chord. You know, it's really nice sound. That A at the top gives it a h. Like a It's like, very kind of plain, but then there's this, like, real sharp spice, like, right at the top. But it is a nice sound. Um, let's try a major 13th chord. 21. The Major 13th Chord: All right. So if we want a major 13th chord, we really go back to where we had it. It's gonna be completely diatonic. So take that E and up to E flat back up to E natural, and that B flat back up to B natural, and we get our major 13th chord. Let's rename this major 13. Interesting, right? Alright. Now the dominant. 22. The Dominant 13th Chord: Okay, to get the dominant, we're going to have to change how many notes. This is a little bit of a tricky one. Remember, we first, we need a dominant chord on the bottom, right? So a dominant chord is a major triad with a minor seven. Okay? So let's do that. Get that minor seventh. The rest, we're gonna leave it alone. That's all we need to do is change that. So that gives us our C just a plain old C 13 or a C dominant 13. Major. Minor. Major. Okay, now, for this next one for this one, for the 13th, there are seven notes in this chord. So there are, like, 1 million variations, right? Like, think of how many different ways you can combine these notes by lowering one by half step, raising one by half step. But let's go to a new video and talk about what we can do with that. 23. Lots of Variations on 13th Chords: Okay, there's a lot of different things we can do. If we just look at the Wikipedia page here, you can see, here's minor 13th, minus 13th with a flat nine, major 13th, another inversion of a major 13th, dominant 13th. These are hard to read. Minus seven add 13. So you can tell what these are gonna be, right? Like a minor seven add 13. That's gonna mean we don't have the 11th or ninth in it, right? We just have a minor seventh chord, and then we're going to add on that 13th. Let's do that. Let's take this one here. So first, we're gonna turn it into a minor seventh. Okay, there's our minor seventh. And then we're just gonna add that 13th on, like that. Gets you a little bit thinner chord, but still with that, like, spice that we're talking about. So let's rename this one minor seven, add 13. I don't think we capitalize that A. There we go. Kind of an interesting sound. We could do so many other ones. Let's do just a few more that I find particularly interesting. The sus 13 is interesting. Let's take a look at that one. So C 13 SS, we would just call it. So this one is going to have a C, and then it's going to have an F. I'm actually looking at this because this is weird. CF G, B flat, D A. This is called a C 13 s. So if it was this, it would be a dominant nine chord. And we've left off the 11 and gone straight to the 13th. But it's also got this sus four in. That's interesting. So I'm gonna give it a more proper name. Wikipedia says we're calling this C 13 sus. But I don't like that. So I'm gonna say C 13 sus four, I think is a more accurate name for that. Oh, let's do one more. How about um C 13 flat nine. C 13 flat nine. So that's going to be a dominant dominant naught chord. But we're going to lower that nine and leave that A there. Now, I think we're leaving off the 11th really just for taste here. You could add it back in. Ooh. It really causes some trouble, doesn't it? So I think we're leaving off that 11th Wikipedia is leaving off those 11th just because it doesn't sound great with that altered nine. So you can leave notes of chords off. It's just tricky to leave some off, and then still, how many can you leave off before the name of the chord changes? We're going to talk more about that soon. Actually, in the very next section, we're going to talk about voicing and inversions and what notes you can leave off of the chord. That might surprise you, actually. Okay, let's talk about one more thing, and then we'll move on. 24. Can we go Higher? We about 15ths, 17ths, and 19ths?: Okay. So my question for you here is, what about 15th, 17th, 19th? Can we keep going higher? Let's find out. So here's our 13th. Let's go up two more chord tones and get to a 15th. What do we get? We're back to our root. So We get back there on a 15th. If we go to 16 17th, we're just back on our chord now, right? C E, C, E. And if we keep going G, and basically the whole things going to start over if we keep counting up, it's going to get thicker and thicker chords, and it's going to be weird. What we have in a 13th chord is all the notes of the scale, right? Like, the only way we can add more notes is to start going chromatic, which we've already sort of done with all of these sharp elevens and flat nines and all of these other things, right? So we can't really go up any higher. 13th is the biggest one because a 14th would be B, that would be the seventh and a 15th would be C, and then it starts all over again. Okay? So at that point, you're just counting octaves. Okay. Now, I had this crazy idea. What if I could really quickly make something with all of these different cords? I kind of have an idea for how I'll do it just to kind of something really simple that kind of just emphasizes the different chords. I'm going to try it, and I'll be back, and we'll play this for you, and then I'll give you this session so that you have all these chords written out for you if you want them. Okay, here we go. 25. Let's Listen and Study These Chords: Alright, so I made a fun little thing for us, and I'll give you this file in just a second. But I had to move all of the cords over into this channel. If you're not familiar with Ableton, that's okay. This is just kind of a fun silly thing. I'll give you this file, and if you're not an Ableton user, then, sorry, it won't be useful to you, but that's okay, 'cause you know how to make all these chords on your own. But what I've made here is I basically have a little baseline doing almost nothing. It's just playing a C and an octave of C like this. Ooh. Mm hm Really, nothing else. This was a bad idea. Here's some drums. Okay. Nothing fancy. Now I have all of these chords to set up to randomly decide where to go. So I'm gonna click on one, and then it's just gonna start playing these chords. If you're curious how this is done, it's done using something called follow action. That looked like this down here. Basically saying 68% of the time, pick a new ord, 32% of the time, play the same chord again. Logouto unlinked, so it's changing chords every two weeks. So this is actually a pretty recent ear training exercise. So just watch these cords. The one that's solid green is the one that's playing. If it's blinking green, that means that it's going to play that one. Okay, so we're hearing C minor 37. You can slow it down up here. Okay, so we're hearing C major 11. Now we're hearing 15, sus four. Now we're hearing that one. Okay, so it's pretty fun. You know, listen to a way to explore these chords. Okay, so I'll give you this session in the next bit, and then we'll move on to talk about some voicings and things. 26. First, Some Definitions: Okay, in this section, I want to talk about voicings, voice leading, and inversions. So all of that is to say that these chords in their root position, don't sound awesome. With the exception of the 13th chord, we don't often use any of these chords in root position. More on that in a minute. But let's define these things voicings, voice leading, and inversion. Now, you might already know voice leading. I may have said that before. And definitely, if you took my traditional music theory classes, you know about voice leading. Here's what voice leading is. Let's take this chord. And let's say let's shorten it to be right here. And let's say the next chord is going to be a C 13 let's put that right there. No. It's a minor 11. Let's do a 69 chord. So let's take that, go to that minor 11 and add it in. Okay. But actually, let's make this a different route. Let's call it like an f69 chord. Sure. Okay, so voice leading is getting one note to the next. You can kind of think of it as imagine you've got a choir and there's one person on each of these notes. Often, but not always, but often the easiest way to get one chord to get to from one cord to the next is to move the smallest amount, okay? So let's see. If I move this note up octave, the C up an octave, now this voice doesn't have to move at all. Great. This note goes up a whole step after G, that's fine. This one goes E flat to F. That's okay. This one goes either G to A or this B flat down to A, but there's a G up here. So if I move this up an octave, now this has better voice leading to there, right? This D could go up there, but now this is kind of by itself. Let's do that there and that there. Okay. Now this is pretty tight voice leading, right? Everything very closely moves. Now, this isn't always what you want, but it tends to sound good. That's pretty cool. Oops, let's stop that one. Make sure we're not hearing that. Oh. Mm. Okay, so that's what voice leading is. Now, voicings are this. So just a single chord, and we're going to talk about how it's stacked, and that influencing the sound. This particular voicing has the root up here. It is an inversion. So we're talking about inversions here, really. But we're talking about specifically how these inversions make it sound. In this inversion, for example, we have this D and D sharp right on top of each other. That's going to make a nice, hard dissonance. So that could be a cool voicing depending on what we're doing. It could be not a cool voicing. So we're really talking about inversion, which is the third word in our thing, voicings, voice leading, and inversions. So voicings is kind of like the more jazzy term for inversions. They're basically the same thing. Voice leading is how two chords or more connect to each other through the path of least resistance. So let's talk about root voicings or root inversions and how we can avoid them and why. 27. Avoiding Root Voicings: Okay, let's go to our C major 13 chord. Okay? Now, this sounds pretty good. Stop everything and just go this one. Mm. Okay, I kind of like it with the bass and drums behind it. Makes life more interesting. Life is just more interesting with bass and drums. Okay, so let's see here. This this voicing or this inversion keeps us all stacked in thirds, right? That's great. Being all stacked in thirds is great. That's how we make chords. But it doesn't really emphasize the intervals in that cord. If we took something like if we took this A, for example, and shifted it down. Now, I know I told you in 13 chords, we like to have it be in root position, because we start to create a lot of confusion once we move it down. So let's do something a little different. Let's do a major 11 chord. Okay, we're still going to make confusion here, but I'm going to take this F and move it down. Okay? Now I've created a beautiful little dissonance, right with that E and that F. Let's listen to it now. And you have that ENF in there. There's another one in here. If I took this B, actually, let's not do that. Let's take this C and go up and octave. Now we have another half step right there. So this is actually a pretty cool voicing in the right context because you've got two half steps right there. So this voicing or this inversion really brings out these half steps. Let's do this. Let's take this. Let's go there. Let's do Pepsi challenge with this. So let's take this back to root position, which I believe was that. Okay? Now, see if you can hear the difference between the two. Okay. Do you hear how this one is just a bit more subtle in a way, and this one is kind of like hitting you over the head with a book a little bit. Root positions are always just more bold, whereas more well thought out voicings tend to have some subtlety to them, emphasize the notes in the chord and can just generally get you a better sound. Now, it is true that you don't always need to use all the notes. This is a really weird concept. But I might need to pull out my guitar for this one. Let's go to a new video and talk about it. 28. Avoiding Root Voicings: Okay, check this out. If you don't play guitar, it doesn't matter. This is just a little demonstration of leaving out notes. Now, I have a six note instrument here. This instrument, guitar, can play six notes at a time. I do have a ten stringed instrument right behind me, but we're not going to play that one. So I can only play six notes at a time. So if I'm playing a chord like this, it has five notes. Okay? I could play all of those notes, but it generally doesn't sound good. I generally like to use the middle to the upper range of the guitar when I'm playing this kind of music. And I generally only play three or four notes when I'm playing jazz, I should say. So for this chord, here's a C nine, okay? So what I'm probably going to play in most cases, is this. Okay? There's my C dominant nine. I'm playing three notes. Okay. I'm playing. Let's see what I'm playing here. Okay, I am playing a E A B flat, and a D. Okay, I'm gonna put my guitar down, no. I am just playing those notes. Now, how is that okay? Well, That's just the voicing that I'm doing. So what notes have I left out? I left out the root and the fifth, okay? And here's what might blow your mind about this. The root and the fifth are the two best notes to leave out, okay? The root is great to leave out on your voicings. You can leave the root out all the time. If you're analyzing it and trying to figure out the name of the chord, that can drive you mad if there's no root in it. But we're not talking about analyzing. We're talking about what sounds cool. You don't need the root. There's a few reasons. One, if I'm, like, really playing jazz, I know we're not talking about jazz here, but these are jazz like chords. And if I'm playing that, the odds are there's a bassist or a keyboard player who's playing the root, okay? So it's going to sound good for me if I play a thinner chord, so I'm going to leave out the root. That's going to just give me, like, a thinner sound that I like. Um, the next most important or least important, I should say, is the fifth. The fifth is going to fit in that cord. If I leave it off, it's not gonna matter. If I really want the color of this cord, C nine cord, the real spice of that cord is in those upper notes that we added, right? Those are the ones that give it its real character. So those are the ones that I'm going to emphasize. The root isn't really doing much for its character, right? It's giving us a name for the note, but it's not the most important note of it. I'd say the most important notes of these chords are obviously the nine, seven, and the third. So when you're working on chords, if you want to use like a ninth, 11th or 13th chord, but you want that cooler kind of voicing that's not as thick and bulky as those chords can be, try leaving off the root, adjust your inversion so that you still got a nice sounding chord. If you still want it thinner, try leaving off the fifth. If you still want it thinner yet, at that point, all the notes are kind of the same. I might consider leaving off the third or one of the top notes, just to thin it out a little bit more. But it's weird to think that the root is the least important note in a chord. Once you get up to this kind of a harmony where you're doing more advanced stuff, it's true. The root is really kind of the least important note in the chord. And the fifth is second. Okay, let's move on to this weird chord voicing challenge thing, and we'll give it a shot. 29. The Chord Voicing Challenge: Okay, we're gonna try a little experiment. We're gonna play a little game. So there's this game that you can see people do online. There's a famous school founded by a guy named Burke who that puts out a video of this every couple of years of their professors doing this. So basically what we're gonna do is we're going to pick, let's say, eight random chords, any key, any chord, most random thing you can do. And we're going to use voicings to try to make it sound like these all flow together in a normal song. Okay? This is dangerous. This could not work. But I think I can do it. It's much easier to do when you're just playing the piano because you can emphasize notes differently, but we'll get by without doing that. So basically, we're we're going to use voicings and voice leading to tie the chords together, even though they're going to be totally random. So I found this quick little flash chord site. I don't know really anything about this site, other than I can specify what kind of chords I want. Oh, we should add those. Um, 13, six, nine. And I can say any key totally random. So I'm going to hit G, and it's going to generate keys, eight chords for us. I'm going to write them down, and then we're going to see if we can make them sound good together. Okay, so here we go. Start. Okay, stop. G sharp, major seven, Sharpnine. Okay. That's one. Next one. Just G Oh, just G sharp nine. Tricky. Any more posted notes here. That's two. Okay? A minor flat five. Easy enough. God, they're like, right hovering around this G and G flat and A stuff, and that's gonna be really hard to make work, but we'll try it. G flat minus nine, sharp 11. Gosh. B minus nine, sharp 11, all these sharp 11. It's gonna be really hard. How many we got? One, two, three, four, five, F minus seven, flat five. This Weird. F minus seven, sharp nine. F flat 13. 678. Okay, that's eight. All those Fs in a row are gonna be tricky, but maybe I can do some inversion with a different baseline that makes them feel good. That's moving. All right. We picked our chords. Let's try to do this. 30. Playing with Voicings: Okay, so this video is going to be a little boring. I'm going to figure out this whole thing in real time. You're welcome to stick around as long as you want and then zip on to the next one. It's gonna take me a while to figure out. So first, let's just figure out what these cords are. So I have our first one, G major seven, Sharp nine. So Oh, I have a natural nine here. So here's our nine. Let's go up from there. Okay. Okay, so there's our G major seven Sharp nine. Next, we're going to do Oh, sorry, this is G sharp major seven. Sharp nine. That's the weirdest chord ever. And then we're going to go to G. And then we just have G sharp nine. So that to me says G B, D with an A sharp. Okay? Like, everything is, like, slid down a little bit there. Okay? Uh let's keep it going here. Next chord, three is A minor flat five. So we're going to go A minor is ACE and flat five is going to be an E flat. That's just a triad. A minor with a flat five. All right. Next is G flat, as our root. G flat minor nine, sharp 11. Okay? So G flat minor. You know, if you're making these weird chords like G flat minor, a little mental trick you can do is just make a G minor. G, B flat, D, then take everything and lower it. Now you've got a G flat minor. G flat minor nine. So that's going to have a seven. Actually, let's go back up to G because it's just easier to think. So seven and nine. There's G flat minor nine with a sharp 11. So, nine, ten, 11 is going to be C. We're going to raise that to C sharp. Now we're going to lower it to get us to G flat. Okay? B minus nine is our next chord, so it's fine to B. Minus nine. So B minor is B, DF sharp and B minor and the nine. So this is going to be our seven is going to be in there. Eight and nine. There's going to be a C sharp, but we're on B minor nine. Sharp 11. C sharp an 11 of B is E. But we want a sharp 11 there. Okay. F minus seven, flat five. So we're going to go to F minus seven. F A flat, C is our F minor E flat is going to be our F minus seven. And then flat five. So we're going to take that C down to technically a C flat, but it's gonna show up as a B. All right now we've got all these F sharp minor chords. So let's duplicate this one. F minus seven, not a flat five this time, but F minus seven, sharp nine. So we're gonna leave that minus seven. We're going to go up to a nine. So F is going to be G. And then that's going to be our ninth. So we're going to raise it to be a sharp nine. The last one is F F 13. So that's no, F with a flat 13 in parentheses. So that's going to be F A C major, and then just with the flat 13th on it. So there's our nine. 13th of F is going to be 13th is going to be D, and it wants a flat 13th. So that's going to give me a C sharp. That's a tricky one. Okay, so we should have eight chords now. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Good. Okay, so let's try to get these to go smoothly between each other. Okay, I don't really want to start on Let's take that down. Maybe that's okay. We'll let that roll. Let's just try to find the smoothest it's gonna get him into, like, the smallest configuration here. Kind of up there. Okay, let's get these. Take them down there. That A can just kind of cruise across. Let's now go with let's take the F up. It's that G sharp. It's a duplicate. And this C sharp. Okay, let's hear what we've got. Okay. Here we go. Ooh, that was a tough one. Let's try again. Okay, let's see if we can make this kind of melody line pop out here. So we could go to an A sharp. Let's take that. We can also do some rhythmic stuff here to help. This is what they do in videos with that Berkeley dude. Let's make this like a resolving point, this A flat five. And well, let's try this. Let's try that. Let's take all of them and lower the velocity of this not so crass. And then we will try again. Okay, it's kind of like working out to where it's again resolving after a few cords. So let's just let it. Let's let it do that. And then we'll tag on this last cord. Okay, I need a little more volume. So let's go to Our contact controls, which I've lost, there they are. Let's just juice this a little bit over there. Okay. Let's try again. Okay, let's go here and here and that. Okay, the only thing that's really bugging me still is this chord. So let's take that there, that there and that there. I don't like that. Let's try that. We could loop that. Let's try looping it. Okay, well, that was tricky. We got something that sounds kind of jazzy going. When you see videos of people doing that online, what they can really do is, like, really emphasize a note that turns into a leading tone and then falls down or pushes up to the next chord. It can be pretty cool, but, like, even with that, we've got something basic that sounds weirdly jazzy. If it was my actual song, what I would do is probably start chopping out some notes and saying, Okay, I don't want you know, this clash here and that clash there, and I'd probably thin it out. But it was a fun experiment. So try it on your own. That website was called Flash Cord that just, like, gave us some cords. It's a fun little experiment. 31. Warning: These Chords don't Follow the Rules: Alright, in this section, I want to just go over a whole bunch of just weird chords. There are there are a whole handful of chords that just don't play by the rules. A lot of these are named after people. So we'll have something like the Petrushka chord. This is not named after a person named Petrushka, but it's named after an opera called Petrushka, by Stravinsky, where you just use this chord, a whole bunch. And there's just no good way to analyze it. So we just started calling it the Petrushka chord because it's so weird. Um, there's a bunch like that. Other ones like the Hendrix Cord that we already saw do have real names. But we can kind of just colloquially call them like, the Hendrix Cord because everyone knows what that means at some point. Also some of these are just chords that are in the normal lexicon of chords. They're just weird. Like the diminished seventh chords, we're going to talk about in a minute. 69 chords, we've already talked about the fractional chords. I think we've talked about that early, early on in this class, but we'll come back to it again just to revive ourselves. Oh, the French, German and Italian chords. Those are just bizarre. So we'll get to all of those in this section. So just like a bunch of random fun chords that you can use for some purpose. If you want to be like a little extra sneak one of these chords in. People will be like, Whoa. This person knows their stuff. Actually, don't do that. That's a horrible reason to use these cords. Use them if you like the way they sound. Okay, let's get into it. 32. Fractional Chords: Okay, let's put all of these here under odd chords. And let's call this first clip fractional chords. Okay, so we've seen these before, so this is a bit of a refresher, but I just want to remind you how they work. So if we see a chord that's written sort of like a fraction, like, let me show you. Here's a random piece of sheet music I just found that has some. So we've got stuff like this. It sort of looks like a fraction. Now, your first hunch might be that's two chords I'm supposed to play at the same time. It doesn't really work, and I'll explain why in a minute. What this really is saying to do is the top part of it, this B diminished seven, it wants us to play as a chord. But it wants us to put the E as the lowest note of the chord. Okay? So if we examine this piano music a little bit you'll see there's an E down here. Even if you don't read music, it's okay. Let me just tell you this note is an E. So there's an E just kind of sitting there the whole time, and it keeps going through all this, right? So this B diminished seven over an E, and then we go to an E chord in this particular example, you don't have to always do this. But that means that that E is basically just like chugging along. That's a cool effect. So that's why we're doing that. So a fraction like this just means that that note that's the bottom of the fraction is in the base. So if we had effectively what we have here is C major over C, right? That's basically what this is because we have a C in the base. But we don't say that when we just write C major because it's assumed that it's either the root in the base or that we don't care. If it doesn't really matter what's in the base, then we don't put it in the base. Uh, so we could do this. Now we have a C over G. That's another way to write that. Um, now, this kind of goes back into, like, what notes do you really need to play? Because as a guitar player, when I see fractional chords like that, where it's like, C over G, I pretty much focus always, I will focus on playing a C chord, C major chord. That's what that's telling me to play. The in the bass note, I probably leave for the pianist or the bass player unless it's something easy I can get. If I can grab it, then I probably will. Like, if it's over E, then yeah, I'll hit my low E string and let that ring. But in most cases, not so much. Um, because by leaving out that note, that is the lower part of the fraction or the right side of the fraction, you're not playing any wrong notes. You're just not playing the over E part. That note can be in the chord, and it might not be in the chord. If we do this Okay. Now we have C major over A. Okay? Now, this is tricky, right? Because our ear isn't going to hear this as C major over A. What's it going to hear it as? It's always go well, not always, but usually it's gonna hear it. It's the most simplest thing. So if we pretend A is the root, A, C, E, G, what do we have there? We have an A minor seven chord, right? By doing that. Oops. Right, so that's an A minor seven chord, C over A. So we wouldn't typically do that. We'd just write an A minor seven chord. So sometimes having notes out of the chord in the base produces a new chord. Often not, though. I mean, if I did this, what if I did that? You know, like C major with a B in the base. Technically, that's a C major seven chord. But with a B in the base, it's gonna give it a little crunch. Yeah. So like, what if I did this, G sharp in the bass? G sharp is not in the chord. That's gonna, you know, produce something with a little more dissonance to it. But that can be done. So that's what those fractional chords mean. They don't mean playing two chords at the same time. But let's address that because I often get asked that. Could you play two chords at the same time? Let's talk about that really quick. 33. Can you have two Chords at Once?: Okay, I remember when I was starting to play guitar in my parents' house, in my little room with my little four track recorder, there was this progression that I was obsessed with for, like, a while, where I would play a G chord. And then underneath it, I would have another guitar part that was playing a D chord with an added G toggling. So, so one guitar is doing this. Others doing this. So I'm playing a D and a G chord at the same time. I just loved the sound of that, and I would put it in all kinds of songs. Okay, two chords at the same time. If you're a fan of office space, that might be a little funny. So let's look at what I was actually doing in the notes. So I'm playing a G major chord. But with kind of guitar voicings. But that doesn't matter. G major chord, right? Let's leave that. Let's just do that. And I'm playing at the same time a D major chord. D F sharp A. Okay? So D F sharp, A and G D. Can you see what's happening here? So I love that sound, but what I was actually doing is I was playing two chords at the same time, but that's not what our brain really hears. If you're going to play two chords at the same time, imagine that the sound of all of those notes is going to come out of what you're playing or recording, and they're all those notes are going to hit our ear at the same time. Not really going to perceive it as two chords at the same time. That's not really a thing. We can play two chords at the same time, but what we're going to hear is all these notes coming in, and we're going to kind of synthesize them in our brain into one sound, right? So we're going to hear that probably as some kind of G, B, D F sharp, G major seven chord with an A is a ninth. Oh. G major ninth chord. So the sound I was really liking was the sound of the G major ninth chord, not necessarily the sound of two chords at the same time. So just remember that you can play two chords at the same time, but they're going to be perceived as one kind of sonic thing hitting us, right? So we're going to perceive it as one chord. Now, you can do some special tricks to make it feel like two chords. Like, one chord is like a drone staying there and the other chord is moving. You can do stuff like that. There are some composers that have experimented with two keys at the same time or two whole different musics playing at the same time, and can our brain kind of keep them separate? Kind of. If you're interested in that, listen to the music of Charles Ives. 34. The Oddly Powerful Half-Diminished Seven Chord: Okay, diminished chords are not a chord we've spent very much time on in, like, part one of this class when we did the diatonic Cchord progression, I told you, kind of, you know, if you're writing any kind of pop type music, you can kind of safely skip over it. But if you want to make more dramatic music, it can be really valuable. So remember that a diminished chord is kind of like a super minor chord. It's going to be the root, a minor third, and then another minor third, okay? So this cord has weirdly powerful things, especially when we turn it into a seventh chord. So when we turn it into a seventh chord, we have two options. Okay? Let's look first at what's called the half diminished seven. What that is is a diminished triad with a minor seventh on it. Okay? Now, this is cool. Let's just hear it. Hold on. It's cool. It's cool because it can resolve like a seventh, which means it wants to go down a fifth. It can resolve, like a diminished cord, which tends to mean it wants to go up a half step. So this could resolve to some kind of C sharp cord because C is the root. C. But here's where diminished chords get really weird. Almost any of these notes could be the leading tone note, right? Watch this. Can we make this resolve to an E by treating this like a root? See, it kind of works. G? It sounds kind of weird now because you have C in your head. But in general, the diminished chord has these magical powers of kind of sending you in many different directions. Any of these notes can be leading tones. This one, not so much. The seventh is not so much greater at a leading tone, but hold on to that for a minute. I'll be right back with that. It can also be an upper neighbor tone, right? We can go resolve down to that B. Or here. Or it can be a common tone. So what if we did an E major? W or an E major. Treating this note like the leading tone. You know, this one, I would want to use this version. It'll sound a little bit better. But the point is this half diminished cord can get you almost anywhere. It is kind of the perfect transition cord. Just slap one of those on something and then go whichever direction you want to go almost, you know. But there's a little more to it. Let's look at what's called a full diminished cord. 35. The Even More Oddly Powerful Fully-Diminished Seven Chord: Okay, I'm going to duplicate this one and put it here, and then we're going to call it the fully diminished seven. Okay, what's different about the fully diminished seventh chord is this seventh. We're going to lower it by half step. Now, check out what that does. This is actually kind of cool to me because this is one of the few instances where teaching music theory and a piano grid instead of traditional notation is easier 'cause this is a really kind of tricky concept to see in notation, but it's really easy to see in the piano grid. And that thing that I want you to see is how this is perfectly symmetrical, right? This is all a minor third apart. Note, two half steps. No, two half steps, note, two half steps, note two half steps, and then it starts over. Right? That's it. So this is a perfectly symmetrical chord, and that gives it weird magic powers. It can do everything that the half diminished chord could do, but more because the seventh now becomes a good transitional leading tone, common tone note, as well. This chord can get you almost anywhere you want to be. You can go up down by actually, it can get you anywhere because it's perfectly symmetrical. Here's another weird thing about it. There are only three of these cords. They don't transpose the way that other ords transpose. Because watch. If I take it, I'm going to duplicate it, I'm gonna go up a half step. Okay? There's two. Those are different. I'm gonna do it again, I'm gonna go up a half step. There's three. I'm going to go up a fourth time. And now look what I have D sharp, F sharp, A, C, C. It's the same notes. So we can only actually transpose this three times, and then we're right back to where we started. So there are only three diminished cords. They are not transposable in the same way that other chords are transposable, meaning you can put them in different keys. Diminished cords will work in any key. You just have to decide which one goes in your key. But there are only three options. So let's stick with this one. Let's hear the difference between full and half. Here's half. Actually, let's get rid of this resolution. Okay. Here's half. Here's full. To me, it sounds like if you have a half diminished cord, you have, like, a very sinister looking person. But if you have a fully diminished cord, that sinister looking person is doing that, like, Stephen Colbert eyebrow thing. It's like, he's getting, like, a little gnarlier at you. Making sure you got your stuff together. Anyway, so there's a lot you can do with diminished chords. In my traditional music theory class, I have a whole class, a whole, like, I don't know, 40 or 50 videos devoted to diminished chords because of how useful they are. In pop music, not so much because those dissonant transitions we don't really need, but in other kinds of music, they're really valuable. If you want to do any of this advanced harmony stuff, I really recommend you spend some time exploring diminished chords. But okay, let's move on to some of the goofier ones. 36. The Neapolitan Chord: Okay. Let's talk about ice cream. The Napolitan cord. Alright. No, this is not named after ice cream. This is probably related to Napoleon in some way. But no one really knows. The exact, um, reason for this name, I think, has been lost to history. Um, so we don't exactly know why it's called that, but here's what it is. The Napolitan cord is interesting because it's just a major cord. There's nothing weird about the cord. It's where you put it that makes it so weird, okay? So what we're going to do is if we're in C major, the neopolitan cord is a flat two major chord. Or let me say that one more time. It's a major chord built on the flat two of the scale. It typically exists in first inversion, and it can be a really colorful way to take the place of a four chord. Okay? That was a lot of info. So let's do it. So let's just leave, like, I don't know, a C major here. Okay. There's our C major. Let's put that over there. Okay? Now, let's go boom, okay? Half step up. Now, that's gonna sound kind of funky, but check this out. So if I take the F, the middle note and lower that by an octave, now, this is usually the way it shows up with the third in the base. And now you can kind of see why it takes the place of a four chord, right? Because this is a four chord. F is the four of C, right? So a four chord is going to look like this. If this was a four chord, the C sharp would actually be a C natural, and the G would actually be an A. See how that opened out like that? Right? That's the resolution that this likes. Okay? So it can go. It can go. Is upper voices open out to a four chord, and then we can resolve to a one chord. So listen to this. Right? So it's a weird chord progression. But in order to do this cord progression, you need this funky cord called neapolitan chord. Usually, in first inversion, so the third is in the base. Kind of works like a four chord, or it can take the place of a four chord. If you're writing a song and your four chord is just kind of boring, try Neapolitan chord. Um, it's weird because it's a flat two, but, um, you might like it. Oh, and it also works best in minor keys. So if you're in a minor key, it's going to sound a lot more natural, but still be a little funky. But give it a try. It's fun chord. 37. The Italian 6 Chord: Okay, these next three chords are weird. But they sound cool, though. I really like them. So let's start with the Italian six chord. Yes, it is called the Italian six. The next three chords we're going to do are the Italian six, the French six, and the German six. Yes. That is what they're called. This is, again a situation where we don't we really kind of lost to time why they're called this. Maybe you could say that they were in use by composers at the time, who were of, you know, like Italians like to use the Italian one. French like to use the French one. Maybe maybe that's true or maybe that was true for a minute. It's probably more likely that it was kind of a random music theorist or musicologist who coined the term based on their own weird prejudices or something. I don't know. But all three of them are beautiful cords and all of them are a specific type of cord which is called an augmented sixth cord, okay? Now, let's think about that a little bit. We know what a sixth is. C to A is a sixth, okay? And we know what augmented means too. Augmented means too big, right? We have a major interval, but if we have an augmented interval, it's one half step bigger than major, okay? So if we took this and we made it augmented sixth, we push it up a little bit, okay? By one half step. That makes an augmented sixth, but it also makes a seventh, right? This makes a minor seventh. So it's a minor seventh chord. Not quite. Because it's going to function differently than a minor seventh. Hold on to that for a minute. I'll show you. It's going to do a weird This court is really good at doing a weird resolution that opens out really similar to the Neapolitan court. Okay, so here's how we make one. First, you're going to take we're going to make one in the key of C, but not one that the root is C, but it's going to be in the key of C. What you're going to do, this is another chord that replaces the four chord again, because this likes to lead the five. If this leads to five and then tautonic is ideal. So to make one, we're going to go to our G. We're going to go to our five. Then we're going to go a half step up and a half step down. Now we're going to add our tonic. Now what we have is C F sharp, G sharp, these are almost always in an inversion, second inversion to be specific. I'm going to take this top note and move it down. This is my augmented six chord. G sharp, C F sharp. Okay? Weird. So this is my Italian six. This is the specific formula for Italian six. So what it's going to do is these two instead of being a seventh cause these are a seventh, if G sharp is our root and it's a seventh chord, it's going to resolve down a fifth, right? So to C sharp. But that's not how we're going to resolve it. We're going to resolve it by this seventh, which is actually an augmented sixth opening out. Okay? So this F sharp is going to open out to G, and this G sharp, which should be written as an A flat, is going to open down to G, okay? And then we're going to build a G chord inside of that. Okay? So that's the resolution to this. Here's what it sounds like. Okay. It sounds like a seventh. But it resolves funky, and that's why it gets its own name for an Italian six chord. 38. The French 6 Chord: Alright, let's do another one, but this one is French. Sorry, I had to do it. French six chord. Let's rename that. Oops. And put a space after French. Okay. Or before French. After French. Okay, so this one, same formula except we're going to add the second scale degree into it. So first scale degree is C. Second one is D. So that's it. That's the only change. That's what makes it French. It's got a little I don't know, butter in it. But you can see for that resolution that actually helps the resolution because we get a common tone. We also get a little more crunch with this second in the French. Hear that? So what we would typically have actually, is it goes to five, and then it goes to one. But let's make our voice leading a little bit better here. Let's try that. Okay, so now we go French six to five to one. Interesting. I should also say that when we analyze these with Roman numerals, we don't even really pick a root for this. We could say G sharp is the root. We could say C is sort of the root. We don't typically. Typically, we just analyze it by writing FR six, French six. And the same is true, IT six is how we analyze an Italian six chord. Like this. Let's see how this shows Italian 65. Okay, and for the German one, we write GR six. So let's learn the German one. 39. The German 6 Chord: Alright. The German one, we're going to take this extra note here, this D, we're gonna raise it by half step, making a minor third from the tonic of our key here. And then everything else is the same. So the German one has a minor third, and then the seventh that's going to open outwards. Alright, let's hear it. I like that resolution. Okay, here's the Italian. French. German. Cool. So those are collectively called augmented six chords. Okay? So there are three of them. I've heard of a fourth one, but I can't remember it right now. It's very rare. It's like Portuguese six or something like that. It's I don't think really one of the standard ones, but you may come across one other one at some point. I'm not sure what it is. Moving on. 40. The Elektra Chord: Alright. The Electrochord. This one falls under that category of playing two chords at once again. So the electrochord comes from Straus. Ricard Strauss, you may know from the planets, other classical music hits. This is from his opera called Electra. And it's kind of the entrance of the main character, Electra. So what it is is it's two chords at once, but we hear it as one chord. So it is an E major chord. Mm EG sharp B. E major cord and C sharp minor, C sharp, E G sharp. Oh, no, sorry, C sharp major. So C sharp, E sharp, G sharp. We can write E sharp as an F. Okay? So these two cords. Let's take a look at them. There. C sharp major and E major. So they sound like this back to back. Or let's put him in the right octave. Okay. Now let's hear them at the same time. Co. That's a tight cord. So let's find some of these dissonances. Here's an E against an F. B against a C, G sharp, G sharp. It's really just that E against that F. That's the nastiest bit. But there you go. The electrochord from Straus, named after just a piece that used it a whole bunch. If you wanted to give this a normal name, you could. There's always a way because we know the formula, right? We could call this an E and six E major six flat nine E major six, flat nine, flat 11 'cause we want an A for 11. Flat nine, flat 11, something like that. But in these cases where they're so identifiable with a certain thing, they get their own name. It's like Bond having one name. This particular cord gets a beyond name. There should be a beyond cord. There probably is. No, there probably isn't. 41. The Rite of Spring Chord: Alright. Next, we have two chords from Stravinsky. If you don't know Stravinsky's music, he wrote a lot of pretty crunchy stuff. He's probably one of the most famous composers of this era that was writing music that was just really pushing the boundaries of tonal harmony. So he gets two chords named after his work. Oh. So, the rite of Spring. Maybe you've heard the rite of Spring. That's his most famous piece. Probably. Probably. And it has this section that just goes on, honk, un c c with this chord for, like, a long time. It's a really cool piece. It's really beautiful and powerful in many ways. So he needed a very distinctive sound, and he got one. This particular chord is an E flat Cord over an F flat chord. Weird, right? So let's find it. So E flat major. I'm going to switch this to show flats. Let me just remember how we There we go. Okay, now we'll show flats here. So we have Okay, so I'm going to make this the more simple way, which is to make an E major triad. And after I make this, I'm going to transpose it down a half step. So it's just easier to make it thinking like this. So E major, E, G sharp B. Now I want sharps again. That's annoying. And an E flat seven on top. So E flat, G, B flat, D flat. G, B flat, D flat. Okay. Now let's take this and go down a half step. Okay, so this is the actual chord. Okay. So, there it is. It's a gnarly chord. But if you want to reference the rite of spring, Let's go up and octave. And here's how you play the rite of spring. Sing it down and octave. Sounding better. That's not right, though. We want it more like. We want it more like that. Ready spring. Awesome. Cool. Let's move on to the other famous one from Stravinsky. The one I mentioned earlier, the Petrushka gourd. 42. The Petrushka Chord: Alright, up next, a really fun one to say the protruska cord. The Petrushka chord, PET, I'm just double checking. I spelled that right. PET, RUSH KA, PETRUSHKA. Okay. The Petrushka chord is another one from Stravinsky. This comes from his ballet, which I believe was just was called Petrushka. And he used it later, like in more pieces after it, but it kind of became best known in Petrushka. And here's what we got. Now, of course, all these cords are transposable if you want to put them into whatever key you want, except sort of those diminished cords, right? Because remember, those can transpose to whatever key we want, but it kind of doesn't matter. Because there's only a few of them. Okay. So this one is fun and relatively simple. So the Petrushka cord is a C major chord. C major. It's also an F sharp major chord. So if I go up to an F sharp. There we go. Let's switch to showing sharps. Let me just remember how I do that. Sharps. There we go. F sharp A sharp C sharp. Now, what's cool about this, let's get rid of all of this. Is we have a C major triad, and then we have the farthest possible away triad, a tritone away, right? If you're looking at the circle of fist, this one is going to be as far away as you can get. So F sharp A sharp, C sharp. Let's try taking that down an octave. And it looks like that, right? This is the Petrushka cord. It is often that the F sharp cord is at the bottom. So it kind of looks like that. So we've got this sharp dissonance there. We've got, you know, tritones all over the place, F sharp to C, A sharp to E. You know, it's quite dissonant. But let's hear it. Okay, let's maybe stretch it out. Yeah, I take it up and octave. I kind of dig the dissonance in this right now. It's just a cool sound. So two major chords separated by a tritone played at the same time. That's kind of the definition of the Petrushka chord. It's an early one, but I kind of like it. I'm kind of in the mood for it. Now, don't worry. We are going to talk about kind of how to use some of these chords in a few videos. I just have, like, two more actually that I want to go over. Okay? So let's do that. 43. The Bridge Chord: Alright, up next is the bridge cord. Now, if you're like me, you went your whole life, knowing not your whole life, but you know, ten years or so. Knowing the existence of this cord, but knowing the completely incorrect place it came from. It's called Bridge Cord, and so I thought it must have some origin in probably jazz players using it as a really weird bridge, like using it as a transition cord to get to a bridge or to get out of a bridge or something like that. No, that's not what it's named after at all. I just learned in doing research for this video that it's actually just named after the composer Frank Bridge. I had no idea. Weird, but let's learn it. So the bridge chord has nothing to do with writing bridges for songs. The bridge chord is kind of similar to Petrushka. Let's go down to a C or up to a C, I suppose. And what we have here, we're going to have a minor triad. C E flat G. And then a major triad half or a whole step higher. So C minor triad and then D major triad on top of each other. Okay? So D F sharp, A. Okay? So we have a minor triad and then on one and then a major triad on two, but those played at the same time. In this case, it's going to sound like this. Okay. Let's try taking this down an octave so that they're just right in the middle there. Up an octave. Oh. That is a sharp dissonance. That sounds much better. I rather like that. I almost sounds like a bell, right? Yeah, it's very church bell in its dissonance. But there you go. The bridge chord. 44. The Hendrix Chord: Alright. The Hendrix cord, we've already looked at, but I want to put it in this section. So let's look a little closer at it. And it's actually really similar to Petrushka and Bridge because it is kind of two triads stacked on top of each other. This one is a little different in that it is a minor triad with the same chord but major on top. In fact, usually we play at least the way Hendrix played it opposite of that. So minor on top, major in the bottom. Now, because of this, we duplicate a whole lot of notes. So really, we don't need this C again or this G again. What we really have here is a major chord with that minor third on the top. So we have both a major third and a minor third. If we wanted to do that, you would look like that. But specifically, the voicing that Hendrix used, because it works so well on the guitar looks like this. It would be root, third, seventh. And then minor third. So it'd be like that. So he did put a seventh in it, now that I think about it. So that gives you the Hendrix cord. Right? Like, it's relatively thin because it's only four notes. But if you listen to, like, a lot of stuff, Foxy Lady is the first one that comes to mind. It's boom, bop, boom, boom, bop, boom, right? It's that chord. That's the chord it's doing. He loves that chord. And a lot of guitar players have loved that chord for a long time because it just fits into your hands really well. It's a very guitar like chord. Now, this one is slightly different because we can put a name on this, right? We can just analyze this straight up. And if we do, what we're going to get is a seventh chord with a sharp nine, right? So we have C E. We've left off the fifth. That's okay. We get a seventh there. So we have a C seven. If that is the seventh, so the C is going to be our eighth, right, or really our tonic again, two is going to be our ninth. So we're going to sharp that up by a half step, and that minor ninth, that raised ninth is what's gonna give it to us. So we could call this a seventh with a raised ninth. That's a better name. But sometimes we just like saying it's a Hendrix cord because he used it a lot. It's kind of an honorific, you know? Like to name a cord after someone that's oh, you get to be referred to this cord forever by your name, Horay. So you can call it whichever one you want. There's not a strict rule about this. Okay. Let's talk about a few more quick things in this area. 45. Many, Many, more.: Okay, so that gets us to the end of this section on these specialty chords like this. But there are more. There are hundreds of more. There are hundreds of more? Sure. Let's use that language. There are a lot more. Especially when it comes to, like, the guitar players, there's a lot of guitar players that have, like, unique cords named after them, things that they've used a lot. Um, there's other chords that are attributed to different composers. There's a bunch more of them. And are there more that you could get? Could you have a chord named after you? Sure, you totally could. All you have to do is come up with a relatively unique combination of chords. It doesn't have to be totally unique. But then you just have to, like, use it in a lot of music, and sooner or later, a theorist is going to write a paper about you and say, they like to use this ord a lot. It kind of analyzes weird. I don't really know what to call it, so let's just call it the U cord. Um, if we take all of our possible notes we could put into a cord, I just ran the math on that. We're coming up with a about 16,300 combinations, right? That's a lot. So there could easily be combinations of notes out there that are unique to you. However, they're going to be pretty disant. So if you want a cord named after you, it's going to be a dissonant cord. But my point is, there are millions more chords out there. Any combination of notes can be a chord. And that's something we're going to talk about in the next section a little bit, how do we use these? Can we just make our own? Stick around to the last video in this class where I talk about my current personal thinking about harmony in my own music to understand more about that. I promise I'll talk about it more. Okay. But let's move on from this section. I want to go spend just a little bit of time talking about tips for using these kinds of chords if you want this kind of sound in your music. But first, let me give you this file. You can have all of these cords and use them if you want. I don't know if this little drum loop will come with it. So if it doesn't, just replace the drum loop in this session. But I'll give you this whole session. If you're an Ab toner or an Ableton user, you can download and play with it. If you're an Ableton user, I'll give you this session in the next little bit, and then we'll go on from there. Here we go. 46. How do I know when to use these?: Okay, I'm going to answer a couple of questions here. So I'm going to presume that you're thinking about this question or a few questions that we're going to go over in this section, and I'm going to answer them. This section grow over time. As I get more questions, I'll come back here and update this chunk to reflect some common questions I get. For now, we're going to start with what I think might be your first few questions, obvious things that we haven't talked about yet. Like this first one, which is, how do I know? When to use seventh, ninth, 13th? How do I know? Or any of these other weird cords. I think earlier I was using the example spice, and this is the best way to think about this for me anyway. So, get your head out of the gutter. When we're talking about spice here, we're talking about, like, let's say we're making a soup, okay? We're making a soup. And if we want it to be just, like, a nice, simple, delicious tomato soup, right, we're not going to put a lot of stuff in it. It's just gonna be triads. If we want this soup to have a little bit of kick. Cool, a little bit of spice to it. Maybe we throw maybe we throw in a little pepper, right? That's your seventh court. If we want a little more spice, we want to have a little kick to it. Okay? Let's Let's throw in, let's dump a little sacha in there. You know, just a little bit, a little bit of sacha. That's your ninth art, right? But let's say you want to make this more unique. Give it more kick and just more flavor all around. Not necessarily spice, but flavor. Then maybe we're going to add in some garlic, maybe some cloves, maybe some, like, more chili spice. Okay, you know, that's your 11th chord, okay? Like, we're really going far away from the blend at this point. But is it too much spice? I don't know. It all depends on your music. So that's what you need to think about as you're writing it. And yeah, I guess I haven't done 13th. It's because I don't know spices well enough. So let's think of, you know, you dump the whole cupboard of spices into your soup. Now you've got 13th chords with sharp 11th and things like that in it. So it just depends on the taste, what you want it to sound like. Stick around with me till the end, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in one of the very last videos when I talk about kind of deciding what comes next. 47. If I'm using 7ths, do all of my chords have to be 7ths?: I Okay, next question. Can we go from something like a seventh chord down to a triad? In other words, if we're using seventh chords in a chord progression, do we need to always use seventh chords? Like, once we commit to using seventh chords, do we need to use seventh chords all the way through? Now, there's two answers to this. First is from a voice leading perspective. We'll do that in this video, and the second is from a density perspective. We'll do that in the next video. So voice leading. Here's what we need to think about. Here I have a good old C major seven with on a piano. Okay, so let's resolve this to, I don't know, something easy. Let's say like a G chord. Okay? So we have G, B, D. And let's just do a triad, okay? So we can see here some of my voice leading is pretty great. That means this note doesn't need to move. It just goes right to there. This note doesn't need to move. This one does, but if we move it down an octave, it's much smoother, right? Good voice leading just means, um we can go from L, if you imagine this was being performed by four singers, right? Each one of them is singing a note. We want them good voice leading, which you don't always want, but often you do. Good voice leading just means that each of those singers has to move a small amount to get to their next note. So this one stays on the same note. It's great. It stays on the same note. It's great. Now, this one is presumably is going to go from E down to D. Okay? That's cool. That's fine. That's fine. Voice leading. But C, the root here is going to presumably go up to D. And even if we're not working with singers, that's kind of what's happening. Our ear is going to sort of put together that both of these notes are collapsing in on that. Okay? Let's hear it. Okay. Not bad. Sounds pretty fine. If you want to make it a little bit better, though, we could do some sort of voice leading for these lower two notes so that they actually have somewhere to go. One way would be to double this B an octave down. Okay? So now this E goes down to this D and C goes down to this B. That's going to make a little bit fuller chord that competes with the seventh chord a little bit better, even though it's still just a triad and we've doubled one note in it. Let's hear it. I don't know why I started doing that. Dope. That was, like, a weird glitch, but it was super groovy. Anyway, so there you go. Now, let's talk about the density problem. 48. Chord Density: Okay. Let's do this again. Let's make another clip. And let's call this Cord density. Now, density when we're talking about cord, is that really like a real, like, music theory term? Um, I don't think if you looked up in your average, music theory book that you would find the term density, but I do have my pocket music theory terminology, uh, Thing here, and let's just confirm just for fun because I've never actually done this. We go from Delornte con Del Rio, Dmiquaver, dependent chord, harmony, triad, depress, descant, it goes on from there. I'm right. Anyway, but I like to think about chord density. So if you ever take a real music theory class and there's an exam or something and someone says something about this kind of a topic, chord density is not the normal term. Here's what that means. If we have a chord progression, that's like let's do a big old nine tenth or sorry, 11th 13th chord, big old major 13th chord. Okay. And then we resolve it to a plain old triad. We've got a C major 13 chord here and a G major triad after it. Let's hear what that sounds like. Comes a beat. That's so weird. It's just doing that on its own. I don't know what's going on. But anyway, I kind of like it. Okay, so maybe you can hear what's happening here. I have this big thick cord, and then I have this little thin cord. This cord suddenly sounds very wimpy, right? This is the density problem. This is thick. This is a thick cord. Um, This is a thin chord, right? Now, a major chord, a major triad is not particularly thin on its own. It's a nice sounding chord. But when you stack it up against something that's got so many different notes, it sounds thin. You can also see that this whole chord is inside the triad, which makes the change between chords less pronounced. So how can we deal with this? The first and easiest way to deal with this feeling of thick and thin Well, actually, first, let's talk about why you might want to deal with this because that might not be as obvious as I assume it is. Sometimes this can sound cool to go from a thick cord to a thin cord, but usually in a cord progression, it doesn't. Usually, it feels like there's something missing. There's like a hole there. Like, the floor just gave away on the cord progression. If you go from thick to thin like this. So there's a couple ways around it. The first is we can thicken up this cord, right? We could probably the first thing I'd do is double down octave, just to really push that home. Maybe I'd put a fifth in between there, like that. And then something up around this range. I could do that. Okay? Now I have similarly thick cords, right? Let's hear how they sound. Okay. Cool. It definitely somewhat solves the problem. Um, but not entirely because of the consonance and dissonance. This is not just thicker. It's also got more hair to it, because it's got all that spice in it. This, no matter how many notes we double, it just doesn't have that spice. I would definitely be easier if we made this a big 13th chord as well and we can adjust the voicing so that it works. DEF GA, Let's find a B down here. Oh, no, sorry. I need a C and a D. Oops. How did that work? Okay, so GBD now I need an F sharp. Now I need an A. Now I need a C. Now I need an E. So there's actually only one note different between those two. Isn't that crazy? That's bizarre. But let's hear it now. Okay, so we can take these down and spread them out. We'll see if there's only one note different between these two chords. It's kind of crazy. But it's because these chords are using almost the whole scale, right? So in this case, it's not going to feel like there's a cord change necessarily. It just feels like one note is changing because that's what's happening. So let's reinforce the root a little bit more let's do that. Okay, better. We can get in the range of that. But basically, if this problem is happening for you, where you feel this density issue, there are three ways to solve it. The first is to double a bunch of notes in the thinner chord to thicken it up. That sometimes works. The second is just to make your thinner cord thicker by adding more extensions to it, like ninth tenth, like ninth, 11th and 13th. The third, which we haven't talked about yet, is to thin out your other cord. Let's take a quick look at that. I'm going to go back to just our triad, GBD. Okay, let's take our big C 13 chord here and let's get rid of some notes. We know that our root and our fifth are not the most important. Let's try getting rid of the ninth also. Okay. So now we have similarly dense chords, four notes against three notes, but our inversion is messed up or our voice leading is messed up. Let's take this E up an octave. Let's take this F down an octave and this A down an octave. There we go. Now we're kind of sitting within the same realm. Now, this is going to be a lot more dissonant than this, but the density might not be too bad. See, I kind of like that. Okay, so that's option three, thin out the thickchord by getting rid of the tonic, the Fifth, maybe some other notes, too. But that's how we deal with density. 49. Transition Chords & Pivot Chords: Okay, let me tell you about another way to use some of these chords. You might be thinking, All of these chords are too dissonant for me. They're too just weird. They're not gonna fit with my style of music. I have no idea how I would ever use these things. Let me show you. Transition cords can be ugly as all hell, and in some ways, the uglier, the better. Remember what I told you, the most used chord in history, that minor 11th chord, because the open strings of the guitar. That gets used as a transition sound all the time. Let me show you what I mean. Let's do a little bit bigger clip here. Let's make a new one. Let's say Let's go to I don't know, let's sick with G. That was in fun. GBD, Let's do G minor seven. Oops. Okay. G minus seven, let's go to, uh, I just want to make a short chord progression here. G minus seven, let's go to kind of feeling an A something. Um, it's kind of a tough fit, but let's go to a ACE G. Let's put that on the bottom. Um, Okay. Let's extend this out a little bit longer. About that long. Let's do another chord. Let's see, we want a G, we want to an A. How about C would probably work well. Let's take that A down. C, D, CE G. We want to B. Let's do that. Okay, let should work. Okay. Now for my last cord, what I'm looking for is something that is going to swing us back to the beginning, right? Because we're going to loop this. So we want this cord to go back to there. But let's say it let's make something that doesn't quite work. So let's go to Let's go to a D with an F sharp in the base. So D F sharp, A, C. Okay? Now, a D chord here actually will swing back to there, but let's add a transition cord into it. First, let's hear it without, okay? What did I do wrong there? No D sharp. D, F sharp, a C. Okay, one more time. Okay, cool. Now let's use one of our crazy chords to swing us back around. Let's go. I'm going to take this. I'm going to leave us one beat or half a beat, actually. And let's do something like the Petrushka chord. Think we can get a Petrushka chord to work here? Little Stravinsky and a pop song. If you remember, the Petrushka chord is C major and F sharp major, okay? So let's make it here. C. CEG, and then let's go F sharp, A sharp C sharp, okay? There's our Petrushka cord. Now, what that's going to do is just shoot us with a big dissonance, okay? This could be any cord. Honestly, this could be any red because it's just a transition. That's all we're doing. So we're gonna go Bh boom and then to a consonant, right? It's gonna be a big dissonance, and then a consonance is gonna feel really good after it. That's how resolutions work. So this is using a super weird cord as a transition. It's gonna whip us back to that, okay? Let's try it. That was a lot of build up to hope this works. That's a good one, Dad. See, you can feel how it pushes you back to that tonic. You know, it really has a lift me up kind of feel. Now, again, this could be anything. Transition cords are great for just pushing you back to the tonic. It's a strong dissonance that's going to resolve pretty much no matter how you do it, right? Let's take this and maybe even put this closer to our key. So it's like in G. Okay? Is that going to change anything? I just switched the key up a half step. That should be pretty dramatic, but in this case, It's still just a big dissonance that goes to a consonant. So, that's another great use for this chord, definitely not the only or for any of these chords or any of these harmonies. It's not the only, but it's a great way to just kind of pivot use one of these chords to pivot back to something else. 50. Outer Voices and Inner Voices: I want to point out one more thing with these chords to keep in mind, and that is that all the notes in a chord progression like this, all the notes are not created equal. Our ears latch on to certain things more than other things. In this case, what I'm talking about is outer voices and inner voices. Outer voices are the notes at the top of the chord, this, and the notes at the bottom of the chord. Okay. Those two things, the top and bottom notes of a chord in a chord progression, tend, not always, but tend to stand out. It's just like a weird psychological thing. The inner voices, are these notes. And, you know, the number of inner voices you have depends on the chord. Like, this has four inner voices, right? Inter voices is everything except the highest note and the lowest note. Here's a good example of how powerful the intervoices are. If I play this and I ask you to think of a melody for this, or I would just say, do you hear a melody in this? Even though we haven't written a melody, your ears probably going to latch on to the top voice. Okay, so that top voice usually gets an extra bit of emphasis. The reason I'm pointing this out now is that as we're putting things together, you can really shape a chord progression by thinking about those outer voices. Okay? The inner voices can really muck around and do some funny stuff, and it really won't it often won't affect the feeling of the cord if your outer voices stay consistent. So for example, one of the things I could do would be kind of start doing some suspensions with the inner voices, right? Like, check this out. We've talked about suspensions before. I'm just going to, like, kind of change where notes enter and leave. I'm not gonna mess up in the outer voices, but I will just kind of play around with the inner voices. Whoops. Let's just do that. Oh, that's the same note. That's no fun. Let's do that. Maybe that. Maybe that. I don't know, something like that. So now we're starting to get let's do that, too. Piano doesn't sustain a whole lot, so we're not gonna really hear this all that great, but on strings, this will sound gorgeous. That's kind of pretty. So we can get away with doing stuff like that with the outer voices or the inner voices. The outer voices, we could did I get back to normal? I think so. We could do some fun stuff with, like, changing. So let's say this note. We want to sing a little bit more. What note could I get to? What do I have here, GB CGB. So I could take this outer voice, get it away from this E, but maybe go up to I could go down to a D with it, and that would add a ninth. But that changes our melody, so to speak a little bit. Let's hear that. Just change that one note. Oh, that makes me think maybe this note should go back up to E. That changes the chord, but that's okay. Right? So you can really shape these melodies by using the outer voices and the bass line too. And you can have a lot of fun playing with the pacing of the notes on the inside with the inner voices. 51. Chord Rhythm: Okay, last but not least in this section, I want to point out one other thing. Let's make a new clip and let's call it chord rhythm. I think we've talked about chord rhythm before, but because I always do examples in these classes where the chords are so, chord, chord, chord. They're so steady rhythmically. I just want to point out that it doesn't have to be that way. And you can do all kinds of fun stuff by changing the progression of the chords. Like, what if we did this, this? The chord rhythm is just the rhythm at which the chords move. I've been doing it with half notes, Chords are just going chord, chord, chord, like I just said. But switch it up. Here we're going to do one chord for a beat, half a beat, half a beat, and then back to this chord, maybe for half a beat. I don't know, it doesn't matter. But switch up the rhythms. Have some fun with it. And then maybe back to this one. Maybe done to there, 'cause my heart wanted to go there right now. Alright, so just let don't worry about being so rigid with your chord percussions. You know, they can move all over the place. And you can have different rhythms of chords in your music all the time. And it's a great way to add some excitement and some motion to your harmony. 52. How to Pick the Best Chord Every Time: Okay. So here's the deal. I'm just gonna kind of talk freely in this video, like I don't in other videos. But still, I want to tell you something that's very important. If you know me, and if you've watched a bunch of my classes and maybe read my bio and listen to some of my music, you know that I have in the past, taken long trips up to the Arctic on a ship just to get solitude and write music. I've done it twice. And the second time was just a couple of months ago. And what I wanted to do on that trip, my personal goal on that trip was to reinvent my sense of harmony. I'd really felt like I've fallen into some traps and some cliches, and I just wanted to rethink the way I explore harmony. So I talked to a bunch of fellow composers who I feel like have a really good sense of harmony that I'd like to emulate. And I asked them how they think about harmony, how they think about all this stuff. I have a friend who used to be the string arranger for Prince, and now he, you know, writes does all kinds of arranging. And he's a jazz guy. And I asked him, like, Can I take harmony lessons? What can I do? I just need to reboot my whole way of thinking about harmony. So I talked to him a long time. I got some books. I loaded them up in my suitcase, then I went to the Arctic. And I started reading these books. You know, and they're not particularly brilliant books. They're like jazz harmony books, you know, so that I could pick through them, experiment around, and try to find what I wanted my new voice to be. Um, and that's what I did on the Arctic. And it was about three days in of working. And I was also committed to working on this big solo piano project. So it was about three days of working, of, you know, reading these books, looking at harmony, analyzing it, trying to write little things within that harmony. And I finally, out of nowhere, landed on an epiphany. And once I found that idea, this epiphany that I'm going to tell you in just a second. Once I found it, I was like, Oh, my God. This is what harmony is. This is what I want to sound like. And I just felt like I solved it. And over the course of the next maybe 12 to 13 days on this ship, I wrote 27 piano etudes that I was really happy with. Not all of them. Most of them. I was really happy with the harmony in them and the choices I had made in the harmony. So here is the epiphany. The best Harmony is the one that sounds the best. I know that's stupid. I know that sounds entirely stupid. You're like, Dude, I could have told you that before I took any of these classes. I could have told you that the note that sounds the best is the note that sounds the best. What a stupid thing to say, Jay, I can't believe I paid for this class. Hear me out. Hear me out. What I did is I stopped thinking about harmony. I really did. I stopped thinking about harmony. Now, I didn't now I need all my knowledge of harmony to get to where I am, to get to knowing what I want it to sound like. But what I did is I just shut it all off, and I just said, I'm going to do what sounds good. That's all I'm gonna do. I don't care if it's using big chords, fancy chords, things that show I have a PhD. I don't care about any of that. What I care about is what sounds cool? And I stopped analyzing chords that I was writing. And I went back to how I used to do it, which is not analyzing the chords that I was writing because I didn't know what those chords were. I just started putting notes in combinations that felt good that were hitting me in the right way. And yeah, I could go through and analyze all of it, and it'll probably, you know, have a lot of ninth and 11th in it and all of those things. But, but the best harmony is always the one that feels right. So don't put a name on it. Don't worry about putting names on it. Use all of these chords because they sound good. They sound right for your piece. Train your ear to get comfortable with these harmonies so that when you encounter them, you know what they are. But as you're writing, the best chord is always just the one that comes next. That's it. There's really no You know, you can take all this music theory and dissect it all down and say, Okay, here are my options. But there's an unlimited number of options. The only truth is that your music is going to sound like you. And if you want cool harmonies, You need to decide what sounds cool to you. Don't decide that you want to use ninth or 13th or whatever, Petrushka or, you know, whatever chords. Use what sounds good. Somebody's put a name on it. Who cares? Let them put names on it later. Do what sounds good. That's my advice for you. And once I got that back into my head that I don't need to think about all these chords, I started writing good music again. 53. What Comes Next?: Alright, we've reached the end. So what comes next? Let's say you're feeling this and you're like, I love this stuff. What more can I do? Well, I would recommend if you're really super into this stuff, I do have a giant traditional music theory class here. This class has been six parts. That one is 21 parts. It's quite long. Um, a lot of it will be redundant, but it does use notes and, like, traditional notation. So I would recommend starting at the beginning because the beginning is about how to read notes. And you'll understand a lot of the concepts, but you'll have to look at it through traditional notation. So I think that'll give you kind of a head start on that, and I think you'll do pretty well with it. Will there be more sections of music theory for electronic music? Or electronic musicians. I don't know. I think this is enough for now. We're at six. Maybe I'll make a seven someday. I don't know. But there's no immediate plans for that. I think six is probably the right number for this. So check that out. I have tons of other online classes. You can check those out here on this site. If you want to learn more about Ableton, I have 1 million Ableton classes that I'm really proud of, so check those out too. In the meantime, I have one more video for you and then a couple other goodies. So let's press on. 54. Thanks for Watching!: Hey, everyone. I 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 in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.