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.