Music Theory for People who Hate Music Theory

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to music theory for people who hate music theory. If you hate music theory, you're in the right place because I like to explain music theory in simple, welcoming, non pretentious ways. I've been doing this for a long time, and I've built kind of a reputation around it. I wrote this book, Music Theory for electronic music producers, and this book really focuses on teaching music theory in a way that just kind of slices the fat off everything and says, Here's what you need to know if you want to write music. I'm assuming in this class, because you are all self identified haters that some of you are probably interested in getting started writing music. But some of you might be performers who are interested in learning the basics of music theory, a very smart thing to do. Music teachers, maybe music students. Or maybe music listeners that just want to understand what's going on in the music a little bit better. That is awesome. If that's you, I applaud you. But any of those reasons and any other reason is great. So what we're going to do in this class is just dive into music theory, freshman level music theory, but we're going to do it in a very just hold my hand relaxing way. If you've tried to learn music theory before, but you got stuck, trust me, give it a try again with me. I'll get you through it. Alright? Enough talking. Let's dive in. 2. My Approach to Music Theory: Okay, everybody, welcome to Music Theory for haters. That's just what we're going to call this. So this is, you know, this is a little tongue in cheek, the way that we're calling this for people who hate music theory, but here's what I'm really assuming is going on. Maybe you tried to learn music theory before and it just didn't click. Maybe you had a teacher that just wasn't resonating with you. Maybe you read a book and it just didn't happen. It's all okay. I've taught music theory to hundreds of thousands of people. And I've really kind of developed a technique over the years that really kind of makes it more welcoming and less pretentious. Music theory can be a very gate kept kind of discipline. But for no good reason. So, I'm assuming that you are maybe you're a writer, like someone who writes music, a songwriter or something like that. Maybe you're a performer or interested in being a performer. Maybe you're a teacher, a student, or just a curious person. Let me tell you a quick little story about how I learned music theory. When I got to college, I knew I wanted to major in music, but I didn't really know much about and I had a hard time learning music theory. I really did. I struggled through it, and eventually I got really good at it, but it wasn't until grad school or later. And I had this teacher at the time, one teacher who told me that you know, you never want to study with a virtuoso, right? Like, he would say, People who have a hard time learning something are the best ones to teach it because they know all the techniques. Like, you wouldn't want to study, like, writing music with Bach. He was just a genius. He just did it. You want to write You want to study writing music with someone who had to really learn how to do it tediously. So that's where we are with music theory. For a long time, I hated music theory. I eventually got pretty good at it because I use it as a composer, which is what I am. But don't worry. We're gonna we're gonna, um, ease into this. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be a little quirky. But you're gonna learn music theory. Trust me. 3. What is Music Theory, anyway?: Okay, so what is music theory? This is, I think, where a lot of people go wrong, like, right off the bat is not understanding what music theory really is. And it's a matter of opinion, to be honest. This isn't a strict definition, but let me tell you how I approach music theory and what I think it is. And then I want to tell you about how we're going to cover it in this class. So music theory is not writing music. Those are different things. And when I write music, I'm not really writing from as, like, a music theorist, right? Like, I write when I'm writing a piece of music, and I have to make a decision about, like, what note comes next or what chord comes next, the one I'm going to choose is the one that sounds the coolest to me in the moment. It's not going to be the one that fulfills some scale or weird chord or sequence, something. It's not gonna be that. It's gonna be the one that sounds cool. Period full stop. The point of theory is for us to be able to figure out what the composers did and put names on it so that we can learn how to make those sounds. For example, let's say you are in a concert because this happened to me not that long ago. You're in a concert and you're listening to some music, and it's like a rock band. It's whatever. It doesn't have to be It's not like classical music. Any music you can imagine. I was just at a concert the other night, and there was this acoustic guitarist, and they did something really strange. And I just thought, What was that? It was just like, a weird chord progression that I'd never heard before. So I took out my phone and I recorded it. And then I brought it home, and I listened to it 1 million times until I could write it down and analyze it and figure out what that was. And it turns out it was a one to a major flat three chord progression. You don't need to know what that means. You'll know what that means by the end of this class. But it's weird. It's kind of weird, and it sounded really cool. So I thought, awesome, I'm going to use one to major flat three core progressions all the time because I like the way that sounds. So that's kind of music theory. It's help it's a tool to help us understand what sounds cool, the sounds we like. So in this class, we're going to learn to do that. We're going to learn to look at a piece of music, analyze it, figure out why it sounds cool, and then do something with it. Maybe you're going to write music with it, maybe you're going to teach it or play it or something. But that's our main purpose. 4. What we Will Cover in This Class: Okay, so in this class, we're divided into kind of three big chunks with the middle one being the biggest, okay? So the first big chunk we're going to talk about reading music, okay? Now, hold on. Before you have a panic attack, before your anxiety levels rise, reading music might be the thing that is the biggest barrier to learning music theory for most people. So let me tell you something about reading music. In order to do music theory, we need to understand the symbols on the page, the dots and the lines and stuff. We don't have to be able to sight read, and we don't have to be particularly good at reading music. You can count up notes. Like if you know where G is and you need to find C, you can count G, A, B, C, can count up notes. That's fine. Look, we're not sight reading here, okay? So you don't need to get good at reading music. I'm going to spend some time telling you, about the symbols on the page and how to find notes and things like that because that's how we write stuff down in music theory. We write stuff down in music. So we need to be able to read it a little bit. But you're not going to have to memorize a bunch of stuff. It's not even a major part of this class, okay? But you're not going to understand very much of the later stuff unless you understand how notation works. So we're going to spend some time on that. Then we're going to dive into chords and harmony, building chords, analyzing harmonies, looking at other music, what makes a chord fit in a key, how do scales relate to that? Those are all the things we're going to do, and the kind of real meat of the class is in that middle section. And we're going to stick primarily to major keys as we learn it. And then the third big chunk is we're going to apply all of that to minor keys. Cool. So if you already know how to read music, then you could do two things. You get kind of like a chose your own adventure class here. You could just continue watching because some review never hurt anyone. That's option one. Option two, you could skip ahead to that second big chunk. Okay? You could do that. There's nothing wrong with that. You could skip ahead to it. I don't know what number of lecture that's going to be yet, but by the time I circle around to editing this, I should know. So if I do know, I will put it in text right here somewhere when I know. And that is the class that you can jump to if you already know how to read music, okay? And you don't want to rewatch the reading music stuff. Okay. So that's our plan. Alright. Last thing, before we dive in, let's talk about some tools that you're going to want to have access to in order to learn how to do this stuff. 5. Tools You Will Need: Okay, there are two tools that I would like you to get your hands on, if possible, and have at the ready as you follow along with this class. The first one is quite easy. That is some staff paper. Now, staff paper is this five line stuff that we see. It also looks like this. You can buy whole reams of it like this one. I have thousands of them over there. Um, you can get nerdy and get really nice staff paper. Like, I really geek out about nice quality, like, actual paper. But you don't need to do that. I'm going to give you in the next lecture, I'm going to give you a blank piece of staff paper. Just print out four or five pages of that and keep it next to your computer or your iPad or wherever you're watching these classes, okay? Just keep it handy to jot down notes. Okay? It's going to be a lot easier to write notes on staff paper than just blank paper. So just print out the thing I'm going to give you and keep it handy. That's the first thing. The second thing is some software, a notation program. Now, there are kind of four, um, notation programs on the market right now. There are three that are kind of the big professional ones. Those are finale, Sibelius, and Dorico. I believe all three of those work on Mac NPC. Dorcos the big, the new kid on the block. Those are all big, hard to learn programs. No matter how you slice it, they're hard to learn. There's another one that is by far the cheapest because it's either free or close to it, and that's called MuseScore. That's the one I'm showing you on the screen right here. MSESCRE MuseScore. Now, there's some complicated stuff about this. Let me just say a few things about it really quick, and then I'll explain why we want it. First, Muscore was open source. It was a free program, but it's been taken over by this other company now, and I don't think it's free anymore. It might be like $1, but it might be free. I'm not sure. Now, this version of Muscore that I'm talking about, I'm talking about Muscore on a desktop computer. They have a version of Muscore for tablet, but it's really just a reader and you can't really do what we want to do. If you are working on a tablet, look at a program called notion NOTION or really any other just notation editor. But MuseScore is a great option if you're on a desktop. One last thing about that is if you have a notation program or access to one, you can use any notation program. It really doesn't matter as long as it can do these few things that we needed to do, which is this, we need to be able to input notes, play notes and listen to it playing back. Okay. So we need to be able to put in notes and then hit play and listen back to them. This is a very standard thing that any notation program should be able to do. So really, any program will work as long as it can do that. So there are a lot of different options. I would actually recommend not getting one of the big ones finale, Sebelius or Dorico just because they're so hard to learn. Okay, but get one of those so that you can hear what we're doing. Okay, and the next thing, I'm going to give you some staff paper, and then we're off to the races. 6. Do we Need to Read Music?: Okay, so do we need to learn how to read music? Like, for real, can we get around? Um, kind of. So here's the thing. We need to be able to understand what we're looking at when we're dealing with chords and harmony and melodies and things. So we do need to be able to understand written music, particularly something called the lead sheet, which I'll show you in a minute. But let's, like, actually drill into this a little bit, because I think there's some misconceptions about reading music. In order to really get music theory to the level that we want to get it, you need to be able to read music, but you don't need to be able to sight read music, okay? These are two very different things, and I think this is what trips up a lot of people at first, okay? I'm going to show you where the notes are on the staff, and we're going to talk about some techniques for remembering it and all of that good stuff. What you need to be able to do is look at a staff and be able to say, Okay, I think that's a C, so that's a D, E, F G and count your way up and figure out what the note is. You don't need to be able to look at a complicated sheet of music and just be able to play it on an instrument or hear it in your head or something like that. You don't need to be able to do that. It doesn't hurt, but that comes with, like, years and years of practice. I was terrible at reading music for a really long time. I'm a guitar player, and the joke about guitar players is, how do you get a guitar player to play quiet? Give them sheet music. And that's kind of true because as guitar players, we very rarely learn how to read music. I went to college for music and then grad school and all this other crazy stuff. So, yes, I learned how to read music. But I wasn't very good at it, and it took me a long time to get good at it. Don't stress out about it. You need to be able to recognize some symbols on the page, okay? That's the way we want to think about it. Now, the type of music written music that we're going to be looking at is mostly lead sheets, okay? So let me show you what a lead sheet looks like, and let's just start by going through all the different kind of elements of the scores and the symbols and all that stuff and figuring out what they mean. 7. Lead Sheets: Okay, so when we start diving into notes, which we're going to do in the next video, I think, we'll be looking at individual staves. But when we deal with full songs, we will look at lead sheets, which is kind of what we have here. This is a little bit more elaborate than most lead sheets. But basically, what you have is kind of maybe one or two staves of a reduction of what's going on. It's like a shorthand version of the whole song. It looks like it's kind of written for piano here, and it is, but it could also be interpreted by really any instrument. I'll show you the guitar chords, the melody, the lyrics, and the form of it, which means, like, you know, you do the verse and then the chorus and then the verse and then the chorus and the bridge and stuff like that. So we don't need to read any of these individual notes here because everything that's there is summarized in this cord up here, E major seven. So we really just need to know what that E major seven does, then we can avoid all these other notes. Same thing here. Still an E major seven chord, but now it switches to this, which we would pronounce C sharp minor seven. We'll talk about that in a minute. Don't worry about it. But we really don't need to concern ourselves with all of the notes. However, when we're dealing with melodies and stuff, we do need to deal with the notes a little bit, okay? So all of that is a long way of saying, Yes, if you already know how to read music or if you're scared to death of it, that's cool. Skip ahead until we get into some of the cool music theory stuff. But for now, for the next, I don't know, 15 or 20 videos or so, we're going to talk about reading music. Cool. Um, it is an important skill to have, but nobody gets good at reading music without years of practice, okay? It's just like any other language. So I want you to learn the principles, the basics of how it works. And then if you want to spend years practicing to get really good at sight reading, you're welcome to do that. But if you don't want to, that's cool, too. Whatever. Okay, enough apologizing. Let's get into pitch names. 8. Clefs: All right. So now I'm over here in use score. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. Okay, so here's what we're looking at. First thing we see is we have this symbol, which is called a clef and this symbol, which is called a time signature. Okay? You'll notice that we have two staves linked together. We can tell they're linked together because these bar lines go all the way through, and there's a little bracket right there. So this is kind of what piano music looks like. There's two staves, kind of sort of one for your right hand and one for your left hand. These symbols are different. These symbols are called the clef, and they basically tell us the range that these notes are going to be in, okay? This one is called treble clef, and it means that the notes are going to be kind of right in the middle of the keyboard or the middle of the staff or the way we hear, whatever. It means like the middle. This is called bass clef. It means these notes are lower, lower side of the piano. That's why we kind of treat it as right and left hand. Okay, so there are a number of other clefts you can encounter. But these two are the most common, and you may go your whole life without encountering those other clefts. So we're not going to deal with those too much. And most of what we can do for a while here is going to be just on the trouble cleft, okay? So let me give you an example here. Let me make a note. So this note is at the bottom of the treble clef staff. And if I make a note at the top of the base clef staff, it is the exact same note, okay? So if I do this, those are the same note, okay? So I'm only inputting those like that to show you how these line up, okay? So let's not worry about base theft for now. But that's how clefs work, okay? So most of what do will be in trouble clef. Now, there's a little trick to a trouble cleft. A treble clef is also sometimes called a G clef, like the letter G. And the reason it's called a G clef is because this symbol, which looks kind of like a fancy ampersand, the little circle right here, this circles around the pitch G, okay? So this line right here is G. Okay. So that is now a G. So this little circle in the clef can be a good little, like, anchor to remind you that that line is G. But I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit. Let's go to a new video, and I want to talk about languages, and then we'll start talking about pitches. 9. Languages: Okay, so for most people, when they're getting started learning to read music, it's not all the symbols of music notation that trip them up. It's specifically pitches. This is where people get really hung up. And for good reason, it can be hard to learn to recognize pitches on the five line staff. Rhythms, though, are much more of an abstract concept to me. I think that's a lot harder. We'll talk about rhythms in a minute. But anyway, So before we dive into pitches, I want to tell you one kind of weird thing that'll help clarify 1 million questions later. There are at least two different systems for naming pitches, okay? Um, the system that a good part of the world uses is to use letter names for them ABCDEFG. Okay? Another big part of the world uses a different system where they don't use letter names, but they use syllables, DR mi fa la t do, okay? And now it gets even weirder because there's probably a handful full of you out there saying, I know that, and you just said it totally wrong. Okay, so two systems, letter names and what we call solfege. In solfege, there are a number of variations, okay, especially on the seventh note, what I call T in other parts of the world. They call it other things. And the whole system is different. In Germany, they use letters, but they have one more than we have. It's kind of weird to us. So I'm going to use letter names. This is the most common where I live in the United States. If you use somewhere different, you're gonna have to kind of translate letter names into Soulfeh, okay? So just keep that in mind. But you should use what's being used in your area so that you can talk to other musicians. So, I'm going to use letter names that's what I learned. 10. Pitch Names: Okay, pitch names. You ready? So I think what is the best way to do this is to pick a few pitches that you're just going to, like, memorize, like, brute force, and then you can kind of learn how to count up and down to find them. So we already talked about G, okay? So G is right on the line. So all the pitches are going to be on a line or on a space, okay? So this is on a line. This one's on a space. So G is a good anchor. Another good anchor is C, which is right there. So from that, if I say, find me an E, you could say, Well, C is here. So this note this note must be a D because it's the next one higher, and this one must be an E because that comes after D, and it's the next one higher. Okay? So I would recommend really getting these two in your head as, like, your anchors. Now, if your brain doesn't work that way and you just want to know all of them, let's do it. So C, D, E, F, here's that G, G A, B, C. Now we've gone a whole octave. We're going to talk about more about octaves in just a minute, but octaves are kind of how the letters repeat after we go through seven of them. So seven, and then we're back to C again. So these are both C. This is C and that's C. But then it just keeps going. D, E, F, G, and it can go higher. A, B, C, another C, D. It can really go infinitely high. These notes are really hard to read when they get up there. Even I have to count up there sometimes. These are called ledger lines. These lines that put us above the staff. They also go below the staff. You'll see them here and they can go lower yet if you want. Don't worry about memorizing these high ledger lines. They're tricky to see. One way that people sometimes memorize um, the note names, this might be helpful to you is to remember the lines and the spaces. So if we look at just the lines on the Treble Clef staff, we have E, G, B, D and F. If you like mnemonics, a good one here that people tend to use is every good boy deserves budge. I've also What's the, like, gender neutral one people are using? I can't remember, but make up your own. It's great. You can, uh come up with anything that uses those letters, EG, B, D and F. Okay? Those will help you remember all of the lines. Now, the spaces are a little bit easier because you don't even need a mnemonic. F, A, C E. Spells face. You can use a mnemonic for it if you want, but it spells a word, face. Cool. Okay, so those are our notes. 11. Octaves: Okay, let's go back to this octaves idea. So we talked about how clefs are kind of like showing you what range this staff is in. Octaves do kind of a similar thing. So when you're playing this, let's look at a keyboard. Maybe that'll be helpful. Okay, so here's a piano keyboard. So here's our notes. So here's a low C, and we can label octaves with a number if we want. We don't really have to. I don't really worry about that too much. So here's C and here's another C. A whole bunch of Cs. The thing about octaves, an octave is an interval, okay? So it is the space between two notes that have the same name, C to C. Or you can have two octaves, which would be like that. Now, the reason that they have the same name is because they basically have the same, like, frequency content or more accurately a multiplier of it, right? So if you imagine there's all these, like, waveforms that get created when we play a note, like, if the waves are going this fast, the next octave up, the waves are going to be going exactly twice as fast. And that means they're going to sit together real nicely. If that was weird and confusing, let's just put it this way. Octaves always sound good together, okay? So if you want to write something, if you're like, I have this cool little melody that goes FACE, and you're like, I want to make this sound a little thicker and a little, you know, richer than add an octave. Okay? Now, all of these notes are in octaves. Okay. Here's the takeaway. If you're writing music and you want to make something sound a little bit bigger, octaves will always sound good. Add an octave, and it all sound great. Okay, so we have seven notes. And then they start repeating, and that makes an octave. Now, that counts what we call the white notes, okay? Like, these ones. But we haven't talked about these black notes yet. We're gonna do that in a minute. I want us to do a worksheet, and then a little bit on rhythm, and then we'll come back to the black notes, okay? Baby Steps. We're gonna get you there. Don't worry. Okay, let's go on and talk about worksheets real quick. 12. Worksheets!: Okay, so throughout this class, you're going to find a number of worksheets, like seven or eight or nine of them or so. This is what they look like. This is the first one that you're gonna see in just a minute. Um, what I've done here is I put a little keyboard with the note names on it that may or may not be helpful to you. It's just kind of a way to cheat. In the later ones, that'll go away, so watch out. So in this worksheet, I'm just going to ask you to identify the notes and then the notes in the chord. So for these ones, each circle gets a name, okay? So this bottom one here, we know that one because that's our clef cheat. So that's G. Then there are two more notes here also, okay? And then, at the end of the worksheet, if you scroll all the way down, you'll get the answers. Okay? So they're at the bottom of the page. I've seen some people, like, just do these on their screen. I've seen people print these out and do them. Whatever. You can do whatever you want. I've seen people just totally ignore them. That's fine, too. One thing you can't do, which is a bummer is just play them. You can't just hit this and hit play because I have to put these together in, like, Microsoft Word. So they're not playable. They're just sheet music. Okay. You can do it. I do hear from most people in other classes that I've done this in that these worksheets are really helpful. So just try them. They're not excessively long. They're pretty short. But they'll make sure you're keeping up. Cool. Okay, so in the next bit, there'll be a download for your first worksheet, this one, and then we'll go on to Rhythm notation, also known as time notation. 13. Accidentals: Okay, so here's where things get a wee bit more complicated, okay? So we have all of our notes, right, ABCDEFG, then it starts over. Now, that's all of these notes, but it's not all the notes, right? Because we have these black notes here. So we know this note and we know this note. But what is this note? This note, the way we name these other notes, these black notes is kind of bizarre, but just hold on. So basically we have three symbols that we need right now, okay? We need sharps, flats, and naturals. Three symbols collectively are called accidentals, okay? Now, you might think, Look, why? Let's analyze this word accidental. That kind of means something that happens accidentally, unintentionally. That has nothing to do with this. I don't know why we call it accidentals. We very intentionally do them, but that's what we use. It's really weird. So flat sharps and naturals are all symbols called collectively accidentals. So when we say that note needs an accidental, it means it's not in the key, and it needs to get a flat or a sharp to put it in key. Okay, so let's talk about sharps in a new video. 14. Sharps: Okay, so the Sharp symbol, which looks like that, okay? It looks like hashtag or pound symbol. We call it a sharp here in the music world. It's not exactly the same as a hash tag. A hash tag is like This is like an italic hash tag, so it's slightly different. But when we're typing, we just use the number symbol, hashtag symbol, whatever. Now, here's what it means. That symbol, which we call a sharp, a sharp symbol means that note, the note that it's on a little bit higher, okay? So it means a little bit higher than that note. So we're showing here a C, okay, with a sharp on it. So that means C sharp. That means C a little bit higher, okay? Now, what is a little bit? In this case, a little bit is an interval called a half step. Okay? Half steps are going to be very important as we move forward, okay? So this is an important concept. A half step is the closest possible note you could go to, okay? So C to C sharp is a half step. D to D sharp is a half step. The next possible note, whether it's white notes or black notes. Let's look right here. Right here is an E, okay? A half step up from E is an F, not an E sharp. There's no such thing as E sharp. Slight caveat. Once you get into really advanced music theory, you may find E sharps around. They do exist. It's kind of a theoretical thing. We're not going to stress out about them right now. Cool? Okay. So sharp means a half step higher, okay? So we can call these notes C sharp, D sharp. This is an F. So F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, and then it starts over. C sharp. Okay? So easy enough, right? When there's a sharp on it, it's a half step higher than the note without a sharp on it or you could say without an accidental on it. Cool. Easy, Ps. Now let's talk about flats. 15. Flats: Okay, cool. Now, let's talk about flats. Here is a note with a flat on it. So we have this note D flat, okay? So flat is the opposite of sharp. It means this note is a little bit lower, and that little bit is a half step. Okay? So it's a half step lower than the note that it's on. So D flat takes us down a half step. Now, that flat symbol is a weird symbol, and it's kind of the bane of my existence when I have to make these videos because I have to dig around to find that symbol and paste it in and do all this stuff, usually. It's a weird symbol. When you're just writing, sometimes we use a lowercase B. So if you see, like, a flat written where it says at A and then a lowercase B, it's just a quick, shorthand way of doing a flat. But that symbol is its own unique little thing. You can find fonts that have it. There are, like, music fonts that have it. Anyway, um so cool. Easy enough, right? Like it's a note down a half step. So we could have here's D flat, E flat, G flat, A flat, B flat, and we start over. There's no F flat. Again, theoretically, but we'll deal with that later. There's no C flat. Okay, so if you're paying attention, you just realized something bizarre. And that's that these two notes are the same note. C sharp going up a half step from C and D flat, going down a half step from D are the same note. Just listen to it. Well, that's confusing now, isn't it? Why would they do that? Well, um, first of all, this thing that we're experiencing right here where we have two notes written two different ways that sound the same. There's a word for that, and it's enharmonic, okay? If two notes are enharmonic, it means they are written differently, but they sound the same, okay? So all of the black notes on the piano can be called two different things. Yes, that is true. They can always be called two different things. How do we know which to use? When do we use sharps and when do we use flats? There's a couple rules. The first rule and kind of the biggest rule about when to use sharps and when to use flats, is that some keys, when you're in a key, some keys are sharp keys where we write it in sharps and some keys are flat keys, where we write it in flats. More about that soon, especially when we get into the circle of fifths, you'll see why. Um, so that's probably the biggest thing. But even outside of that, if you're writing music that is totally chromatic and you're just we're always going to write using whichever one is easier to read. Sometimes, based on the context of what we're doing, it's easier to read sharps and sometimes it's easier to read flats. We tend to avoid bouncing between the two within a single measure. That's sometimes inevitable, but we avoid that whenever we can. Sometimes that means that when a line is going up, it's easier to read in sharps. And when it's going down, it's easier to read in flat. Times that's true. We do do that sometimes. But the key is the biggest tell. Okay, so we have one more symbol we haven't talked about, and that's unnatural. So let's talk about that next. 16. Accidental Behavior and Naturals: Okay, let's look at some music. Here's a very simple little lead sheet that I wrote for the purposes of having something to show you. I used this first in the last theory text that I wrote, and that book was called Music Theory for songwriters. I'll probably make a book out of this version of the class too, maybe. We'll see. But I've changed a few notes here from what's in the book to demonstrate this particular topic. So it's very slightly different. So, whoops, there's two things that we need to learn here. One is how accidentals work, and the other is what naturals are, okay? So here's what we need to know. Let's go to this bar down here. Okay? So here we have a sea sharp. A D, an E, okay? And then this note. What note is this? Here's what here's the most important thing. Any accidental sharps or flats or naturals, they hang on for the whole bar, okay? So this note has a sharp on it. That means nothing to this note or this note. But to this note, that sharp is still there. The bar line, any of these these are all bar lines. The bar lines turns off the accidental, but not until the bar line. So this is a C sharp, okay? Right. So anytime you use an accidental, think of it like a light switch, okay? This has just gotten turned on. The sharp just got turned on for C, okay? So now C is sharp in this bar, okay? This one still sharp. The sharp is still on, right? This bar line turns it off. So the next C that I use is not going to be sharp. But it is because I have the symbol on it. So I don't need the symbol here because it's still on. We know that it's still on because that's how accidentals work. But down here, it has been turned off because we had a bar line. So now we need this symbol again, okay? So you can see, we have a symbol at the start of the measure, but we don't need it. Now, what would happen if I wanted this to not have a sharp on it, okay? It's going to be sharp because it's within the measure. So if I want it to not have a sharp, I need to explicitly say, do not add the sharp. Turn that switch off, okay? And the way I do that is with a natural symbol. Okay? This is a natural symbol. It means turn off all previous accidentals. It works for sharps or flats. Okay? So in this case, we're using that symbol to turn off that C sharp, okay? It only applies to the notes that it's on, okay? So this natural wouldn't affect any other sharps or flats in this measure, but only the Cs. Let's go look over here. So here's a bar where I go, B, C sharp, D, but then I want to see natural, so I need to see natural there, okay? So naturals turn off accidentals, even flats, right? Like, if that was there. This would be a D flat and this would be a D natural. Now, this is a good case of demonstrating how going between sharps and Npusing Because if I'm playing this, like if I'm just sight reading this, I see notes, notes going up. I basically see notes going up here, all the way to here, actually all the way to her. But that's not what's happening, right? What we're actually seeing is C sharp, D flat. This is the same note twice. But when I'm sight reading and I'm going quick, that looks like a half step, and I'm going up, but it would be wrong. So we would do that. It would be a lot easier. Anyway, so natural signal naturals, turn off. The accidental, okay? Now, we also have a thing called key signatures. We'll talk more about key signatures later because they tell us a lot, but a key signature is an accidental that's just kind of floating at the beginning of the piece, okay? Like this one has an F sharp, just hanging out there, okay? This is the key signature, and what it means is that all Fs on this entire page, this entire piece of music, all Fs are sharp, okay? So if I look at my music here, this note This is an F sharp. It doesn't need any symbol on it because that symbol is all the way over here. Okay? If I want this to be an F natural, I can put a natural symbol on it, and that says, Ignore the key signature for this bar. Okay? But then it turns back on after this bar. Okay, so we'll talk more about key signatures, but just remember that a natural can be a way to turn off the key signature as well, or at least that single note in the key signature. Cool? Okay. Let's talk about a couple other symbols that we find in scores. 17. Dynamics, Key Signatures, and Repeats: Okay, in this video, I just want to kind of go through a lead sheet and point out a couple other symbols, just kind of random bucket of stuff, okay? So when we have a lead sheet, we often have some kind of tempo indication up here. It's always going to be in the upper left, that's just where those things go. This says 100 beats per minute. Tempo is always in terms of beats per minute. If you want a easy way to remember approximate tempos, uh, 60 beats per minute would be one beat per second. So you can use your watch or whatever, just to think about that. 120 beats per minute would be two beats per second. So, like, if this is about 60, 120 would be about around here. So this piece, you know, a little shy 120. Um, we have cords at the top always not always. I mostly sheets we do. Sometimes we might just get the name of the cord and sometimes we get a whole cord chart. That's neat. Um, we don't get a lot of dynamics in lead sheet. Dynamics is volume, instructions on what to do with volume. Like, get loud here, get quiet here, stuff like that. That tends to not happen in lead sheets. Although we do sometimes get dynamics, you'll see things like forte is an F symbol or piano is a P symbol. Piano means quiet, forte means loud. If you see a bunch of Fs, it means really loud. If you see a bunch of Ps, it means really quiet. The other thing we have in scores, often, especially in lead sheets is kind of a map. Like, there's kind of a weird way to tell us how to get around this piece of music. So in this particular case, here's what it is. We start at the beginning, and then we go to here. So note this symbol here. This is a repeat symbol. This means we're going to come back to here at some point. Okay? We don't do anything with it the first time we see it. We just kind of play past it. And we go all the way through here. So now we have the other side of that symbol, and then we have this one and two. You don't always have this, but this one does. So what we're going to do this is called the first ending and the second ending. So we're going to go all the way to the first ending, and we're going to play through it. Then we're going to get to this little symbol. That means jump back to the other symbol. Okay? And we're going to jump all the way back up to here to right here. Okay? Now we're on the second verse. Then we're going to keep playing all the way through till we get to here. When we get to here the second time, we're going to skip the first ending because we already did that and jump to the second ending. Okay? So we're going to jump right to here, and then we're going to keep going. Okay, keep going. I don't know why there's a blank page there. Keep going. We keep going. We keep going. Okay. Note that this says to CODA right here, and then we have this symbol, okay? We're not supposed to do anything with that right now, but we'll need it in a minute. So we're going to keep going. Go to keep going. Okay, we get all the way to here. Okay? Now it says dsl CDA. It's kind of cut off there, but it's CODA CODA. That means go to the beginning, go back to the beginning and play through until you get to the coda symbol. Coda symbol looks like this. We have already seen that, right? And this says Take second ending. So what that means is that we're going to jump all the way back to the beginning now. We're going to go from here. We're going to play through here. Here comes that repeat, but it told us skip the repeat. Play the second ending. So we're going to skip this and we're going to just go right to here. Okay? Second ending. And we're going to play through this till we get to that CDA, right here, to CODA. So right here at the end of this bar, we're going to jump to the CDA, which is all the way at the bottom. Here it is CDA. So now we jump to here, and then we play. Here's another repeat symbol. So we're going to play all the way till here, and then we're going to go back up to there, and then we're going to play all the way through again. Here, and then we're going to go back up. Again, here, I think it says repeat and fade. It just wants you to do that and then fade out. So that's how it ends. Okay? So there's always kind of like a weird flipping pages around back and forth with these kinds of charts. Not all charts are written like this where you have to jump around, but most of them are. Okay, so that tells us kind of how to navigate one of these charts. Probably not super important to you, but I thought I'd just pointed out since we're here. Okay, what I want to do next is talk about some ways you can practice notes, okay? Let's do. 18. Practicing: Okay, there's a great free practice tool that I want to tell you about real quick. I don't have any affiliation with this site that I'm about to tell you about. I don't make any money if you go there or anything like that. It's just a good site. So, music theory.net, okay? You're going to come here and it's going to look like you should click on one of these two things, but you don't need to. Go up to Exercises, and then click on Note identification. Okay? And here we are. So all you have to do is click on the box that tells you what note you're seeing. So it's kind of like quick little flashcards. Now, I will note that in your options here, you do have options for those weird theoretical notes that don't really exist, like E sharp and B sharp, C flat, and F flat. And it will show you those. Okay? So you will see some of those. Now, again, we don't really encounter these at the level of music theory that we're doing here. Once you get into some advanced stuff, those are those exist, but technically, they do exist. Let me just say that. So we see this note here. We're going to say, I don't know, I think it's a B. It is a B. Now we see this one. We've seen that one before. It's a C sharp. This one is a D. No, I got it wrong. It's a D sharp. Cool. So use this to practice. Um, It's a great little tool. There's a G flat. Another G flat. So here's one of the theoretical ones. Here's an E sharp. It's weird, but sure. If you're looking at a piano and you want to play an E sharp, you play an F. It's natural. Anyway, so use this to practice. Now, I have another worksheet for you. In the next little thing, you'll be able to download it. So grab worksheet number two, practice on that also. And then we'll move on to rhythmic notation, otherwise known as time notation. 19. Languages: Okay, next, we need to talk about how rhythms are notated in music. Now, here's what's really interesting. When most people approach learning how to read music, they really get hung up on notes and memorizing where notes are. And that is tricky. That is hard to learn. I'm not trying to deny that. But the thing is, like, the way we write down rhythms is way more abstract and strange. Like, it's really kind of weird the way we do it. I think it actually can take longer to learn. Luckily, we're not going to focus too much on it now because we're going to focus on harmony, and rhythm isn't a big part of music theory, although it is a part of it. So again, don't worry about mastering this, but I do want you to know how it works, okay? Now, thing number one, just like in notes, when we had two different systems for naming the notes, we have the letter names, and then we have solfege, do Remi Faso ati D. In rhythms, there is also two different systems for naming stuff. Now, the actual symbols on the page are the same in both systems. It's just a language thing, the way we say some stuff. And it's really, I believe in this one, it's the whole world versus the UK. I could be wrong, but um the UK is the only one that uses these other words for rhythms. Okay? So I have them up here on the screen. So we have what we would call, what I would call a whole note, half note, quarter note. Let's just do those. And you see those here, whole note, half note, quarter note. But in the UK, we would say, semi breathe, minim and crotch it. And then as we go down, they have quaver that I would call an eighth note, semi quaver, that I would call a 16th note. This is where they start to start sounding really funny to me. Semiquaver 16th note, Demi semi quaver is a 32nd note, and a hemi demi semiquaver is a 64th note. That's just kind of fun to say, now I kind of want to do it the way. But I won't be. I'll be doing it our way or the rest of the world way, I think. Because it's just a lot easier for me, and that's what I learned. But do note that if you're in the UK, you might see rhythms spoken in this way, and you should do that. You should always try to, you know, adapt the language of the region that you're in. Okay, so I'll be using whole note half note quarter note eighth note. For one, it's what I learned. For two. It's much easier to understand with these, like, fractional rhythms. Okay, let's talk about how it works. 20. Rhythmic Divisions: Okay, so I have another chart here. Let's look at this. So basically, when we take when we have a bar, okay? So a bar is anything up to the bar line, okay? So in between these 2 bars in between these two bar lines is 1 bar. Now, inside of that bar, that bar needs to be full. We have to fill the bar, okay? So if the bar is one, then everything else is a fraction and it has to fill the bar. So like, two halves fill the bar. So for every rhythmic value, we have a percentage of the bar, and we also have rests, which we'll talk about in a minute. Okay? Rests are these things over here. That means just be silent for that rhythm. What we need to know with every piece of music is how many beats are in the bar so that we can fill it. And that's what the time signature tells us. So this tells us, we'll go over time signatures in just a minute, but this tells us there are four beats in this measure, okay? So that can be filled with a whole note. Okay? A whole note gets four beats. That's one of these. A half note gets two beats. So we can fit two half notes in a bar. A quarter note is four beats, so we can get four of those in a bar. An eighth note is eight beats. We can get four of those in a bar. Okay? So we like to count things. So there's a counting system that we use where we basically count quarter notes, okay? And then when we have things that are faster than quarter notes, we add some symbols. So here, we would count one, two, three, four. So we hold one note for four beats. Here, we would count one, two, three, four, and we would get two half notes. Here we just count one, two, three, four, et cetera. Here, this note is on a down B, and this note is on a down B. This is in between, so we can use the word and. So here we would count one and two, and three and four, and that would be this bar. Okay, more on this in a second, but let's talk about time signatures first to really understand what goes into this weird symbol here. 21. Time Signatures: All right, time signatures. Okay. On any time signature, that's this thing over here. You're going to see it at the beginning of a piece, and it's going to have two numbers, a top number and a bottom number. Okay? Sometimes they'll be the same, sometimes they're not. Okay? Now, the top number tells us how many beats are in a measure, okay? So this top number is four. There are four beats in a measure. Sweet. Okay. Easy enough. The bottom number is the slightly trickier one. The bottom number tells us what is a beat? What is the rhythm that gets the beat, okay? Now, I kind of just told you here that in this case, it's a quarter note. Quarter note is the beat. Like, if you just wanted to, like, if you heard a piece of music and you just wanted to dance to it or, like, stump your foot to it or count to it, if it's in 44, which it probably is, that's the vast majority of pop music is in 44. If it's in four or four, then it's going to be a quarter note, okay? Because the bottom note says four. That's shorthand for quarter for 1/4, right? So four is quarter. So that's saying the quarter note gets the beat. And this is saying there are four quarter notes in a beat in a measure. So easy enough. Let's look at a different one. Let's go back to MuseScore, and I can go to time signatures, and let's do three, four. Okay? Now we're in three, four times. So what does that mean? Well, it still means a quarter note gets the beat. Okay? But how many beats are in a measure? Now there's only three. Okay? So I can fill up a measure with three. Okay? Let's look at a more complicated one. Six, eight. This is another fairly common uh, time signature. Okay, so what gets the beat? There's an eight there. So that means eighth note. That's one of these. Okay? Now, there are how many of them are in a measure? Six. So six of these make up a measure. Okay. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, six eighth notes make up a measure. Okay. And then from that, you can figure out most of them. Let's look at 58, okay? Eighth note gets the beat, and we're going to be able to put five of them in a measure. So let's do this. Okay. Is that five eighth notes? Yes. Quarter note is two eighth notes. So, one, two, three, four, five. So let's go into rhythms a little bit more so that we can understand why a quarter note is two eighth notes. 22. Divisions of the Beat: Okay, let's take a look at this chart. This chart kind of shows us how it breaks down. So a whole note, typically it gets four beats. Half note gets two beats. There are two half notes that make up one whole note. If this gets four beats, these each get two beats. So two of these equals four beats. If we break a half note in half, we can get two quarter notes. Okay? So that means four quarter notes. Are the same as one whole note. If we break a quarter note in half, we get eighth notes. Each eighth note is the same as two quarter notes. We can fit eight of those in the space of one whole note. If we break those down again, we can get 16th notes. Each eighth note is two 16th notes, which means each quarter note is four 16th notes. Each half note is eight 16th notes and each whole note is 16 16th notes. Makes sense? Okay, so let's look at some actual music here. Here's my copyright avoidance song. This has fairly easy rhythms in it. Okay, let's look right here, okay? So we are in 44 and here we have Rest. So we have a half note that is two beats, another half note, that is two beats. That fills out this measure. Great. This measure is complete. Remember, all measures need to be full. This one has a half note that's two beats, and this is a half rest. That is two beats as well. So this measure is full. Again, two half notes equals four beats, and one half note and one half note rest equals four beats. Okay, here we have a quarter note, a half note that equals two quarter notes. So we're up to three quarter notes now, and then one more quarter note. Okay? Down here we have a whole note, fills out the whole bar. Here we have a half note and then four eighth notes. Remember each Remember, two eighth notes equals a quarter note. So this is a quarter note. And this is a quarter note. So all four of these are two beats. And so, together with this, that fills out the measure. Okay, is there any other interesting things? That's it. Okay, so it's a weird system of, like, chopping things up. Like, every bar is a piece of a pie. It's very strange. Okay. So what we've covered so far is the very basics. There are a couple other little symbols that we throw on things just to make things even a little bit weirder. So let's go through those extra symbols now. 23. Dots: Okay, let's talk about dots when it comes to rhythms. I don't think we have any here, so let's add one. Basically, what a dot does, let's put one right here. What a dot does is it takes the rhythmic value of whatever the dot is on, and it adds half again to it. Let me explain that. So here we have a half note with a dot. So what we're going to do is we're going to say, Okay, a half note is two beats, right? Okay, so we're going to take half of that value, which one beat, and we're going to add it to our half note, which is two beats. So a dotted half note now equals three beats, okay? So now this measure is full quarter note and a dotted half note. Dotted half note is three beats. So that makes four beats. Okay, let's do a more complicated one. Let's do a dotted quarter note. Okay. So now, this measure is actually full. Okay, so let's see what we have. We have a dotted quarter note. So that's going to equal a beat and a half, right? Because a quarter note is one beat. So if we slice it in half, we get a half a beat. So we add that to the quarter note, and now we have a beat and a half. Okay? So now this eighth note gives us the other half of that beat. So these two things together are two full beats or a half note. Then here we have another quarter note. So that's beat three and a quarter rest, which is what this symbol is. Quarter rest. This is like a weird little squiggly line. Whenever I'm drawing it by hand, I just write just go and just write a squiggle. So quarter rest. So this has four beats in it. Okay? What would happen if we put a dot on an eighth note? We're it's gonna get rewritten this way. So here we have half note. So we have two beats. Okay? So here's beat three. So this is a dotted eighth note. So that means it's basically three 16th notes because it's an eighth note and a half. That leaves us with an extra 16th note that we need to fill out this measure. So it's right there. And then we have two eighth notes, which equals one quarter note. So this is a full bar. Talk about these beams really quick. These are called beams. And basically what this means is that an eighth note looks like this. It's got a little flag that comes off of it, right? And these flags and these stems, these will go up when it's a low note and down when it's a high note. That's all that direction of it means. So here we have a flag. When there's two eighth notes next to each other, the flags kind of join hands and they make a beam like that, okay? Now, with 16th notes, the same thing happens. With 16th notes by themselves, you're going to get two flags like. Okay. But when there's two 16th notes side by side, those two flags kind of shake hands and they become a beam. The same thing if there's three or four 16th notes, they'll get all beamed together, but they work the same. It's really just a way to make things a little bit easier to read rather than all those flags. But anyway, um, Okay, so that's how dots work and beams work. Let's talk about ties. 24. Ties: Okay, sometimes we have a rhythm that we're trying to write, right? Like, we've come up with a rhythm, and we really like that rhythm. We're trying to write it down, but we can't really get it to work inside of the bar. So we're trying to find a way to accurately write down that rhythm, and no single rhythmic value can do it. So we combine multiple rhythmic values, and that's kind of what a tie does. A really simple example of a tie is, let's say you want to hold a note for longer than four beats, right? Let's say you want to hold a note for six beats in four or four. You kind of can't do that, right, because you're going to cross a bar line, right? Like, here is four beats, and then we hit a bar line. That's as big a note as we can do. But if we look down here, this is four beats, but it actually started two beats ago. This is a tie. So what happens here is we go one, two, three, and we're going to hold that note for beat four. We're going to hold it for beats one, two, three, and four of the next measure. This is effectively six beats long. When two notes are tied together, we do not re attack this second note. This means you're going to hold this note all the way through and for this full value. Okay? Let's see. Do I have any other ties? Here's another tie. Ignore this for now. Here's another tie where we have four beats, but the four beats are over the bar line, so we had to tie them. Sometimes we have ties within a bar line like this, I'll just add a tie here. This is going to make an eighth note and then a quarter note. This is effectively the same as this, except it's a little easier to read using ties because of where it is in the beat. Sometimes ties are easier to read and sometimes dots. Okay? So in this case, though, the important thing here is that we do not reattack the note. We hold it for the full value. Ties can only happen between the same note. The note can't change under a tie. So here, it's the same note being tied together. Now, if you see a tie connecting different notes like this is kind of over a whole bunch or let let's do it like Let's do it like that. Here's an easier one. C sharp to D and a tie. This is not a tie. This looks a whole lot like a tie, but it's not. Technically, they are different symbols. This symbol is a little bit thicker than a tie. I don't know. But we can tell it's not a tie because it's connecting two different notes. This is called a slur. And what it means is it's not a rhythmic thing at all. It means still play these two notes independently. But with a slur, you want to kind of let them slur together, right? Like, it's like legato, you might say, let them kind of drift together a little bit and blend. That's why we use a slur. That's what this is up here. This means take this melody. And play it as one line. Try to slur it together in a way. So slurs are different than ties. Ties will only be between the same note. Slurs will 99% of the time be between different notes. There is occasion where you can slur between the same notes, but it's rare. Okay, so that's ties. Let's take a quick look at rests again because we didn't really study all of the rests quickly. 25. Rests: Okay, let's go back to this chart because it shows us all our rests. Okay? So a whole note rest kind of sits on, you know, the D line like that. A half note rest sits right on the middle line. So this is sitting, and this is hanging is what we say sometimes. These can be a little hard to tell them apart when you're looking at music, but it's actually usually pretty easy because this one will take up a whole bar most of the time. So it's kind of easy to tell what's going on. Okay, a quarter note rest. Now, this is saying that we have our squiggle quarter note rest or this, and I've never seen this. I've never seen this used. So ignore that. I don't think that's common. A quarter note rest basically always looks like that. An eighth note rest looks like that. It's a different kind of squiggle, I guess. But note that the little dot coming off of it corresponds to the flag because down here, we have two dots because we have two flags. Down here, we have three dots, three flags, four dots, four flags. Okay? So these notes 32nd notes and 64th notes. These are super fast little notes. You might not ever encounter one in a piece of music. You can go theoretically, you can go faster. You can divide this more. And the next one you would get is to 100 I don't know, what's 64 times two. You get to that note value. But increasingly rare. But that's what the rests look like for eighth notes and up. Cool. Okay, one last thing, and that is triplets. 26. Triplets and other Tuplets: Okay. So let's imagine a situation where you're coming up with a rhythm and you're like, I want this rhythm to go Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. And you're like, Cool. Okay. How do I write that down? Boom, boom, two quarter notes. Boom, boom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. Well, that last one, the beat four was an eighth note, one and two. So that would be beat four. That's easy enough. But what happened on Beat three there? Bom bom, bom, bom. One, two, three, one. One, two, three, one. So I need to smush three eighth notes in the space of one quarter note. How can I do that? That is called a triplet. It kind of triplets kind of break the rule. Like, we're going to stop chopping everything in half to make rhythmic value. And with a triplet, we're just going to say, smush three notes into amount of space where normally two notes go. Um, that's how it works. That's literally what it is. So here, I have an eighth note triplet, okay? So these are eighth notes. There are three of them. We can tell it's a triplet because it's a little tiny three, and this is equal to one quarter note. So this is going to go bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. Let's hear just for fun. Okay, it's very fast, but three notes smushed into the space of two. Now, other things can be quarter notes or can be triplets also. Let's make Okay. Here's triplet quarter notes. Oh. Okay, so a triplet quarter note with two quarter notes after it. So it looks like there's five quarter notes in this bar. But these are triplets. They're not beamed together because they're quarter notes, so we use this little bracket to show that it's a triplet. So this is tough because this is going to be three quarter notes spread out over two beats. So if this is our beat, going to be bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, right? It's like a weird hiccup. P p p. It's weird. But it's three notes over the space of two. That's literally what this means. It means three over the space of two. Now, you can have weirder triplets than that. You can have quintuplets. You can have five in the space of three or five in the space of four or five in the space of two. This is basically a little cheat code to get rhythms that don't perfectly fit within the grid, okay? Is doing some kind of triplet or other tuplet is what we call. So if you had a really weird rhythm, you could just say, It's five notes in the space of four and just make a tuplet that is five notes in the space of four. So it's kind of a weird little cheat that we do all the time. 27. Places to Find Scores Online: Okay, in this section, I want to talk just a little bit about practicing and ways you can practice learning to read music. The first thing you need if you're going to practice learning to read is some scores, some music to look at. So you can, you know, Google around and find scores all over the place online. Um, it used to be that you could go into a music store and buy scores, but that's actually not happening very often anymore. Especially in the US, there's just not a lot of, like, sheet music in stores anymore, except for, like, piano vocal guitar stuff. To find really to find some really great music, let me show you this website, mlp.org. This is an acronym Internet Music Library something. I don't know what it is. But we used to call this we used to call this a secret Russian score website because it was hosted in Russia, and it had millions of scores, and it went against all of the copyright rules in the US, but not in Russia. Now I think they've legitimized it a little bit. They're really emphasizing public domain. It went away for a little while, but now it's back. So you can find a lot of classical music here. We just go to composers, I don't know. Let's go to Bach. Okay? Well, there's a lot of Bach throughout history. But the one most people care about is Johann Sebastian. Let's find him. There he is. Okay, so there's, like, you know, tons of works here. So if we want to look at something, let's look at the Cello suites. They're popular. Okay, so up here, we have audiopils. So these are recordings of it in pink. If we go down, we have scores. Kano, sometimes here, you're going to find, like, handwritten scores. What you really want to find is one that says type set. That'll have computer kind of versions of it. So let's go here. And now it's going to say, Hey, give us a donation, blah, blah, blah, which, you know, you should do. That's very nice. But if you don't want to, you just have to wait, like, 7 seconds, and then it'll give us that score. Here it is. So now we click here to continue, and here's the score. Neat, right? Great. So you can find so much music on that site. Things that are going to be good for you to practice with will be solo instrument stuff. Like these Bach Cello suites will be great. Anything by Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Vivaldi. Any of these composers that write relatively tonal music. Don't do anything really crazy and modern. But stuff like this, note that this is in bass clef, okay? So you're going to have to brush up on that if you want to read this. But this is a great thing to practice with, okay? Any music here will be great. So let's talk about how you should go about practicing and some techniques that I've used over the years. 28. Tips for Practicing: Y. Okay, let me tell you a funny story. So when I was young, you know, I was a guitar player, and I really wanted to learn how to read music. So I went to my local music store, and I bought a book that was, like, a transcription of one of my favorite guitar albums, which was Steve Vi's passion Warfare. Now, if you know this album, you may know that this is, like, completely virtuosic guitar playing, right? It's just insane. It's still an insane album, and I still love it, actually. Um, but it's a very difficult music. So as, you know, this 14-year-old kid, I wasn't going to learn how to play it. But what I did is I took that book, and every, like, family trip we went on, every just everything for about a year, I took it with me, and I sat and I stared at all that music. I did is I tried to just name notes. I just looked at it and said, Okay, that's a C, that's a D, that's an E, that's an F sharp, that's a whatever. I wrote in the names of the notes. So on every note, I just wrote in underneath it, said, this is bass clef. So that's a G, A, B, C, D, E, B A, G, just going through him just writing all the notes in. I still have this book. Unfortunately, it's like packed away in a box, I think. But it's got all these, you know, handwritten things on it from a long time ago. So, writing in the names of notes on any of this music is a great practice to get into. Don't forget key signatures, clefs and accidentals. Clapping rhythms is a great way to practice. And just experimenting with writing. So open up use score and just start putting in notes, listening to them, say the names of the notes as you're putting them in, listen to what they do. And that is extremely good for your brain and your ear, all of those things. Lastly, probably the best way to learn how to read music to practice reading music is by learning an instrument. So if you are learning an instrument, just sight read a little bit every day. Practice music the way that your teacher says to practice or whatever book you're working through says to practice, but also devote, I don't know, ten, 15 minutes every day to just sight reading a couple measures. Right. That's all. When I learned when I was in college and I had to play piano, I had to learn how to play piano, one of my teachers just said, Take these bach corals and sight read one every day. They were only like 16 bars long. So the first ones that I did, you know, it took me an hour and a half to sight read one of them. But after about a year, only took me a couple of minutes to sight read them. So sight reading is really, really good. Just look at new music that you've never seen before and try to play it. Slow, slow, slow, slow. Speed doesn't count for anything here, okay? So just practice slow, practice reading notes. Great techniques. 29. A Reminder about Why Reading Music is Important: Okay, just one more quick reminder about why we care about reading music. So, it all depends on what your goals are. I know you probably because you're in this class, you probably have tried to learn to read music before and failed or gave up. Maybe you had a bad teacher, maybe you had someone who was too strict. I don't. But depending on what your goals are, there are many reasons to do this. The biggest reason is, if you want to be a musician, an amateur musician or a pro musician, you ought to be able to read the language, and this is the language. If you are aspiring to be a writer and write music, standard notation is the only way is the best way to convey your ideas to other musicians, right? So if you're writing music and you want other people to play that music, you need to write it. If you want a computer to play it, you need to write it with notation. If you're a performer, obviously, you need to be able to read music and understand how that music works, which is what music theory is all about, and we're going to get into that in just a minute. If you're a teacher, even if you're teaching young kids and you're not going to be working on reading music with them, you still ought to be able to read music in order to convey ideas and understand the ideas in there. And if you're just curious about how music works and that's why you're taking this class, then then then be curious and learn to read music. So it is really important. As we get into music theory, it is the language we use to talk about music theory. So we're going to go on next into the real kind of meat and potatoes of music theory. So in order to do that, we're going to focus on this. We're going to focus on notated music. If you're not great at reading music yet, that's fine. Don't worry. You're going to be fine going forward. All you need to do is be able to understand the basic principles of the note names, and that'll get you far enough to understand all the music theory. Then you can go back and practice, learning to read music all day long. But let's move on and start working with scales, and then eventually we'll build on those to chords, eventually chord progressions and songs. Off we go. 30. What are Scales?: Okay, you don't have to memorize scales, okay? Whatever teacher you had when you were young and you took piano lessons or flute lessons or guitar lessons or something, and your teacher said, Let's learn to play all of the scales. And they made you memorize a bunch of scales or try to memorize a bunch of scales. We don't need to do that. We're not going to memorize scales. We're going to memorize one pattern, and that's going to tell us what all the scales are because all the scales are the same. A major scale is a major scale. We just have to transpose it to the right notes. This is actually way easier than memorizing all of the scales. So that's what we're going to do. Now, why do we care about scales? Let me just clarify one thing that I just said. Even though you may have had a teacher that made you play a bunch of scales, there are good reasons to do that in an instrument lesson. I mean, it's good to get those things under your fingers. There are a lot of performance reasons why you might play scales. They are good technique, things to practice. So I don't want to throw shade on your like 10-year-old teacher, like when you were ten. Anyway, moving on. What are scales? Scales are a collection of notes in an order that tell us all the notes in a key. So if we play a C major scale, what we're really doing is playing all the notes that are in the key of C major. If we play an F minor scale, we're playing all the notes that are in the key of F minor, okay? So scales are actually really handy from music theory because they're going to tell us all of the possible notes in a key really quickly and easily, okay? So, we need to remember a major pattern and a minor pattern. And really, that's it. So we're going to go to that pattern in the next section. But in this section right now, I just kind of want to talk about why we care about scales and a couple of definitions. So let's go on to the definitions next chromatic and diatonic. Let's go to a new video and deal with those. 31. Definitions: Chromatic and Diatonic: Okay, we have major scales, we have minor scales. There's tons of scales. Maybe you've seen, like a book at a music store that's like, Here's the book of 100,000 scales and all of these silly things like that. That's cool. I mean, yeah, there's probably 100,000 scales, but really what we're gonna do is we're going to learn a couple of scales and then how to modify them to make 100,000 scales. Don't memorize 100,000 scales. You'll never need more than four of them at most. But all of those scales all of those scales are scales that are in a key, and that makes them diatonic, okay? So in this video, I want to talk about two words diatonic and chromatic, okay? Diatonic means in a key, and chromatic means not in a key. It means in all keys. So let's talk about chromatic. Chromatic that word comes to us from visual art, Chroma mean color, colorful, all the colors. Okay? So chromatic means all the colors, all the notes. So if we're looking at a keyboard here, if we are playing music chromatically, we can play any note we want. Chromatic music tends to sound creepy and weird, okay? But there's a whole bunch of music that's totally chromatic that was written, and it's fascinating. But it's not pop music. Pop music is not chromatic. Songs are generally not chromatic. Even, like, really heavy weird stuff that sounds really dark like metal is far from chromatic. So chromatic means any note is possible and any note is as good as any other note, really. Diatonic means we're in a key, and we have to play by the rules of that key a little bit. We can break those rules, but there are rules to the key. So if I make a scale, that's a major scale. Okay. Here's a C major scale. Cool. Now let's make a C chromatic scale. That's gonna be C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, A, A sharp, B, C. That's a chromatic scale, okay? It's all the notes. Let's hear them. So here's a major scale. Nice and, you know, happy. It's cool. Here's a chromatic scale. Okay. Chromatic. All the notes diatonic in a key. Cool. Ca. 32. "Ordered Pitch Class Collections": Okay, in music theory, textbooks and things, we have a fancy term for this. We have a fancy term for scales, and that is ordered pitch class collections. Oh. So that's a term you'll never hear me use because I think it's very pretentious. But let's just for this video, let's pick that term apart because it does tell us some things about scales and kind of why we care about them. Okay? Ordered pitch class collections. Okay, so let's start with ordered. Ordered means these are notes that are in an order. They go from low to high or high to low or something like that. Now, when we just deal with the notes in a key, they're not in an order. You know, if we say, is this note in a key? It doesn't matter what comes before it or what comes after it. But for the purpose of being a scale and laying everything out, we do, you know, tend to have an order of a scale. One note comes after the other, and it goes up or down, depending on what we're looking at. So it's in order for the scale. Okay, ordered pitch class collection. So let's talk about pitch class. Okay, pitch class is kind of a strange term, but really what it means is that this scale includes all octaves, okay? So a pitch class is a fancy way to say that C is a pitch, but the pitch class C is all Cs. Okay? All Cs, very low, very high, and everything in between. So when we talk about what notes are in key, we're saying, if the pitch C is in key, then all of the pitch C is in key, no matter what octave it's in. If the pitch C sharp is in key, all of the C sharps are in. Okay. That's what pitch class means. It's a weird term. And then collection means a group of notes. So ordered pitch class collection means we're in an order. If we're talking about a scale, pitch class means we're talking about all the octaves. Collection means we're talking about a group of notes. So that's what ordered pitch class collection is. Now I can stop using that term, but hopefully it taught us a little something. 33. Chromatic Scales: Okay, one last thing about the chromatic scale. The chromatic scale is kind of a special thing. Soon, we're going to start going through the scales by looking at a pattern for the notes, and then we're going to start building cords by finding certain numbers of notes of the scale that will help us build cords. That works for scales. That doesn't work really for the chromatic scale. So once we start doing stuff with scales, I modifying them, inverting them, transposing them, the chromatic scale is kind of special in that it doesn't do that. We don't build cords out of chromatic scales really so they don't have a huge musical purpose for music theory, just to straight up low to high chromatic scale. We will do chromatic things later. But once we start talking about scales and things you can do with scales, just remember that those things don't really apply to chromatic scales chromatic scales are kind of their own little weird animal. But chromatic scales are great for practicing. If you're learning an instrument, practice chromatic scales. They're really great for your fingers and for your muscle memory. But it's really just every note going up your instrument. Okay, that being said, let's move on and let's talk about the major scale. Let's find the pattern, a couple key things about it, and then we'll even do a worksheet with it. Off we go. 34. Whole Steps and Half Steps: Okay, you music theory haters. Let's get into the real theory bit, okay? So, we've practiced learning to read music. Now we kind of know our way around notation a little bit. It's cool. Let's look at scales, okay? So, here's the deal. There's a pattern to the scales, okay? Now, when it comes to music theory, I'm really not a big fan of asking people to memorize stuff. I remember having to memorize 1 million things, and I always just thought, you know, there's got to be an easier way. And there is. So, you don't need to memorize 1 million things, but we are going to have to memorize a couple things, and they're gonna be patterns. And this is the first one, okay? So let's talk first about intervals. Okay, now, the interval is space between two notes, okay? This here's a C. This interval, C to D is a small interval. The interval from C to B is a big interval, okay? You've already learned one interval, and that is the octave. Okay? The octave is a big interval. That's big. But it's the space between two notes. Now, the space that we care about right now and the interval that we care about right now is half steps and another one called whole steps. Okay. Now, for terminology, some people call this a semi tone and a whole tone. Some people call it a half step and a whole step. There's a third thing I've seen this called, and all of those are fine. I don't think those are regional things. Those are just different textbooks, call them, different things. I like whole step and half step, but you can call it whatever you want. Okay? So if we look at a piano, a half step is the closest possible note, okay? We looked at half steps when we talked about accidentals, right? If we add an accidental to something, we're raising it up by a half step, okay? So a half step is the closest possible note. A whole step is really just two half steps, okay? So this is a whole step. So let's do a little pop quiz, shall we? So let's say D to D sharp. Is that a half step or a whole step? Half stop. Good job. What about C sharp to D sharp? That's a whole step because C sharp, there's a D in between and then D sharp. That's a whole step. What about D sharp to E? There's nothing in between, so that is a half step. What about B flat to C? Okay? That's a whole step because there's one in between. All right? What about E to F? Half step. Nothing in between. Okay? Half steps and whole steps. You got it? So, the most scales, certainly the scales we're gonna look at now are some combination of half steps and whole steps, okay? The chromatic scale that we just looked at is just a series of half steps. That's a half step. That's a half step. That's a half step. That's a half step. Those are all half steps. So that's a little bit different. But when we look at a major scale, That's a whole step. That's a whole step. And that's a half step, okay? So let's go to a new video, and let's go through the pattern, okay? The major scale pattern. 35. The Whole & Half Pattern: Okay, so let's zoom into the major scale. And let's figure out this pattern. Okay? So I'm going to use W for whole steps and H for half steps. Lowercase H for half steps. Okay? So we have here, we have a whole step. Here we have a whole step, D to E. We can confirm it by looking down here, D to E. We have an E flat in the middle. Okay, E to F. This is a half step. Okay, half step. F to G is a whole step. Let's put it right there. Okay, G to A is a whole step. A to B, is a whole step, and B to C is a half stop. Okay, so this is the pattern. Now, this is the pattern for the major scale, okay? We're gonna stick to the major scale for the next, kind of while, okay? We're gonna be talking about just the major scale. Now I know a lot of people are saying, I want to write songs, and I'm sure that I want to do it in a minor key. That might be true. But just stick with me. We're going to do the major scale first, and then in a little while, once we're really comfortable with that, we'll go into how this all applies to the minor scale, okay? This pattern is the major scale pattern. The minor scale pattern is slightly different, okay? Okay, so let's look at what we have. We have whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Cool. Memorize that. That is the pattern for the major scale. There are two half steps in. Let's look at the major scale a little bit different way. We're looking at a C major scale here, right? Why do we learn C major first? Everyone always talks about C major as the first one. Well, look at the piano. And these whole steps and half steps just line up perfectly on the piano. Whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, full step, half step. So the spaces of the black keys line up perfectly to make a major scale starting on C. Now, why don't we call that A? That would make more sense. But music theory is weird, so we don't just the way it is. Sorry. Okay, so let me write out this thing one more time. So whole hole, half, whole whole hole, half. Okay? Let's move that out of the way. Oh, it doesn't want me to do that. Okay, let's do that. Okay, so this is your pattern. Whole whole, half, whole ho hole, half. Let's figure out a really weird scale, right? How about one that's hard like F sharp major the reason that a scale would be hard is it has a ton of accidentals in it. But let's do it because we know how to do it now. Okay? So F sharp, the next note in F sharp major scale is going to be a whole step away. That's how it works. And a whole step away from F Sharp is going to be G sharp. Okay? So whole step. Now we need another whole step. Okay? Now we need a half step that puts us on B. Now we need a whole step, another whole step. Other whole step and then a half step. Okay. Now, this F natural to F sharp, this should really be an E sharp. But let's not stress out about that too much yet. Because this is such a weird key. I should have thought about that. It just kind of requires some weird things to happen. But it's okay. We can call it an F natural. We can even put a natural symbol on it if Now, the reason I don't like this is because in a major scale, each note happens exactly one time and only one time. Here's what I mean. If we look at the C major scale, there is a C, and there's only one C in it, I mean, other than the octave. There is no C sharp in the scale because the C is used, right? It is a C natural. That is the C in the scale. The D in the scale is D natural. We can't have a D and a D sharp or a D flat. We can only have one type of D in this scale. We can only have one type of each note, and that's true in this scale, too, in all scales. So let's do a little bit less crazy one. Let's do, like, let's do B flat. Okay? So we'll start on B flat, and then a whole step to C, a whole step to D, a half step to E flat, a whole step to F, whole step to G, whole step to A, and then back to B flat. Okay? So we can't have an E natural in this because the E in this scale is E flat. Okay? We can't have a D flat because the D is D natural. So this is a concept that seems a little abstract now, but it's going to help you in the future to understand, okay? So every major scale has all the notes in it in some version, okay? But it has only one version, okay? So there is only one C in each scale, but there is always one C in the scale. It might be C sharp. And if you do something a really weird scale, it might be C flat. But if we have a B flat, we cannot have a B natural, okay? This is an important concept. It'll help us in the future, okay? So just file that away. Next, let's talk about a very important concept called tonic. 36. Tonic: Okay, so in, like, weird magical music theory land, we have names for every note of the scale and not just the names of the note, but when we're talking about a scale, we have fancy words that we use for each note of the scale. We have tonic, median, leading tone, dominant. They all get their own little name. Those will come up later. Some of them we care about, some of them we don't right now, I do want to focus on one of them, and that is tonic, okay? Tonic is a term. It's a very important term. I don't think we've talked about tonic yet, but it's very similar to the root of a chord, if you know that word. So tonic is the note that the scale is named after, okay? So if it's a C major scale, C is tonic, okay? If it's a D major scale, D is tonic. Tonic is a single note, and it's the home base, okay? Now, you would think, okay, that's a very simple concept because tonic is just like the note at the bottom of the scale, but it's not always, okay? So this will later get to be a very important thing. Let's do this. Let's look at two scales. Okay. So now I have two different scales here, okay? So in this scale, B flat is tonic. It's a B flat major scale. Great. In this scale, we could say A is tonic because that's what it looks like, right? But I'm if A is tonic, this is a really weird scale. So not quite right about that. So in this scale, we can treat B flat as tonic, and then we have a B flat major scale, okay? Because these are the same notes. I just put a different note at the bottom. I put an A at the bottom rather than a B flat. Otherwise, these are all the same notes. But if I have all the same notes, but I treat a different note as tonic, then I have a different scale, completely. This scale is a really weird one called Locrian. That's not a major scale at all. This is a Locrian scale, but it's all the same notes, but I'm using the wrong note as tonic and that makes it a different scale. So what note we treat as tonic is an important concept. There are some cases that come up in not too long, where we're going to see a scale, and we're going to say, Well, if B flat is tonic, it's one thing. But if E flat is tonic, it's another thing. So how do we figure out what's tonic? When it's written out as a scale like this, it's kind of obvious. But in the context of actual music, it's not so obvious sometimes. So we have to figure out what's tonic in actual music, which can be tricky sometimes. Now, let me point out one thing. If you're a fan of, like, TikTok or other social media, there's a dude on TikTok, who I'm not going to say his name, who likes to go around inventing music theory terminology, and he's gotten to be pretty popular. And he talks about, Oh, you know, there's only one scale. You're just leaving off notes and doing this and that. And that's wrong on many levels. And he also, like, invents different words for roots and things like that. It's just bizarre. But the biggest thing he does that's bizarre is I don't think he understands what tonic means. So if you know who I'm talking about, Don't listen to it. Don't believe everything you hear on Tik Tok. Some people are get famous for bad information. So like, he's like, one of the most famous, like, music theory people on TikTok, other than me. And, um, he's wrong, and I don't like it. Sorry. Okay, let's move on. 37. Practice: Okay, ways you can practice this, try to make some major scales. Okay? Remember the pattern and remember that each note can only happen in the scale one time. And any version of that note. So you could say, I want to make a D major scale. Make that, forget out the pattern, and then just Google D major scale and see if you're right. That's a great way to practice. I'm also going to give you a worksheet in the next little blurb. Here's what it looks like. I'm going to ask you just to identify half steps and whole steps and then look for scale fragments, okay? Actual music is not made up of just scales, okay? But scale fragments are everywhere. You can see here these are scale fragments. Here's a scale fragment, parts of a scale. You don't need to figure out what exactly it is. But in real music like this, scales are everywhere, even right there, you know? So I'm going to ask you just to circle anywhere you see a scale fragment, and then remember the answers to this worksheet are at the bottom. Cool. Alright, so do the worksheet and have fun. 38. Using Major Scales: Okay. So now we know what a major scale is. Let's talk about how to use it, okay? So we can do basically everything with scales. But let's talk specifically about what most people think about, and that's writing a melody. So, you hate music theory. I don't know why you're here, why you are trying to learn music theory, but a lot of people are doing it because they want to write music. And when they think about writing music, they think about writing a melody. So let's talk about writing melodies in this section because it is very scalul. Scale ulter means we use all kinds of scale fragments for writing melodies, as you saw in the last workshee. So let's see what we can do. So as we start to write a melody here, I'm going to tell you a couple of different ways to do it, but I want you to remember, and this is very important that you can do this however you want. There's no rules to this. You can write melodies that do all kinds of crazy stuff, okay? I'm going to give you some techniques for writing very vanilla melodies, okay? Things that work. So, um, so a couple quick rules of thumb. One is start and end on tonic. You don't always have to start an end on tonic. But if you want it just to sound good and pretty, that's a good way to do it. Okay? So let's put a C here. The next thing is, don't have much more than an octave in range, okay? So I want my highest note to be somewhere around here, an octave away from there. It could go up to a D if we wanted it to, but try to keep it around an octave. And then just use a good amount of notes or different kinds of rhythms. I'm going to make a quick four bar melody. Now, the way I'm choosing notes here is I'm doing two things. One is I'm staying within the key, okay? So I'm only going to use stuff in C major. Only going to use notes in C major. And then I'm just kind of jumping around using this technique called steps, skips and leaps. Which we'll talk more about in the next video. I was kind of a fast silly melody. Let's go up to our high note here. Quick little scale. And then we'll go boom, boom, boom. Boom. Okay. So here's our simple little melody. Let's listen to it, then I'll tell you a couple things I did. H Okay, I think it sounds a little bit better slower. Maybe we'll listen to it again slower in a minute. But one thing I look for in melodies is we like to have this, like, golden ratio thing I think about a lot, which is you want the big point of the melody to be about three quarters of the way through. So right around here, it's where I want the highest note to be. And then I want to start and end on tonic and then stay within the scale. So let's talk about this step skips and leaps thing in the next video. 39. Steps, Skips, and Leaps: Okay, for every note that you're on and you're choosing the next note, you have four options, okay? The first option is a step. That would be like, I guess I went down everywhere. Well, you could do down. Here's a step, right? So on this note, the next note is a step. That means just the next note in the scale, either up or down, okay? Step. Next thing I could do is a skip. That means skip a note and then do a step. So I'm on Tonic here. I skipped D, and I went right to E. So that is a skip. Okay? A skip means literally you skipped one note and then go to the next note in the scale, okay? So like this is not a skip. That's bigger. That's a bigger leap. And so we call that a leap. So a leap is anything bigger than one skipped note, okay? So two or three notes. So this is a leap, this is a leap. So if I go through this, I have Skip, step, leap, step, step, step, leap, step, step, step, step, leap. And then here is the fourth thing you can do, which is stay on the same note. So same note. Sometimes, if you want to be really fancy, we call that oblique motion. Don't worry about that. Pretentious term. Step, step, step, step, step, step, step. Cool. So that's what steps skips and leaps are. It's a handy way to think about a melody. What I like to do is whenever I do a leap, I follow it with steps in the opposite direction. So here's a leap, and then I'm going to step down. Here's another one, Leap, and then same note, but then step down. You don't have to do that. It's just something I like to do. Um so a couple tips and tricks on writing melodies. It's really hard to tell if a melody is good or not without any harmony. So we'll come back to this after we figure out how chords work and what we want to do with our chords. But next, let's look at an existing melody and just kind of analyze it. 40. Melody Analysis: I Alright. All Too Well by Taylor Swift. Let's look at this melody. Let's zoom in a little bit here. So this is in the same key. So we're in C major, and we start on C. We start on tonic. Great. Off to a good start. So here we have a C and then a skip and then a step. So they skipped up or she, I guess, skipped up and then stepped down, and then step up, skip down, step up, leap down. Eap down, step up, leap up, step down. So same thing here, Leap and then step in the opposite direction. She likes to do that, too. Step. That's weird. There's a tie going to nowhere. Hmm. Strange. Alright, and then we get into pop song melodies are very rhythmic like this. You see this a lot. But we have basically a bunch of C, tonic, step down, step up, leap down. Or, I guess that's a skip down. Step up. All step, skip. So, you know, pretty simple. Steps, skips and leaps. I keep on to say Skeps. There's no such thing as a Skep, J. Okay. Let's talk about one more thing, which is, you know, I mentioned that we're in C major here and we're in C major here, but what does it mean to be in a key? Let's talk about that next. 41. What Does it Mean to be "In Key"?: What does it mean to be in key? Let's talk about this. So it tends to mean that that thing that we've been calling tonic feels like a good place to start and end, okay? We've talked about similar things to this. So this melody is in the key of C major because it Uses only the notes in C major. That's one thing. But that's not necessarily entirely true. I could do this. And now it's using a note that's outside of the key of C major. But I'd still call this whole melody in the key of C major. It's just got one chromatic note, right? One note that's not in the key, but that's okay. That doesn't, like, ruin anything. In fact, that's where things start to get kind of cool. So even though we have one note out of key, we're still in key, as the whole melody goes. We have tonic is C. We begin and end on tonic, which is not required, but helpful to make it feel like it's in a key. Know, at the end of the day, we know that something is in a key because it ends if it ends on a place that feels good, that home kind of feeling, then we're in a key. Home means tonic feels like we could end there. We could stop there, and it would be a good thing. Listen to what happens if I end on this D. Let's get rid of that C, and let's end on this D, okay? I'll leave this B slide in there, too. See, you're still kind of waiting for this note to happen, right? That means that feels like home. That feels like tonic. Okay? Tonic is a good place to end. And all of this will be heavily informed by what we do with harmony. Harmony just means the chords, all of the chords and things that are happening underneath or at the same time as this melody. All of those chords are going to really inform how strongly this feels like it's in a key, okay? I think that's an important concept, too, that something is in key or not in key. It's not a yes or no question. Something can be, like, mostly in key or a little in key or not very much in a key. There's a gradient there. There's a spectrum, sort of. In this case, what we have here, I would say it's mostly in C major, but it mostly because we're using a chromatic note, but we're still really emphasizing tonic being the lowest note, the highest note. And if I put this note back in, it's definitely there. So we're making it feel like it's centered around the pitch, C, okay? That's going to make it feel like it's in the key of C. 42. Why We Care About Keys: Okay, so why do we care about keys anyway? In this section, we're going to talk about keys. And keys are really just a collection of notes that sound good together. That's all it is. We already know all the notes in a key because we know how to find the scale. And that tells us all the notes in the key. But it's a little trickier when you go the other way, which is to look at some music and try to figure out what key it's in, okay? This can be an important thing if you're in a number of different situations, one of which would be your writing a song and you want to know what chords you can use. You got to know what key you're in. You wrote a melody like this one, and you want to know what key it's in. Sometimes it's obvious. Like, what we've done here is pretty obvious, but there are other times where it's not so obvious, and it can be tricky to figure out what key something is in. So that's what we're going to talk about in this section. There is nothing that is a definitive. Here is what key you are in. Okay? There is no, if this symbol appears on the page, you are in the key of C sharp major. Those things don't exist. Not even a key signature will really tell you that. What we have instead is a number of things we can look at that'll help us figure out what key we're in. None of them are definitive, and so we kind of add up all of the factors, and we say, Well, this is happening, and this is happening, and this is happening, so we're probably in this key. That's how it works. It's a little washy, and I know some people hate that, but remember, music theory is theory, you know? It's not, you know, one plus one equals two all the time. It takes some analytical approach. So first things first. Let's talk about key signatures. We talked about key signatures earlier on. We talked about what they are, but we didn't talk about how to identify them. So let's do that now. 43. Identifying Key Signatures: A Okay, let's start fresh here. Well, maybe I'll keep that. Okay, let's go right here and let's look at different key signatures. Now, remember that a key signature is kind of a floating accidental that tells you that all of that accidental are going to be applied throughout the piece. So in this case, we see an F sharp here, and that means that all Fs in this piece will now be F sharps unless they have a natural on them. Okay? But the the key signature is also a pattern, and there's a way to kind of pick apart that pattern to tell us what key we might be in, okay? So there's a sharps pattern and a flats pattern. Let's talk about sharps first. So the sharps pattern is we look at all of the sharps in the key signature. In this case, there's just one. And then we go up a half step from the last one. Okay? In this case, we have F sharp. That's the last one in the key signature. We go up a half step, and that gets us to G. G is what key this is. Now, like I just said, even though this is the key of G, it doesn't mean that we can only be in G. This is actually two keys, a major one and a minor one. We'll talk about the minor one later. But this shows us that we are probably in the key of G. Now, you can use a key signature and be in a different key. That happens. So it's not definitive that we're in the key of G. But it's a pretty good guess that we're in the key of G. Let's look at another one. Here's the key of D, right? So we have C is the last accidental, C sharp, so we go up a half step, that gets us to D. So this is the key of D. Okay? There's just a pattern. Let's look at a ton of accidentals, ton of sharps, okay? The reason this works is that whenever there are sharps in a key signature, they always follow the same order. It goes F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, D sharp, A sharp, E sharp. It just goes in this pattern. So we always know that the next one is going to be what we need. This is a really complicated one because for one thing, it's got a ton of accidentals. And for two, the last one is E sharp, which is weird. But what we would do with this one is we would say, Okay, E sharp, we go up a half step that makes F, but there is an F sharp. So that takes us to F sharp. So this is the key of F sharp major. Let's do a less weird one. Okay? What key is this? Half step up from the last sharp, and we get to E. So this is E major. Key. Okay? That means that if we laid out all the notes of E, we don't need to use any accidentals because they're all in the key signature. Right? Let's look. Let's prove. Okay. E to F sharp is a whole step. F sharp to G sharp is a whole step. G sharp to A is a half step. A to B is a whole step. B to C sharp is a whole step. C sharp to D sharp is a whole step, then D sharp to E is a half step. So it works. It follows the half step and whole step pattern. Cool. Alright, let's look at flats. Flats use an entirely different pattern, but there is still a pattern, okay? The pattern for flats is you take the second to last flat, and that is your key. So in this case, we are going to be in the key of E flat, most likely, because we have a flat, and then we go back one to E flat, and that's what key we're in. Okay? This is going to be the key of a flat major is what is being shown here, okay? This one is the key of B flat. Cool. Okay, now, there are two exceptions to this rule, sharps and flats, figuring out what key they're telling you. The two exceptions are this one because this one just doesn't work with the pattern because we take the second to last flat to tell us flat what key we're in. This only has one. So this one we just memorize, this is the key of F, okay? F major. And then the other one is this one. So you're seeing a bunch of naturals here, but that's because these naturals are canceling out these sharps. Well, the actual key that we're showing here is this one, where there's no key signature. Okay? This one just doesn't hold the pattern of sharps or flats because there's nothing. So we just remember that when there's no key, no key signature, that is showing the key of C major, right? Because that's how that C major works. There's no flats or sharps. So that's how key signatures work. Now, you might say to yourself, man, if I'm playing music, and I'm trying to read this music, and I got to keep track of all of these accidentals, like, in my head. Is that really how that works when you're playing? That is how it works. You get good at it. You get good at just remembering what accidentals. You actually just remember what key you're in, and then it becomes very natural to play in that key. So holding on to these in your head is actually easier than you would think after a little bit of practice. So something to think about. Okay, let's move on and talk about other ways of finding the key rather than just the key signature. 44. Other Ways of Finding the Key: Okay, so the key signature will tell us a very, very good possibility for what key we're in. Whenever you see a key signature and you're trying to figure out what key you're in, it's likely that the key signature is it. However, what if you're not working with written music? What if you just hear a melody or you play a melody, and you're like, What key am I in? Or what if you are looking at written music, but something doesn't line up quite right? Remember that what you're looking for is tonic, okay? That's the most important thing. So if you see a key signature, but the tonic doesn't sound right, then go with the tonic. Okay? Let's go back to our melody here. Okay? What key is this in? Well, we see it has one flat. So that might suggest we're in the key of whatever has one flat, which is the key of F. So, okay, maybe we're in the key of F. Let's look and see if F feels like tonic. A good way to do that is to find an F and end on it. Right there. Okay, let's end on that note. Does that feel like it could end there? Does that feel like home, a note that is comfortable stopping spot? Kind of doesn't. It kind of feels like it could keep going down to that note. So that note is clearly tonic. At least that's the way I hear it. Now, everybody hears things differently. So maybe you did hear F as tonic. And if you did, then you could make a case for this being in the key of F if you wanted to. This happens all the time. In my music theory classes in, like, real life, I might say something is this way in music theory, and then I might have a student challenge it and say, I don't think that is tonic. I think it's an F. And my response to that is prove it. And if they can say, Well, F sounds like tonic to me. It's got a B flat in it. And there may be other reasons that we haven't gone over yet, too, then I'll say, Okay, I believe you. To you, it's an F. But, you know, the key can often be a matter of perception. So, what is tonic? Other clues. The first and last note. Definitely a good clue, not a sure fire answer to anything, but a good clue. The highest note can tell you something. A note that gets a lot of time, like the longest note. In this case, it's E. So that's not a very good indicator for us. But sometimes that can be a clue. And then the cords underneath are probably the biggest tell. But they fall under the same rules, right? Like, they're going to be in key or not in key or have stress or be the first and last cord. So they may help us or hurt us in terms of trying to figure out what the key is. So first note, last note, highest note, lowest note, key signature. These are all indications of what key we may be in. Okay? If you get two or three of those things to add up, then you're probably you've probably figured out what key you're in. So let's move on. 45. What Key Should I be Writing in, Anyway?: If you're writing songs, what key should you be writing in? This is a question I get a lot, so let's talk about it. Now, in full disclosure, the way I decide what key my music is going to be in if I'm writing electronic music, then I'm just going to start writing music. And then after I get, you know, a little ways in and I need to start working on the chords, then I'm going to say, Okay, wait, what key am I in here? What's going on? Because I'm going to start by just playing stuff, writing stuff, you know, doing some guitar stuff. And I'm not going to think about what key I'm in, and I'm just going to decide after I do a little bit, like, Okay, this sounds like it's in this key. Let's go with that. And then that's going to be how I write it. Really care what key I'm in. And if you're writing purely electronic music, maybe you don't, either. There are some reasons to be in one key or the other. It is said that two, three, 400 years ago, keys mattered a lot. There are some anecdotal stories about, you know, different keys influencing us having different emotional properties, like some keys being sadder than other keys and some keys being happier than other keys and some keys being good for marching into war two and things like that. That may or may not be true, but a lot of that is kind of lost on our modern ears. Like, we just don't have the ears for that anymore. So when it comes to the emotional quality of the key, they're all really the same, okay? Cord progression is where you'll make more emotional quality. So we'll talk about chord progression soon. But there are some very practical reasons that you may choose a key. They all kind of have to do with performing. So if you're writing totally electronic music, this doesn't really matter. Although I have heard some people say that you should write in certain keys for electronic music because you want to, like, hit the sub the subwoofer in a club, like, just right. So you want to be in keys of, like, E. Apparently, those subs are tuned to really crank on an E. So that's a good key to be in. But if you're an acoustic, you're writing acoustic music, there are a few different things to think about. One is, what instruments do you have? This is probably the biggest one. So let's say I'm writing a piece of music for, like, a rock band, okay? And there's, like, two guitar players, and then bass and drums. So if I'm doing a guitar based thing and I really want it to shine, and especially if there's an acoustic guitar in there, I'm going to want to write it in a key that's going to give me a lot of, like, nice big open guitar chords. That's going to be the keys of E, A, G, maybe D. Those are good guitar keys, right? Because they get me a lot of open strings. Things are very resonant and bright in those keys. If I'm writing for saxophones, then I might write in the key of, like, B flat, because those are really comfortable keys, B flat, E flat. Those are really comfortable keys for saxophones and other wind instruments. If I'm writing for a singer, then I've got a little bit more complicated things to deal with. The key really matters a lot for singers. If you're not dealing with singers, it really doesn't matter nearly as much. For singers, what you want to do is you want to make sure they can hit the high note, let's take this and let's put it up in the key of G. This gonna be enough Sharp. There we go. Okay. So let's say this is my melody, and we get up here. Here's the high note. That's quite high. So I want to be sure my singer can nail that note. When we get there, they just go and can just get it, right? Like dead on. If they can't, if it's too high, and they're like, fracking it, then I want to take my whole song and lower it just a little so that that high note is right where they need it, so they can just belt it out. Um, and the same thing with low stuff. If this G is too low for my singer, then I'm going to raise the whole song up a little bit so that they can hit that low note with a good full voice. So when you're doing like Nashville stuff or TV stuff, you might find yourself changing the key, like, on the fly, like, showing up to the gig and then just having to play the song in whatever key the singer wants. This is a very common thing. When I played jazz, it was really common for a singer to sit in on a song, and she'd say, like, I want to play all the things you are in the key of F. Then so I'd say, Okay, well, I know that song in the key of G. So I need to figure out how to play an F in my head in the next 10 seconds. Like, well, in real time, as we're playing it, I just need to, like, transpose, is what we would call it in order to play it in the right key because that's where the singer needs it to hit the right points, the right notes, really. So that's why a key can matter what key you're in. If you're doing electronic stuff or you don't have any plans and getting performances of what you're writing, then the key really kind of doesn't matter. Um, yeah. There you go. 46. What are Chords?: Okay, time to get to chords. So when we think about music theory, a lot of what we think about is harmony. It's more than that. It's, you know, keys and melody and all this other stuff. But the kind of meat and potatoes that we think about, especially in this kind of earlier stage of theory, is how to deal with harmony, how to figure out harmonies, how to come up with harmonies. So harmony is just another word for chords, okay? So those two words can be interchangeable. Um, so what are chords? Exactly. Okay? So you might know chords from strumming on the guitar or playing on the piano or whatever. Cords are anytime you have more than one note. That's pretty simple. If you have two notes at the same time, you have a type of chord called a diad. Okay? Let's put some diads here. Let's say, something really low. F Um, so these are just diads. So you may have seen these before. These might be familiar to you as if you play any guitar as power chords. Power chords are just two notes, Cords, okay? So those are called diads. Diad is a weird term, and we don't use it all that often. It's like, kind of an esoteric term. So you don't walk around saying, Hey, check out this cool diad I came up with. It's just not something people do. It's a type of chord, so we call it a chord. But this, whatever written on the screen, it's not the right rhythm, but you've heard this before. Okay, two notes at a time. Smells like teen spirit, by Nirvon. Those are power chords. Now, diads can be anything else. Diads can be, you know, they don't have to be nice sounding, you know, technically, something like this. These are a bunch of diads. They're not particularly good sounding diads, but they are diads, anyway. Okay, so enough on diads. We never really talk about diads. It's just like a weird term. If you have three notes in a chord, you have a triad, right? See how we did that, diad and triad. So a triad is what most of our chords are, okay, especially if we're in the realm of relatively simple harmony of, like, pop music or any variation of pop music. We're mostly dealing with triads, okay? So we're going to spend a good amount of time on triads, and then we'll extend it in a little bit and talk about what comes after triads, which is not what you think. It's not chord or something. No, we skip straight to seventh. It's weird. We'll get there in a minute. Let's just focus on triads, okay? So we're going to focus on triads, and all that means is three notes at a time. Okay? So when we think about triads, we are typically thinking of a combination of specific three notes, the three notes that make up chords that we're familiar with, like major chords, minor chords, or a few other ones. So in order for something to be a triad, it does not need to sound good. It can be a dissonant sound like that, or it can be a pretty sound. Like that. We're going to focus on making these nice sounding chords first, okay? Because that is what most of you probably want to do is make chords that sound good and to accompany a song or to play on your guitar or whatever, okay? Now, you might be thinking, I I play a song, if I play a chord on my guitar, how is that only three notes? It's because you have a whole bunch of octaves in there. If you get rid of all the octaves, it's just three notes. We'll talk about that more later. So just stick with me for now, okay? So, let's talk about how we figure out what notes go in a triad. 47. Building Triads: Okay. Now, as you may have guessed, in order to figure out what notes go in the triad, we are going to go back to our good friend the scale. Okay? So let's throw a C major scale up here. Whoops. Alright, there is our C major scale. Cool. So there's a way to figure out all of the chords that are possible. And this is kind of like the scale. So there's a pattern to figure this out. Again, you may have seen books or things online that say, here is a book of, you know, 10,000 guitar chords or 10,000 chords on piano or any instrument. That's cool, but you don't need that. You just need to figure out what the pattern is to figure out chords. So let's do it. Let's start with a major chord. So we take a major scale. And what we're going to do is the pattern here is quite simple, okay? It's going to be we're going to take the first note. So let's do this. Let's go over here and assemble our chord. So we're gonna take the first note of the scale. C, okay? That's our first note of our chord. We're going to take the third note of our scale. We're gonna skip the second one and go to the third. Okay? In this case, it's E, so we'll put that right there. Then we're going to skip a note, skip the fourth, and we're going to go to the fifth, the fifth note of the scale. Those are the three notes that we need. Okay? To get us started, the first, third, and fifth or every other note of the scale. Now what about that one? We'll get to that one later. For now, we're just going to use three notes. Okay? The first three notes of the scale. Simple, right? So that gets us a major chord. Makes sense? So when you see major chords written like this, this is in their most purest form. We call this root position, meaning everything is stacked, nice and pretty. Everything is going to be on a line or a space. If we go up here, you'll see everything is on a space. That's also a major chord, okay? So everything will be on a line or a space, and it'll be very uniform in how it's stacked. It'll look just like that, nice and pretty. You could spot these from 1 million miles away. It's great. Unfortunately, the ords don't always look like that. They're not always so pretty and easy to identify. We'll talk about what I mean by that later when we talk about inversions. But for now, let's just get used to seeing nice pretty chords. Okay, so first third fifth makes our first triad, and that is a major chord. Now, you might wonder you might wonder about minor chords. We are going to talk about minor chords in just a few minutes, okay? Minor chords are in here. They are in the major scale. You can find minor chords. You just have to treat them a little bit differently. So we'll get to minor chords in just a minute. First, let's talk about a very important concept called the root. 48. Roots: Okay, we need to identify the root of the chord. And this is something that'll be easy, relatively easy when the chord is in this kind of a shape. So all the chords all the notes are neatly stacked up. The root is kind of like tonic. So before we talked about tonic, and tonic meaning the note that whole sections of the music are centered around, it's like the key, right? The root is the note that the chord is named after, okay? So the root is just a single note. And it's what names the cord. So in C major, in the cord C major, the pitch C is the root. Okay? That's this one. When the cord looks like this, it's on the bottom, okay? It's often the lowest note of the cord. Now, there's something called root position, and that's what we're looking at now, okay? When a cord is stacked like that, so it's all on a line and everything is right on top of each other, that is called root position. Now, sometimes, once you get into a little bit more advanced music theory, the root is not so obvious. The root can be hidden if we're in a different inversion, but also the root can be debatable. We could have a more complex chord, where you'd say, Well, it kind of looks like it's a some type of C chord, meaning C is the root. Or it kind of looks like it could be some kind of G chord, where G is the root. And you can actually kind of debate this sometimes once you look at more advanced chords. But in major chords, minor chords, typical diatonic stuff like this, when we're really in a key, it's pretty clear what the root of a chord is, okay? So the root of the cord is the note that it's named after, and it's usually on the bottom, but it doesn't have to be. Okay? There you go. That's the root of the cord. 49. The Diatonic Chord Progression: Okay. So here's the most important part of this whole section, okay? The diatonic chord progression. What this is is it's going to tell us all the chords in a key, okay? So we're going to be able to say, Okay, in the key of C major, here are seven chords that are in that key. They're going to sound good. In that key. But not just C major, because we're going to learn a pattern. So once we know the pattern, we can say, in the key of B flat major, here are all the chords that sound good. You're working on a song. You're writing a song and you're saying, I have this song. It's an E major, but I'm stuck. What can I do? Well, apply this thing called the diatonic Cord progression, and it will tell you seven chords you can do in that key that are going to sound great no matter what. You can do more. You can go outside the key if you want. But these seven chords are going to sound great. So let's figure out the diatonic chord progression. Now, in order for this to work, the main thing you need to understand is that chords to us are built in thirds. Okay? We saw that here, right? CD EFG, 135. These are patterns of thirds. That's what we like. That's what our ears are tuned into for when it comes to, like, hearing harmony, it's thirds, okay? Triatic harmony means harmony built in thirds. That is what we do. That is the whole recipe for harmony for us. So if I build this scale in thirds, I'm going to take the first chord, and I'm going to say, Okay, one, three, skip one, five. Okay. There's our first chord, right? Same as there. Okay? So this is what happens if I build a harmony, a triadic harmony on the first node of the scale. I get that. What if I do it on the second node of the scale? I take D, I skip one, and I go to F. Okay? So let's put an F there. I go to F. I skip one, and I go to A. Okay. So now I have another chord made up of notes in this key. So this chord is going to sound great, too. Okay? This is a D minor chord. We'll come back to naming them all in just a minute, but this is a D minor chord. I can keep going. E, skip one, G. Okay? Let's put a G there. G, skip one, B, okay? E minor. E minor is in the key of C major. So if you're writing a song in C, now we know three chords you can do. You can do C major, D minor, E minor. Those are all going to work in that key. Let's keep going. F, skip one to A, A, skip one to C. F major. F major is in the key of C. G, skip one, go to B, skip C, go back to D. We got a circle around here, but D comes next. G major. A, C, and then we're going to skip D and go to E. A minor is in the key of C major. B, this is the weird one. B, we're going to skip C, and we're going to go to D as our next one. And we're going to skip E and go to F. This is called a diminished chord. Hold on to that for now. We'll come back to it. And then C E, G, the same as the beginning chord. Okay, this is the diatonic chord progression. This tells us all our chords in this key. Let's put some text on here and just name these chords. We have C major. We have D minor. Actually, let's name these correctly here. So when we write the names of chords, often, if we just use the letter name, just a letter and nothing else, it means major. So C like that means C major. If we use a lowercase M, it means minor. Okay? So next is E minor. Next is F major G major. A minor. B diminished. So B dim is one way to write that. And then we're back to C major. Okay. So these are all of the chords that work in C major, okay? So if you're writing a song in C major, and you say, Cool, what possible chords can I do? This is the answer, okay? These are all the chords that are going to sound easy and good in C major. Also known as the diatonic Cord progression in C major. 50. The Pattern: Okay, now the diaton and chord progression results in a pattern, like you may have guessed, because so much of this is a pattern that we just need to know. So, if we look at the pattern, what we can do actually, is shorthand this in kind of a fun way. So let's do this. Let's go out here. Let's get rid of this random chord here. I'm just going to write our scale again. C major scale. Okay. Now I'm going to write our pattern. So the pattern is major. So we use a capital M for major in this case, and a lowercase M for minor. This is pretty universal thing. So major, minor minor, major, major, minor, diminished major. Okay. Here's what this means. Let me space this out a little bit. Okay. So this means our first chord in the diatonic chord progression is major. Our second is minor, our third is minor, our fourth is major, our fifth is major. Our sixth is minor. Our seventh is diminished, and this little circle gets used to symbolize diminished. You can also write DIM if you want. But this little circle is just kind of handy. And then major. This one's in parentheses because it's the same as this one. So this is where it starts over again. Let's get rid of that for now. Okay, so this is the pattern, no matter what key you're in, as long as it's a major key. This is the major key pattern. The minor key pattern is slightly different. So as long as you're in a major key, this is all you need. This and the scale will tell you what chords are in the key. For example, let's say, okay, we're in C major, and we know this pattern, so ask me what chord is in this key. So let's say I want to play F. I want to play a chord with an F root. Is it major or minor? Well, if I'm in the key of C major, all I have to do is count. So F is what? One, two, three, four. It's the fourth note in the scale. Now let's go to our pattern, one, two, three, four. The fourth chord in the key is major. Therefore, this plus this means if we want to play an F chord in C major, it's going to be an F major chord. Okay? If I wanted a chord built on A, just count. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. It is minor. So if I want to put a chord an A chord into C major, it's going to be minor. Okay? So that's one way of doing this. There's another way where we use a system of Roman numerals. Now, when you depending on what your interest in music theory is, you may or may not find Roman numerals useful. So I'm not going to use a ton of Roman numerals in this class, but I do want you to understand what they are in case you see them somewhere. So let's take a look at how Roman numerals work. I think you'll find this actually really fascinating and helpful. 51. Roman Numerals: Okay, so we use Roman numerals sometimes to kind of simplify this thing. So instead of having, like, a scale and a pattern, we have them both kind of at once using Roman numerals. Okay? So if you do, if you take, like, a music theory class, like, at a college, you're going to learn to analyze everything with Roman numerals. And we'll do a couple analysis with Roman numerals in just a minute. But here's how they work. Basically, if we're looking at chords in music and we want to put Roman numerals on them, here's what we're going to do. We would say this chord, we would first say give it the number based on what number it is in the key. Okay? So if we're in C major and we have a chord built on C, we're going to say that is one because it's the first chord in the key, okay? The second chord in the key is going to be some kind of two because it's the second chord in the key. So no matter what's going on in a piece of music, if we're in the key of C major, if we've figured out that we're in the key of C major, and we see a D chord, it's going to be some kind of two chord, okay? So the next thing we do is we use capital and lowercase Roman numerals. This is weird. You may have never seen lowercase Roman numerals, but we do it like that. So just I I means two. So the reason we would use capital or lowercase is we use capital for major chords and lowercase for minor chords. Okay? So one, in this case, is going to be major. Two is going to be minor. So now with this lowercase Roman numeral two, that tells us two things. It tells us that we have a chord based on D because we're in the key of C major, and it's a two. And it also tells us that it's a minor chord because it's lowercase. So it tells us two things all at once. So one's going to be three because it is also minor. So one's going to be four because it is major. So one's going to be five capital because it is major. This one is going to be six because it is minor. This one is seven. And we're going to write it like that, meaning it's minor but also diminished. Diminished is kind of like a super minor. So we write it as lowercase. And then this we can just write as one again. Okay, now, the reason we like Roman numerals. Another reason we like Roman numerals, I should say, is that we can transpose them really easy. So let's say let's say, I think we used this example a few minutes ago. But let's say, like, I'm playing guitar at a gig, and I'm playing a song. I'm about to play a song. And the song is, you know, some standard that I know that I just have memorized, which is how a lot of jazz music works. And a singer shows up and she says, Oh, I want to play that, but in the key of B flat, not in the key of C. So I have to transpose it in my head, like, on the fly instantly. If I remember that the chords are C major, E minor, G major, A A minor. If that's what I'm thinking, then that's going to be hard for me to transpose in my head on the fly. I have to rename all of those chords and figure out what they are and then play them as the tune is going. That's tricky. But if I just think, this chord progression is one, three, 64, I'm thinking in Roman numerals. If I'm thinking in Roman numerals, then I say, Okay, I need to play a one, six, 34 in in F major or sorry, in B flat major instead of C major, that's actually a lot easier because now I'm still just going to play a 1634, right? I'm just going to play it in a different key. I don't have to rename all the chords. I just have to apply the Roman numeral to the new key, and that's actually a whole lot easier. Okay? So when I have to transpose, Roman numerals are actually quite a bit easier. And that word I just said, transpose means that I'm playing something in a different key or I'm mapping it into a different key in my head or on paper or whatever. So that's how Roman numerals can be really beneficial. Let's look at a couple songs and analyze them with Roman numerals really quick. 52. Analysis: Piano Man, Billy Joel: Okay, let's do Piano Man by Billy Joel. One of the most standard songs in the world. If you've ever been to a wedding, at least a wedding in the United States, you've probably heard this song. It's also just a nice, lovely song. And it happens to be in C major, which is helpful to us at the moment. Okay, so this is a very simplified version of it, but the chords are the same. So we have the cords written at the top, so we don't have to figure them out. That's very handy. So first. Okay, so first, let's figure out what key we're in, okay? So the key signature looks like C major, there's no key signature. Okay? Our first chord, we have a C, a G, and an E huts. Basically, that's a C major chord. The chord is labeled with C, meaning it's a C major chord. We don't have the end of the Well, we do have the end of the piece. We don't have the end of the piece. We just have the first two pages. But the beginning of the verse starts on C major. It's pretty C major. So just trust me that this is definitely in C major. Okay, so let's use some Roman numerals. And maybe let's do let's put them in red just to make them a little easier to see. Okay, so first cord C in C major is going to be a one chord. Let's switch our font. Roman numerals are weird because the font, you need to, like, really see the, like, kind of seraphi things. There we go. Okay, to tell if it's capital or lower case. Okay, so one, okay? Now let's go to this chord. F over C. This is a convention that we see a lot. This is just a way to write a chord name. What this means whenever you see this kind of fraction thing, it means that the top note of the fraction or the one on the left side, if it's like this, is the chord. Okay? That's the chord. So F means F major. Then the over C means it's F major, but we're going to put whatever note is here, just the note as the lowest node in the chord, okay? So typically, the lowest node of the chord is going to be the root. It doesn't have to be, but that's the most common thing. So a chord like this says it's an F chord, but C is on the bottom, is the lowest note of the chord. That's fine. If you're like, a guitar player or even a piano player or any kind of chord player, you could ignore that. You can ignore the lower number or the lower letter or the letter on the right, and just assume, like the bass players going to do it. That's the bass player's job. So we don't need to worry about it because it doesn't change the chord, at least not in this case. So F is our chord, F major. So, F major in the key of C is we have let's count up to F, C, D, E, F, four. Okay? So it's a four chord. Now, is it major or minor? In the key of C, the four chord, let's go through that pattern. Major, minor minor major. Okay? The four chord is major. So that means the Roman numeral here is going to be four. Okay. Here we have a C major seven. That's a different kind of chord that uses a fourth note in it, but it's still a type of one chord. It's still a type of C major chord. So let's call it a one. Here we have three chords in a row. We've already seen F, so we can call that a four. And then this is going to be a one chord, C over E. The cord is C and E is in the base, so we don't need to worry about that too much. And then G is going to be CDE FG five. And major, minor minor major, major. Fifth chord is major, so a major five. Okay? So that's our first little one, four, one, four, one, five. And that's the intro to the song. We can keep going if we wanted to, but let's do it just to get these E minor and A minor in there, I suppose. So here is one. So for our verse, it's going to be one and then three is minor. So E minor CDE. That's three and three is minor. That's going to be a minor three. And then A minor. If we count up, we'll get to six, whoops, six. And then we get to a C again. And then we get to an F. Which we've already seen as major four. Oops, dyslexia K. And then we can keep going from there. But you can see how Roman numerals work. So now if I was playing this and someone said, I need you to play piano man, but in the key of G, I could look at this quite quickly if I have Roman numerals and say, Okay, my chords are going to be G, B minor, E minor, G C major. So like I could do that kind of fast when I'm looking at Roman numerals. It's much easier than looking at the chord name. Okay, let's do one more quick analysis project. 53. Analysis: All Too Well, Taylor Swift: Okay, of course, I got a sneaky little Taylor Swift in here for the SEO. So let's look at this. Now, this one I've actually already analyzed, and I can't change these. Somehow I burned this into the PDF. That's fine. Okay, here we're actually down to diads, again. These are basically just power chords. C five is a way to write a diad. So we have C and then a fifth above C. So G, and then sometimes another octave of C. That's that power chord shape that I was showing you. Doesn't matter. We can think of it just as it's not really a major chord or a minor chord. It's a fifth chord. It's kind of a power chord. Um, but let's assume they're full chords. So this would be a one, G would be five. A minor would be the minor six, and then F would be major four, and then just repeats on and on. So very easy one, five, six, four. That's a very common chord progression that you'll see in all kinds of different keys. Cool. Okay, so now you know Roman numerals. You might think to yourself. How do I know if a chord is major or minor? Like, we know how to figure out based on the key it's in. But what about, objectively, outside of a key, if I just look at a chord, how do I know if it's major or minor? There's really no way to tell. There is. It's a little trickier, but that's what I want to tackle in the next section, okay? We're going to dissect triads and just sort of see what's inside them so that we can understand major chords and minor chords. And even diminished chords. Cool. So let's jump into that new section now. 54. The Different Types of Triads: Okay, so let's pick apart what's inside these triads. Now, first, let's talk about the different types of triads that are possible. And there are four. We've seen three of them, right? We've seen the major. We've seen the minor. We've seen diminish. And there's one more. So if we think about the qualities of this, I'll talk about the one more in just a second. We tend to think. Okay, so there's kind of a stereotype here, right? Like, major chords are happy and minor chords are sad. Okay? Mm. Take that with a grain of salt. It is true, I think, that major chords have a happier sound than minor chords. And minor chord sound relatively sad. But in the context of a song, they really don't you have a chore progression that's made up of major and minor chords, which almost every chord progression in the history of Core progressions is, then what you get is a more combined sound. You don't hear those minor chords in there as sad and the major chords as happy. Of the saddest songs in the world have a whole bunch of major chords in them, and some of the happiest songs in the world have a whole bunch of minor chords in them. So it's not directly major and as happy and minor as sad. But you can kind of think about it like. Diminished chords are kind of like a super minor chord, okay? And we'll get more into the guts of what's inside those in just a minute. But you can think of them as a super minor chord. There is a fourth chord that's kind of sort of a super major chord, and it's called an augmented cord. Okay? So an augmented ord doesn't happen naturally in a major or minor key. So we don't see them all that often. Um, we will see them by the end of this class because there is one kind of special situation where they do show up. But let's put all of our chords just kind of side by side, all four of these so we can hear them. Okay? So let's go Major. Now let's do minor. So here's a C minor chord. Here is a C whoops. C diminished chord, and here is a C augmented chord. Okay? So major, minor, diminished, augmented. Let's listen. Okay, let's try that again a little slower. Okay, here we go. Oops, my augmented cord is wrong. That's the same as a major cord. What I wanted was that. Okay. Now let's hear them one more time. Correct. That augmented cord has a definite, kind of weird sharpness to it. It's just like, oh. Um they do come in handy sometimes, but rarely. This diminished cord comes in more handy. Because it happens in the key, right? It happens on the seventh note a major chord of a major key. Okay? So those are our different types of triads. For augmented, you can let's just go over real quick our shorthand. So if we're not doing Roman numerals, we're just doing letters. Major, we use capital M. Minor. We use a lowercase M, diminished, we use this little subscript zero or sometimes we can write DIM. Let's go with the zero for now. And for augmented, we can use AUG, if you want, or you can use a plus sign. Okay, that can symbolize augmented. Okay, so let's start picking apart what's inside these to see how we can really tell what's on the fly. 55. The Anatomy of a Triad: Okay, so we know how to find a major or minor triad based on the key, right? If we're in a key and we know we're in a key and we see a few different cords, we can usually tell if they're major or minor by figuring out where they are in the diatonic Cord progression. But let's say we're not in a key or we don't know what key we're in, and we're just looking at a chord by itself out of context. How do we tell if it's a major or minor chord? Or diminished or augmented. Well, let's start with just major and minor, okay? So I want you to look at notice one thing right away. And that's that the top note is the same, and the bottom note is the same, okay? It's just that middle note. Take a look at this graphic. This is the way I always think about this. If the black line here from here to here represents a space and we split it in half, then roughly this length on the left side and this length on the right side is the same, right? But in triads, that's not true. This line isn't in the middle. It's something like this, okay? So our low note and high note are the same. So if I move this red line over here, this distance is smaller and this distance is bigger. But if I move this over here, now, this distance is bigger and this distance is smaller, but the outsides of it didn't change. That's what happens with a major and a minor chord when we move the middle node up and down. This node is an E natural. That makes a bigger gap between C and E than it does between E and G. It's just this weird thing where the interval here is bigger than the interval here by a little bit, by a half step. Okay? This one, now the middle note is lower. That makes this gap bigger than this gap. Okay? So the big gap is at the top here, and at the bottom here. Okay? With me, it's kind of weird. All of that is to say that the difference between a major and a minor chord is just that middle note, third, the third of the chord, and it's only a half step different. Right? That's it. It's only one half step difference between a major chord and a minor chord. And it's always the third, the middle note, a root, third, fifth, right? The third is what changes. So what does that mean? And how does that have to do with the space of the fifths? Think about it like this. Each triad is made up of two different thirds, okay? This is a third, and this is a third. Okay? So this is a major third, which means this has to be a minor third. That's just the way chords work. They're made up of a major third and a minor third. I should say major and minor chords are. These other ones out here are a little different. But major chords and minor chords have a major third and a minor third in them. The major chord has the major third at the bottom and the minor third at the top. Minor third is smaller. The minor chord has the minor third at the bottom, and the major third at the top. Okay? So they're kind of mirror images of each other in a way. Now, how can we tell if that interval is a major third or a minor third? Well, the only really good way outside of just memorizing major thirds and minor thirds is to count half steps, okay? You can count four half steps between C and E. C to C sharp is one. C sharp to D is two. D to D sharp is three, and D sharp to E is four. So there's four half steps here. Okay? If we count to a minor third, it's only three half steps. C to C sharp, C sharp to D and D to D sharp or D to E flat. Three. Okay? So three half steps to get to here. But I can prove that this is a major third by counting up from E flat. So if I count E flat to G, E flat to E natural, E natural to F, F to G flat and G flat to G. That's four. So that makes this a major, okay? Cool. Now, these other two are a little stranger, where the diminished one has two minor thirds in it. Instead of a minor third and a major third like these have, this is just two minor thirds. So we have C to E flat. Don't forget about that E flat. C to E flat is a minor third. If we count up, we're only going to get three half steps there. And E flat to G flat is a minor third. We're only going to get three half steps between those. That's what gives it its kind of super minor sound because it's made up of two minor thirds. And an augmented chord is made up of two major thirds. So C to E natural is a major third, and E to G sharp is a major third. So it's like a super major chord, kind of. Okay, so that's what's inside of those triads. If you want to just count to figure out if something is a major or minor triad, remember, you're looking for number of half steps between the root and the third of the chord. If it's four half steps, it's a major chord, if it's three half steps, it's a minor chord. It's far easier just to think about the pattern of the cords in a key. But sometimes we have to do it that way. 56. The Third Holds the Power!: Okay, let me tag one more thing on there, not to make too fine a point of it, but just remember that the third of the chord, the middle note, we call that the third. The third is the thing that holds the power, right? Because it's that note that turns a chord from major to minor, right? If I take let's take this chord. Right? If I want to take this major chord and make it minor, all I have to do is find the third, the middle note and lower it by a half step. That's now a minor chord, okay? I go to raise it. This D minor. If I want to turn that D minor into a D major, all I have to do is find that middle note and raise it by a half step. Now that's D major. Okay? Any chord, you can just go to the middle note, raise it to turn it from a minor chord to a major chord or lower it to turn it from a major chord to a minor chord. It all comes down to the third, whether or not that chord is a major chord or a minor chord. It's very interesting. So keep that in mind as we push forward. Okay, next, I want to talk about a handful of little things that have popped up. A little more on diminished chords, octaves, inversions. And then we'll just kind of look at how the guitar is laid out because that's kind of interesting because that might be interesting to some of you. 57. Diminished Triads: So let's talk just a little bit more about these diminished chords. Now these chords are not particularly nice sounding. And if you're a guitar player, and sorry I keep putting everything in guitar terms, I know that not all of you are guitar players, and so the guitar stuff doesn't really matter. It's just kind of an aside. But if you're used to, like, strumming chords on the guitar, you probably don't know any open chords, like just kind of like campfire cords that are diminished chords. Like, there really aren't any. And the reason for that is that they don't really sound very good. So why do we have a cord that just doesn't sound good? Well, it's because while these chords are not used a whole lot in pop music, they have a very specific purpose, and that has made them really important from music for centuries. And their purpose is they are what we call a leading tone chord. So while they don't sound great in and of themselves, they help push to tonic. So whenever we have this kind of chord, it really pushes us to tonic. Like, you'll hear, if I just play this and then I stop on this chord and then I play this tonic after it, it'll feel really nice. Oops. Let's do the slow down version of it. Let's get rid of those, and here, let's just go let's just make a big diminished cord. Okay, so you'll hear how this goes to that. Like, it just pushes us into it. And that motion is really important for helping to make Tonic feel like Tonic. So, what does that mean for you? It all depends on what you're interested in getting into. But if you're trying to write songs like pop songs, you can just largely avoid diminished chords. Even this one that's in the key, like, we just don't use it very often. So just skip right over it. If you're writing film music or anything with, like, an orchestra kind of sound, you probably want to get familiar with these. And learn how to use them. In my so I have another music theory class that's like a big music theory class. It follows the whole, like, college level music theory thing. So that class is 21 parts long. It's very long. And one of those parts is devoted to the diminished chord. So that means like a whole, like, 50 or 60 videos is devoted to the diminished chord. So it's really important in the grand scheme of music it's not so important in these beginning stages of music theory, and it's not so important if you're not doing more concert style music. So if you're doing kind of pop music or something like that, then they're not so important. So just something to think about with diminished chords. 58. Octaves and Inversions: Okay, let's just look at the C major chord for a second. And I want us to talk a little bit about inversions. Okay? So so far, we've been looking at triads in what's called root position. Okay? So we know what the root is, right? The root is the note that the chord is named after. So a C major chord, the root is C. And it's usually at the bottom. Now, if we're in root position, it's at the bottom. But not all chords are written in root position. In fact, if you look at any kind of legitimate piano music, hardly anything is in root position. So let's look at the other possible positions of it. Now, there are two. So if we take the root and we move it up in octave, Okay. Now we are not in root position because the node at the top is the root and at the bottom is the third is at the bottom. You don't really need to memorize these names, but basically, this is what's called first inversion. It just means the third is on the bottom. We can do another one where we put the third up octave. Now the fifth is on the bottom, and this is called second inversion. Okay, I point these out just because these are all still C major. The name of the ord hasn't changed. And we don't really notate first inversion or second inversion unless you're in one very specific point in history, and we don't really care about that anymore. But the reason we care is because these are a lot harder to spot when we're looking at them. So when you see this pattern and you're trying to figure out what chord it is, you need to figure out that the root is right here, okay? Now, how do you do that? One way is just to move the notes around until you get them down into first position into root position. So you might say, Okay, well, what happens if I move this G up an octave? Ah, that's root position because it looks like root position. Everything is in thirds, right? So that'll tell you that this is actually the root, and then you can put it back to where it was and analyze it that way. So we would still call this C major. If we were using Roman numerals, it would still be one. Okay, so let's do one more thing while we're here. Let's put this back into root position. Okay, so back to root position, what happens now. Okay, now I have four notes, right? The notes I have are C, E, G, and then another C. Okay, this is still C major. The name of the chord doesn't change. Because we've just added an octave. We've added another octave of C. That doesn't do anything. It's like adding more spice to your soup. If you've made tomato soup, no matter how much pepper you put in it, it's still tomato soup. It was a weird analogy. I don't know if I like that one. But we'll keep it in just for fun. We'll see how it goes. The comments will tell. So if I add another E, another G, another another E, another G. This is still all C major, 'cause I haven't added any new notes to it. I've only added octaves of the notes that we already have. So it's still just three unique notes in this chord, okay? So I would call this colloquially. I would call this a big fat C major chord, but it is still just C major. 59. Chords on the Guitar: A so I mentioned something like maybe ten videos ago or so, where I said, The guitar is playing all these notes in a single chord, how is that a triad? So let's look at one of these really quick. It's the same concept that we just looked at here. So let's say, I'll just do a half note for fun. Okay, let's say, like an E major chord. If I was to strum an E major chord on a guitar like this right? Big, I'm strumming all six strings. Here's what I'm actually playing. Okay, these are the notes I'm playing in order. So E, B E, G sharp, B E. I'm a little out of tune. Let's get rid of the octaves, right? Well, we can already see the triad, right? Like, the triads right here. So let's see. Is this an octave? Yes. That is another E, so let's get rid of that. We just get rid of octaves. Get rid of that. Okay, so we can get rid of that. So these are all the notes once we get rid of octaves. It's just a triad. And it's E major. Let's do one more just for fun. So G major looks like this. Okay. That's how we play G major on a guitar. We can see the triad down there, but this is an octave. That is an octave, and that is an octave. Right? So There's our triad. So that's why we can strum big chords on the guitar, and we're just playing major and minor triads most of the time. Now, you may if you're a guitar player, you may be familiar with, like, strumming a chord and it's a seventh or something like that. We'll talk about seventh chords soon. Okay, so basic triads. We're feeling good, right? Cool. Let me give you a worksheet on that. So give you a little bit of practice. And then let's talk about this crazy thing called the Circle of Fifths. Trust me, you're gonna want to know. 60. What is the Circle of Fifths?: Let's talk about the circle of fifths. So at some point, you were probably in a band room, a choir room, a lesson room, some school room, a preschool room, maybe even, and you saw hanging on the wall this type of thing, the circle of fifths. There's 1 million different ways to draw this, but they're all variations of this. This is a very simple one. I'll show you a more complex one later. So, you know, this is just a silly little thing that gets put on the wall in music rooms, but it has actually a very important purpose. And if you have any interest in composition or songwriting, a super important purpose. So let's learn how to use this thing. What this shows us what the Circle of Fist shows us is our diatonic core progression. It shows us in there once you learn how to read it. It shows us essentially our key signatures for all the major and all the minor keys. And it shows us how we can do how we can use some chords that are not in our key, but still will probably sound cool, okay? So we can do some really non diatonic stuff, some outside of the key music. All of that is shown in this weird little diagram. So let's dive in and look at what it can do. Here we go. 61. Using the Circle of Fifths to Find Chords: Okay, let's start with looking at how the circle of fist can show us our diatonic cord progression. Let's say we're in the key of C, okay? So we're gonna put the C at the center, and then we're going to draw this shape. Okay, we're going to look at all the cords around it. Alright. Let's maybe make my shape a little easier to see here. Okay, not the best drawing, but that's okay. Okay, so if C is our key, this is showing us six of the seven chords. This doesn't show us the diminished chord, right? So we're seeing our major chords, our F, C and G, our minor chords, our D minor, A minor and E minor. Cool, right? So that's great. That tells us that for whatever key we're in, um, these our available chords. And if we wanted to know what that diminished one was, it's right here. It just shows up as minor instead of diminished. Okay. Let's pick a different key. Let's say we want the key of B flat. Okay? So here's B flat. So we're going to go on either side of it, and then up and around here, here, here. There we go. So now we can tell our major chords, our E flat, B flat, and F, our minor chords are C minor, G minor, and D minor. Okay. So that works for every key. So let me tell you a little bit about what we're actually seeing here in the circle of fis. So what we have is we have a key written here. And then if we go to the right, we're going to go up five notes in that key. CDEF G. That gets us to G, so it's a fifth higher, G A, B, C, D, that gets us a fifth higher. So we just keep going around by a fifth. And when we get to the bottom, we start to get in this really weird area where we have the weirdest keys. So B major is a super weird key, but then we get to if we go up a fifth, going to get to F sharp, but F sharp major is insane, insanely difficult to read. Just every note has a sharp on it. Some of them have multiple. So there we flip over to G flat, which is slightly easier to read, and then we get to D flat. So we just go the enharmonic there just to switch us over. And sometimes this is also called the circle of fourth because if we go the other direction, C, and we count up four, we get to F. CDF. If we count up four in the key of F, FGA B flat is in the key of F, so we get that. We get B flat. So fourths going left and fifth going right. That's just kind of the way it works. Now, it's also showing us relative minors here. And we'll talk about relative minors in just a few minutes, maybe ten videos or so. So it's just moving through all the keys, but just by the way it works, it just so happens to show us everything that we need to know for the diatonic chord progression. So you can look at this quickly and say, I'm in the key of E flat. What can I do? And you can say, Okay, B flat, A, flat, F, minus C minus G minus E flat major. So it's really handy in that way. But it can do more. Let's talk about the other things that it can do. 62. Using the Circle of Fifths to Find Interesting Chords: Okay, I may have said this before, but I'm going to say it again because it's really important. If you learn music theory, and then you write music that uses all the rules of music theory. You obey the rules all the time and you write a lot of music that lives happily with the rules of music theory, you will write a whole bunch of very fine and slightly boring music. That's how music theory works. If you follow every rule, you're going to write music that sounds great. Not particularly interesting. But great. The real interesting stuff, you have real great moments musically when you go outside of the key, when you do something different, something unique. And the degree to which you go outside of the key is the degree to which it's going to be difficult to make that sound good. Here's what I mean. Let's look at the circle of fifths. These keys are close, C major and G major, okay? These are close keys. That means they only have one note different. G is the closest key to C. G has enough sharp in it, and C has enough natural. That's the only thing that's different. So that makes these the closest keys. Six of the notes are in common. One is different. D is only one note different than G, okay? This has a C sharp in it, this has a C natural in it. So these two so any two neighbors are going to be one note different, okay? In the scale. The scale is only have one note different. It's going to have a different tonic, but other than that, there's only one note that's actually going to be changed. So if I'm in the key of C and I'm like, trying to find a chord that works, I'm like, D minor, E minor, A minor, nothing sounds good. It's great. What I could do is look at the cords in G major and see if there's something there that I could use. That's going to be going outside the key a little bit, but not a lot. Watch. So if these are my cords in C major, then let's use a different color. Then my chords in G major are these. Okay, so I have four of those chords overlap, right? But B minor and D major, do not. The key of C has a D minor here. I think I meant to say B minor a second ago. The key of C has a D minor, while the key of G has a D major. So what I could do, I'm in the key of C instead of doing a D minor. What if I did a D major? It's only one key away, right? We call these closely related keys, and we also call this modal borrowing, which is a fancy way to say, we're going to borrow a chord from a nearby key, a key that's close, right? That's what this is. Okay? So we're borrowing from the key of G. We can get D or B minor. So if we're in the key of C and we borrow from the key of E, E major, we're going to have no chords in common. Right? No chords in common. So that's far away. It's going to make that's going to be hard to get these chords to sound really good. But there's always ways to do it. And context matters more than anything. So if you have the right melody, if you have the right texture, you can make those weirder chords work. And if you can make it work, it's probably going to sound pretty cool. So something to think about. Okay, so given this near and far thing, what is the farthest key away from C? So it's weird because B, the key of B is way far away. That's almost the farthest one away. And B is right next to C. But if you think about it, the key of C major is like this, and the key of B major is like this. Everything changes. Everything is up a half step, right? So they have very little in common, but not nothing. The farthest away is gonna be F sharp or G flat. That's the tritone away. That's which is a fancy way to say, kind of the farthest away and the most dissonant thing that you can do. So that's gonna be tough to get anything in F sharp to work in that cord, but not impossible. Okay, so that's how you can use the circle of fist to find more interesting cords. 63. Verse Chord Progression: Alright. You music theory haters. Let's write a song. Okay? So we're gonna write a simple simplified song here. We'll do probably just a verse and a chorus, maybe a second verse. And what we'll do here is we're going to write this in traditional notation. And then after we're done writing it, I'll probably take it over to Ableton and actually, like, produce this song. We'll see. I don't know. But here we go, okay? I've got a new score laid out, piano and voice. So we'll write like a melody. I'm not going to write lyrics and stuff. Lyrics really aren't my jam, but I will write a melody. Okay. So the first thing we need is a key. So let's pull up our circle of fifths. Let's do a fun old technique and pick a key by rolling some dice. Let's stay away from the really weird keys. Let's say B flat is one, and then we go up to six from B flat. So I'm gonna roll a dice just for fun. And it's a one. Awesome. Okay, we're in the key of B flat. Can handle that. So let's put a key signature on there. All right. Remember the second to last accidental, and the key signature tells us the name of it. So second to last is B flat. So we are in B flat. Okay, now let's look at what cords we can do here. And remember we are in B flat. So we can go here. So here's the safe stuff, right? The stuff in the key. Okay, so let's start with a B flat chord because that'll help us establish tonic. Let's just do one chord per bar for now, so I'll use whole notes. Okay? So B flat, DF and we'll put a B flat in the base. Alright, what's another chord we could do? Let's go to G minor. That sounds kind of fun. I haven't done a G minor. I don't know. G minor just sounds good. I could roll dice again, but Okay, so here's a G. G, B flat, D. And let's see. Can we put could put a G in the base. We could keep a B flat in the base. Or we could put a D in the base, Let's just do a G. Keep it simple. The base note, I don't know if we've talked about this, but what you do in the base, if you don't want to think too hard, just put the root of the chord in the base. That's the easiest way to go. But you don't have to. You can put any note in the chord in the base. The root is going to sound the best. Okay, so now we're on a G minor. Let's maybe go to how about a C minor? And then an F. Okay, so let's go C minor. I want put C in the bass. And then Okay. So here is our main core progression. Let's hear it. Hmm. Okay. That's a little you've heard that before. That's a little doppie. But let's fix it and make it sound a little bit better. So when it comes to When it comes to writing like this, I tend to really not like root position cords. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adjust some of these cords so that they're all kind of in the same range. It's them jumping around like this that just I just really just don't like. So I'm gonna take this no. Let's move it up and octave. And this B will move up and octave. See how that puts all of this stuff in the same range. So like, only one note has to change to get to this chord. That's called voice leading, and it's going to just make a nice smooth sound. So the same thing up here. E and see. It just sounds better if the least amount of stuff has to move. Let's actually put this F on top. Now it's kind of tight. Let's hear it now. Okay. Pretty simple. Kind of vanilla, but that's okay. So let's say this is our verse. And maybe maybe this is our intro. So let's put a double bar line here. A double bar line usually just means, whoops. The end of a section. There's no big science to it. It just makes things easier to read. Okay, so then we'll say, This is our verse. We'll use the same chord progression, and we'll do it twice. Sure. Okay, let's put a double bar line there to say that's the end of the verse. And now let's come up with a chorus to put right here. 64. Chorus Chord Progression: Okay, so here's the chords we used. We used a B flat, a G minor No, not an E flat. F, and I think a C minor, right? F and C minor. Okay. I'm just going to circle those. So now we're going to make a chorus, okay? So one quick and easy way to make a chorus that's going to almost always work is to take the verse chord progression and say, pick two chords that we used and keep those and replace the other two chords. Trust me, it just always works. So let's go to let's keep G minor and C and then we'll add an E flat and maybe something outside. You know, let's borrow from the key of E flat and go A flat. So let's go C minor, G minor, A flat, E flat. Okay, so let's try it. C minor, E minor. What I say A flat, E flat. A flat, E flat. That should be a C. Okay, let's see it this way. G minor, E minor, A flat, C minor. All right. So G minor Oops. Wrong chord. Okay, G minor. E flat minor. A flat minor. Okay, now, this is one's out of key, right? A flat major. So we need to make turn this major. It's gonna require an accidental because it's out of the key. So A flat, C. And then our last chord is going to be C minor. C Alright, let's adjust our inversions a little bit. Let's take that up there. That's fine there. That's fine there. Alright, let's hear our chorus. I kind of like that. Um Okay. Let's do that twice just for fun, and then we'll put a double bar line there. And then maybe we'll do another verse. What the heck? Another 2 bars or whatever. Okay. And then our final bar line, just this big thick one. And we could delete these extra measures, but Well, let's do it. What the heck. Cut. Nope. Now we have our song. Let's write some melodies. 65. Verse Melody: Okay, so when it comes to melodies, I have weird philosophies about melodies, but here's what I want you to remember. A lot of people when they're writing music for the first time, they think, I need brilliant melodies all the time. Not all music has melody, right? Like, listen to music. Listen to a bunch of music. There are times when there's no melody happening. So you don't need melody all the time. There's even some music, music that I love that doesn't have any melody at all in the whole music. But that being said, let's write a melody for this. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to take the chord, and we're going to play connect the dots, right? We're going to add some rhythm. Rhythm is going to be kind of random, just something that I think is going to sound good. And we're going to use notes that are in the chord. Now, we're not going to use only notes that are in the chord. We're also going to go outside of the chord but within the scale, okay? So we're still diatonic here because we're melodies have something called passing tones. These are notes that are not in the chord, but they are in the key, okay? So let's look at how that works. Let's start with, let's start with a half note, and we'll start right on tonic. Oh. You know what would be handy? Let's label our chords. I'm going to pause and label our chords real quick. Okay, Cords are written in now, okay? So I have chord names there. So now let's go up here. So we have a B flat. So let's do whoops. I wanted that as a half note. And then let's do a quarter note here. So now I'm going to go C D. Let's do another D. Whole note. Then let's maybe tie those together. B flat is in the chord right there. C is not. C is a passing tone. It's going to help get us to this D, which is in the chord, but it's also in the next chord. I'm just going to tie it over and that just ring for a minute. Then let's go. Oops. Here, let's move up by a half step because that'll get us to that E flat. E flat, D, C B flat A. Okay? That gets us the A of that F. And then let's put a little breath there. Singer's got to breathe. So let's leave that as a rest. And then let's go one, two, three, four. Okay, let's do the same beginning again. It's really common to, like, re use the beginnings of a melody. But then here, let's go. Alright, here, let's go. GGee. E flat. F. E F A flat. It's screaming high. G. So we land right on G on this chorus, okay? And that gets us to the chorus. Okay, let's hear. Okay. I like it. Let's go to a new video and work on the course. 66. Chorus Melody: Okay, let's find a melody for that chorus. I kind of want to keep it a little bit simple. So let's see. We do have a common tone here. Common tone means this G is also in this G or in this E flat chord. I could go up to this A flat and then back down to that G. So I wonder if I could take advantage of that G A flat thing by going Let's do that, and let's go there. Okay, the idea I have in mind here is gonna be super hard to sing, but I'm not gonna sing it. We're gonna let the computer do it, so Let's go G A G. And then A flat. I don't like that. That's gonna sound kind of weird to have that A flat there. The A flat is fine. The G to A flat thing. I didn't look like something I'm going to like that. Now, let's go Let's do that. So a little step leap kind of thing, right? So step down, step up. Sorry, skip down, skip up, step to that half step. That's going to be kind of a big moment. Then let's jump up or leap up here and sit on that note for a minute. Okay. Then maybe I know this is boring to watch somebody write music. You know, there was a period in time where people wanted to do this publicly where you would, like, you could get a grant to, like, put you in a little cage like in a mall while you wrote music. There was a That was a thing that happened for a time. I don't think I ever did it. Didn't sound that fun to me.'s gonna go scale down here. Now we're back to the beginning. Let's stay on this B flat. No, let's not. Oh. Let's go down like that. Okay. So we'll do that and that, and then I'll take this EFlat. Do the same thing I did there. And then this will be the same thing. And we'll make this the same thing. And that'll lead us back into the verse. Okay, so let's just grab that verse again. Boom. Alright, now I need one more chord here so we can go back to that B flat Oops, 'cause it's gonna end not on the tonic, which is fine. But, um, one more chord is going to make that sound 1 million times better. Let's take this B flat, put it there. And then whole note on a B flat. Now, this B flat is super high for a singer. But it's the end of the piece. I'll work. Okay, let's hear Let's hear our whole song. What the heck? Here we go. And and, Hey. Okay, so we wrote a song. Now, in the next bit, I'm going to give you this file. I don't know if you want it. If you do want it, you can play around with it. You can change it, mess it up, keep it how it is, use it as your own. I don't care. I'll give it to you as a Mu score file and as a PDF file. And then we'll be back, and I'll throw this into Ada and see if I can make a nice song out of it. We'll see what happens. 67. Full Song: Alright, I'm gonna try to turn this into an actual song. This is kind of out of the scope of this class. I'm just kind of doing this for fun. But then I thought, maybe this is interesting for you to see. So I'm in Ableton Live here. This is going to be like, tediously, like, trying to find something that works for the song. So I'm going to do most of this in, like, fast forward. If this is interesting to you, I have a ton of production classes here. So pick up some of those and I'll show you how to do this in those classes. But in short, what I'm going to do here is I exported that song from Core as a MIDI file. I'm going to import that MIDI file here. Okay, so we have the voice and then two piano parts, the right hand and the left hand. Okay? So, now I'm just going to build up some stuff and see what happens. So here we go. That's all. Let's go. Alright. I think we got it. It's not the most brilliant thing I've ever written, but it's, you know, kind of fun. Super happy, you know, good summertime jam. So I put the melody in the just in a violin so we could hear it. I tripled the right hand piano part just to make a thicker sinth sound. The bass part, I doubled and shifted by an octave to make it a little thicker. Added a little drum beat. Oh, wait, I wanted to tidy that up to right there, I think, yes. And then I put a couple guitar tracks on there just for fun. Um yeah, here we go. Here we go. Neat. Okay, I guess I'll give you this to download. I can't give you the whole session because it's too big. So but you can remake this session really easily if you just take the music core file, export it as a mini track, and then assign some sense to stuff. But I'll give you a bounce of the track. You can chop it up and play with it and do whatever you want with it. Cool. And then we'll move on to seventh Chords. 68. What are 7th Chords?: Okay, so, we know our way around triads pretty well at this point. It's time to extend the triad a little bit and talk about seventh chords. Now, here's the deal. When we look at our scale, let's go back to scales. C major. Whoops. Why don't we do that every time. Okay, C major, we know that we can make a chord, a triad by going every other note, right? C, E, G. Now we can keep going, okay? We can go one more. Okay? That adds a fourth note to the chord. And that fourth note is called the seventh, and these are called seventh chords. Not because I have seven notes. I know that's confusing. It's weird, but they're called seventh because we use the seventh in them. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay? So now we have a new kind of chord. Actually, we have four new kinds of chords you could have a major a seventh can be major or minor, okay? So you could have a major chord with a major seventh, could have a minor chord with a major seventh. You can have a minor chord with a major seventh, and you could have a minor chord with a minor seventh, right? Gives us four new chords to deal with. And if you're asking, well, if we can go to seven, can we keep going? Like nine, 11, 13? Yes, you can totally do that. Once you get into those higher numbers of chords, like ninth and 13th and stuff, you start to get very kind of jazz sounding. So we're not going to do that here, but you're welcome to explore that. Okay, so why would you add the seventh? The seventh is going to give your chords a little more color. So they're not just gonna be major and minor anymore. So let's do this just for fun. Here's our song that we just did. Let's turn all of these into seventh chords. Okay? So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go here. So B flat, BDF A. So that's gonna make that a seventh chord. G minor. This is in root position, so that's an easy one. CGB. FAC E. Okay? So here's what our chord progression sounds like as seventh chords. Okay? It's a little fuller. There's a little more sound in there, and there's a little more character to each chord, too. So should you always use seventh chords? No. Don't always use seventh chords. You use seventh chords when you want that extra little amount of color to it, but there's nothing wrong with triads, okay? You can use just plain old triads, one, three, five all day long, and it'll sound fine. Seventh chords just, you know, more color. Okay, so let's talk about these four different kinds of seventh chords. And let's go one by one and work our way through them, they all have different kind of qualities and characteristics to them. 69. The Diatonic Chord Progression and 7ths: Okay, before we go over each one, let's start by just doing the diatomic re progression with sevenths. Okay? And that'll show us three of the four different types. Okay? So here's our triads. Okay. Now let's add the seventh. Okay. So now let's figure out what these are. So this first one what we started off with was a major chord, right? This is tonic, C major. So now we have a seventh on it, and that is a major seventh. So in this case, what we have is C major seven, okay? You can also notate this with a little triangle instead of the major seven. So sometimes you see C and then a little triangle, kind of like a little pyramid. That's another way. That's kind of an old school jazz way to notate it. But major seven works. You could also do this like that. So M, major, and then seven. I'm used to seeing this more, so it's a little easier for me. Okay, let's look at the second one. The second one is a minor chord, right? Two in our diatonic chord progression, two is minor. So D minor is what we have here. And then we also have a minor seventh. So here we would have a D minor seven. Lowercase M minus seven. Here we have three is a minor chord in our diatonic chord progression, and the seventh is minor also. So here we have an E minor seven. Let's put that one up there. Okay? Here we have major chord with a major seven. So same as the first one. This is going to be F major seven. Right there. Okay, now we get to this one. This is the weirdest one, okay? Not the weirdest one, actually. This is a strange case. So we're on the five here. One, two, three, four, five, right? So we're on the fifth chord. The fifth chord of the key has some magical power to it. Okay? In this case, we have a dominant seven chord. A dominant seven chord, we notate it like that, the letter and the number, G seven. And what a dominant chord is is it's a major triad and a minor seventh, okay? It only happens one place in the key in the diatonic cord progression, and it's on the five chord, okay? That helps this cord to be this super powerful cord that helps push us towards tonic, and that seventh supercharges that motion. It really wants us to push towards tonic. Okay? We'll look more at that when we look at dominant seven chords in just a few minutes. But for now, let's move on. The sixth. The six is going to be a minor chord with a minor seventh. So it's a minor seven. The seventh is a diminished chord with the seventh on it. In this case, a minor seventh. So we'll just call that diminished seven. And then we're back to our major seven chord. Let's go up there. And then do that. So C major seven. So those are all of our chords. So here, we've seen three of the four chords, a major seventh type, a minor seventh type, and the dominant type. The diminished is kind of its own thing. We won't go into diminished seventh chords too much because they have some weird, like, magical powers. We'll deal with those. If you really want to go into those in more detail, you should take my big huge music theory class. We're gonna leave those behind for now. The one we haven't had yet is the one where it's a minor triad with a major seventh. Just like the augmented chord, this one doesn't really happen naturally. It doesn't pop up in a diatonic chord progression. But it does exist and we just call it the psychochord because of its use in the movie psycho. More on that in just a second. Let's go through each one of these types and figure out really what it sounds like and what it's good at. First, the major seven chord. 70. Major 7th Chords: Alright, major seven chords. Major seven chords are the prettiest ord. They are just they just sound pretty and nice. It's like taking a major cord and turning it into, like, a super beautiful cord. Okay, listen. Right? That seventh just adds. It's actually adding dissonance. Like, it's adding a note that clashes with the root of the chord. The seventh and the root clash. But in just, like, the perfect way to make it just pretty and gorgeous. So, the major seventh chord is just, like, the most beautiful chord. It's just so it's pretty. It's gorgeous. So there you go. Okay. 71. Minor 7th Chords: Minor seven chords are also kind of nice sounding chords. I think a minor seven chords are like minor chords with this very slight step towards major because that minor seven makes them more pretty, more little bit more emotional almost. So if I want to turn this into a minor seventh chord, I'm going to turn into a minor triad, like that. So now I have C minor, and then I'm going to turn this into a minor seventh. Let's talk about this major and minor seventh business really quick. When we say a major seventh, we're talking about the distance, the interval between the root and the seventh, okay? A minor seventh will have a whole step to the octave. In other words, if we want to go to this C just above this B flat, it's going to take us a whole step to get there. So we could go B flat to B natural to C. Okay? That's a whole step, two half steps. A major seventh, though, is going to be one half step away from the octave. So F to E, if you go up one half step, you get to the root of the chord. So let's turn this into minor seventh, also. So listen to these. All right. It's just a It's a nice sound. It's more colorful than the normal minor triad. It's less abrasive than the minor triad to me. It's just something that I find more appealing than the regular minor triad. I don't know. Okay, let's look at dominant. 72. Dominant 7th Chords: Alright, the super important dominant seventh chord. So a dominant seventh chord is a major chord with a minor seventh. So these are both dominant chords. Now, the dominant chord only happens once it happens on the fifth scale degree. So when you go to the fifth scale degree and you build a seventh chord in key, you are going to get a dominant seventh chord. Now, these cords, more than anything else in the world, want to resolve to tonic, okay? Let me show you. Well, let's just hear two of them. You hear that kind of, like, grittiness that the seventh gives it? It's like a dissonance. It's a soft dissonance, but it gives the cord like a little bit of teeth. It's kind of interesting. But watch this. Let's take that cord, and let's resolve it, okay? So that cords a strong resolution. Okay. So now let's hear this and then it's resolution. Right? Like, that's how it sounds. You know how when you hear, like, you've heard some old, like, symphony, and at the end of it, it goes, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom. Like 1 million times for like an hour. It's just going like, boom, boom, boom. And usually the tympany is going like this. The tympany is going five, one, five, one, five, one, five, one. And everybody else in the orchestra is going 57, one, five, seven, one, 57, one, one, one, or whatever. That's what you're hearing when you hear that kind of thing. 571. So what chord is this? This is an F chord. The reason I chose F here is because this is a C seven. So what I have to think to find out how it resolves is I have to think, C seven is five in what key? Okay? It's not C because the seventh happens on the five. So I have to think, what is C seven the five of? And C seven is the five of F. If we are in the key of F and we count FGA B C, we get C seven. We would get C seven. Okay, so this one, we call it just the letter and the number, that always means a major triad with a minor seventh. That's what that means, okay? So another cool thing about seventh chords, this dominant seventh chord is that if you ever want to change keys, all you really have to do is hit this in the new key. So if we're like, in the key of C and I want to switch to the key of F, I just have to play five of F as a seventh chord, and then it's going to resolve to F, and then we're in the new key, right? So if I did this, let's just do that. Okay, here's a bunch of chords in C major, and then we're going to play C dominant chord and then we're going to resolve to F. And suddenly we'll be in the key of F. Right? And F sounds like tonic. It's like a really quick way to make something sound like tonic. So, there you go. The dominant seventh chord. 73. Blues and the Dominant 7th Chord: There's one more weird thing about dominant scorns that I want to point out, and that is the blues. If you've ever listened to the blues, um, The thing that makes the Blues sound like the Blues is the seventh chord. Let me show you. This is what a blues chart looks like sometimes. F seven, right? Dominant chord plays for a whole bunch of bars. These slashes mean just keep playing that one chord over and over. Then we go to B flat seven and then F seven, and then C seven, BFlat seven F seven. This called a 12 bar Blues. It's like the skeleton of every blues song you've ever heard. Are all seventh chords. None of them resolve correctly. This is, like, a gross misuse of music theory, but not really because it sounds cool and it's part of the genre. So the style of blues is to use a whole bunch of dominant seventh chords and not resolve any of them. That's what makes the blues sound like the blues. It's just the way it is. And it's cool, and I love it. 74. The "Psycho Chord": Okay, so there's one of these cords that we haven't talked about yet, and that's the just most unnatural one. So it would be a minor triad with a major seven, okay? It's just an ugly cord, to be honest. So let's listen. It doesn't happen really in any key. Does the diatonic chord progression never cranks this one out. Um, so we don't even have a real good name for it. We tend to just call it, like, the psychochord because maybe This is familiar. If we do that, maybe we turn it into a quarter note, copy the whole thing, do it a few times. That's not the right transposition of the ord, but it's basically from psycho. The movie, old movie. So it's called psychochord. It doesn't happen very often. You won't find it very often. But it's there if you want to make it. So the psychochord. Okay, up next, I got a worksheet for you to practice these, get them in your head, and then we're going to move on finally to minor keys. 75. The Minor Mode: All right. Let's talk about minor keys now. So everything we know about the major keys, the major scale, diaton and chord progression, all that stuff. I still works. It works the same. But there's a little bit different pattern, sort of, not entirely. It's kind of the same pattern shifted. We'll talk about that in a second. So a couple of things. First of all, we sometimes referred to major or minor as the mode of the music, so to speak. So, for example, you might say something is in C, and the mode it's in is major or minor. Now, if this sounds funny to you, it's because maybe you learned about what modes are already. There is a thing called mode where you get these really funky sounding scales, Dorian, Locrian, Mixolydian, Lydian, Aeolian, Ionian. These are like, you can think of these as different flavors of a key, okay? And major and minor are two of those flavors. So we're not going to get into the other modes in this course, because we're going to stay kind of basic here. But if you want to research the other modes, they're kind of fun. And supposedly, it used to be the case. So there are seven modes, and it used to be the case that all seven of them were in common usage. But over the years, two of them developed and turned into the ones that most music uses. And by over the years, I mean, like over centuries. There is one that was used far more than anything else. And so we just started calling that one the major mode because it's the mode that gets used the most. There was another one that got used a little bit less, so we called it the minor mode. It was not as big as the major mode, but it was still pretty popular. So it became the minor mode. And all the rest of them were more specialty. So let's start with the scale, okay? The minor scale. There are a few different ways to figure out the minor scale. We can figure out the new whole half pattern. We can figure out what we need to do to adjust the major scale to get to the minor scale. There's something called the parallel minor scale, and there's something called the relative minor scale. It's four ways of figuring out the notes in the minor scale. We're going to do all four in the next four videos because I want you just to understand how the two work together. Let's dive in and let's talk about how to turn the major scale into the minor scale first. 76. Finding Minor by Alterations to Major: Okay, so let's start with a major scale, and guess which one we're gonna start with. C major. You got it, because that's just what we do. Mm Alright, C major, how do we turn this into C minor? Now, let's think this through because you might know at least part of the answer already. When we looked at chords, how do we turn a major chord into a minor chord? We move the third of the cord down a half step, okay? So you can bet that the third of the scale going down a half step is also going to apply. So step number one, move that third down a half step. Okay? That gets us partially the way there. That gets us one third of the way there. Okay. The next thing we need to do is we're going to move the sixth down a half step. And then the third thing we're going to do is move the seventh down a half step. So three, six and seven go down a half step, and that gets us the minor scale. Cool. Easy, right? So the difference between the major and the minor scale is the third, the sixth, and the seventh are a half step lower in the minor scale. 77. Finding Minor by the Whole/Half Pattern: Alright, let's look at the whole half pattern. Now, if you remember our whole half pattern from the major scale, it's whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half, right? Um, let's do the same thing. It's a little different. So we're going to start off with a whole step between C and D. Then we're going to go right into a half step between D and E flat, right? Then we're going to go into a whole step between E flat and F, a whole step between F and G, a half step between G and A flat. A whole step between A flat and B flat and a whole step between B flat and C. Okay? So, interesting thing here. We still have two half steps, right? That still works. We still have whole steps and half steps and the same number of whole steps and half steps. They're just shuffled a little bit. It's very curious, isn't it? We'll look more at that in a minute. Hold on to that idea because we're going to shift now into relative scales and understanding what a relative scale is, and that pattern is going to come back, okay? Let's go on talk about relatives. 78. Finding Minor by the Relative Major: Okay, so every major scale has a cousin, a relative minor scale, okay? And and every minor scale has a relative major scale. Every minor scale is linked to a major scale and every major scale is linked to a minor scale, okay? They kind of go hand in hand. Do you remember way, way back when we were talking about key signatures? And I said, When we look at a key signature, it can tell us two possible keys. And so far, we've only really looked at the major key, but there's a minor key in there also, because the relative minor scale has the same exact notes, okay? Let me show you. Let's go back to let's keep this. Let's keep C minor up here. But let's look at another scale. Let's look at E flat major. Okay? E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat, C, D, E flat. Okay, E flat major. Okay. I want to get them all on the screen here. Look at the flats. E flat A flat, B flat, right? E flat, A flat, B flat. C, C. These start and end on a different place, but they are the exact same notes. F, G, A flat, B flat. Okay? All the notes here are the same. What's different Tonic, okay? That is the key to understanding this. Relative scales have the same notes, but different tonic, okay? That's what we need to. Okay. So and one of them will be major and one of them will be minor, always. So if I have C minor and I'm writing music in C minor, but I really start emphasizing E flat, well, it's going to start like E flat major pretty quick, okay? If I am an E flat major and I start emphasizing the pitch C, I'm going to start to build that into tonic, and it's going to start to sound like C minor, okay? So when it comes to finding the notes in the minor scale, one way is just to find the major scale and then figure out what the relative is. And in perfect honesty, this is what I do most of the time. If someone says, What are the notes in F minor, whatever, what I'm going to do in my head is quickly say the notes in A flat major because I know that's the relative. Cool. How do we figure out what the relative is? Simple pattern. Of course. Everything is a simple pattern. Let's go to our old friend C major. Okay? All right. So so if we are in a major key and we want to find the relative key, here's what we're going to do. We're gonna go to tonic of that key. We're gonna go up to the sixth right there. You can also go down three. To right there. You get the same spot. That's kind of what I do in my head. I go down three. So you're going to go down to the sixth or up to the six. It doesn't matter. That is your relative. So C major, if we treat this as tonic, we have A minor. Like, check it out. Let's go down here. Here's C major. And if I just say, This is the beginning and I say, A, B, C, D, E, F, G A. If I do my half steps and whole steps here, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. Okay? So the pattern still works. So, to that end, you could say the pattern is just shifted, right? Because this is C major. But if we just shift this pattern, we get this. Okay? In other words, let's look at this. Let's look at just the pattern. So here's the minor pattern, right? Whole, half, whole, whole hole, half whole, whole. Alright. And then here's the major pattern. Okay, that got weird. Okay, major patterns on the top. So look, whole whole, whole, half, right? They don't line up. But if I shift this to here, now they do. Wole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, this will circle around to here, whole, and then half, and then it starts over. Okay. So back to figuring it out. We in C major, you go up to the six and that's going to tell you what the relative minor is. If you're in a minor key, here's C minor, in order to find the relative major, go up to the third. E flat. That's why I knew E flat here is going to be the same notes. Okay? So as a way of doing this kind of quickly in your head, I always just think about thirds. So if I'm on a minor scale and trying to figure out the relative major, I go up a third. If I'm on a relative major, trying to figure out if I'm on a major and trying to figure out the relative minor, I go down a third, which is the same as going to the six. Cool. That will tell you. So basically, when you see a key signature for C major, like what we have here, there's nothing there that's C major, that it's also a minor. Okay? If we see a key signature for E flat major, that is also the key signature for C minor. So when you're trying to figure out what key something is and you look at the key signature, you kind of have to keep in mind that it might be two different things. So you look at the key signature, then you kind of scan through the music and you figure out what tonic is. And that will tell you if we're in the major or minor key. Okay? Relative minors, super helpful at figuring out all the notes that you might need to know. Now, there's another one, parallel minor. This one's way easier. So let's talk about it. 79. Finding Minor by the Parallel Major: Okay, the parallel minor scale. So before I say this, let me just say one more time, the relative minor scale means we have the same notes, but a different tonic. Okay? The parallel minor scale means we have different notes, but the same tonic. In other words, if I have here an E flat major scale, okay? The parallel minor is E flat, same tonic, E flat major scale, okay? That's basically what we did when we turned the C major into C minor. Those are parallel minors, okay? So there's no need to make this more complicated than it is. It's quite simple, right? Like, A minor, the relative major is A major, okay? B minor, the relative major is B major, right? It's just same tonic, different mode, or different notes. Okay? This one is not as useful, but it is musically, musically, you might say, I've got this cool melody going. I'm going to switch to the parallel minor here. That has a certain sound. And that can can help get you ideas. So, um, don't overthink it. It's just the same. It's a different scale, but the same root or tonic. 80. The 3 Types of Minor Scales: So the minor scale has a little wrinkle in it. It's got one little problem, and we have a couple of things that we do to adjust for it. Here's the problem. Let's look at a major scale again, really quick. So here's our E flat major scale. Remember that at the top of the major scale, there's a half step. Okay? That means this note, the seventh note of the scale is what's called the leading tone. I think we may have talked about this earlier. But basically, this note pushes to tonic. Really hard, right? If we stop on that note, it's really annoying. Right? You really want to hear that. That half step right there helps us establish tonic, okay? When we build triads, when we look at the diatonic chord progression, and we build our five chord, remember that 57 chord is the thing that really pushes to tonic. It has that leading tone in right? Because B flat D is going to be our next note in the triad or the seventh, and that is that seventh scale degree is in that five chord, okay? Keep that in mind. Now, if we look at a minor scale, we have a whole step at the top. So we don't get that big push to tonic, right, that the leading tone gives us this one is not as strong. So it makes establishing tonic a little bit harder. The other thing is that when we build our five chord, it's going to be minor because of that. So the five chord, we'll do the whole diatonic cord progression in a minute. But the five chord in a minor key is minor. And that causes some problems because it makes it harder to establish tonic. So we have some tricks to get around that. There are let's go to A minor scale. Let's just go right here. Look at A minor being the simplest minor scale. Okay, so there are three different flavors of minor scale. Now, this minor scale. This minor scale right here is called the natural minor scale, okay? It is the straight up vanilla minor scale. Nothing fancy about it. This is what we do. If something just says the minor scale, it's talking about the minor scale or the natural minor scale, okay? That's this one. But there's two variations on this. The first is what we call the harmonic minor scale. And in that scale, we raise the seventh tone, okay? Doing that fixes those problems. That makes it so our five chord is now major because now it's got E G sharp in it. So now the five chord is major, that helps it push tautnic and we have a leading tone that helps us push tautnic. However, it causes one weird problem in that that makes this interval F to G sharp in A minor, this interval is actually a minor third. It's not a whole step or half step. So it gives it this weird kind of sound. It's almost like this very stereotypical Eastern sound. Let's hear. That p. At the end, really does it. The other one is the melodic minor scale. In that, we smooth over this big interval, this minor third by raising the sixth also. Okay? So now we have whole step, whole step, half step. We basically have the top of this is the major scale, and the bottom of this is the minor scale. The only thing different between the minor scale, the helotic minor and the major scale is the third. If we want this to be a major scale, we just do that, and now it's in a major scale, nothing weird. But if we lower that down, it's now a minor scale, alotic minor scale. Okay? Now, to make things even weirder, even weirder. Typically, when we do the harmonic minor scale, the official rule is that we raise the six and seven going up, but when we're descending, when we're going down, we don't. We don't raise them when we're going down. That's so weird, right? Put a natural on here just for consistency. No, we don't need a natural here because of the bar line, but we can put one on it anyway just to be super clear. So, this is the melodic minor scale. We go up and we raise those. We take them back lower when we're descending. That's super weird. And that rule of descending and lowering it is so often not used that I think it's barely even a rule anymore. It's not even a rule. It's maybe a convention that doesn't get used in modern music at all. But let's hear. There you go. Very strange. So don't worry about the up and down thing. It's true, but it really doesn't get used in modern music. If you're analyzing Bach, you might encounter that. So those are our three flavors of minor scale. We'll look at those again when we do the diatonic chord progression in Minor in just a minute. For now, I want to go back to key signatures one more time and just kind of hit that home. 81. Key Signatures in Minor: Alright, let's go to a new line here. Let's put a random key signature on it. Um, Okay. Let's go on here. Okay, name me two keys that use that key signature. Okay? Easy enough. First, let's figure out the major. We know that the last sharp, we go up a half step, and that's D, D major. Cool. What's the other one? The other one, we're going to figure out. So what I'm going to do in my head is figure out the relative minor by going down a third. So that gets us to B minor. Now, I think there's a trick where if you take the last sharp and go down a whole step, you get to the relative minor. So C sharp gets us to B. Let's see if that always works. So this is the key signature of E major, which would be C sharp minor. So if you take that last one, you go down a whole step, you get to a C. C is already sharp, C sharp minor. So I guess that works. I never use that technique of figuring out a system of telling the flats and sharps of figuring out the minor based on the patterns of flats and sharps. I always just go to the relative in my head. But if it helps you, you could totally do figure out a key signature kind of workaround. Let's see what it is for flats. So for flats, I'm going to go to the second last flat, so A flat. So this is the key of A flat major or F minor. So I don't know how you figure out F minor here. Maybe the second flat and up. So that would require you have at least three flats. I don't know what the method is here. Maybe up a third from your last flat. Let's see. Does that work in, like, F? Up a third would be D. So this is the key of F major or D minor. So yeah, I guess that kind of works. So, you can do that if you like. I just like doing the relatives in my head. Okay, let's do a worksheet on this, just to practice. And then we'll do the diatonic core progressions in minor. 82. The Pattern: Okay, let's look at the diatonic core progression in minor. So let's go to a minor oops, let's fix our key signature first. Okay. That would make things sound a little funny. Okay, so I'm just gonna make a minor scale. Alright. So if we build our triads Okay. We get pretty high up in the ledger lines here, but that's okay. Okay. So if you remember our pattern from before, we had major, minor minor major, major diminished, minor, right? Um This is going to be similar but different. So minor, two is diminished diminished. Two, how crazy? And then three is major. Four is minor, five is minor because we're a natural minor. Six is major. Seven is major, and then the repeat is minor. So minor diminished, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor. Okay? Now, let's look really quick. So the whole pattern is major diminished, sorry, minor, diminished, major, minor minor, major, major, minor. Okay? There's the whole pattern. Let's stack that up against the major pattern. Okay, just to look at it. Okay? There's the two patterns. This is the major pattern, and this is the minor pattern for the diatonic core progression, okay? So, just like the half steps and whole steps, these do repeat. These are the same pattern just shifted, right? Let's line up the diminished, right? If we do that and then circle around with this stuff, like we put that here. Oops, we don't need to repeat that minor. Okay? Now, we can go like that. It's the same. Major, minor minor, major, major, minor diminished major, right? So the one prior to this would be major. So we could do that. It's the same pattern. It's just shifted, right? Cool. In fact, you can really kind of see the major here because of the diminished. Like, the diminished was on seven in the major key, right? So it leads to the tonic of major, and you can see that happening still here. It's just leading us to our relative major. So that's the pattern. The pattern is minor, diminished, major, minor, minor major, major. Minor. Okay, so let's see what happens to that pattern, once we start complicating things with the melodic minor, 83. The V Chord and the Leading Tone: Okay, so if we take our minor scale, and let's add the raised seventh to it. Okay, so that's going to be G. Okay? So if we raise that, this now becomes G sharp B, D. So G sharp B is a minor third, if you count half steps, and B to D is also a minor third. So that makes this one now diminished. But anytime you change a single note in a scale, and then you look at the diatonic core progression, it's going to affect it three places. So that's just one. Let's go here. Find the G there. So now this is going to be E G sharp, B. That is a major triad. So that's what we wanted, right? That's going to turn our five into a major five, which will help us with that five to one sonority that we want to help establish tonic. There's one other place we're going to find a G. It's right there. So here we have C, E, that's a major third, and e2g sharp is a major third. What does that make? Boom, our first augmented cord caught in the wild. So this is the only time that an augmented cord really shows up in the major or minor scale. It's when you adjust the minor scale with a raised leading toe. And that gets you that. So some people do sometimes is you can actually ignore this. You could go back to just a normal G natural there and a G natural here if you wanted. Making that major, but just leave the G sharp on the five, making basically just a major five chord in your diatonic chord progression. You can do that, and people do that. You have to watch out for, like, clashing between G sharp and G natural, so you have to be a little careful about the chord progression. But in modern music, when this is done, it's just to make the five major, really. So I wouldn't think of this as, like, a rule that you have to do or don't have to do. It's more of like a thing to experiment with if you're writing a chord progression or playing around and you're like, Hey, I wonder what that would sound like if I put a major five there instead of a minor five. Do it. That's all. Okay, one more thing on this. Let's look at seventh chords in minor. 84. 7th Chords in Minor: Okay, I took us back down to natural minor. Let's add seventh and see how these shake out. Now, we're really high. Fun fact, reading these high ledger lines is not something that everybody can do really well. It takes some practice, actually. I got kind of good at high ledger lines because when I was in, like, high school or something, yeah, when I was in high school, I wanted to play guitar in the pep band, like, the band that plays like in the stands during, like, basketball games and stuff. I was already in the marching band as a percussionist, but I wanted to play guitar in the pep band. But there were no guitar parts. So what I did is I learned how to read flute parts, and flute parts are way up high on those ledger lines. So I got good at reading those ledger lines. But it took a lot of practice. So let's see what we have here. We have a minor chord with a minor seventh. So let's call that a minor seven. Here we have a diminished chord with a minor seventh. So let's just call that a B diminished chord. Here we have major with seventh. So let's call that a C major seven. Here we have A minor chord with a minor seventh. So let's call that D minor seven. Here we have another minor chord with a minor seventh. Whoops. Let's call that E minor seven. Here we have another major seventh chord. That's F major seven. Here we have a G major seven. And here we have our tonic, A minor seven. Cool. So you'll see that our five turned out to be minor. If we wanted to make that major, it's not unheard of, that would give us back our dominant chord, right? Without making that major, we have no dominant chord in the minor key. So we often make that major just for funzies and to help us establish tonic. Cool. Alright, let's go back to the Circle of Fits and see what we can do with it now that we're in the land of the minor. 85. Minor Keys and the Circle of Fifths: Okay, let's go back to the circle of fifths. And you'll see that our relatives are actually built right into the circle of fis. They're right underneath it. So C major, relative is A minor. G major, relative is E minor. D major, relative is B minor. Like, all the way around. They're right there. Now, different diagrams of the circle of fis have different things on them, and they can have more details in this. Let's look at, like, an elaborate one. Okay, here's one that has even more stuff, but it's the same basic thing. C major underneath A minor, G major, E minor, D major B minor. Notice that the minor keys are lower case and the major keys are capital. This one is also showing us the key signatures for each one. So you can see here how as we move around the circle, we get one more accidental in the key signature. Here we have zero, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, we switch to flats, and then now we're going to go down five, four, three, two, one, back to zero. Okay? So different images of the circle of fifths show you different things, but they all basically show you what happens when you go up by a fifth, the relative minors and closely related keys. So let's talk about what our options are now for closely related keys. 86. New Options for Closely Related Keys: Okay, so if we're in the key of C major, we know that our options are these are our chords in our key, and we know how to borrow from closely related keys. So let's look at this from the perspective of a minor key now. So this shape is still the same. It's just that this is our tonic now, right? But our possible chords are still F, C and G major, D minor, A minor and E minor minor chords. We could borrow from et's say we want to borrow from the key of E minor or we could borrow from the key of G major. It doesn't matter. We could borrow from any of these any of these or these. So in the key of E minor, we could go here, let's do a different color. There we go. Okay. So in the key of E minor, if we want to borrow something we're in the key of A minor. We want to borrow something from E minor. We could do B minor, D major. Those are our new chords, or we could move farther. So the same rules apply with the circle of fifths, and even the same shape. We just look at a different spot for tonic. 87. Reading "All Too Well" by Taylor Swift: Alright, you can now read music. Let's look at a chart and tell what's going on with it, okay? So, All Too Well by Taylor Swift. We've already looked at this a little bit, and we've analyzed the chords, right? So here's what we can tell about this. We can tell that we're in C major, we're using a 1564 chord progression, very common chord progression. And those chords are CG, A minor F. You've got this fifth chord here. As we go farther into this song, we have more C. There's the lyrics. We're really just playing a fifth in the lower part. So we know we can tell a good amount about this song. If you are reasonably competent on any instrument, you'll be able to play most of this song now by understanding the harmony and the melody and things about it. Right, hooray. So whenever you find a lead sheet like this, which is like a simplified version of a score, you'll be able to play it. Let's look at another one. 88. Reading "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye: Alright, what's going on by Marvin Gay? We open on a big E major seven. We can play that E major seven through this whole intro. We know how to find the notes in an E major seven chord. We know what it means to be an E major seven chord. We get to the verse, we have another E major seven chord. We switch to a C sharp minor seven chord. We know how to find those notes. We also know that C Sharp minor is a good chord to switch to from E major, because it's in key, but also it's the relative minor. More E major seven, C sharp minus seven, and F sharp minor seven. That's going to be the two chord in E major. F sharp minor seven over B, that means there's a B in the base. When you see add 13 like that, that just means put a 13th in there. So you count all the way up to seven, and then eight will be the octave, and then the next note, the next note will be the ninth, and then the tenth and 11th and 12th and 13th. So you have to circle around on that again on the scale again. So let's talk a little bit about lead sheets, real books, fake books, these terms that you may have heard of before, because they're full of this kind of music, and there's so much that you can learn from all of this music by analyzing it. So let me show you what a real book looks like. 89. Real Books and Fake Books: Okay, this is a funny story, and you're probably not going to believe it at first, but this is 100% true. There's a book that exists out in the world. This is a little different now. It's been kind of modernized a little bit, but up until about ten years ago, this book was illegal. It was illegal for kind of a good reason. Um, the reason was that it was filled with music and none of it was paid for. Nobody got permission to include that music. Nobody paid for the copyrights. It was just all photocopied music put together. But it became so popular that everybody had a copy of this book. So you would go to a gig, and it was just assumed that you had that book filled with all the illegal music of the world, and well, not the illegal music. Filled with sheet music that was not legally copied. So you would go to a gig and someone would say, let's play this tune that's in that book, or they would just call it a page number sometimes. That book was called The real Book, okay? Because it was the real thing. It was, you know, the book that had all the real music in it. In order to get one of these books, you had to do you had to do a little bit of cloak and dagger kind of top secret stuff. I differed everywhere, but I remember when I got mine, I had to go into a specific music store. I had to go up to the counter. I had to tell them who sent me, and I think there was a password. So I had to say, Pat sent me to buy a real book, and I'm supposed to tell you this password of something. I don't remember what it was. And then the clerk would reach under the counter and pull out the book and sell it to you. This is that book. It's thick. It's big. It's got a ton of music in it. It does have a cover. Mine's been ripped off because I've been carrying this around for, like, 20 years. It's got just like 1 million jazz standards in it. That's as lead sheets. Let's see. Let me jump to a tune that we all might know. Okay, here's Heaven by Duke Ellington. Not everyone probably knows this tune, but, you know, they're all, like, handwritten. There was a recent podcast about the invention of this book, and I think on the podcast, they claimed that it was a bunch of Berkeley kids that put it all together and distributed it. It's been sort of legalized now. I think I don't know how and why I haven't been keeping up on it because I don't need to. I already have a copy. I don't need another copy. But I see it in record stores or I see it in music stores now, like, just on the shelf, just normally. So there's been some kind of legalizing of its maybe they've paid for the copyrights or whatever. I don't know. Um, but it's just filled with everything. Like Maiden Voyage by Herbie Hancock is what I just jumped to. So Keith Jarrett, Coltrane, More Coltrane, Frank Zappa. That's a fun one. Very difficult to read. 'Cause Frank Zappa music is very difficult to play. Yeah, it just goes on forever. So, real books are the real thing. You can also find what are called fake books. Fake books are not as good as the real book, but they're not bad. I have tons of fake books. Fake books are just big books of music. They're lead sheets like this. And you can so you might buy, like, a fake book filled with, like, Christmas music or a fake book filled with wedding music or whatever. I have all of those buried away in a box somewhere at this point. But those are just big books of music. So you can get those too, and they're handy for different things. So if you really want to do more of this, I would recommend go get this super legal book, not supposed to recommend you do illegal things in these classes, but I think there's a legal way to buy it now. Go get that and start analyzing. You know, start putting Roman numerals on chords, start figuring out the keys, start playing through it, and just start listening to those songs along with the scores. I'll help you out immensely. Okay. That being said, let's write another song. 90. Verse Chord Progression: Okay, let's write another song. Doing using the tools that we've just learned. So let's write a song in a minor key for sure this time. So I have set up here a piano and flute, just like what we did last time, just to give us a melody and harmony. So let's come up with a chore progression. Um, let's do the same kind of thing. So what key do we want to be in? It could be A minor, but let's do something a little more interesting. How about E minor? Okay, so let's start on a big E minor chord. Well, first, let's put a key signature down. I don't think we did that last time, but here's the key signature of E minor because the relative major of E minor is G major, and this is key signature for G. So let's put a big old E at the bottom here. And then let's do an E minor. You know, let's do something a little more interesting. Instead of whole notes here, let's do quarter notes, and I'm going to make a little riff here by doing an E minor and then inversions of it. Okay. This is all E minor, right? E minor, E minor, but I put the E on top, E minor, but I put the G on top, E minor, but I put the E on top. Okay? Nothing too fancy. Okay, so what are our notes in E minor or our chords in E minor? Let's look. So here's E minor. So let's go like this. Whoops. That's okay. Whoops. Okay, now it got a little bad. It's hard to draw with your mouse sometimes. It's hard for me to draw with my as sometimes. Okay. So here's what we've got. We can do CGD, A minor B minor E minor. C get weird and go outside to one of these other cords. But let's stay inside for now. So let's maybe do E minor let's go to an A minor first. That'll sound pretty nice. So I'll just go to an A and then I'll do the same thing up here where we'll go ACE, maybe I'll go down this time. Okay. Next, let's do maybe a D. Oops. D major. So that's going to be DFA. A Oops. Okay, and then one more chord. Let's see, we're on D. I want to get us back to E minor. So let's do B minor. And I could do this as major because it's the five, right? So this is where we could do it major. Let's do it as minor first and then we'll change it to major and see what we think. Okay. Whoops. I'm gonna go down here and go to B minor B and then we'll go B, D F sharp. Someone's gonna do another inversion of that down up. So let's go down. Okay. So let's listen to it, what we've got so far. Okay? We got sort of a sequence kind of happening here, a term that we don't need to concern ourselves with too much. Let's turn this B minor into B major. So we would do that with a D sharp. So everywhere there's a D, I need to raise it to a D sharp. See if we like that better. Oh, I kind of do like it better in this case. It's just got kind of a fun new groove. So let's keep it at that. Let's analyze what we've got here. So we have here E minor. And let's see, we did A minor. And then D major, and then E. No, sorry, B major. B major. Okay. Cool. Let's take that. We'll treat that as an intro. Maybe do a double bar line here and then put it again. We'll just do it twice. Sure. We could do if we wanted to do something fun, could do something a little different with this bassline. Just to kind of liven things up. So I'm just gonna create kind of a rhythm here. Do do. Let's tie that. Yeah, that's cool. So now I'll just use this for all of these. This is an A this is a D. And this is a B. Cool. Alright, let's hear our verse. Cool. Okay, let's put another double bar line right there. Let's call that good and go on to our chorus. 91. Chorus Chord Progression: Okay, I have kind of a different idea for the chorus. So let's figure out our chords first. So this E hoops it copied E minor all the way. Let's fix that really quick here. Now, for this section, let's go to whole notes again with our right hand. Now, this B really wants to push to E minor. So let's start our chorus on E minor. And then let's get outside of our key just a little bit. So E minor, we could go to D minor. We could go to F. We could go to F sharp minor. We could go to A. Let's do D minor. Now, you don't have to go outside every time. I realized on the chorus, this is the same thing we did on the last chorus. But, um, because this is what I like to do, but you don't have to do this every time. Alright, so we're gonna go to D minor. That's gonna require an accidental. Now, let's go to C major back in Key. Et's put another C on top, just for voice leading for all of these. Still, just the regular old triads. And then maybe B seven. So B, D sharp. F sharp, I need to change this D. Okay, BDF A. If I want this to be a seventh, I need BD sharp, F, and A. All right. Now, in the base, this is my big idea. I don't know if it's going to work, but lately, I've just been really fond of baselines that are just like chugging on the root. So we're going to go Eps but I want this. I just want solid A ths all the way through here. And then here, I just want D. Just solid just cooking. And then C. Stop jumping around on me. B. Okay? That's an interesting little line moving down. Okay? And, oh, let's label those chords real quick. So what we have here is E minor. And then D major. C major, and B seven. Cool. Alright, let's maybe do it twice. Oh, there's a siren going off. Don't worry. I'm okay. That siren you may have just heard is, like, the monthly tornado testing siren. It's fine. Hopefully, you can't hear it all that much, and it's not too distracting. Okay, let's hear our chorus. Okay. Not bad. Let's cheat on it a little bit. Watch this. This is a I'm gonna move my base note to the next chord just a little early. So I'll just give it a little bit of color. So we're making some non chord tones here. This one, maybe I'll just run up a scale, sort of. Alright. That should be good. I guess I'll do it here, too. Alright. So that should give it a little more character. Let's hear it now. Okay, that's cool. Now let's just copy my verse in again. And let's maybe do a double bar here just for fun. Why didn't you like that? Why? What's wrong with you? There we go. And then we'll do our verse again. Okay, maybe our verse twice, just for fun. Okay, so now we have the kind of very bare bones song. Let's do some melody stuff. 92. Verse Melody: Okay, let's find a melody in here. So our intro, we're going to leave without a melody, but then here we'll start to add one. So, let's see. We could really do anything we want here. We do have something a little more up tempo with this kind of motion happening in the bass. So let's go Just so right now I'm just doing kind of chord tones here. Maybe find a way to kind of mirror that first bar. A minor. Go down to E. Okay, then this note, let's go. Let's go up to F Sharp, and then G. Hey, so we're getting some non chord tones in here. So what we have right here is a non chord tone on a strong beat. That's something you don't really want to do. But I'm going to step off it really fast. So it should be okay. So we need to go to this. I'm gonna tie that. And then B. Mm. Okay, we'll tie that together. Ooh. Yeah, that's rather nice. Maybe you'll just copy that same thing again for our second half. But take this much down and octave. Yeah, that works just fine. Okay, let's hear. Neat. Sounds pretty fine. Alright, let's figure out our chorus. 93. Chorus Melody: Okay. Um, this chorus has this kind of line in it going E, D, C B. But I'm using that in the bass, so I don't really want to do it again in the in the melody. Mm. I could do, like, an ostinato thing again. Didn't I do an ostinato in the last one? I think I did. Um. Mm. I kind of want to just do this. Let's try it. I bet I wanted to change their. D sharp. And then let's go 16th notes. So I'm going to do a quick little scale run here, but I got to figure out which scale to use. So we're E minor, but we do have that D sharp in here. So I should just be able to run up E minor. C as natural as fine. D sharp. And then E. Let's do that and then we'll repeat this again. But we'll start it up. And maybe tie these notes together. Sure. Cool. Let's take those three. Put them there. Alright, and then let's just paste in that verse again, just for fun. That leads into that rather nicely. Maybe do it again. Okay. Now we've got our whole song. Let's listen to it, and then I'll bump it over and do some studio magic to it. Oh, it needs one more bar. Let's put maybe we'll put this on it just for a way to end it. We'll do that and then that. But we'll change that to a whole note there. Okay, now we have an ending. Cool. Okay, so let's do some studio magic and see if I can turn this into a nice sounding song with a little drums and guitar and stuff. I'll give you this file in case you want it in the next thing, and then we'll be back with the full song. Here we go. 94. Full Song: Okay, here's what I did. Um, you know, when I loaded this into Ableton, I just put the melody in strings, the right hand of the piano in, like, a nice sounding piano sample, and the left hand in an acoustic bass sample. I just really liked it. It's just a simple, almost chamber music kind of sound. So I left that alone, and then I duplicated it and did the whole thing again, where I added drums and a subtle kind of synth and some more strings. Um, it's really not much. I kept it pretty subtle and pretty down. But here it is. So one time through with just as written, a couple instrument improvements, and then in the end with drums and a little bit of synth. Here we go. 95. What have we Learned?: Okay, we are at the end of this giant thing. What have we learned? Well. We've learned the basics of reading music. That's where we started. And then we learned everything you need to know about music theory to get you to the point of writing music, listening to music differently, teaching music, studying music, or just being a curious person about music. Now, if you were in a college music theory class. So those courses, there are typically the way we typically do it, at least in the US with music theory is you take four semesters. Everyone who goes to school for music typically takes four semesters of music theory. It's just and it's your first four semesters in a music major situation. So where are you now? Now that you've taken this class, four semesters of music theory, you are maybe about halfway through the first semester. Maybe a little shy of halfway through the first semester. Those are the things you're going to learn, okay? So there is plenty more to learn. Like, you've learned this much about music theory. You've learned the very basics of how to understand music. You could go on more, right? There is so much more music theory. People get PhDs in music theory. They write books about music theory. Every day, I've written books about music theory. There's a lot of stuff to cover, right? So it goes on and on and on. But for someone who hates music theory, self described, I think we've done you right. I think you've really got to a point of a very basic but solid understanding of music theory. 96. What Comes Next?: So what comes next? If you want to continue your study of music theory, where should you go from here? Well, the kind of next big topic that I would do is jumping into modes. We talked about modes when we talked about minors. And so with modes, we would go on to do a little bit more in that direction. You can think of it as we have major, minor, and there are actually other ones like that. Um, so if you're looking for a book to read or anything like that, that's probably where I would start as the next thing to do. Now, having said that, I have a big old traditional music theory course that's here on this site, and it's giant. You could go to that and jump in on P three, maybe part four, and you'll be pretty comfortable. If you're still having a hard time reading music, maybe start at the beginning and go through it that way. Uh but if you're comfortable with reading music, start at three or four. That class goes all the way through all four semesters of college music theory. It's huge, monstrous. So that's what I would do next if you want to continue on. 97. Bonus Lecture: 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.