Music Theory for Songwriters Masterclass

1. Intro: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Music Theory for songwriters. My name is Jay. I am a music producer, composer, songwriter. I've had albums on the charts, and I've worked with major orchestras and everything in between. In this class, what I want to do is teach the basic principles of music theory from the perspective of a songwriter and for songwriters. So my goal here is to get you to be able to do two things. One is use music theory to come up with new and exciting ideas for if you're stuck in a rut. Two, use music theory to help you finish songs and write whole songs faster. By knowing just a handful of things from music theory, you'll be able to just kind of know what's going to sound good and make choices that way. Now, if you've been looking online for theory classes, you may have seen some of my other classes. I have tons of music theory classes. But this is the first one I'm making really focused on songwriters and how to use this to write songs. We're going to write two songs in this class. There's going to be seven worksheets for you to download, to practice with a whole bunch of stuff that I'm going to give you to help you practice, and maybe even some top secret tips and tricks. We'll see. Before we dive in, I want to show you one thing. This is the sheet music to Marvin Gaye, what's going on. Now, when I show you this, you might be able to understand some of what's on the page. Maybe a lot of what's on the page. Maybe none of what's on the page. And that's okay, because by the end of this class, you're going to understand everything that's on this page, and you're going to know how to take things away from this by saying, I really like the way this core progression goes. How can I do that in my own songs? That's what we're going to use music theory to figure out to make your songs better. Cool. Let's start in. 2. My Approach to Music Theory: Okay, so at the end of this class, you're going to be able to read a chart like this one on the screen. No problem. But that's not the only thing you're going to be able to do. Why do we want to be able to read a chart? What does that mean? Well, the actual skills that you're going to get from this class are not only to be able to read a chart like this, but also to take things away from a chart like this and to write your own charts like this. Here's what music theory means to me. It's not just being able to write down what we're doing. It's not just being able to do an analysis of what the song is about. Those things are all great. But what we care about in this class is being able to listen to a song and hear something and think, oh, That sounded cool. What was that? Then we can look at it. We can listen to it. We can analyze it, pick it apart and say, Ah, I see what they did. They went from atonic to a minor third and a major key. That's weird, but that might be a sound you really like. And if that is a sound you really like, by looking at it, by analyzing it, you'll be able to take that away and say, I want to use that kind of major key minor third transition. Right? You don't know what that means yet, and that's okay. The point is, we're going to be able to hear songs and take things away from them that we like. We'll be able to identify the things we like and put it into our own music. We'll also be able to hear things we like and put it into our own music. Now, another big benefit of music theory is generally writing faster. We might be in a given key, you might be writing a song and it's in C minor. Then you might say, Okay, what can I do here? Where can I go from here? I need a bridge. Well, you could fish around for chords and find stuff that works. Or you could use some very basic music theory and say, here are seven chords that are going to work right now. Let's pick three of them. Boom, bridge done. So knowing what's going to easily work in a song is a very handy thing to have in your songwriting toolkit. My big approach to music theory is this. The most important thing about music theory is that you should not let music theory be a bully. Okay? Here's what that means. I have students all the time that come to me and say, I wrote this thing. I like the way it sounds, but I need to change it because it doesn't really work with the rules of music theory. That is Major noo. If it sounds good to you, then it works. That's the most important thing. Music theory is a way to tell us why we like the way something sounds, not to tell us what sounds good and what doesn't sound good. So if you write something really weird and you're like, this doesn't make any sense with music theory. One of two things are happening. One is that it's a more complicated thing and you just don't have the advanced music theory skills to explain it. Or two, you did something weird and out of the key, and it sounds awesome. That happens all the time. So both of those things are perfectly fine. So don't let music theory push you around and tell you what sounds good and what doesn't. That's not the job of music theory. The job of music theory is to tell you why something sounds good or why something doesn't sound good. So that's the approach I take through all of this. Okay? We're going to learn how music theory works, and you'll be able to read and write charts on your own. So that's my philosophy. Now, let's talk briefly about the topics and what we're going to cover in this class and what we're not going to cover. 3. Tools You Will Need: Tools, what tools do you need to really learn how to do this stuff. And what tools am I going to be using? So there's a few things that I would like for you to have. Most of them are free or cheap. First, keep your instrument handy. We're going to look at a lot of stuff on piano and guitar. Anything we look at, you can do on piano or guitar, or saxophone, or clarinet, or whatever your instrument is. Just keep your instrument handy because I want you to hear these things. It's important that this is not just all theoretical. Play through these things as best you can. So that you actually know what they sound like. That is the most important thing. So the problem I have all the time when I teach theory classes in college is that we spend so much time talking about music. It can be hard to remind yourself to actually listen to what you're doing. So let's talk about some tools. Other than your instrument, I still believe in having some staff paper handy is a very good thing. So with staff paper, it's just normal paper, but with the five lines of a staff. Trust me. If you need to jot down an idea, it's much easier to do on staff paper than any other kind of paper. So get yourself some staff paper. In fact, I'm going to give you a template just like a blank piece of staff paper in the next little thing. And you can print out, you know, ten or 20 copies of that if you want, and then you've got some staff paper. This is what staff paper looks like. You have already scribbled some stuff on here, but it's just blank paper. Here's actual blank paper with the five lines on it. You'll be glad you have it. So in the next little bit, I'll give you a PDF that's just a blank piece of staff paper. Print out a couple copies of that and just keep it next to your desk or wherever you are watching this so that you can jot down things. I'll probably be more important later, but for now, just have it. Trust me. Maybe you'll never use it, but it's going to be free, so just do it. Other than that, one other piece of equipment and not equipment, software, piece of software. The on the screen, you're going to see me using some notation software to write things like this. Okay? And I'll be able to and the advantage of using software like this is that I can play it back. Hora. And so we can hear what we're doing. This is really important. This software, you can write whole you know pieces of music with it. These programs, there's a number of programs that do this. They are collectively called notation programs. They are not like a Daw. You wouldn't sequence music with these programs. They're very narrowly focused in making sheet music and letting us write sheet music. The cheapest of them is called MuseScore. That's what I'm using here. MuseScore is really inexpensive. I think it's free. However, MuseScore was free for a long time, and it's recently been of it's the opposite of open sourced. It's like un open sourced or whatever. So now some elements of it can cost money. I'm not really sure. But it's a solid program. It works great, and it's either free or very close to it. Note that I'm using it on a desktop, and they do have a tablet version that is decidedly not free. So if you're working on a tablet, I would not recommend you score. There's another program on a tablet called Notion, and there's a few others. So let me remind. If you're working on a MAC or a PC on a desktop or a laptop or any kind of traditional computer, Mu score is a great option. It's free or close to it. If you're working on a tablet, specifically an iPad, I think, notion, NOT ION is a great program, and there are a few others that are good too. If you're working on one of the other tablets, I'm not sure, but just search for notation program on your program and you'll find some good options. Be leery of Mu score on tablets. It's a different program entirely. Now, if you are also on a desktop, there are other programs that are a little more professional. Like, there are three, Finale, Sebelius, and Dico. Dorico is the new cool one, and that's the one I'm using for everything. All of my professional scores, I'm using Dico. You can use whichever you like. So any notation program will work. If you search around online and find a different notation program, it's going to work just fine. All you need to be able to do is input notes and play them back. What you'll see me using here on the screen is MuseScore, and I'll probably occasionally share MuseScore files with you, maybe. But the main worksheets and stuff are just going to be PDFs. So you don't have to worry about that. Use whatever program you want, but get something that you can put in notes and then hear them back. Okay? Okay. I think I explained that. I think I overplain that. But I just get a lot of messages when I teach theory from people saying, I bought us score on an iPad. It doesn't work the same. Now, can I use this program? Can I use that program? The answer is, yes, you can use whatever program you want, as long as it lets you put in notes and play a Peck. Cool. Okay. So here comes that staff paper download, and then we're moving on. 4. Do we need to read music?: Okay. Let's talk about reading music. Now, first of all, if you already know how to read music, you could skip ahead because that's really all we're going to be doing in this chunk. However, having some however, brushing up on your reading music by watching all of the next handful of videos isn't going to hurt anyone. So I would still recommend it. But if you want to, you could skip ahead to the chromatic and diatonic scales section. That's going to be the first section where we're kind of done talking about reading music. Okay, for the rest of us, Do we need to know how to read music for this? Let's look at what's going on. What we really need to be able to do is read this. E Major seven. I need to be able to play in E major seven and know what that means. It's not just memorizing the chord shape or something like that. We need to know what notes are in there and there's a formula to figure it out. But the way we talk about that formula involves notes. So, we're not going to have to look at this kind of music and be able to just sight read it, right? Sight reading means like looking at the music once and just picking up an instrument, playing it on the spot, no practice, no preparation. We don't need to do that. It doesn't hurt. If you can do it, that's awesome. But what we might need to do is be able to say, okay, what note is that? We can count? There's a couple tricks we can do that I'll talk about in a minute. So we might, you know, need to look at something like this and say, Okay, that's a G sharp and that's a B. Okay? Now, how do we know that? There's a couple tricks I can show you that'll help you kind of count up to those different notes. But we're not going to need to be able to read this little melody here and be able to play it back. That's all fine. Now, a couple tips for learning to read music. If you do want to get really good at it, the only really real way to get good at reading music is to practice a lot. Read music every day. Get some sheet music, search around online for, like, a real book, a fake book. We'll actually talk about those kinds of books at the end of this class. But just find some music online. There's an infinite amount of stuff. And in fact, I'll direct you to one resource. This is through the website called mp.org. That's like a Internet archive of scores. Go there, download a bunch of stuff, and just practice reading it. Just practice saying the names, practice playing it on your instrument. I'm a guitar player. That's why I keep doing this. But whatever instrument you want is fine. Practice. It'll be really, really slow at first. The more you do it, you'll start to get a little bit quicker, and then a little bit quicker, and eventually, they'll be kind of sight reading stuff. But it takes a lot of practice. So for our purposes here, what I want to be able to do is just have you know your way around a score and be able to identify some notes and some rhythms, okay? So, you could take everything we're about to learn and just practice it a whole bunch, and you'll get great at reading music. But you don't need to do that for our purposes now. Okay, so let's go into detail on this. We're going to start by talking about the elements of a score. In particular, a lead sheet. 5. The Elements of the Score: Okay, let's look at a score, and then let's talk about just what's on the page. Okay? Big picture here to start I'm looking at a piece of sheet music. Now sometimes we call this a score. I come from a classical music world, so I tend to say the word score. But there are actually three different names for what we're looking at here. We could call this a score, that's fine. We could also call this a lead sheet. A lead sheet means that it's a reduction of the music that's in the song. This is what's going on by Marvin Gay. The drums are not going to be notated here, the bass isn't going to be notated here. Exactly what the guitar is doing isn't going to be notated here. This is a version that shows us of a piano part, that's kind of a riff off the guitar part, the chords, and then the melody and the lyrics. That's kind of what a lead sheet is. We might also call this a chart, which would be the same thing as a lead sheet, just kind of different lingo. Always in these, you're going to get the title at the top. The authors over here. The tempo over here. This is moderately fast, quarter equals 100. 1,000 would be insane. If you're ever looking at a tempo indication like this and want a basic reference, quarter equals 60 would be one beat per second. A little slower than that probably. Quarter equals 120 would be two beats per second. Oh, actually have a second hand right here. But it's not consistent. Here's 60. No, I'm looking at the recording time in my software here, but it's like jumping around. It's not accurate for a second. But quarter equals 120 would be two beats per second. So pretty quick tempo. So 100 is moderately. Then what we have here is two staves at the beginning and three staves later on. Now the reason is we have this piano reduction part, and then the third stave enters when we get the vocal. Now, when you see two staves together like this, if they're attached, meaning there's lines like this that go through them. Then they're probably going to be a low part and a high part, and that's what this symbol means. This symbol means this is higher and this symbol means this is lower. We'll talk more about that in a minute. These are called clefs. And then we have our notes. So our vocal with the lyrics goes above. With these two staves, we also sometimes say right hand and left hand because this is clearly written as a sort of arrangement for piano. And on the piano, left hand is the low stuff, right hand is the high stuff. Doesn't always have to be, but that's typically how it works. At the bottom, we get a bunch of copyright information. So these chords tell us a lot of what we need to know. In fact, almost everything except for the lyrics and the melody Now, these lines here where it says one and then this line, and then two, this is called different endings. This is a first ending and a second ending. We'll talk more about that shortly. In a little bit, we're going to talk about form in scores and how it's outlined. Just hold on to that for now. For now, let's talk about the pitches. This is probably universally the hardest thing to wrap your head around. And that is knowing what these are called and where to put your fingers to make them. Let's talk about how that works in the next video. 6. Pitch Names: Alright, let's talk about pitch names. First thing, before we dive into pitch names, I want to just tell you really quickly that there's two different systems of naming the pitches. There's actually kind of more than two, but there's really The way that these two systems tend to be regional. That means where I live here in the United States, we use letter names. We name each note by a letter, C D E FG A B C. In other parts of the world, they use what's called a sofa system. Instead of C, they would call that note do, and then D would be, what I call E, would be M, et cetera. I do foss t do. Now, it gets a little more complicated with the second to last one, T. Some countries say T, some countries say Ta. There's a few different ones for that last note. It's a little strange. So I'm pointing this out just because you should do this in whatever your regional thing is. It's basically, I think the US, and I think also the UK, I think uses letters, which I will be using in this class. Most of the rest of Europe uses solfege. So I'll be using letter names. If that's difficult for you, just try to swap them out based on what is normal for your region as I say them. So when we're looking at notes, this is what we call them, okay? So I'm going to explain a few things here a little quickly. So just watch this video a few times if you like. That would be helpful for probably everyone. Okay, so this pitch is a C. This is called the staff. Remember, this is a clef and it shows us high stuff and low stuff. Here's what's really annoying. All the notes are different, depending on what symbol is here. But here's how we remember it. Here's the shorthand way. This is called the trouble clef. With this symbol, what we do is we have this circle right here. The circle spins around the pitch G. Right on that line is the pitch G. Use that as your grounding home base. If you want to just focus on this trouble clef staff at first, that's totally fine. After you get really good at trouble clef, come back and learn the base clef. The trick for the base clef here is the two dots hover around F. This line, if we go all the way up to here is the pitch F. Now, here's one important thing to keep in mind about the two different clefts. This pitch C at the bottom of the trouble clef is the same pitch as the pitch C at the top of base clef. These two notes are exactly the same pitch. The bottom of this one and the top of that one. Okay. From here, we go up doing line space line space. This first C is underneath the staff, so it has what's called a ledger line going through it. We use ledger lines when we go above or below the staff to help us see where we are so that we don't have notes just floating out of nowhere. You can see one above the staff here and above the staff here. So below the staff here, we have C, and then it's going to go space. So in between two lines, it's going to be D, and then on the space, E between two lines, F on the line G, A, B. And then it starts over. Okay okay? We'll talk more about the starting over thing in the next video. But we only go up to G in the Alphabet. So it goes. We usually start on the pitch C because C is just a universal starting point. You would think it would be A, but it's not. It's C. It's weird. Just roll with that. That'll make sense when we start looking at scales and stuff. But we typically count from C, but it depends on what we're doing. C comes again here, and then we keep going up. Again, we have C another D, both this and this are D, E FG A. Now, there's a couple of tricks that can help you memorize this if you want to. The first, I would say is get a good grounding point. This G on the second to last second to bottom line is a good grounding point. C in the middle is also a good grounding point. Because if you remember this G, and you see this note, and you're trying to figure out what that note is, you can say, well, I know this is G, then you can say G, A, B, and you can count your way through the Alphabet up to B and figure out the notes around that one. Another thing you can do is come up with a little mnemonic to remember the lines and the spaces. The spaces are actually pretty easy. If we start here, and we go F, and we look at the next space, A, the next space, C, and the next space, E, spells the word face. You can keep going and add G and D if you want, but that doesn't spell the word face. So stick to the word face. You could do lines with E, G, B, D F. That doesn't spell a word, but you could come up with something like every good boy deserves fudge is a common one. Things like that. So you can find a couple of those that'll help. Now, the notes are all different on the base clef, but focus on the trouble cleft for now. I'll remind you that we need to learn the base clef once we get down to it. Okay, those are pitches. Now let's talk a little bit about why pitches repeat. 7. Octaves: Let's go back to real world example. Here is Marvin Gay. What's going on? What pitch is this circle right there? Se our trouble clef here and it's got that hoop. So that's G. And now we can count up what pitch is this? Well, if this is G, there's a space in between, G, that space is going to be just the next letter in the Alphabet, A, and then, well, I guess you have to cycle around after G. But it's A. And then after A comes P. So this note is B. Cool. Okay, so let me explain the octaves. Okay, so notes have different registers, so to speak, and we call those octaves. So here is C in a lower octave than this C, which is a higher octave. Now, there are other Cs even higher and other Cs even lower. Here is the same C as that first one. That's the same note, but here is a C even lower right here, okay? So when all of the notes, there are seven different notes, and we have them all over the keyboard. They repeat all the time. And what that means is that when they repeat, they sound really good together. Let's go to Musco. Okay, let's take these notes. So the notes we have here are C, D, E and F, and let's play them here in octave higher. I'm just going to move them up. Now, these are the same notes, C, D, E and F, but an octave higher. So just listen to these notes and then those notes. It sounds almost the same except one is higher. Let's hear those notes at the same time. Okay, now here are those notes at the same time. Right? They just sound really good together. So if you're writing a song and you're like, How can I? What are some other notes I can do? Here's music theory Lesson number one for songwriters. Add an ctaive. It's always going to sound good to add an ctive. You can add an ctive up or down. So if you know you're singing C F G, then you can always go up an octave, CE CFG, or go down an octave, CFG. That's going to sound good 10,000% of the time. Those are called octaves. Okay? You can think of the word octave as meaning different registers. If something is in a higher octaive, it's a higher register, lower octive, a lower register. Now, so far, that's all relative to where we are, but there are ways of keeping track of where we are. We use octaive numbers, and you'll see those in different things. So C, this is, I believe, C five, although I always get them confused. It doesn't because I very rarely need to know this. But it does happen. C five, D five, E five, F five. And then this would be C six because it's the next octave higher. We can go all the way down to C zero. Even some pianos go down to C negative one, even negative two. But each octave has a number. The lower the number, the lower the note. 8. Worksheets!: Okay. Now, I'm making a bunch of worksheets for this class to help you follow along. Now, as you may or may not know, I have hundreds of online classes, and I have a huge music theory curriculum. And in that huge music theory curriculum, I've made a bunch of worksheets. And that seemed to be really popular and great for people learning music theory. I heard from a lot of people that they really like the worksheets. So I'm going to put them in this class two slightly altered for our topic here. To be kind of tailored towards songwriters. So, you don't have to do them? There's no grade for this class, right? You can do whatever you want. But people have found them really healthy. So let me just tell you about the first one. I'm not going to talk about all the worksheets as they come, but the first one is up next. So for each worksheet, it's going to be a PDF file, so you can't just download it into your, notation program. But you can play it. Listen to it, try to play it. You can recreate it in your notation program if you want. But my idea was that people would either print these out and do them or just do them on their screen with some writer or whatever. So in this first one, I'm going to ask you to identify some pitches, practice that. And then in all of the worksheets, I'll give you the answers at the bottom. So don't zip to the bottom until you've at least tried it once, and you want to double check to see how you did. Okay? So worksheet number one is coming up next. And then we're going to move on to go in more detail about how pitch notation works and how to identify pitches. 9. Languages: Okay, let's talk about how we notate time in music, because that can be a little bit more complicated than pitches. When we talk about time, what we're looking at is all of these shapes and symbols around here. The little dot is what tells us the pitch that we're on. But the line coming up off of it tells us the rhythm to play. So this little dot tells us something about the rhythm. This beam at the top tells us something about the rhythm. This extra little thing here tells us something about the rhythm. This little smiley face here tells us something about the rhythm. So all of those things go in to tell us how we should play the notes, what speed, what order, what pattern, what rhythm. And before we get into this too much, and I want to just say one more thing about language because there is another language issue here. Again, there are two systems of putting names on all this stuff. In the US and other places around the world, we say, talk about divisions of the beat. We're talking about like slices of a Pi. We talk about whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes, chopping it in half every time. That's the way it's done here in the US, and that's the way I will be doing it in this class. You might be from a part of the world that uses this other system where they talk about quavers and semiquavers and semi demi quavers, I don't know if that's a thing. That's a different system of naming things. I think a quaver is what we call a quarter note, if I remember, right. So just know that that is another system. The system I'm going to be using is the quarter note eighth note half note system because that's common for where I live. Okay. So just look it up, look up how you call different things in your country, and you'll get the answer. In this case, it's really, as far as I know, really just those two systems. Okay. With that being said, let's go on and let's talk about divisions of the B. 10. Rhythmic Divisions: Okay, let's leave what's going on for just a minute, and let's look at this graphic. So Here are the first four rhythms that we talk about. H notes, half notes, quarter notes and eighth notes. Now, these four things all take up the same amount of time in this graphic. In other words, one whole note is the same amount of time as two half notes, is the same amount of time as four quarter notes, is the same amount of time as eight eighth notes. You'll be able to see these different kinds of things in any music, and there might be more, there might be 16th notes and things like that. So, listening to any music in the world. Imagine that the quarter note, this one. This is what you hear as the main pulse of the music. So you hear Let's use an example here. Okay, so what you're going to hear is a piece of my music. Okay? This is mine. Nobody sue me for copyright stuff. This is a piece of music I wrote. Okay. So, we're first thing we have to do is identify the beat, like, what is the thing you're going to dance to, right where your feet walk, ok? Here's the B. And I'm going to count a four here, one, two, three, four, because we're in a kind of music that has a pattern of four notes. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, two Okay. Cool. So we'll talk more about that groups of four notes in a minute when we get into time signatures. For now, just know that what we were doing, we were looking at quarter notes there. If that was a quarter note, two of those together are going to be a half note. Let's count a half note. Let's go back to the beginning. Here's our beat. Half note, half note, half note, half note, half note, half note, half note, half note. Now, let's do a whole note. That's going to be four quarter notes or two half notes. One, two, three, four, one, whole note, Hole note. Holl note. He. H note. Cool. Now let's do eighth notes. This is going to be hard because it's actually fast tune. There's going to be two eighth notes for every quarter note. Let's try. I is actually going to be a mess. One, two quarter notes, one and two, and three, and four, and one and two, and three and four and Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Okay. You get the point. Okay? So very basic divisions of the beat. We can slice eighth notes even more and get 16th notes. Now, if you go back to Marvin Gay, let's look at right here. Here, these four notes in the base part, These are eighth notes. When we have two eighth notes together, we beam them together. It's like the little flags that we saw here. These little things coming off of it are called a flag. When there's two flags right next to each other, they reach out and hold hands, and they become a beam. So these two notes are eighth notes. And when there's four together, sometimes they become one big unit. These four eighth notes, how many quarter notes are they taking up? The answer to that is true, no matter what music you're looking at? Four eighth notes take up two quarter notes. Okay, which takes up one half note. Alright. Let's look at another chart here. There's a lot of different kinds of charts that show all of the same stuff. But of course, all of them are really grainy and blottery. Okay, so let's look at this one. Let's start at the bottom. So a whole note looks like that. This is what a whole rests looks like. We'll come back to rests in a minute. So just hang onto that for a minute. How many beats does it get? Four? How many eighth notes does it get? Eight, and how many 16th notes does it get 16? If we look at a half note here, half note gets two beats, four eighths and eight 16th notes. A quarter note gets one beat, two eighth notes and four 16th notes. There's an eighth note, half one and two, and then a 16th note is one layer deeper. It gets a quarter of a quarter note a half of an eighth note and one 16th note. I skipped over now these dots because these dots complicate things a little bit more. Let's talk about what dots mean in a new video. 11. Dots: Okay. When we add dots to something, that tends to be where people start to get really frustrated with this. So let me just remind you. You don't have to be really good at this. And actually, reading rhythms is probably something you won't need to do all the time. It's a great skill to have, though, when you should be able to read rhythms. So I want to explain it to you. But if you're not just mastering this right away, don't worry about it. It takes a lot of practice to get this right, even for the best of us. It took me a long time to learn how to read music. Don't stress out about it, but I do want to explain how it works. Okay, so when we have a dot on a rhythm, what that means is we had half of the rhythm half the duration back to it. If a quarter note is one beat, a dotted quarter note is 1.5 beats. Is that make sense? The reason is we take half of the value of it, which is going to be half a beat, and then we add it to the original, 1.5. A dot always makes things longer. Dots don't make things shorter. Okay. If we took a half note, and we said, put a dot on a half note. So a half note means two quarter notes, which is our beat usually. If we put a dot on it, it's going to be three quarter notes, because we're going to take half of the half note, and that means one beat, and then we're going to add it to the original half note, which is two beats, so now we get three beats. And you can do that with anything. If you do it with an eighth note, a dotted eighth note is going to be three quarters of a beat because a half of a half note would be a 16th note. So a 16th note added to an eighth note is going to be basically three 16th notes or three quarters of a beat. It's a little like weird. You can see them in practice. They do happen everywhere. Like right here, let's see if we can find a simpler one. Maybe right here. So what we have here is a 16th note and then a dotted eighth note. So a dotted eighth note is three 16th notes. Make sense. These two things together make up four 16th notes, and that's important because it makes up one beat. We tend to group things whenever possible by a beat. These two things are together, that means they make up a beat. These two things are together, they make up a beat two eighth notes equals one quarter note or one beat. This is a 16th note rest with a dotted eighth note. So that means three 16th notes and one 16th note makes one whole quarter note. Okay Let's see. Let's do one more. How about here? Eighth note and two 16th notes, all connected together. So an eighth note is half a beat, and 16th note is a quarter of a beat, but we have two of them, so that's half a beat plus the eighth note half of the beat that makes one whole beat. We don't always group things in terms of making up one beat, but the rule and notation is that you try to. Whenever you can, you group things according to a full beat. Next, let's talk about these things, which are rests. 12. Rests: Okay. Let's look at this chart now. Rests mean the same thing as a note, except with a rest, you're just going to be silent for that amount of time. But the way notation works is that we have to fill all the measures all the time. They have to be full or else they're wrong. So we need to fill empty space in the measure with rests. That's how we know everything is the way it's supposed to be. So every rhythmic value has a rest. A whole note rest looks like that. A half note rest, looks like that. Quarter note rest looks like that. I like the weirdest hardest thing to draw in the world. I just make a squiggle when I'm doing it by hand. An eighth note rest looks like that, 16th note rest looks like that. So Here is a quarter note rest and a 16th note rest. Here's an eighth note rest with a dot on it because dots can have rests, rests can have dots two backwards. Rests can have dots. So this rest is going to say rest f three 16th notes, because an eighth note is two 16th notes, and then the dot is one, so that means 3/16 of rest. Here's a whole rest. This means rest for this whole bar. You might say, well, what is this stuff down here doing? This is for a different verse. It's written in tiny notes and tiny rests. That's basically for something that comes later. Here's a whole rest with nothing in it. No quarter rests. Cool. Go back to this idea that the whole bar needs to be full. Let's look at this bar. We have a quarter note. We have two eighth or half notes that makes another quarter note. We have two beats at this point. Here we have an eighth note, sorry, a 16th note and a dotted eighth note, that makes one beat. Now we have three beats, and we have a full quarter rest. That makes four beats. We have four beats in this measure. Everything is full. That means that this measure and the measure is the beginning to here. Each measure is just walled off by this, which is called a bar line. Each measure has four beats in it, but that's not universally true. All measures don't have four beats. It depends on what we call the time signature up here. Let's talk about how time signatures work. 13. Time Signatures: Okay, for this, let's go back to Mu score. What we have here is a time signature that shows 44. A four on the top and a four on the bottom. Time signatures are always going to have two numbers. Here's what they mean. The one on the top, the number on the top tells us how many beats go in a measure. Each one of these is a measure. The four at the top says, there are four beats per measure. Great, easy enough. That's what we just counted out. There were four beats per measure, four quarter notes, but four beats per measure. Bottom number of the little fraction here tells us what is a beat. This is the one that's a little harder to figure out. So Top number, how many beats per measure? Bottom number. What is a beat? So let's focus on the bottom number a little bit. So the bottom number in this case, is telling us four, which means quarter note. You have to make a weird little leap there. Four means quarter note. Quarter note is the beat. That's not always true. You can have something else be the beat. Ann eighth note. Let's switch our time signature. Let's put that there. We have four quarter notes in a 44 bar. But if we switch to something like whoops, 68. That looks like that. Now what do we have? We have six, there will be six beats per measure, and what gets the beat, it's the eighth note. That means we can have six of these per measure, okay? That's a very different feel, okay? A four, four feel is one, two, three, four. You know, a dance tune or really most music is in 44, actually. 68 is one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. Think about old sailor songs. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. Things for other than sailor songs. But we can have other things like let's do 34. Take a guess, what we can fit in the 34 bar. If you guessed three quarter notes, you would be right because three beats in the bar and quarter note gets the beat. You can really put together any combination you want. There are such things as time signatures where the bottom number is not four or eight. They can be other weird numbers. That makes things difficult when you do that. It's very rare that you'll see that. Most of the denominator numbers are or eight. Let's look at this one. Here's 54. We can put five quarter notes in that bar because it's 54. The time signature, I should remind you point out, can change all the time. It's possible. Often in pop music, the time signature doesn't change very often. But in other types of music like progressive music, prog, stuff like that, changes all the time. Now, I want to point out one important thing here. Let's go let's go back to a measure of 34. Now, because we're in the measure of 34, that means that, yes, we can fit three quarter notes, but it also means we can do whatever we want in this bar. It doesn't have to be three quarter notes. It could be a quarter note two eighth notes. And four 16th notes. All of that adds up to three quarter notes, which is what we need for this measure. So don't think that because we're in 44 that you can only put four quarter notes in it. You can put whatever rhythms you want in the bar. They just have to add up to four quarter notes, and don't forget rests go in there too. This is still correct, because we have three quarter notes and one quarter note rests, that adds up to four quarter notes. So watch the time signature. In what's going on, it's 44, because most pop songs are in 44, some are in 68. What's a good example of a song in 68. A really good example of a song in 68 would be like we are the champions by Queen. I'll clap the 68 part. I'll clap one, two, three, four, five, six, one. We are the champions away. Boom. Oops. We keep on fighting. Boom, boom, boom, goes on like that. We have two more wrinkles to add to how this all works, and they are ties and triplets. Let's talk about ties first. 14. Ties: Okay. One thing you might have noticed is that when when we're working in a meter, We're always stuck with these bar lines. Like, I could be doing something in 44 or any time signature, and I always have to do what the bar line makes me do because there needs to be there's no way for a rhythmic value to carry over a bar line because what we have to do is fill every bar with either notes or rests. On the next bar, it starts over. There is a way around that. The way around that is called a tie. Let's say I wanted this rhythm to go one, two, three, one, two, three, four, we wanted this note to hold all the way to here. What we would do is we would tie these two notes together, and that symbol looks like this. Now, when you see this, Here's how we would play that. We would play basically what I just saying. Bum bum bum bum, bum bum. We would not re attack this. You would hold this note. This is essentially now a half note. It is two quarter notes tied together. You play it like a half note that goes over a bar line. Okay. By tying two notes together, we extend the duration of the first one. We do not attack the second one. We do not play the second note. We keep holding it over. This is probably one of the biggest questions I get asked on this topic. When we're talking about rhythmic divisions, do you play the second note? You do not replay that second note. You continue holding this through there. Now, this tie can only happen between the same note. But you see them all the time. Look, right here, those are ties. Right here, those are ties, not over a bar line, but to extend the division of the beat. Here's a tie. Here's a tie. Here's a tie. It's not just for over a bar line. We use them all the time. But for this bar line, that he has to connect two of the same note. If you see something that looks like a tie and it's connecting two different notes, that is something different. That is something called a slur. It's a different. We'll talk about that later. What that's asking you to do is actually let the two notes run together a little bit way, the way you would like slur words together if you were drunk or something. But a tie is different. It'll only connect the same note to extend the rhythmic value of the first one. M. 15. Triplets: Okay. One more thing. What if we're in 44, let's say, and we want something that is faster like in eighth note. So we add in eighth note here. But maybe that's not quite right. My we need another note too. What I'm trying to get at is there's a thing called a triplet. What a triplet means is we're going to take usually, there's a couple of different ways of doing triplets. But most of the time, what it means is, we're going to take three notes and we're going to smash them in the space of two notes. That's going to make it's going to feel like a rushed eighth note. But here's what it looks like. Okay. So here's what it looks like. Usually, you get three notes. They'll be beamed together and they'll have a little three underneath of them. They don't have to be the same notes. They could be doing That? Sure. I can all change. So the way we would play this is it feels like actually rushed. So if this is the beat two, three, four, I'll play this whole bar. One, rest. Triple four, and one. Okay? So this is Bat one. This is beat two, triple, then the next downbeat. So this is like, one, two, three, one, and it's out. So triplets let you basically cheat in a way. We're going to smash a few different number of notes into a smaller space. You can have 16th note triplets, you can have quarter note triplets, you can have everything you want. I don't think we're going to encounter triplets a whole bunch, let's stress about it, but that's what they are. Here they are and what's going on? Here's a spot where they have a we're in 44, so we've got one big bar here, and this is a half note. So, that takes up two beats, and then we've got a triplet of quarter notes. So that's going to take up two quarter notes, and they're going to put three quarter notes in the space of two here. That's what they're doing. So three quarter notes in the space of two. So we get a bracket in this case because there's no beam on a quarter note, and notation that says three, that tells us it's a triplet, and to play it a little faster to squeeze all those in. That's what triplets are. Okay, let's talk about some ways you can practice this stuff. 16. Musictheory.net Exercises: Okay. Now, I want you to practice this stuff. The only way you're really going to learn this is if you practice it. And one of the hard things about practicing this is just knowing if you're right or wrong. This is where an online class makes is a little tricky for some of this stuff. So, do me a favor. I'm going to give you a web resource to use. Instead of a worksheet for this, we'll go back to worksheets. But for this particular case, let's go to a web resource. I don't have, This isn't like a sponsored thing. I don't get any money from these guys. It's fine. So music theory.net, and you're going to load up the site. It's going to look like it wants you to click this or this, but you don't have to. Just go up here and click Exercises. And then go to note identification. Okay? Next, I want you to do one more, very important thing. Go up to this little gear up here, and turn this accidentals to off. And that should be all we need to do. Just turn that off, and now you're going to focus on the middle row of notes here. So basically, it's going to give you a whole note, and we're going to say, what note is that? Let's say that's an A. And we're right. What note is that? It's an A also. What note is that? It's an F. It's not an F. It's actually Practice that way. There's not a good way here to practice rhythms, as much as I wish there were. So The best way I could advise you to practice rhythms might be to I have these ear training classes up on probably whatever site you're on. And the first one, I think there are four of them, and the first one is all about rhythms and identifying rhythms and writing down rhythms and things like that. So I would suggest listening to that, it has a whole bunch, like 100 or so, I think, practice things in it. So that would be a good place to practice rhythms. But practicing notes with this music theory.net is a great way to practice. It's a little more fun than one of my silly little worksheets. Next, let's go on to a couple symbols and conventions that we get in notated music, and then we're going to go on to actually doing some theory and writing some music with the stuff. Off we go. 17. Accidentals: Okay. In this next section, we're going to do a few different things. First, we need to tackle accidentals, which I'll explain in just a second. Then we're going to do some score symbols and conventions, things you'll find in a score. Now, before we get into all of that, let me just remind you again, you don't need to master this. We just need to understand kind of what we're looking at when we look at the page. It's not essential that you're able to sight read or anything like that, okay? I just We just need a very basic understanding about notated music. Okay, let's talk about accidentals. Accidentals are really just a fancy way to say, whenever there's a symbol on a note, like, that's a symbol. That's a symbol, and that's a symbol. It's usually one of those three symbols. So what we call those symbols, this one we call a flat. This one we call a sharp, and this one we call a natural. So I'm going to explain all of those in the next two videos, how they work. They basically correlate to the black keys on a piano. So if you're not familiar with a piano or a piano isn't your instrument, look at a piano for this. It's going to help you. You don't need to be able to play the piano. Just glance at a piano. It'll make a whole lot more sense if you're looking at a piano. Okay. With that, let's go forward and talk about sharps. 18. Sharps: Okay. Let's look at the piano really quick here. Okay. So we see in this piano, this is just the piano that's built into Muse score? We can play notes, and it's neat. So we see all of our Cs labeled. This is where the C is, the pitch C on the piano. C, C, C, C, C. So if we count up from C just with the Alphabet, C D E F G, A B C. Okay? Great. How do we get these notes? Oh. That's where accidentals come in. So let's go back to C. So let's say I wanted to play this note. Okay? I can call it a C sharp. Sharp means raise that note by a little bit, k? By the smallest amount possible, actually. And there's a fancy name for that smallest amount possible. That fancy name is a half step. So file that term away, half step and whole step, which would be to here. Those two things are going to be really important as we get into scales. So just hold on to that for a minute. We have C to C sharp, the way we would write that is just like this, except this is an octave too high. Let's go up here. I guess it's two octaves too high. C, that's that note. C sharp, which looks like that is that note. C to C sharp. Whenever you see a sharp on the note, you're going to go to whatever that node is without the sharp, and then you're going to play one half step higher. If I said G, This G. How would I play a G sharp? If this is G, a G sharp is going to be right here. How would I play an A sharp? This is A. If I want to play an A sharp, It's going to be that. It gets the symbol, and it gets and we play it right there. Now, the sharp symbol itself, it looks like a hash tag, right or a pound sign. It is technically, slightly different. Sometimes when we write, we just use like the number sign for that. But it's like in italic and skewed just a hair. At least or the horizontal lines are. So it's, like, slightly different, but we just use it. We just use a the number sign on our keyboard, when we have to write it. Now, if when we get to flats, it it gets a little trickier because that's a weirder symbol. So let's look at flats next. 19. Flats: Okay, flats. Flats work the same way, except opposite. So let's go to B. Here's a B. So what if I wanted to play this note, I would go to A B flat, is what that node would be. It would look like that. Now we have this funny symbol. Sometimes if we're just typing, we use a lowercase B for that, but it's not. It's its own little symbol, but a lower case B can work sometimes. Anyway, that's a flat symbol. That means you go to whatever node is here, and then this means go down a half step. Okay. So let's go to D. If I want to go to D flat, this is D, D flat is going to be there. It's going to be one half step down. It's going to look like that. Cool. Make sense. Now, you might be saying to yourself, now, wait a minute. D flat is a half step down from D that gets us there. But that's the same note we got to here, a half step up from C. Here's C, a half step up, gets us C sharp. A C sharp and D flat, the same. They are. So all of the black notes can have two possible names. They can have a flat or a sharp. So this note, we can call this note F sharp, or we can call this note G flat. Note, we can call G sharp or A flat. Okay. This note, we can call A sharp or B flat. Okay. This note, we can call C sharp or D flat. And this note, we can call D sharp or E flat. Now, why would you use one or the other? It has to do with the key we're in. If we're in a key that uses sharps, we're going to use sharps. If we're in a key that uses flats, we're going to use flats. And in some cases, we switch between them. So more on that when we get into keys, which will be very soon. Now, your next question might be, why do we do it this way? This seems really weird. Yeah, kind of is. There is a bunch of history behind it, where we had kind of seven notes. Actually, we had like two notes, and then that some monks would sing, and then they added three notes and four notes and five notes, and they would use their hand to say what they were. So then they said this note or this note or this note or this note. So we got this five line staff, and they said, Well, I want this note, but only a little bit higher, and then we got flats and sharps. The short answer is, why is it this way? The short answer to why it is this way is just history and convention, and it's been this way for, like, 500 years. Sorry. Okay, last question you might have is, what about these two and these two? Like, I can go to F sharp, but can I go to F flat? There's no black note there. You're right. So there isn't an F flat, nor is there an E sharp? And there isn't a B sharp or a C flat. Okay? Those are exceptions. Now. Um I'm going to tell you one thing just to file away for a rainy day, that in some more advanced music theory, we do use C flats and B sharps and E sharps and F flats. Those will come up again. They're what we sort of call theoretical keys. You don't need to worry about them until you get into, like, really advanced music theory. But to say that they purely don't exist is not actually true. So just file that away. Okay. Next, let's talk about how these work in printed music and what this weird little symbol is. 20. Accidental Behavior and Naturals: Okay, so when you see these things in notated music, here's how they work. Whenever you see a sharp or a flat, they stick around for the whole measure. So if I was to do this, whoops, let's look at just this 1 bar. Okay, what we're seeing in this bar right now is this is a C, just a normal C. And then now it turns into a C sharp. Now, for the rest of the measure, these are C sharps. Okay? So when you put an accidental on a note, it stays on that note for the whole measure. Once you cross a bar line, it turns it off. Okay? So think of the accidental as being like a switch. Okay? So it gets turned on here. So now it's on. My Cs now are all C sharps. Okay? The bar line will turn it off, okay? Now, what happens if I want like this note to be a normal C again. I can do that, but I need a different symbol. It's this symbol. This symbol is called natural. It means turn off the accidental. There's only one natural symbol and it works for sharps and flats. In this case, what we have is a normal C or C natural, is what we would call that. Then C sharp, back down to C natural. And now the bar line doesn't really need to turn anything off because we're back to a C natural. So in this bar, we have this is a C natural, A sharp, D flat, E C C. So these are on, but I don't have another A. If I did this, Now, this is an A sharp, this is also an A sharp. Because it's still within the same bar. If I want that to turn off, I need to put a natural sign on it. Make sense. This is a really weird thing and hard to get used to. But the rule of thumb is that when you see an accidental on something, it stays there for the whole measure. If you want to turn it off, you need a natural symbol. That leads to some things that look like this sometimes. A This, which is really hard to read. So we have C sharp. We're just going between those two notes. This is hard to read, and in this case, we might do this instead. See, this is much easier to read because now we're alternating between C and D flat, which will sound the same, and we have a fancy word for that, too. When something sounds the same but can be written two different ways because one way using sharps and one way using flats. That's called enharmonic. The two things are enharmonic. They are written differently, but they sound the same. Okay? Now, what you'll find in music theory is that the way we write something down matters. Okay? That tells us what the songwriter was thinking when they wrote it. Okay? Even when it comes to chords. If I wrote the chord as an E flat major chord or a D sharp major chord, those mean different things. So the way we write things down does matter, which is why this is all important. Cool. Okay, let's move on to a couple other things about looking at scores and lead sheets, and then we'll wrap this section up with another worksheet. Gar. 21. More Score Symbols: All right, let's go back to what's going on. Why are we using what's going on? I don't know because I saw the score, and I thought, that is an awesome song. So we'll use that as a basis for something. So when we look at a score like this or even a lead sheet, there's a bunch of symbols here. And almost all the symbol well, actually, all the symbols that you'll see on this page have some kind of meaning. Okay? In this video, I want to point out four different things. The first is a key signature. That's this. See all these sharps just hanging out right here. This is a very important thing called the key signature. What that tells us is a few things. It gives us a clue as to what key we are probably in because there's a pattern to these. We'll talk more about that when we get into keys. But when it comes to the notes, what it means is it's like an accidental that's always on. So when you see these at the beginning of a piece of music, it applies to the whole piece of music. So here there's a sharp on the line for F. That means all Fs in this whole piece are sharp. This is a F sharp. Here is a sharp on a C. That means all Cs in this whole piece are sharp unless they have a natural on them. Same thing, this is a G sharp, and this is a D sharp. So all of the Ds like this one, are sharp When you read a piece of music, what you need to do is you look at the key signature and then you just remember that and then you play the music. You have to just memorize the key signature really fast and know what what notes you're supposed to put sharps on. Now, it's not as random as that. There are patterns to it, so it makes it a little easier. You could have the same thing with flats. You'll have flats in a key signature. That's called the key signature, more on those later. Another thing is dynamics. I don't see any dynamics written in this. We don't often have a lot of dynamics in lead sheets. I don't see any. So let me find a different piece of music that's got some dynamics in it. Okay, here's a piece of music by me. This is a big solo piano piece. Dynamics are these things. So you see here, FF, they tell us the volume that we want to play. So F F means for TC mode, that means loud. Go pump, pump, pump, pump. Here it mean it says subido P. So P means piano, which means quiet. Subido means quick. So very quickly, get quiet. Here is a crescendo to meto Forte. So that means get louder slowly, the crescendo. That's why it's opening up. It's getting louder to meto Forte. Metso means like it means kind. So meto Forte, like Kind Forte, kind loud. L et's go somewhere else. We've got more dynamics. There's another crescendo to Forte, just pretty loud, Subdo Metso Forte. This is an ugly piece sometimes because it's packed with stuff. PP is Pi, very quiet. All of these are just dynamics, crescendo up to for Timo, three Ps. The more ps you have the quieter and the more fs you have the louder. T Ps means super quiet. The F would mean. That's what dynamics are. There any indication about the volume and it changes all the time for music. Then last repeats. This symbol here, this says repeat. What this is telling us to do is play from the beginning from here, and then go to here. When we get to here, we're supposed to just remember this repeat symbol was here. Then we're going to play, we're going to keep playing until we see another one. Right here. When we get to here, we have to note this first ending bit. This says play all the way to here, and then this symbol tells us jump back to the other one. Now we jump back up here. To this spot. We come back here and we do it all again. But this time, we have a second ending. From right here, we're going to not play this a second time. We're going to jump right to here where it says two, which is going to get us past the repeat, and then we keep going from there. Then we go down here. Keep going, keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Now we have another indication of what to do. This is cut off, but it should say DS Coda. What that means, that's giving us more instructions on what order to play all this stuff in. When we say C DS CODA, that means jump back to the beginning and look for the CODA symbol. The CODA symbol is this target thing. Once we see the COD symbol, it says, jump to this section called the CODA. We're going to jump back to the beginning. Going to go back here and we're going to play, we're going to play. I said, take the second ending. We're going to skip this, and we're going to go right to here, second ending. I'll show you where it said, take the second ending in just second. Then we're going to keep playing all the way through right there to Coda. At this spot right here. We're going to jump down to here Coda. Se right here, it says DSL Coda, take second ending. Now we're in the Coda. We jump to here. Here's another repeat symbol. We're just going to file that away for now. We're going to go all the way down and then here, we're going to jump back up to that repeat symbol up here, and we're going to do it again. And here it says repeat it probably says repeat and fade, but I got cut off. You're just going to repeat that over and over and then it's going to fade out. You need to come up with your own. That's what the recording does. You need to come up with your own ending. The important things in a score when it comes to the symbols in a score. We'll work more on those when we focus on reading a lead sheet, which will be important for you to be able to do. 22. Back to Musictheory.net: All right. Now, if you want more practice, I've got two things for you. First, let's go back to music theory.net. We're going to change one thing. So click on Exercises, and then note identification. Then go back into this little gear up here and turn accidentals on. Now, we're going to have different accidentals. So what note is this? This is funny because it just randomly automatically came up with one of those weird theoretical ones. This is an F flat that doesn't really exist, but does. So it would be right here. This one, just want to get some more accidentals in here. This would be A sharp. C Sharp. Cool. Alright. So play around with that if you want practice on notes. I wish this had a good rhythm practice practicer. But it doesn't. So I'm going to give you a worksheet after this that'll have a couple more things that you can use to practice if you want to practice notes and stuff. After that next worksheet, we're going to talk a little bit more about kind of lead sheets in general, and I'll give you access to, like, a whole bunch of music that you can use to practice with. And then we're going to get deeper into the real music theory stuff. All right. So here we go. 23. Places to find scores online for Practice: Okay. Okay. So we've talked about reading music. Now, like I've said a few times before, two things. Don't stress out about it. You're not going to need to be a genius at it to get through this course or even use music theory for songwriting. You just need to know the very basic principles. So now you do. Second thing, if you do want to get good at reading music, it takes a lot of practice. So you know the fundamental principles. There's really no shortcut to it. You got to practice. So for the next couple of videos, I just want to talk about practicing if you want to If you want to get good at this, I know that reading music freaks a lot of people out as it should, it can be hard to do. It took me a long time to learn how to read music well. But here's some stuff on practicing. First, where can you go just to find some scores and things to read? I think I mentioned this or this website earlier, but it's worth mentioning again, p.org. This is a site that just has an insane amount of classical music in it. Now, if you're not interested in classical music, that's fine. These are just great ways to practice reading. Let's go to I know composers here. Let's see. There's 1 million of them. Let's say These are just the As. How about Let's go to Mozart. Motart is great music for learning how to read because it's not too complicated, click the wrong thing. Wang Mozart. Here's an insane amount of stuff. Click one doesn't matter which one, performance, complete performance. These are recordings of the piece. Here are the scores. A complete score. This might be the handwritten one. You can get handwritten scores here too, which is really fun. They're going to ask you to make a donation. That's cool. We're going to wait 10 seconds and then we'll be able to look at it. Okay. Now we can click here to download. There it is. These handwritten scores are not the best example. They're fun to look at, though. This is what it looked like when Mozart wrote it. But let's go back. Let's do a typeset score. Looks like this one, probably. There we go. Okay. So So here's a bunch of notes. You can practice playing this and listening to it if you're interested. But you can also just read through this and practice saying the notes, figuring out what the notes are. Remember your landmarks, you know, G here, C here, whatever you choose to use, and then just count up and down. You're going to get good at saying the Alphabet backwards. At least the first couple, the first seven notes of it, letters of it. You can just look through here. There's an insane amount of stuff on this website. It's just a great resource for some music to practice reading with. 24. Tips for Practicing: Another tip for practicing, Let me go back to this Mozart score actually. One thing you can do, I'm going to tell you two things that are great ways to practice. The first is to play this stuff. If you have an instrument, if you're proficient on an instrument like piano or guitar or literally any instrument. Try to play this stuff. That's probably the best way to practice reading music. But if you're more interested in just the theory end of it and you just want to practice understanding where the notes are, you can write in the notes. What I would do is print this page out And then I would just write in C E, G, G sharp A, G natural F E D. Side note. Notice that I have said in the past, that the right hand or the top is the higher part in the bottom staff, when there's two staves together, is the lower part. But in this case, they both have a trouble clef. Okay? So just note that there are two trouble clefts here, which means the notes are the same. So these are trouble cleft notes. So, write them all in. Now, I have I wanted to pull this out and show you, but it's all packed away somewhere. But I have a book that when I was a kid, I bought a book of music from one of my heroes, a super guitar Shredder guy who's still kind of one of my heroes. Um, and I bought this book and I just remember on, car road trips, and everywhere we went when I was a kid. I brought this book along and I wrote in the notes, every single one of them. I still have this book with all the notes written in. If you're curious, it was the album Passion and warfare by the guitar Virtuoso Steve Vi. If you know that music, you know, it's a lot of notes. So I just wrote them in all day, all night. I just wrote them until I got good at it. By the end of the book, I could do it pretty quick. Um, I wouldn't recommend doing that to that kind of level of obsession. But just having some sheet music and writing in the notes. Figure out what they are, write them in, figure out what it is, write them in. The more you do that, the faster you'll get at it. So if that's helpful to you, give it a shot. Okay. Let's move on. 25. A Reminder About Why we are Doing this: Okay. Before we move forward from here, a quick reminder as to why? Why are we doing this? You signed up for a class that was music theory focused on songwriters. Why are we doing all this reading music stuff? Well. Remember our goal. Our goal is to be able to listen to a song, figure out what they're doing that we like, and then learn to apply that to our own songs. That's what music theory is all about. By that same token, we can listen to one of our own songs and say, Why do I not like that? What is that missing? Then we can look at it, look at the chords, and say, I see. I see what is going weird here. What is that sound that I don't like? Now, the only way to describe that sound is through notes and chords. Now, in case of songwriting, it's probably mostly chords, which we're going to get into right now. But it's very, very difficult to explain what we need to know about chords without being able to talk about the notes in the chord. In order for us to understand that, I need to show them to you on a staff so we can see those notes. So it's important that you know your way around the staff a little bit. You want to be really good at it. But that's why we're doing this, okay? So now, we're going to move into the theory stuff, okay? We're going to start by talking about scales. When we talk about scales, eventually, we're going to build on scales and start making chords, and eventually once we make chords, we're going to string chords together, and we're going to be writing songs that sound the way we want them to sound. Here we go into scales. 26. What are Scales, and why do we care?: Okay, onto the fun stuff. So we're done with the kind of basics of learning how to read music, and now we're going to get into the real music theory stuff. Okay? So let's start with scales. Now, you know, if you were a kid at some point, which presumably all of you were because that's how humans work, off to a great start, J. Okay, let's try that again. When you were a kid, if you took music lessons, you probably had to learn to play scales. All right? Like you were on piano, you learned how to do scales. You learned how to play scales. And you probably said, these are boring and dumb. Why do I care about them? And you would be right. But we do need to care about them for music theory. Actually, playing scales have a good purpose, but I won't go into that. But what scales do is they tell us all the notes in a key. We're going to get into keys in a minute, but the scale is basically just taking all the possible notes that we can use in a given key and laying them out in an order, one after another, going up or down. What that means is that if you take any note, if you're saying, I'm working on a song and it I'm on a G major chord. Okay? If you want to know all the notes that are going to work with that chord, play a G major scale. That's going to tell you all the possible notes that will work with that. U Now, there are other notes, too, but we'll get into those later. So while yes, scales can sometimes be boring, they do have a very important purpose. To get started on our discussion about scales, first, we need to define two words and learn how to use them, and those two words are chromatic and diatonic. Let's go to a new video and talk about what those two words mean. 27. Definitions: Chromatic and Diatonic: Okay. Chromatic and diatonic. Okay? Let's start with chromatic. Okay. So, when something is chromatic, it means using all the notes. Think about, Let's kind of dissect that word a little bit of chromatic chroma color, right? So, really, chromatic means all the colors. You'll actually find this a lot when we talk about music when we get deeper into some of the music theory stuff, that oftentimes, we don't really have great words in English to, talk about sound, and so we borrow from visual language to help us. So chromatic means all the colors, right? Now, let's look at a keyboard here, okay? So here's our keyboard. If we are in chromatic music, we're going to use all the notes. Okay? Chromatic music can be pretty narly sounding, and it's very rare. Some people do write music that is entirely chromatic. It sounds kind of like this. Two. It's very dissonant. It's dark. It was actually really popular after the end of World War two, composers came back and they had saw some very gruesome stuff in the war, and so they started a lot of them, started writing chromatic music because it conveyed that pain and gruesomness that they experienced a lot. So it's probably not what you're going to use. But chromatic means all the notes. That's not typically what we do though. What we usually do is we selectively use some notes, and we write music in keys. If we're writing something in a key, that means we're only using some of the notes. We're using notes that sound good together. Like Remember just a minute ago, I said, if you're playing a G major chord, and you want to know what notes are going to sound good with it, play G major scale. Now that G major scale is not all the notes. It is not a chromatic scale. It is a diatonic scale, meaning it is in a key. We are leaving some notes off, so we're just playing the notes that sound good with that G major scale or cord. So diatonic means a specific subset of notes that will sound pretty good. So most of the time, we're working with diatonic stuff. So if you want a simple way to remember these two things. Chromatic, all the notes, diatonic, a subset of notes. Diatonic in key. Diatonic means in a key. As we move forward, we're going to look at keys soon. Whenever we're working in a key, which in pop music is always, I think, I think it's safe to say always, we're going to be in a key. We are going to be diatonic. The two are opposite ends of a spectrum, chromatic and diatonic. 28. "Ordered Pitch Class Collections": Yeah. Let's go back to scales now and talk about what that means. When we talk about scales, there's a fancy word or phrase for scales. That's maybe useful for some of you. I think it's a little pretentious of a term. But it is ordered pitch class collections. That's Who cares what that means. But let's dissect it a little bit, because it might be helpful to us. Ordered pitch class collections. Ordered. They are in an order. They go from low to high, usually. A scale has an order to it. Pitch class is a specific thing, and it basically tells us that it's going to apply not just to a given pitch but all octaves of that pitch. So if I was to say the pitch C is in this scale, it means all the Cs. The low ones, the high ones, everything. No matter what octave I say or I show you, if it's a diatonic scale, a scale in a key, then it means all octaves of it. That's what pitch class really means. And then a collection in our ordered pitch class collection. Collection is a group of notes, right? So ordered pitch class collections, fancy way to say a scale. Okay? So let's look at one. So if I make a scale here, Oops, I'm still in 34, but that's okay. Okay, so now we have not chromatic, because what notes am I leaving off? I'm leaving off C sharp or D flat. I'm leaving off D sharp or E flat. I'm leaving off a bunch of notes in between these. But this is for all practical purposes, an ordered pitch class collection. Now you'll probably never hear me use the phrase ordered pitch class collection going forward in the rest of this class because I like to use the word scales. It's a little less pretentious and now we all know what scales are. But that term does help us understand a little bit better the chromatic and diatonic pattern of it. And if nothing else, the octave issue. That's helpful to know. Okay. Let's talk about a chromatic scale. What that looks like. M. 29. Chromatic Scales: Okay, so the trick to scales is understanding which notes to leave off and which notes to include in the scale. K? Now, we don't have to memorize every scale. Maybe you had to memorize a bunch of scales when you were in, you know, sixth grade band with your clarinet. Or maybe you read you saw a book somewhere that said, 1,000 scales to memorize. We don't have to memorize a single scale. We just need to memorize the pattern. There's a pattern for it. We're going to do that in the next section, and that I'll tell you all the notes you need to make a scale in any key. It's actually way more simple than memorizing a ton of scales. Don't memorize anything. I'm very anti memorization, actually. So you're going to need to memorize this pattern, but it's going to be way easier than the scale. But let's take a minute and think about, what if there was a scale without any pattern? That would be a chromatic scale. Let's write down a chromatic scale. Let's start on. It's not really going to matter what note we start on, but I'll start on C just for fun. We're going to go C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E F because there's no E sharp. F sharp, G sharp, A, A sharp B oops, B. There's no B sharp, so C. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, and then it starts over. That is a chromatic scale. It's all the notes. Let's hear it. Cool. Now, you might ask yourself, why did I use sharps instead of flats? That's a good question. Good job, if you were asking yourself that. Here's the answer. In a lot of ways, it doesn't matter. But there is a common convention that if you're not in any key and you're writing chromatically, if you're going up, sharps, if you're going down, use flats. If I was to write this going now back down, I would probably use flats. What I just do G? A. So this is now the same thing. One's going up, and I used sharps, one's going down and I used flats. A almost sounds like a Ferris wheel or something about a circus, right? That kind of, like, chromatic circus vibe is You know, that's a real thing. They use some chromatic music. You know what? I actually side note. I think that actually comes from gi ragtime music is not chromatic music, by any means, it's diatonic, but they use a lot of little chromatic rifts like this, where they might connect some stuff chromatically. And I think that's where we associate it with circus or at least I do, I don't know. Maybe I'm the only one that does. Anyway, chromatic scale. Now, let's talk about major scales and how they work and what's inside them. Specifically that pattern I was talking about. 30. Whole-Steps and Half-Steps: Okay, so in order to understand how major scales are put together, we need to first understand a very important concept. One we've mentioned already before, and that is half steps and whole steps. K? This is Crucial for understanding scales, chords, building harmony, writing songs, okay? It's like If writing songs was a pile of legos, understanding half step and hole steps would be that little, like two bump one that you always need to have hanging around if you want to make anything interesting. I have a 4-year-old, so I speak in terms of legos. Okay, so here we go. Half steps and hole steps. Switch just to 44 here just to make it a little easier to fit on the screen. So half step is the closest possible distance we can go. So the next note, including white notes, black notes, all of them. The next possible note. A whole step is two half steps. So two half steps away. If we're on C right here, what is a half step away? Half step away is going to be up to here, D flat, C sharp, whatever you want to call it. That is a half step. If I'm on C, and I want a whole step, I'm going to go, this is the half step. This is the whole step two D natural. Okay? That is half steps and whole steps. That gets a little trickier. So Let's go to something like E. Here's E. What's a half step up? F. Cool. That's es. What's a whole step up? From E, it's F sharp. From E, here, we're going to go to here to get the whole step. Remember, it doesn't matter if it's black keys or white keys. Let's go to G sharp. Here's G sharp. What is a whole step from G sharp? A sharp. A sharp. Good. What is a half step from G sharp? It's a natural. Okay? What is a half step from B flat? It's B natural. What is a whole step from B flat? It's C natural. So I know it seems like a simple thing, but we really need to wrap our head around this. Half step, closest possible note. Hole step two half steps. So closest possible note, and then closest possible note to that, that's going to be a whole step. Now, this has a few different names. I say half steps and whole steps because that's what I learned, but you may also hear this called Semitone and whole tone. Same thing, half step, whole step. Semitone is a half step. I don't like whole tone because that has multiple meanings in music theory. We'll talk about whole tone stuff later, but it means something different. I don't really like that term. But it's the same thing. There are a few others that I've heard, but they all work the same. So if you see something that looks like it might mean half step and whole step, it's probably what it means. Once we understand what half step and hole step is, we can start to build the pattern for the major scale. Let's do that now. 31. The Whole-Half Pattern: Okay. So here's the pattern. Okay? Now, remember, the point of this pattern is you don't need to memorize a ton of scales. You just need to memorize the pattern. Now, this is the major scale pattern. There will be a different one for minor scales when we get there. There are a lot of patterns in music theory. You'll find that everything is built around patterns that work in different keys. If you memorize the chords, scales and all of that stuff, you have to memorize them in every key. But if you just memorize the pattern, you don't have to memorize them 12 times. You just have to memorize them once. So I will be talking more than once about patterns. So I'm going to write half step, H for half step and W for whole step. So the pattern for a major scale is whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half ops, half step. Okay? That is the pattern. Hole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. So let's do it. So I'm on C. Let's make a C major scale. All we have to do is say, Okay, what's a whole step above C? It's going to be D. What's a whole step above d? It's going to be E. What's a half step above E. It's going to be F because there's no E sharp. What's a whole step above F. It's going to be g, it's a whole step above G, A, it's a whole step above A, B, and what's a half step above B, C, and that gets us back to where we started. Now we've made a C major scale. Hey. Let's do the same thing in a little bit trickier key. Let's do it in, like, E flat major. Okay? Now, you're like, What is an E flat major scale? I don't know. I don't know how to figure that out. Yes, you do. Check it out. E flat. What's a whole step above E flat? Let's go down here. Here's E flat. Half step, whole step. It's this note, which is F. What's a whole step above F, G. What's a half step above G, A flat. It wrote G sharp here, which we wouldn't normally do. You tend to stick to flats or sharps. A flat, what's a whole step above A flat, B flat oops. It is B flat. What's a whole step above B flat. Think about this one. It's C. A whole step above C is D, and then a whole step or a half step above D is E flat. That gets us back to E flat. If you start and end at the same spot, you did it right. Let's listen to it and make sure that sounds like a major scale. It does. Hora. A major scale can be done with this pattern. Okay? Now, there's a couple other things that I want to impress upon you in this section about major scales. Okay? Couple of terms that I want us to go over and a couple lingo things. So let's do that. No. 32. Tonic: Okay, there's a very important concept when it comes to scales, and that is something called tonic. Okay? We're going to hear this word tonic all the time. It's a very important word and principle, really. So when it comes to scales, tonic is pretty simple idea. Here's a C major scale. Tonic is C. It is the note the scale is named after. It is home base for that scale. It is the note that feels like a great place to end. It's a note that feels like a great place to begin, but it doesn't have to begin and end there. It just feels that way. It is home. Every note in the scale has a fancy name, and maybe we'll talk about them later. Most of them don't really matter. Tonic does, because we're always thinking about tonic. Here's a good example of that idea of like home. Tonic feels like you could end there. Watch, I'll play this scale, but I'm going to stop on this note, and you're going to say, Oh, I really want you to play that next note. Here we go. What you really want to hear right now is that. Okay? That would be more effective, slower. Let's try that. Okay, slower tempo. Same thing. Right? Ton. Tonic. Feels like home. We're going to use this all over music. Even in chords. We're going to say, what chord is tonic? Which one feels like home? The song could end there. Okay. In this case, in this scale, tonic is C. Tonic is the note that the scale or the chord is named after. In chords, we call it something a little bit different. We call it the root, but it's the same basic principle. In this scale, the E flat major scale, Oops. We're missing a flat there. In the E flat major scale, tonic is E flat. Very good. I'm assuming you said E flat there. So it's the note that sounds the most like home. I hate saying that over and over, but that is the best way to describe it. Okay? Tonic. 33. Practice: Okay, a few different ideas for how you can practice this. I'm going to give you a worksheet in just a second right after this video, but I wanted to point out one other thing you can do if you're interested in both practicing and seeing how scales work in the real world. So, go back to that IMSLP website and pull up some music, whatever music you're using to practice learning how to read music if you want, or just find some random music. Here I've pulled up Mozart. Now, this works with popular music, too, but I just wanted something quick that I could just look at notated music. We're going to go through here and we're going to spot some scales. This is just a random piece of music. But if you look right here, there's a scale, here's going down and up, some scales. These are scale fragments, but this isn't. This is a whole D major scale, just from top to bottom. Now, how can you know if it's a scale or not? Well, if you see a whole bunch of notes in a row, you can probably guess that it's a scale. Um, but if you want to know for sure, figure out the half steps and whole steps. So here's D. Let's go to the bottom. There's another D. Remember, this is base clef. Okay? So we can count up whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. And as I was doing that, I realize it's not technically a D major scale. It's got one wrong note, and it's the C right here should be C sharp. So it's a major scale, but it's slightly altered. That's okay. Just see if you can find little scales or scale fragments. Just find the lowest note, which is not always tonic, but let's just pretend it is for the sake of practice and count up. Here's this is trouble clef, so this is A, B, C, D. Now, you're not going to get whole steps and half steps out of that. If you look at it, you can see whole step, half step, whole step. That doesn't quite line up with what we know to be a scale. It is a scale. It's just not a major scale. We'll talk more about that later. Just see if you can identify scales. Here's a big one right there. It goes up really high. But let's see if it's a major scale. Hole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. Half step. So interesting, this is the same scale as this, except it has the fixed note. That makes me wonder if this C sharp is a typo, but we'll deal with that later because here's a C sharp. Doesn't matter. So look for scales around music that you know. Okay, I'm going to give you a worksheet and then we're going to move on to talking about how we can use what we know about scales to write good melodies. 34. Writing a Melody with Major Scales: What we're going to do in this section is we're going to talk about using scales to write music in particular melodies. Now, how do you come up with melodies when you're writing songs? Are you playing chords than just singing? That's a great way to do it. That's a great way to come up with a melody for a song. Or do you sit down and try to write a melody and then write chords to go with it? Both ways are fine. What we're going to do here is we're going to talk about just sitting down and writing a melody, and then later putting words to it and then putting chords to it to make a song? If you want to work this way, here's a way to do it from the perspective of understanding music theory in particular scales. I'm going to talk about a couple of different ideas in this section. This isn't real hardcore theory stuff. This is really just how I do it when I'm working on writing melodies. Now, melodies are very sceular, which is a weird way of saying, melodies are full of scales, as you may have seen in that last worksheet. There any melodic line has a little fragments of scales all over it. It might be the same scale. It might switch scales all over the place, but scales are everywhere. So there's one kind of trick that we use when we analyze melodies. Is to use this technique called Step skips and leaps. So I want to talk about that in the next video, and then the one after that, we'll actually analyze a melody using this technique. 35. Steps, Skips, and Leaps: Let's do this. Let's write a melody, Let's get rid of that, in that. Let's just say we're going to use a major scale. Let's use C major scale. It's the easiest one to wrap our head around. Let's use that and let's write a melody. I'm going to write a melody in this line. We'll zoom out a little bit so we can see maybe like 4 bars. Ignore this. Let's just clean this up a bit. We'll start right here. We can start on whatever note we want, but if we want to do something pretty generic and not too crazy, we're going to start on tonic. We're in C major here. You're using a C major scale. Let's start on a C. Now, what note comes next? You can think about You have three options here, okay? Actually, you have any option you want. You are the songwriter, you are the composer. You can put whatever note you can possibly imagine to come next. That is a k. You can do whatever you want. So even when we're learning all this music theory, what I'm telling you is what's going to sound good and fine? Okay? If you want to do something progressive and brilliant and maybe even Avangarde, then do the opposite of what I'm saying. You can do whatever you want. You're in charge. So that being said, Your three options here are a step, a skip in a leap. Here's what that means. If we go back to our scale, we could go a step. That would be D, or we could go a step down, and that would be C, it would be down to B. A step means the next node in the scale up or down. We could do a step. In fact, let's do it. I'm going to randomly choose a rhythm as we go here. We could do a step. Now, what should we do next? We're on D. We could do a step up or down. Let's do another step. Now let's go to the next one, and that is a skip. That means skip a note and then keep going. We're on E. I could do a skip up, in which case, I'm going to skip over F, and I'm going to go to G. Or I'm on E, I could skip D and go down to a C. Let's go down to a C. Then let's do another skip. And go up to E because we were on C and I skip up. Let's do one more skip, just for fun, G. Let's maybe make that a quarter note. Sure. Now, what should I do? Let's go back down to some steps. Let's go step, step step. Now let's do the third one, which is a leap. A leap is jumping to somewhere else in the scale. That's not a step or a skip. Jumping four or more notes higher. We're on a D. We've got to go to a G, A or B, or C, I could do. Same thing I could go down C B AG. Let's jump up to a C here. Then let's just make a rhythm that's going to sound nice, going to connect those notes together. And then maybe another eighth note. Now, what do I want to do? Se Skep step, skip, or leap. Let's do a ski, go here, and then a step, and maybe another step. Skip Skip. Where did I go? Skip. Okay. So there's my melody. I wish I could get that all on one line. But that's okay. Okay. Step skips and leaps. Let's hear it. Cool. So I think I said skip here when I did a step. So let's go a step. So a nice, pretty simple melody. Using steps, skips and leaps, a Now, you'll notice that I ended on tonic because that's just always going to sound good. You don't have to end on tonic, but it's pretty safe to do. Great. Now what did we do here? We started and ended on the tonic of the scale. We played a bunch of notes in this scale, and now we've established by doing that a key. I want to talk more about keys and what it means to be in keys. We'll do that in just a minute. But first, let's analyze a popular song. 36. Melody Analysis: Okay, I have here the lead sheet for flowers by Miley Cyrus. I picked the song because I actually just think it's a really nice melody. Now, remember, a lead sheet is a score, where we mostly just have the melody, the lyrics, and the chords. Okay? Let's go down to the chorus right here. This is not written, very good. It's really hard to read the words, but if you don't know this song, Google it, it's called Flowers. It's by Miley Cyrus. It's a nice song. It's a really nice song. I can't really play it for you, because I get in copyright trouble when I do that. So pause, Google it, come back. Listen to it. Cool. Okay. Now let's look here, what She did. I can tell you, the key of the song is A minor. All you really need to know about that is that A is our tonic. Keep that in mind. Now let's look at how we're moving around in the scale. We have the same note and then we have a little scale, E D, C, little scale down, and then skip. We skipped over d here, and then a step to F. And then a skip down to D. Step skip leap. A leap from A, which is tonic up to E, Let's keep going. Same note, step, step, skip, step, step, step, same note. Step, skip, step, step, step, step, ski, step, ski bunch of skips in a row, Step, leap, step, step down to see. Same note, leap, step. This is a common thing to do a leap up and then step down. That's something you see a lot. Then step, step, step, skip, gets us back to tonic. Skip, step, step, step, step, skip and back to tonic. I think that's the end of the chorus. So that's one way to look at melodis and something for you to think about while you are writing your own melodies. Skep Skeps. There's that mystery word again. Steps, skips, and leaps within your scale. 37. What Does it Mean to be “in key"?: Okay. Now let's get back to this idea of a key. Okay. So maybe you've heard this before that we're in such and such key or something like that. Okay. So if we're working, if we're writing a melody and it's all using C major. Then it's probably true that we are in the key of C major, but not necessarily, but probably. Knowing what key we're in on any given song is a surprisingly tricky thing. There is no definitive, here's what key we are in. Sometimes it's even debatable and open to interpretation. You might be able to say a song like this like flowers. You might be able to say this is in C major. You might be able to make that argument. If I was teaching a graduate theory class and someone came in and said, I think this is C major because of the following factors, I would probably say, Okay, I would agree with you, as long as they had a good defense for it. On the surface, this is more obviously an A minor, at least the way it's written here. But how did I come up with that? How did I figure out that it's an A minor? There's a couple of things that you learn to look for. But none of them are definitive. There's also things like key changes. Songs can change keys, songs can temporarily change keys? And some songs can just be in a vague key. Sometimes it's just hard to tell what key a song is in. Typically, the easiest way to tell what key you're in is to identify the tonic. If you can hear a note that sounds like that is the end, that is, I could end on that note and be happy, then that's probably what key you're in, but you have to be able to definitively tell what it is. In the next section, I want to go deeper into keys, and we're going to start understanding what it means to be in a key. How to identify the key and how you can be writing songs in different keys. And when you're writing songs, what key should you be writing in? We'll talk about all those things in the next chunk. 38. Why We Care About Keys?: Okay, let's talk about keys. We're going to come back to scales shortly because they have a lot to do with keys. So we just talked about, what it means to be in key, but let me give you another example. In this tune, flowers by Miley Cyrus, we're in the key of A minor. Just trust me on that for now. I'll explain how I know that in a few minutes. One thing you could do with this piece of music is because we're in the key of A minor, you could take the pitch A. So find A on a piano, find A on a guitar, whatever instrument you have or just sing, find the pitch A, and sing it. And we could basically sing that through this whole song. And it's never going to sound very bad. It'll sound pretty okay through the whole song. It'll come in and out of dissonance. It'll be a little bit dissonant. I some parts, like around here. But for the most part, it'll sound great all the way through. And that's a good indication of what key we're in. Why do we care what key we're in? It tells you a lot about what's going to sound good. The key is just a collection of notes that says, These sound good. These are the notes that sound good together. And what's cool about this is you already know that collection of notes that are going to sound good in a key because they are also the scale. So if we're in the key of C major, we know that all the notes in C major are going to sound pretty good. And we know what all the notes in C major are because we know that pattern of whole steps and half steps. That's going to tell us everything that's in C major and everything that sounds good. Now, it's also going to tell us what chords will sound good. If you're on an a minor chord and you know what key we're in, then I can tell you seven chords that are going to sound great, no matter what you do. So that's the advantage of knowing what key we're in. It helps us write fast. It gives us a lot of options. So in this section, we're going to talk about keys, and then we're going to get into chords, and how to figure out chords. So, how do we know what key we are in? This is a tricky thing to do, actually. There's a bunch of different things that give you a good clue about what key you're in. But nothing is totally definitive. The first thing that is a clue is the key signature. All of these sharps or flats at the beginning of a piece of music. Those are called the key signature, and they tell you a lot about what key you might, you probably are in. Let's go to a new video and talk about how these work. 39. Identifying Key Signatures: Okay, the key signature at the beginning of a piece of music. Now, that we'll tell you usually, that I'll narrow it down to two possible keys you're in because the key signature tells you that you're in one or the other. But the problem with key signatures is that they only work in notated music. If you're reading a score, you can tell if you're reading a lead sheet or something, you can read it and say, Okay, we're probably in this key. So this isn't the perfect way to figure out what key we're in, if if we're not looking at notated music or if we're writing music ourself. When it comes to what key you should be writing in, we'll talk about that in a minute too. But let's start with this so that you at least know how to identify the key when you're looking at notated music and then we'll go on to other ways. I'm going to pick a random key just to start explaining this with. Here's what you need to know about this. Whenever you see a key signature, there's a pattern to it. It's not just that there's a bunch of sharps or a bunch of flats. They will always follow a certain pattern. Let's go to one with some more sharps here. They're always going to be in this zigzaggy pattern, and it's going to start with a sharp on F, and then C G D, and you might be able to see the pattern. What comes next is going to be A, and then E, and then you can see how it's going from there. The order of the acnals is always the same. It's different in flats, If we look at a key on flats, it's slightly different. It starts on B flat, Is B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat, the next one will be G flat, and then C flat, and so on. The order is always the same. Next thing you need to know is there's a trick into figuring out what's what. Let's go back to sharps. Okay. The trick is slightly different if we're looking at sharps or flats, and there are two exceptions to the trick. Here's the trick. When you see a bunch of sharps, go to the last one and then go up a half step, and that's what key you're in. So in this case, the last sharp is on G. So we're going to in our head, we're going to go up a half step. That makes this G sharp because there's a sharp on g. G sharp, what's a half step above G sharp, A, the pitch A. This is the key signature for A. Now, what does that mean? What does that key signature actually mean? What it means is that if we made the A major scale, go A, and then we go whole step. Now, here we have to go whole step. We're going to have to make this a C sharp, because B to C is a half step. In order to get this to be a whole step, it needs a C sharp. But there's a C sharp in the key signature, so I'm good. I don't need to add that. We keep going, D is going to be a half step from C sharp, and then whole step. Now in order to get a whole step, I need u sharp, and it's already there. Cool. Then in order to get a whole step above F sharp, I need a G sharp. It's already there in the key signature, and then I'm back to A. By using that key signature, I don't need to use any accidentals. All the notes of my major scale, and therefore, all the notes of the key are in the key signature and in the piece of music. Makes sense. So those sharps or flats are going to tell us exactly what notes we need to play. Because if they're not in the key signature, we play them as naturals, and that's going to give us all the notes in the key. L et's try, let's look at one with flats. If we go to flats, here the pattern is or the trick to figure out the name of it is a little different. For flats, we go to the second to last flat, E flat in this case, and that's the name of our key. Second to last one, e flat. If I was to make an E flat major scale, it's going to work. E flat because the key signature applies to all octaves. E flat, and then I need a whole step to F, whole step to gps, a half step to A flat, but that's in my key signature. A whole step to B flat, which is in my key signature, a whole step to C, a whole step to d, and then a half step to E flat, which is in my key signature. Cool. Cool. Now there are two exceptions, as I mentioned. The two exceptions are the key of F, which has one flat. This one you just have to memorize. F is one flat because the pattern of going to the second to last flat, and that's the name of our key, it just doesn't work here, because there's only one. This one is the key of f. The other one that doesn't work, is when there's no key signature. When there's no key signature, this is the key of C, C major. Because as we've seen, the key of C major is all white notes. There's no flats or sharps. This is another one you just have to remember. Okay, one more little caveat. Remember at the beginning of this video, I said that really it narrows you down to two possible keys, probably. Because there's a key signature for major and a key signature for minor. We'll come back to talking about key signatures for minor and how to figure those out. So for now, let's just think about major key key signatures. Okay. So everything I've said so far applies to major keys. And we're going to stick with talking about major keys for a little bit. Then we'll get to minor keys a little bit later. Okay. Cool. Onward. 40. Other Ways of Finding the Key: Okay. Other ways of telling what key we're in. Let's go back to this Mozart piece, concerto and A. Let's look. We have a key signature that's telling us what key. Remember with sharps, we're going to look at the last sharp and go up a half step. So G sharp, A, This is showing us the key of a major. Let's say we didn't have a key signature or we didn't even have notated music. What are some other things that'll tell us what key we're in? Again, none of these are definitive, but all of these add up to be a really good clue about what key you're in. The first would be, what is the first chord? This here, we see a A, A, C sharp E. That's an A major chord. We'll talk about chords in a second. But for now, trust me. That's an A major chord. It's an A major chord is the first chord of the piece. That's a pretty good clue. Another thing you can look at is the last chord of a piece. Now, this may have changed keys, but this is also an a major chord, the very last chord. That's another pretty good clue. In a piece of classical music like this, sometimes they put the key in the title, Concerto in A. That's a pretty good clue. Another good clue would be that thing that I was talking about in the first video in the section, where we could just play a note all the way through. If we played a recording of this and we just started playing A, the pitch A over throughout the whole thing, it'll sound pretty good. So that can be a pretty good clue. Another one is if you look at like a melody, this melody, it doesn't start on A. It starts on E. It's okay. Then it comes and it comes to an end here at A. The next one starts on A. So where a melody ends can be a good clue. It doesn't need to end on A or on the tonic is what we're actually looking for here. But it might. So all of these things are pretty good clues about what key we're in. 41. What Key Should I be Writing in?: Okay. Now let's go over to some songwriter stuff. What key should you be writing in? I get asked this all the time. How do I know what key to start in when I'm writing a song? There's a few different ways I like to answer that. I'm going to answer for I'm going to answer and I'm going to give you all the ways that I answer it right now. The first thing is that what key you're in For purely musical purposes, doesn't really matter all that much. If you write a song in C major, or you write a song in C Sharp major, no one's going to really know. I mean, some people will, some people can hear the difference between C and C sharp. But most people won't, and even if they could hear the difference between C and C sharp, it doesn't really matter. One key is as good as the other key. All keys are great, and they all sound the same. If we're dealing with all major keys, they basically all sound the same. However, there are some situations where what key you're in will matter. In the old days hundreds and hundreds of years ago, people had some symbolism behind each key. If you are writing a certain key, it might mean a certain thing. But that's long lost. We don't really care about that anymore. No one really knows that symbolism, nor do we have an ear for it anymore. The really big reason is for performers and instruments. So if you're writing a piece of purely electronic music where there's no performers, it really doesn't matter what key you put it in. Some people would say if it's for a club thing, you want to make sure that the low base hits at a certain frequency for like a club. But I don't know, that's different. If you're writing a song, let's say you're writing a song for guitar, voice and saxophone. It's weird. But just go with me on this. Okay. The lowest note of a saxophone, I believe it's B flat. If you have some big moment where you want the saxophone just to hit a big low note, you want to make sure that B flat, the lowest note they can play without doing special techniques is in the key. You might say, Okay, well, B flat is a good key for that because then they're going to be hitting tonic for that low thing. Maybe you don't care about the saxophone doing a low thing. It's fine. What about the singer? The singer has some point in the song where they hit their high note, and it's the big moment of the whole piece. You want to make sure that the high note that they hit is a really good note for their particular voice. That's why people change the keys of songs for different performances sometimes. If I was going to cover a song by Jeff Buckley, I would probably lower the key a little bit so that when I go to the high note, it's in my range, and not Jeff Buckley's range, which is significantly higher than mine. You might be playing a song, and then you go to hit the big high note, and it's just a hair out of range for that singer, they're just struggling to get that high note. No problem. Lower the key of the song, take everything down by a half step or a whole step or so. And now when they go to get that high note, it's a whole step lower and they can land right on it and hit a really good sound. Third thing, our guitar player. If we're writing like a strum song, and it's It's not like metal or something, but we want to be able to strum an acoustic guitar to it. Then we might want to do something that's going to take advantage of open strings and some of our open chords. That's going to be E major, A minor, C major, G major, those types of chords. In that case, we might want to transpose the song so that we can get those, get those open strings. That's why so much music for guitar is an E or A because we like our big open string sounds. So those are reasons why you might change the key of your song or pick a specific key. Now, let me tell you what I do in reality. What I do when I'm writing music is I just start writing. I don't think about the key at all. I just start going. I might be tinkering around on a keyboard, I might tinker around on a guitar. And I might just say, what feels good and find something that's cool. After I get a melody idea or a chord idea or something, then I step back and say, Okay, wait, what key am I in? Because I've already made something. Then I just figure out what key I'm in and then I say, Okay, now, here are other places I can go with it, now that I understand the key. Make sense. So I don't think about the key at all while I'm getting started writing. I figure it out once I've got some stuff, and then I can use knowing what I know about the key to find all the chords that are going to work. And then when I'm done with the song, if I need to change the key, I can change the key, fine. Lower everything, raise everything. It doesn't really matter to me. But while I'm working on it, I'm just going to stick to whatever key I land in as I'm noodling around. Okay, so I just mentioned the big thing, which is, once we know what key we're in, we know all the possible chords. That is the thing that's going to elevate your songwriting to the next level, and that is what comes next. Next, let's talk about chords. Here we go. A. 42. What are chords?: Okay. C chords. What are chords? And how can we make good decisions about what chords to use? Okay. First, let's define what a chord is. A chord is a group of notes. That's it. You can get fancier about this or that, but it's just a group of notes. If you have one note, you have a single note. If you have two notes, you have a type of chord called a diad. Did It's not like a term that we use all that often. It's in a technical term. If you have three or more notes, you have a chord. If you have three notes, you have a type of chord called a triad. And that is what the majority of our chords are triads. This is where it gets weird though. If you have a four note chord, you have something called a seventh chord. What? That doesn't make any sense. Why isn't it called a fourth chord? It's something else. A seventh chord. I'll explain it soon. Don't worry. If you have a five note chord, you might call it a ninth chord, and you can call it a few different things. But we're going to stick to triads at first. We'll get into seventh chord soon. Now, when you're strumming on a guitar and playing like those open chords, nearly always, you are playing triads. Three notes. Don't believe me. I'll prove it. Let's say you're going to play a big old E major chord on a guitar. Here are the notes you're actually playing. You're playing an E, the low E string, and then a B, and then another E, and then G sharp, and then a B, and then. So you're playing six notes, right? One, two, three, four, five, six. You're playing six notes because you're strumming all six strings, right? But We have an E here and an E here. So that's a duplicate. That's an octave. Let's get rid of that. We have a B here and a B here, we have another octave of B, and we have an E here and an E here. That's another octave of E. If we get rid of all the octaves, we have three notes triads. So you could have any three notes could be a triad, really? A three notes. However, it's the difference between, well, let's make another one. Let's say, okay, So we have this one. So these sound very different. They are both triads because they are a group of three notes. But this one is a major, major triad. This one is a bunch of dissonant notes. So we do a bunch of dissonant notes is still a chord. It's just we might not be able to put a good name on it, nor does it sound particularly good. So we're going to focus on the ones that sound good. Okay. So chord is any group of notes, but there are certain ones that sound good, and those are the ones that we call major chords, minor chords, and there's a couple of other types. Okay, so let's talk about what is in these things. How do we know what notes go in there? 43. Building Triads: Okay. Let's go to a different one. One that's a little easier, Let's go to C major. Let's do. C E. These are the notes in the C major chord. How do I know? This is the question of the moment. How do I know what three notes go in there? You could memorize every C chord. Sure. That would be one way to do it. But there's a better way. There's a pattern as there is with most things in music theory. So let's look at what the pattern is. In order to figure out what notes are in there, we're going to go back to if you said the scale, you are right. So let's do a C major scale here. There's our C major scale. What we're going to do to find a C major triad from a C major scale is we're going to go to the scale. And we're going to take every other note. We're going to take the first note. Skip the second, we're going to take the third note, skip the fourth, and we're going to take the fifth note. One, three, five. Those are our three notes. C, E, G, and then here it is here. Now, you might say, why don't we go further, G and take this note. We could. That gets us into seventh chords. File that away for now. We'll come back to it. For now, we're just taking the first three notes. Now, this is true on any scale. Let's say you wanted to make an F cord. Go to an F scale. Make sure it's right. A F has one flat in it, remember from key signatures. Here is our F scale. If we want to make an F chord, we're going to take the first note. Let's write that down. We're going to take the second note, is A or sorry, the third note, which is A, and we're going to take the fifth note, which is C. Now we have an F major chord. E. The pattern is always, if you want to know what notes are in a chord, take the scale from that chord and then take the first third and fifth notes of that scale. That's the chord that goes with that scale. Okay. Now, it's going to get a little more complicated, but that's step one. If we understand that, we're off and running. So how do I do that thing of knowing what chords are in a given key? That's what we've got to do next. So we're going to make this a little more complicated, but still hovering around our scales. 44. Roots: Okay, I got a little bit ahead of myself. There's one more thing we need to talk about actually before we get into all the chords at a key. Two pieces of terminology. First is the root. The root is a lot like the tonic. When we talk about a key, we talk about the tonic of that key, the note that feels like home. We talk about a scale. We might talk about the tonic of that scale. When we talk about chords, we tend to talk about the root. If we're just talking about a single chord, then the root of that chord, is simply the note that the chord is named after. C major chord, the root is going to be C, the pitch. F major chord, the root is going to be F. In F minor chord, the root is going to be F. It's just the note that the chord is named after. That's what the root means. You're going to hear me talking about the root of the chord a lot, especially in this next section. Now we know what roots are. Cool. Now let's go and talk about the diatonic chord progression. 45. The Diatonic Chord Progression: Okay, here's how we're going to figure out all the chords in a key. We're going to take our major scale. We're back into C major. We're on C major here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do it again. I have C up to C, but I'm going to layer this, and I'm going to start on E right here. Now I'm going to go up the major scale from E, E F g A, B, C, D, E. Now I'm going to do one more time starting on G, G A, B C E FG. Okay. Now, important to note here that when I started this on E, I didn't do the E major scale. I'm still doing the C major scale. In other words, all I did was use the major scale in stack thirds. A? Let's hear him all at once. Okay. Weirdly fast, but it's okay. So all of these chords. These are the chords and C major. These are the chords that I can use. So how do I know what these are called? Well, we could pick them apart and tell you, but of course, there's a pattern. That's why I shouldn't name this course. I shouldn't name this course. There's a pattern. Or there's a pattern for that or something like that. Anyway, Okay, This pattern will always be the same for any major key. And it is major. A common convention here is when we're talking about chords and we're going to alternate between major and minor chords. We use capital to say major chord and lower case to say minor chord. Major minor minor. Major a tight here. Major. Minor minor, diminished. Okay, so the pattern is always this. The first chord in this sequence will be major. The second one will be a minor chord. The third one will be a minor chord. The fourth one will be major, the fifth one will be major. The fifth one or the sixth one will be minor. I have one too many here. The first one will be major, the second one will be minor, the third one will be minor. The fourth one will be major, the fifth one will be major, the sixth one will be minor, and the seventh one will be diminished. I'll explain diminished in a minute. Diminished is kind of like a super minor. It's a weird one. Then it starts over. This last one is a major because it's the same as that. This is called the diatonic chord progression. It's the most important thing for telling you what notes for what chords are going to work. All we have to do is take this pattern and then the root of each chord. This chord is C major. This chord is d minor, this chord is E minor. This chord is F major, this chord is G major, this chord is a minor. This chord is B diminished, and then back to C major. The chords in the key of C, C major, d minor E minor, F major, G major, A minor, and B diminished. A Normanclature thing here. Let me get it down here so we can read this a little bit easier. If a cord name has nothing after it, it's major. If a chord name has a after it, it's major. If it has a lower case after it, it's a minor chord. If you're writing a song, and you're in the key of C, and you're playing like C F and G, those chords are in your song, and you're like, what else could I do? Well, you could go to D minor, you could go to E minor, you could go to A minor. You could maybe go to B diminished. Right? Like, now you know what all of your options are. Another thing I tell people is when you're writing a song, if you're using four of these chords for your verse, and you're having trouble coming up with your chorus, keep two of the chords from the verse and add two different ones from this list, and those are your four chords for your chorus. It's a simple idea, but it often works. It's not a, you know, Sure fire pattern or anything. It's just something I found that tends to work pretty well. Okay, that's our diatonic or progression. We're going to work with this a whole bunch more and show how we use it in practice, and some other things we can do with it soon. But I want to talk about a few other things about chords first. Let's continue on with some other elements of how this works. 46. Roman Numerals: Okay, I'm going to take this one step further and give us another system for naming these, okay? This is the Roman numeral method. Now, you might say, Why do I need to put Roman numerals on all this stuff? Just trust me for a minute. Hold on to this. It'll be helpful. Soon. We're going to do an analysis of a song in a minute and I'll show you why Roman numerals are so important. Here's what we do with Roman numerals. For major chords, we do a capital Roman numeral for minor chords. We use a lowercase Roman numeral. So just i. Now, the two here represents the root of this chord, which is D is the second note of the scale. This is the two chord of the key. Makes sense. E minor, is the three chord of the key. Be e is the third note, one, two, three, E is the third note of the scale. It's a minor chord because it's the third one in the pattern and so that makes the Romanumeral three. F, F is major, that gets Roman numeral four. G gets Capital Roman numeral five. A gets lowercase Roman numeral six, and our weird diminished gets a lowercase Roman numeral, and then we put that little diminished symbol on it. Also. There are our Roman numerals. Now, one of the reasons we do this is that it shows us each chord has a function and kind of a purpose in the key. And knowing that can really help you as a songwriter. So for example, the five chord, the G. The five chord tends to want to go back to the one chord like kind of a lot. So try this. Trust me. You're playing in the key of C. You're in C major, you're playing in C major. Maybe you play some other chords, F, maybe an E minor, and you go back to C major, and then play a G major chord and then stop. Will not feel like home. That will feel like it wants you to go bum back down to seat. Let's do it. Let's take this. We'll go C F. Then we'll do maybe a two chord, and then we'll take this up to a G or. Our Roman numerals here for this little core progression are one, four, 25. Five. Now, when we listen to this, this will not feel like a great place to stop. Let's try it. Like, it kind of feels like you just like threw a bunch of stuff in the air, and we're just kind of waiting for it to land, right? Let's hear one more time. What you really want to hear if you are like a normal person, is this one chord again. It resolves it. Five likes to go to one. Two likes to go up to five, or two can go down to one. It's not as strong. Seven, this diminished seven, part of the weird thing about being it being its own chord, which is a diminished chord is that this chord always wants to go to tonic really strongly. Four likes to go to one, but less strongly than five, six can go to five, or to one, a lot of these things depend on the context. The big one is five to one and seven to one. But more on those later. 47. Piano Man, Billy Joel (Song Analysis #1): Okay, let's look at piano man by Billy Joel. Okay? Now, let's say, hypothetically, we really like this song. We're like, that song is just so cool, the way they do that. Mostly in the verse, the sound that he gets in the verse, I really like it, and I want to use it in my own song. Okay? Cool. Let's figure out what it is that's actually happening and then figure out how we can use it. Let's analyze this piece a little bit. So let's jump to the verse. This is kind of like a simplified version of obviously the piano part, but it gives us the chords. So that's great. Okay, the chords are C, that means C major. E minor over B. When you see this, for now, you can ignore the B. What that really means is that it's in e minor chord and then there's a B in the base, the base players playing a B. We don't need to worry about it too much. E minor, A minor, same thing here. This is a C major, but the base player is playing a G. Then Fs. Keep going back and forth. C D seven, g C. Let's take the first four chords for now. H C minor a minor C. Okay Let's look at those. We're in the key of C major here, and I know that because there's no key signature. First chord is C. I only have one page of the score, but it's looking awfully a lot like C major. Let's call it C. C minor A minor C. If we have C E minor, a minor C. Let's go down here. C, e minor a minor c. We have one e minor three, a minor six, c one. We have a one, three, 61. You would say that You would say that as 1361. Now you can say, that's the thing. That's the thing I like. I like a one, three, six, one chord progression, that thing is not copyrightable. You can use it. The reason we can put it into Roman numerals is that it makes it easier to put it in any key we want. Now, if we're writing a song and our songs in the key of F, We can say, Okay, I want to do a one, three, 61 in F. Because if you're in the key of f and you just did C minor a minor c, it's not going to work. Because those aren't all in the key of F. If we're in the key of f, our songs in the key of F, and we want to add this Billy Joel like sound, then we're going to add a one, 361 in the key of F. That is going to it's going to be F A minor D minor F. Cool. All right. Let's look at another song just for fun. 48. All Too Well, Taylor Swift (Song Analysis #2): Okay, let's look at A To Well by Taylor Swift. I got to get some Taylor Swift in here just for the SEO. Okay, so I'm choosing these songs because they're in the Key of C major for now. We have C five. Now a five after the name of the chord really just means that it's C and then five notes higher, which is G, the fifth note of the scale. C and G, it's a diad. It's really just those two notes and then usually another octave of the original. This is also what you call a power chord on the guitar. But we can treat it like a major chord for our purposes here. C, G A minor F, and then it starts over. C g a minor F. Co. Let's figure out what that would be. I think I can annotate it right on here. In the key of C, C would be one, and then G would be five. Whoa. Five. I don't know why it's doing that. There we go. A minor would be six, minor. Now, it's funny because when you're doing lower case and Roman numerals, you have to be careful of the font sometimes. These are capital and this is capital and this is lower case. It's weird. It's hard to tell sometimes. Then this F is going to be four. Then it starts over. This core progression is one, five, six, f. This is a very common progression. But if you like it, you can use it in your own music in whatever key you want. One, five, six, four progression. Number four leads back to one rather nicely, not as strong as five does, but it still leads back to one. So it's going to have a nice all around good sound to it. And this is also the verse CG A minor F. So it just keeps going for quite a bit of the song. There's probably a bridge somewhere. But there you go. Very simple one, five, six, four. That's how we analyze songs on a very surface level just to get the chords so that we can learn what is the cool sounding thing there. But that's not the end. There's so much more to learn. Because here's the thing. What we're doing here is we're figuring out what chords are going to sound good in a key. If you stick to these chords and you only write music in the key, you never go outside of the key, you just use the chords that are in the diatonic chord progression. You will write a whole bunch of music that sounds perfectly fine. But you probably won't ever write anything that's like brilliant. So what we need to do is understand a little bit more about music theory so that we can get outside of these boxes a little bit and do some really interesting music because it only gets interesting once you get outside of the diatonic core progression. Now, don't get me wrong. Knowing the diatonic core progression is crucial because now you can write quick, you know all the chords and all the keys, you can find them quick, and those will give you great ideas. But every now and then, you're going to want to do something a little different. So that's why we need to know more about triads. We need to know what that weird diminished one was. And we need to know some more techniques for using these in our own songs. Let's keep going forward. And the first thing I want to do is pick apart our trihad a little bit and understand what's in there a little bit more because it's going to help us in the future. 49. The Different Types of Triads: Okay, let's circle back and talk about triads themselves, and what makes the different kinds of triads sound the way they do? Let's go out here. Now, so far, we've encountered two different kinds of triads. We've encountered major triads, like C. Well, let's just leave it right there. And then we've encountered minor triads, right in our key, we had E minor, A minor, D minor So let's look at a D minor. Yeah, that's annoying. Okay. So C major and D minor. Now, just by looking at these, how can I tell if they're major or minor? And why do they and what does that even mean? So First of all, let's talk about what that means in a very b broad way. Major chord sound happy ish and minor chords sound sad ish. Now, that's the thing that we always say. Like if you Google, what's the difference between major and minor, you'll probably find a lot of people saying, Major chord sound happy and minor chord sounds sad. That's the typical thing. Um, I'm always skeptical of that because minor chords don't always sound sad. Like in the right context, they sound, you know, pretty happy. Like, listen to that Taylor Swift song. And then, you know, the minor chords in there, do they sound sad necessarily? No, they go by in a larger context. But it's fine. So here's what When we say happy and sad, here's what we really mean. Let me take this chord and turn it into a C minor. Okay. So now, this is a C major chord, and this is a C minor chord. Listen to the two of them back to back. And you'll probably be able to hear that when we get to the minor chord kind of feels like sad. And a bird just flew directly into my window. Crazy. All right. Here we go. That second one just sounds kind of sad. Out of context, not so much, but when you hear it, especially when you hear it right after the major one. Mm. Major chords, happy, minor chords, sad ish. Now, the real thing that's going on here is, you can see there's really only one note different, right? And that's true. There's only one note different between major and minor. So let's dissect these chords a little bit and figure out what's inside of them, and that'll help us figure out how to spot a minor chord or a major chord when we see it. 50. What is inside of a triad?: Okay, so on the inside of a major triad. We have really two intervals of a third. So the interval of a third means the distance between the notes is a third like this to this, because we're going up the scale. We're going up to scale and making a third. You can spot a third in notation really quick because they're just stacked right on top of each other. Two lines, two spaces, like this, but they're going to be just kind of perfectly sitting on top of each other. That means it's a third. So there's a third here between the bottom two notes and then there's another third between the top two notes. Okay. So let's count half steps on these. So C to C sharp. Where did you go? There we go. That's one half step, C sharp to d. That's two half steps. D to D sharp. That's three half steps, and then D sharp to E will be the fourth half step. So Let's tick that back down to see. Four half steps. Now let's do it on the minor one, we're going to go C to C sharp. We're going to go C sharp to d, we're going to go d to D sharp, which is the same as E flat. T. The thing that makes something major or minor is this bottom. It's that this is four sites or a major third, and this is three semitones or a minor third. I could take that middle note of the triad and just lower it by a half step and turn it into a minor chord. Now that's true in more than just C major, that's true with every triad ever. Here's C major. Let's make it C minor. Here's F major. Let's make it F minor. This is D minor. Let's make it D major by raising that middle note, doing the opposite. Here's G major. Let's make it g minor. It's all about that middle note. The third. It's called the third of the chord. When you see one of these, you can count half steps, if you want, you can think about what key we're in. You can count whole steps, if you want. This will give you two whole steps. This will give you 1.5 whole steps. All of those things are fine if you want to identify these chords just by looking at them notated. But as songwriters, we're mostly looking at them in terms of a chord diagram. So you don't need to worry about this part of it too much. But do think about the sound of them, a major chord and a minor chord. Okay. 51. The Third Holds The Power!: Okay, I want to point out one more thing about this before we move on. There's one point that I don't think I really hit enough in that last video. And that's that the third of the chord, which is this middle note, the note above the root is the third. The third of the chord holds really the power to turn it from major to minor. That's true of scales also, but we'll get into that more later. Then again, if we look at these thirds, if we look at these chords, there's a mirror image happening here. This one has a major third on the bottom, but a minor third on the top. If we counted half steps, E to F to F sharp to g, that gives us three. That gives us three half steps. It's a minor third on the top and a major third on the bottom. That is the recipe for a major triad, a major third at the bottom, and a minor third at the top. That is the textbook definition. But the minor triad is the opposite. It's a minor third at the bottom, and a major third at the top. E flat up to g is a major third. That'll be four half steps if we counted out. So mirror images of each other, minor third at the bottom, major third at the top, major third at the bottom, minor third at the top. Okay. Now, your next question might be. Well, two more things can happen here, right? We haven't talked about the possibilities of two more things, which is, what if you had a major third at the bottom and a major third at the top, or you had a minor third at the bottom and a minor third at the top. For that, we need to get into some new and different s, and let's do that now. 52. Diminished Triads: Okay, let's answer this question. I feel like for like the last ten or 15 videos, I've been saying, hold on to diminished chords. We'll deal with them later. So let's deal with them now. Okay. There are four different possibilities of the way the major and minor chords can be arranged. First, Major. Major means we have a major third at the bottom and a minor third at the top. Then we have minor. We have minor, which we use a lower case to mean a minor third at the bottom and a major third at the top. Then we have diminished. So the diminished the way I'm making that symbol, by the way, is option zero on a Mac keyboard gives you the tiny zero. The way we would if this was a G diminished, it would look like that. So it's a tiny zero in the upper right corner. Sometimes this is also notated as just Dim DIM. Let's do that for now. This is going to be a minor third on the bottom and a minor third at the top. This is a ugly sounding chord. Sounds like that. It is very useful in classical music and concert music, stuff like that. It is a chord that is most of the time in popular music, you're going to avoid it. It is in every key. It happens on the seventh scale degree. In C major, if we count up seven, we end up on B. B, when you build triads in a key in the key of C, you're going to end up with this. So if we look at it, it's going to be B D F. That's a diminished chord. So we tend to avoid it. We tend to not use it too much because it's kind of like a super minor chord. It just doesn't sound all that good in a kind of modern strumming song. If you are writing solo instrumental music, then you probably would have a lot of use for it. It's also kind of tricky. There's no good diminished chords on the guitar. There's a few D, but most of them are just not easy chords to play. Okay? And then there's one more that we haven't mentioned yet. And that is augmented. Augmented chords are when we have a major triad, and then another major triad. Okay? These also sound pretty ugly. In my opinion, augmented cords sound actually much uglier than diminished cords. Differently ugly. Augmented like a super major. Two major thirds. Now, there is another shorthand for these. You can use a plus symbol for these in the same way that we use this tiny symbol for that. So if you see like G plus, that's going to mean G augmented. Okay. You can also just use A U G. Now, the reason we haven't mentioned augmented chords yet is because augmented chords don't actually happen naturally in a major key or a minor key, actually, sort of in a minor key. I'll talk about that later. But in a major key, they don't happen. Things never line up to where we get an augmented cord. So you've got to do some stuff out of the key, some chromatic stuff to get one. So it's unlikely that you'll find a need to make an augmented chord in your songwriting. But if you want to experiment with some different sounding stuff, some kind of cool stuff, try to diminished in augmented chords out. There's the kind of fun. So those are the four main types of triads that we have. 53. Octaves and Inversions: Okay, I want to talk about octaves and inversions in this video. So by octaves, what I mean is, if this is a C major triad, then what is this. Now I've added another C on top. Now I have C E G C. The name of the chord doesn't change in this case, because we still just have a triad, but we have octaves. This is like what we saw on the guitar stuff. So now I'm adding all of these notes, but I'm really just adding octaves of what we already have. We still really only have three notes in this cord. Now, if I was to do that. Now I've added a new note, and now the name of the cord changes. There's a couple of different ways it would change with this particular case, but it doesn't matter. We'll get into what that means later. Just know that if you add more notes, it will change the name of the Cord. But if those notes are just octaves of the triad, it's totally okay. It doesn't change anything. Similarly, what happens when we change the order of the notes? What happens if I do this? Here's the C. Now the root of my chord is on top. But I still have all the same notes of the chord, they're just different in a different order. Still the same chord. The thing that's tough about this is that it becomes tougher to spot them in notated music when they're stacked like this. When they're stacked as triads, it's really easy to see a triad. But when they're stacked like this, it's harder to see them. But this is still just to see major chord. What if I did this? What about that? Now it's all spread out and weird. But it's still just to see Major cord. We do have ways of notating how it's stacked. But you can look it up. It's really just going to make things unnecessarily confusing. You'll never see those types of notations outside of a theory book. Trust me. This is just a C major chord. What we have in our chord, There are different ways of calling these when we move notes around by an octave, there are different names for it, and those are might be important to know. This is called root position. That means the the lowest node of the cord is the root. It's root position. This is called first inversion. It means the cord is inverted, and so the root of the cord sorry, the root is still the root, but the lowest note of the cord is now the third of the cord. It's fine. Call it first inversion. Here we have second inversion, where the fifth is in the lowest note of the cord. We probably never deal with those terms again, so don't spend a lot of brain juice remembering those. But the thing I want you to know is that when they look like this they're called root position, when they're in this shape, and no matter what order the notes are in, they are inverted if they are not in root position, but it's still the same cord. It's just harder to see. 54. Chords on the Guitar: Okay, let's circle back around and talk again about how this works on the guitar. Since as songwriters, a lot of us are working on the guitar. Let's do a very guitar friendly or progression here. Let's do something like say we're doing G major. And then we're going to go to C major. And then maybe A minor. And then D major. Okay. So we're in the key of G major here. So I had to add that F sharp because I didn't make a key signature. But that's okay. So this is what the notes would look like on a guitar, right? So we see a triad right here, the notes stacked up all n. So that is the triad. But this is because of just the way the guitar is tuned. This is how we play these kinds. So this progression, it's going to be in the key of G. This is going to be a 1425 chord progression. And you can see here, if you've ever wondered, like, why does my D chord sound so thin compared to everything else? Like, I only has four notes, where the rest of these have this one is six, five, depending on where what string the root is on. So most chords on guitar are in root position in that the lowest note is the root. So G C, A and D. But almost always, they have an extra octave or more. This D just has one extra octave, but the rest of these have two or three. It's just a funny thing about how the guitar works. Let's hear it. Remember, this was a five, so it feels like it wants to go back here. Again. Oh, I wanted to play for you these four triads, too. I think I skipped over that. Let's just hear that. Weird, right? Cool. Okay, I want to do a quick worksheet. Give you some practice identifying triads. 55. What is the Circle of Fifths?: Alright. Good morning. Welcome to a new day. It's a gloomy rainy day here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But I love gloomy rainy days, especially in the summer because I can sit at my computer and work all day and not feel guilty about it. Here we go. Okay, Our next big chunk. This is where it starts getting interesting, friends. I'm serious. So we've learned enough of the basics to start using this for actual songwriting now. So we're going to go to the Circle of Fifths, and we're going to talk about this for a while, and then we're going to write a song. We're just going to randomly write a song. It might not be a great song, but I'm going to show you how to use these techniques to come up with something. The Circle of Fifths. Now, here it is. You may have seen this before hanging on the wall in your Junior high band room or some music store or something. It's become a almost silly symbol of music happens here. But it is super helpful. It has a lot of power, and we're going to show you how to use it here. So let's just talk about what we're seeing here. This graphic is actually a complicated one. Let's get a more simple circle of fifths. Okay, here's a more simple one. Same thing, but just a little bit easier to read. It has less information, but it has everything we need. Okay? So, Let's look at the outer ring here. That's the most important thing to us right now. What we're looking at is keys. So the key of C, is at the top. Cool. Cool. When we go to the right, we're going to go up a fifth every time. So C D E F G five that gets us to here. Now we're in the key of G. Now we're going to count up five notes in the key of G, G A B C D. Then we get to d. Now we're in the key of d. Now we're going to count up five in the key of D. D E, F sharp, G A. Then we get to A. Why is there an F sharp in there? Remember that every time I'm counting up by five, I have to count in that key. The key of D, if you lay out all the notes in the major scale, it's got an F sharp in it. Now it doesn't really matter because whether we say that F sharp or not, we're going to end up on A, but it's going to start to matter. As we get around to some of these different keys. That's why we call this a circle of fifth. If we go around in a circle and go up by five, we're going to see, eventually get to all the keys. There's a couple other things we can do with a circle of fifth. We can count the other direction by fours. C E F four, that's going to take us down to here. F, G A, B flat is in the key of F, it's going to take us down to here. Now, how can I go up by fifth this way and down by four this way? Because they are inversions of each other, fifth and fourths. Which means if I count from C to G, C d e g, that's five. But if I count from C down to G, C B AG, that's four. Fifth and fourths are inversions of each other. If I go this way to me, I'm going to get four, and if I go this way, I'm going to get fifths. Now, this is also giving us minor keys. Now we haven't done minor keys yet, but remember how I told you that that when we look at a key signature, we can tell that it's maybe one of two keys. That's because for every major key, there's a minor key that uses the same key signature. We'll talk more about that in just a few minutes, but this is what they are. In the key of C major, the same key signature is a minor. G, it's E minor, D, it's B minor. These are called relative keys. A minor is the relative minor to C major. D minor is the relative minor to f. This tells us this shows us all the keys and all the minor keys. Now, what's happening at the bottom here? Things get a little dicy as you count up in fis because eventually you need to flip from sharps to flats. When you get to E, you count up five notes in E, you get to B. You count up five notes from B, you get to F sharp, But if you count up from F sharp, you're going to get to C sharp, and then if you count up from C sharp, you're going to get to G sharp, and it just gets kind of weird. So at some point, we need to flip accidentals. That's why the bottom three usually have both of them. So here, typically, you're going to flip here. So you're going to land on F sharp, and then you're going to treat it as G flat and then go up five and up five and five and five and up five. So that's why that's there. If we look at our more complicated one, The only things we're seeing in addition here, here's major, here's a minor. They're giving us how many sharps are flats in this ring here, one sharp, two sharp, three sharps. They're also giving us the key signature up here. Then this is where it gets ugly down here when we have the enharmonic stuff, where we have to flip from F sharp to G flat. Gets a little ugly. One last thing I want to point out about this before we talk about how to use it, is you can see close keys and you can see far away keys. In other words, if you're in the key of C, and you want to switch keys, you want to go to a different key. The closest keys, and by closest, I means the ones that share the most notes are going to be right next door to C. They're going to be F or G. The ones that are farthest away are going to be the toughest ones, the ones that have the least notes in common and are going to sound the most jarring if you switch to them. C2f sharp. That's the farthest away. Now what's interesting is that C sharp is right next door to that. If you went from C to C sharp, that's very far away. That's not an easy key change to make. Because if you think about it, all the notes are going to be raised by half step. There's virtually nothing in common. You're going to get two notes in common by doing that, but that's it. The closest keys are the ones right to the left and right of the key on. Okay. Now let's talk about how to use this. 56. Using The Circle to Find Chords: Okay, let's talk about two super special things we can do with this. First, we can use it to find our diatonic core progression because as the magic of the Circle eff works out, we can see six of our seven chords for every key is laid out here in the circle. Let me show you. I've pulled the Circle epis into a graphics program so that I could draw on it for us. Let's go to red. Key of C, watch this. I'm just going to highlight its neighbors. These are chords in C major. C, D minor E minor F major, G major, A minor, and then B, the diminished one, the one that we want to skip most of the time. But sometimes you'll see a chord written like this, maybe it's there or something just so that it gets in like that. I don't know why I lost my red pen. But sometimes you'll see it like that. Sometimes you'll see it at the top, doesn't really matter. But we can see six cords right there, and that's true of every key. Let's see, Let's say we're writing a song in the key of E flat major. What chords are in E flat major? Well, of E flat, and then we're going to have what's on both sides of it. B flat and A flat, and then we're going to have what's under it and around and back. There is six chords that we can use in the key of E flat major. Pick a major key and then just draw this shape around it and it will tell you all of your chords in the diatonic or progression. 57. Using the Circle to Find More Interesting Chords: Let's go back to C major. Let's say, we're working with these six quarts. Let's say we're writing a song, and we've got a or progression that's going, I don't know, C, A minor, D minor, G, something like that. It's cool, but it's not really working. We want something with a little more spice to it, something that sounds a little better, a little different, little outside of the box. Cool. What that means, if you want to go outside of the box, we can do a trick called I'm going to give you a term modal borrowing. We can use modal borrowing. You don't need to know that phrase because it's a fancy word to say this. Let's go let's do that. This is modal borrowing in a nutshell. What we've done here is drawn very untraight lines.'s turn these a different color just so it's clear what's happening. These are cords that are in our key, but these ones are out of key. They are not in the key of C major. But they're not very far away. If you're looking for something a little different, something that's going to sound not so generic as everything just in the key, this is how you get out of that key safely. The farther you venture away from that C major, this box, farther you venture away, the weirder it's going to be. If we're working and we're like, I just want to use a B minor chord, really out of nowhere. Do it. It's right there. It's going to be a little weird, but it won't be that weird. If you use a G minor chord instead of a G major chord. That's actually a really cool sound sometimes. You could go farther. You could say, let's grab this stuff, E flat, C minor. That's going to get weirder, but you could do it. Modal borrowing. Another way to say this is borrowing from closely related keys. I'll go into the theory of that in just a minute. Actually, let's do that now. Let's go to a new video and talk about what closely related keys means. 58. Borrowing from Closely Related Keys: Let's go back to the shape here. These, these are cords in the key of C. Now, when we go outside of this box like shape, let's say we go out and we grab these. Let's use a very different color. Sure. We go outside and we grab these. Let's sick to just this side for a minute. What have we actually done? What we're doing here is not just reaching out side of the key, we're borrowing cords from a nearby key, and in this case, F. Look, we are in the key of C. But right next door is the key of F. If I pretend I'm in the key of F, then my cords are the B flat minor D minor F C minor. Those. So because that's a very close key, I could borrow those chords. I could use those chords in the key of C. I'm going to make this as ugly as possible. And they're going to more or less work. They're going to be outside of the key, but we might be able to get some good sounding stuff. Similarly, if we were to borrow to use B minor and D, we're borrowing from the key of G because that's at the center of this group. So G is a close key. It is right next door. That means it's mostly going to sound good, and we're going to borrow a couple of s from the key of G. Major. That's what it means when I say borrowing from closely related keys. Borrowing just means using. I don't know why we say borrowing and not just using, but that's just what we say. This is probably the biggest songwriting tool when it comes to music theory, because what this tells you is how to get out of boring diatonic core progressions, how to get outside the keel a little bit, but do it safely without getting hurt. All right. Let's use it, and let's write a song. 59. Verse Chord Progression: Okay, let's write a song. Okay? Let's write a song in the key of G. So let's get rid of this and my little whatever those are. All right. And let's look at the key of G. So we are Whoops. Let's try to do that a little bit better. There we go. Good enough. Here are six of our chords. What's the one that's missing? It's actually right here. F sharp diminished is what's missing. But remember that's an ugly chord, we're probably not going to use it anyway, so let's just leave it off. Okay, so let's say our core progression. Let's start with our verse. With the verse, we'll stay in the key and then when we get to the chorus, we'll do something outside of the key. Let's do something nice and predictable. Let's go G. It's always good to start on tonic. G E minor B minor D. All right. Let's head over to Me score. L et's make a new project. Okay. Started with G. We could come up with a rhythm and stuff. Let's just do whole notes. For this, let's not get too fancy. Let's go G D G major, maybe we'll put a G in the base. We'll do a lot one. All right, G, what did I say next? E minor. E minor. E G B, and we'll put an E in the base. Whenever you don't know what to do in the base, just put the root of the. I'll always sound good. Then we wanted to go to B minor. That's going to be B D F sharp, and we'll put it there. Then we wanted to go to D. Let's go D F sharp, A and D. Okay. This is jumping around quite a bit. Let's hear it. Let's do some inversions to make this flow a little bit better. What I'm looking for is, I just want to make the path of least resistance between these chords. See, these are the same note. Now I'm going to flip this one up in Octave. See now in order to get from this chord to this chord, only one note moves. Let's see what I can do here. If I go this one down a octave. BD, that's not bad. And let's maybe put this one up. Okay. Now, it'll sound just a little bit smoother. Okay, cool. Let's maybe do that again. Let's do it maybe four times. That would be typical. Then let's make actually, hold on. Before we do that, I want to just write in the chords. I'm just going to do it with text. So we can keep track. This is G M. This was E minor, I think, looks like E minor. Uh This was B minor. And this was D major. Okay. All right. Now let's take this, and let's just dish it out four times. All right. And then, fun little notation thing. I'm going to add a double bar line. Double bar lines of notation. Kind of symbolize the end of a section. That's really all, there's nothing real formal to it. Okay, so now we have the basics of our verse. Now, here, let's make a chorus. And then we'll add melody to this in just a minute. 60. Chorus Chord Progression: Yeah. Okay, let's go back to our circle of fifth, and let's see if we can get outside just a little bit. So our options to get outside a little bit are F D minor, F sharp minor and A. Now, we could get out a lot. We could go all the way down here if we wanted. But the farther away you go, the weirder it's going to sound. Okay? So, let's try. What was our core progression? G E minor B minor D. So A would be pretty easy. Let's try F sharp minor. Let's see if we can make that work. Shouldn't be too hard. But I think what would be fun is just to land on it for the chorus. So we're really going to emphasize this F sharp minor. F sharp A C sharp. That's got a new accidental because it's out of the key. And then we'll also put an F sharp in the base. Okay. So now, what should we do? My general rule for quick songwriting is when you get to a chorus, if you don't know what to do, here's a quick thing you can do. Take the four chords that you used in the verse, if there is four chords. In this case, there is, take four chords. Throw two of them out and give two new ones, and then you've got a pretty good verse. So let's use two chords from this original. So you've got F sharp. Let's go B minor. I think that'll work pretty well. And then let's go minor. E minor, maybe. And then some kind of we could stay there. That might sound kind of good. Let's hear that. Yeah. Let's stick with it. Instead of doing a fourth chord, I just stuck with the third chord and hit it again. That felt like a good move to do. Let's do this twice. Then we'll go back to our verse two more times. We're going to write a quick sh song. All right. Oh I didn't put the names of our chords here. So let's go F sharp minor. This was B minor. This is E minor. A lot of minor here. E minor. Cool. Now, I'll just take this and copy it again to make life easy. We made a lead sheet for our song. Let's add a melody. 61. Verse Melody: Okay, so now we're getting into writing melodies to go with this. This is here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to leave these first four empty. We'll treat that as an intro. Maybe we'll put another double bar line there just for fun. And we'll make our verse start here. You can in Musco or in any notation program, you can add a voice. But what it's going to do when you play back the voice, it uses this simulated vocal a sound thing and it drives me nuts. Whenever I'm trying to do something for voice and notating it, I usually just use a flute or something because it just sounds better when they plays it back. That's why we're going to use a flute here. Okay, so now in order to write a melody, I'm going to basically connect the dots, okay? So G sure. Let's start on a G. And then maybe let's go A B. No, why did I choose A here, because B is in this chord, it's right there. So I wanted to put a B there because it was close to the G, and then I filled in the gap with a note. This is called a non chord tone, meaning it's not in the ord, but it is in the key, and it's probably going to sound just fine. These non chord tones are important. If every note is in the chord, it's going to be boring. So let's go bum bum, and then maybe like F sharp. Kees or an A in that. There is. Cool. So two little kind of mirrored riffs. I need to make that a sharp though because I didn't put a key signature on this. Just fine. Now let's maybe do something a little quicker here. So oh, let's maybe make that a half note. And then a quarter note. I don't know. I'm just kind of playing around here. F sharp, because that would be in key for this non chord tone. These are both Gs, so these are not non chord tones. And then let's go maybe an e here because that is in the cord. You want non cord tones to be on weak beats. In other words, not down beats. So down beats, I want to be in the cord. The beginning of the measure. Non cord tones can go in the middle of the measure or something like that, where it's less strong. Now, let's maybe go delete that in a second. Look. Something a little fast. Should that be C sharp? I think that should be Car. The reason it should be C sharp is because we're on a B minor chord here, and C sharp is going to be closer to that key. 'cause we're still sort of in F sharp minor here. So's to quick run E, and then n in F sharp again. And maybe we'll go Plum. And maybe we'll hold this A for, like, a long time. M. M L be down to the G. Watching someone write music is always so boring. That's nice. And then we'll go. Maybe I'll just step down with that and go B. B. A. M And that gets us into the chorus. Okay, so there's our nice little melody. Let's hear what we've got so far. This is going to feel kind of empty, but we'll fill it out in a minute. Okay. So obviously, I missed this sharp cause that sounded bad. But the rest of it, just fine. It's rather nice, actually. Okay. So let's come up with a me the chorus in the next video. Okay. 62. Chorus Melody: All right. We need a chorus melody. Up here. So we go right away to F sharp minor. That's the chord that's out of the key. So let's maybe really lean on that. I'm on this D. So I could just fall down to a C sharp. That'll be a little dissonant. That might work, but I want to kind of be sure things work. Well, let's try it. Let's maybe move a little bit more, so I'll go C sharp. M. Let's maybe do some kind of Ostinato here. Where we go? So Ostinato is just a repeating thing. So I'm just going to do this repeating Patter. For our chorus. For the first 2 bars, then maybe we'll go here. And here. Here, then it starts over. We don't have to start the melody over. But we can. So let's do it. Alright. Let's hear this. This might be kind of weird. It's dark. Very dark. But I kind of like it. All right. Let's take our melody and throw it in one more time. Although I don't think it's going to fit. Yeah, kind of ends there. Let's do this. Let's take this off. Pull that down to a G, and that'll be a nice ending. We'll be back in G. Cool. Okay. So now we've got a nice little song. I think what I'm going to do, even though I really shouldn't spend the time to do this, but I think I'm going to dump it into my, add some drums and guitar and see if I can turn this into an actual song. I'll be back in a minute. 63. Full Song: Okay, well, I spent way too much time on that. But it kind of turned out okay. It kind of turned into an REM song, which I didn't expect, and I didn't see coming, but all I did is I took our chords and our harmony. I put it into Ableton here. I put strings on the chords, and I also put piano on the chords, and then I put the melody in a solo violin. I added a bass line just using a bass synth. I added a high hat track and then drums that come in right here. And then I recorded a little bit of guitar, just me playing along with the chord changes. Nothing fancy at all. Here's what we got. Neat. Not bad. Right? Not bad for just kind of monkeying around. Okay, if you want to use this, I think I just gave you the sheet music in the previous thing. I don't think I can share this whole session with you because it's too big to upload the whole thing. But I guess I'll share a mix of it a bounce if you want. I don't know if that's useful to anyone. But if you want to chop it up and play with it, you're welcome to. So I'll put that in the next segment, and then we'll go on and talk about seventh chords. 64. What are 7th Chords?: Okay, seventh chords. Now, we've learned what chords are in key, and then we learned what to do when we get bored of those chords, how to go outside of the key and find a couple more chords that are especially spicy. But there is another thing you can do, and that is seventh chords. Seventh chords are great for when you've got a chord you like, but you want to give it a little more color. Seventh chords just have more color, they're more color full. Here's what I mean. Let's go back to our song. I'm going to turn this intro. I'm going to make these first four chords all seventh chords. In key seventh chords. You can hear what they're doing, kay? Let's hear them now. And actually, this one's wrong. That should be enough sharp. Let's hear it again. Sounds kind nice. It's maybe a little bit jazzy, you might say, gets a little bit more of a jazz feel to it a little bit. What are these seventh chords? They are a four note. Let's go back to C major. If I go C, o in a bit here. What I'm doing with that, as you remember, is just taking every other note of the C major scale. So first, third, fifth. First, third, fifth. If I go one step farther, first third, fifth, seventh, that's where we get the term seventh chord. It's not because there's seven notes in it, it's because we're using the seventh of the scale on top of the chord. We're just going to keep going. First, f, seventh. That's all there is. However, It does create a weird little situation in that there are four possible combinations that could happen. There's because the seventh could be major or minor. You could have a major chord with a minor seventh, a major chord with a major seventh. You could have a minor chord with a major seventh or a minor chord with a minor seventh. So that it basically generates new chords for us to look at. Let's talk about those now. 65. The 4 types of 7th chords: Okay Let's look at these four types of chords altogether, and then we'll dive in deep on each one because they are a little special. Let's do a C major chord with a major seventh, C minor with a major seventh. Let's do C major with a minor seventh and C minor. With a minor seventh. Oops. That already was minor. Okay. Here are four types. Major with a major seven is possibly the prettiest sounding chord in the world. It's just pretty. Okay. Minor chord. With a major seventh. This is the odd ball. This is the weirdest one. Let me come back to that one for a second. Here we have major chord with a minor seven. This might be arguably one of the most important chords in music. A major chord with a minor seventh. We sometimes call it a dominant chord. I'll come back to that one in a minute, too. We'll talk more about that in the next few videos. Then we have a minor chord with a minor seven. This is just a really nice sounding chord, a minor chord with a minor seventh on it. We would call this a minor seventh chord. We would call this first one a major seventh chord. This one is so weird and unlikely that we don't really have a good name for it. A minor chord with a major seventh, never really happens organically in a key. You've got to go outside of a key to make that happen. It is sometimes called the psycho chord because it's what we get in the movie psycho a lot. It's very distant coord. Okay, so let's go into each one of these in a little bit more detail here and talk about how they work and what their function is. 66. Major 7th Chords: Beach Plum Water. Not my favorite. Not a sponsored video. Anyway, Okay. First, let's talk about this one. This one we let me put some text on here because there's a couple of Normenclature things. That would be fun. This is called a C major seven. Now, remember in this case, M means major, lowercase M means minor. The seven should be small and subscript, so up higher and smaller. There are a couple other names for this. You can also do MJ seven. That's another way of writing it. Then you could also do something I don't know the key for. But in some text, you would do You would do a triangle, like a subscript triangle, like that, but with the bottom to it, a triangle. Triangle can mean major seven. But either of those is fine. I like this one. Major seven. With each of these chords, I want to talk a little bit about the function. The function is we talked for a very brief minute about it earlier. But each of these chords does. They don't have to do the thing that we expect them to do, but they do have a thing that we expect them to do. The C major seven chord is a very pretty chord, it's like a super pretty chord. It works really well as a tonic chord. You could make if you're in a key and you want it to be a little more colorful, you could add a major seventh to it. It works nice as a four chord sometimes. If we were in the key of C major, and we made F and F major seven, that would sound pretty nice. My favorite example of a Major seven chord. And I can't really play it for you because the copyright police will come after me. But it's under the bridge by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I want you to listen to that song. And after the intro, there's like the guitar intro. And then it just goes Blum. And then you hear the drums? And then the vocal comes in. That Blum. It's just like, Oh, that is a E Major seven chord. Okay? Okay, so Major seventh chords. Pretty, Happy. O 67. Minor 7th Chords: Next, let's go over to this one. This last one. This is a minor seven chord. Minor seven, really nice sounding chord also. Let's hear it. Here's that again. We have a minor triad with a minor seven. Don't forget that this is actually a B flat right here because of that. It's a B flat. These chords are not too harsh. They're generally always a good choice. If you're in if you have a minor key and you just want to give it a little extra flavor. Add that seventh to it. Works really good on the two chord and the six chord. It doesn't have a strong function. It doesn't really try to push hard to go any particular direction. It just, it's just there. It's an all around, really nice sounding chord. Let's hear just for fun. Let's hear all four back to back. That might be helpful. Maybe not. Anyway, let's go on to the harder ones. 68. Dominant 7th Chords: Next, let's do this dominant cord. Now, in order to do this, I want to go back to our scale. Let's go back to here and look at our scale. We're N C major. Let me build our diatonic or progression just like we did before. Okay. Now, if we remember this, you might remember that that this results in a pattern. Let's write that pattern down again. Et's do that, I guess. And then we start over on the top. Okay. So this is our pattern. What happens now when we add seventh to it? So if we do the same diatonic progression, but I go up to the next note, let's just listen. Pretty. Okay. But now we got to change our name here, right? Because this is now a major seven. This is now a minor seven. This one is a minor seven, because it was a minor chord and now it's a minor seven. This is what happens when we just stay in key. This one is a major seven. This one is a major seven, sorry. This one is a dominant seven. Things are getting weird here. We'll come back to that in a second. Let's go back to here. This one is a minor seven. This one is a diminished seven, and this one is a major seven. This dominant seven. This is what you get when you have a major triad and a minor seven. That basically means we have major, and then this last third is a minor third because there's another third on top now. These thirds are major, these third are minor. That's how we get a minor seven. You could also count from the bottom and do half steps or hole steps or whatever. But the easier way for me is to think about this interval. Now, this is the only one in which we have a major triad with a minor seventh. It happens on the fifth chord. Of any key, we call it a dominant seventh. And this thing, more than anything else in the world, wants to go back to this chord. T tonic, with a seventh or without a seventh. It doesn't care. This dominant seventh chord wants to push back to tonic at all costs. Listen, That was probably hard to hear. Let's separate it out, and let's do it again over here. So here, let's go. Okay, here I have G G F, and then we're going to want to go to C major. Let's just make it a C. Okay. G seven to C, listen. Let's make it yourself correctly. So here's a C major chord. I'm just going to invert it a little bit so that things do what we want them to do. There we go. Now, listen. So this chord wants to do that. If we don't do that, we get angry. Right? We really want to hear that. There's a story. Famous story from a very long time ago. Apparently, the story goes that Mozart's dad would they lived in this, like, three story kind of row house kind of thing. And down on the ground story, Mozart's Dad would play on the piano very quietly in the morning. He would play that. And then Mozart, three stories up, would hear it wake up and say, Oh, my God, and he would run downstairs and go Because he had to hear that. He had to hear the resolution to the dominant seventh chord. So if you do this chord, you're very much going to want to hear tonic after it. So that is the dominant seventh chord. We notate it usually by leaving off the M entirely. So let me put this on here. It looks like that. If you just see the root and a number, this number seven, specifically, then that's what we're asking for. We're asking for a major chord with a minor seventh. It's a weird shorthand for it, but that's what we do. Dominant seven chord. 69. Blues and the 7th Chord: Okay. There's one other kind of weird thing about the dominant seventh Cre that I wanted to point out. And that's that in the Blues. If you know what the blues sounds like, it's got a little bit of, like, a It's not jazzy, but it's a little bit of a I don't know. It's hard to explain that sound. But what that sound is is a whole bunch of seventh chords. Back to back without proper resolution. Look, this is what Blues music looks like sometimes. This is a typical what's called a 12 bar blues C chord progression. C seven, F seven, c7c7, F 7c7g7, F 7c7g7. A whole bunch of seventh chords, and they don't resolve correctly, but this is what the blues is. The blues is putting that minor seventh on everything. A major chord with a minor seventh just gives you that blues like sound. Is this wrong? No, not at all. It's just the genre. It's what it is. It's got a little bit of chromaticism to it because every almost every chord is moving out of key a little bit because of that seventh. Like, this C seven is using a B flat, which is not in the key of C. This F seven is using an E flat, which is not in the key of E. C. This G seven is using an F, which is in the key of C. This G seven is the only one that's actually in key. There's a b of chromaticism here, and that's what gives the blues that kind of sound. Anyway, I point this out to show you two things. One is that these seventh chords don't always resolve in the way that we expect them to, and that's fun. And two, what the blue sounds like. There you go. 70. The "Psycho Chord": Okay. Now back to this one. The minor triad with a major seventh. We don't really have a name for this. Sometimes we call it the Psycho C chord because if you remember in Bernard Herman's score for the movie psycho by Alfred Hitchcock and it goes, That's this chord. I would probably call it If I saw this in music somewhere and I had to give it a name, I'd probably call it C minor something because it's C minor and then maybe raised seven. You can do stuff like this where it basically means a C minor chord with a raised seventh. That would tell me that it's not a C minor seventh. It's actually got a major seventh in it. You could do that. You could also do a minor major thing where you'd write like that. That looks a little silly, but works. I'd know what you were talking about, if you did that. I think I like this better. There you go. There's all our seventh chords. Let's do a worksheet and just practice identifying some of these seventh chords, and then we'll move on to finally talking about minor keys. 71. Welcome to Minor Keys: All right, let's transition to minor. So a couple of things to point out about minor keys. When it comes to chords, we talked about how major chords are often happy and minor chords are often sad. But in context of a song, yeah, they're both happy and sad. It doesn't. It's not as obvious of that when you string together a chord progression. Keys are the same way. It's not true to say that all songs in a minor key are sad songs. That's not true at all. Nor is it true that all songs in a major key are happy songs. That's not true. However, if you want to write a song that is a little darker sounding, you probably want to start off in a minor key. You don't have to. There are certainly ways to do that in a major key. But a minor key is probably going to get you there a little bit faster. But both major and minor keys are entirely versatile to do a lot of different stuff. So keep that in mind. In this first section, we're going to talk about how to find the minor scale. There's really four ways we can do it. We can do it through a whole half pattern. We can do it by changing a few notes of the major scale to get to the minor scale. Can do it through something called parallel minor scale, and we can do something called relative minor scales. We're going to do all four of those here. You don't need to memorize all four, but I find that if there's four ways to do something, I'm going to tell you all four and then you can decide which one works best for you. So we're going to do that, and then after that, we'll talk about the diatonic core progression in minor, what that looks like, what the pattern is. Then we'll look at the circle of fifths in minor. And then a couple other oddities about minor keys and minor scales. And then we'll get into writing another song, using all of this. Cool. Here we go. 72. Finding Minor by Alternations to Major: Okay. First, let's talk about how to turn a major scale into a minor scale. Now in order to do this, there's three notes we need to remember. The third, sixth, and the seventh. You may have guessed the third was in there, because we know that to take a major chord and turn it into a minor chord, we're going to change the third of the chord, which is of the scale also. But we also need to change the six and the seventh. Let's make a major scale here. Let's go back to see Major. There is our major scale. So in order to turn a major scale into a minor scale, we're going to go to the third note of the scale, and we're going to lower it by one half step. E to E flat. Then we're going to go to the sixth node of the scale, four, five, six. We're going to lower that by one half step. A to A flat, and then the seventh node of the scale, B to B flat. We're going to lower by a half step. And now we have a C minor scale. Let me play it back to back with a C major scale, just so you can get it in your head a little bit. Here's a minor scale first and then a major scale second. Let's slow that down just a little bit. Okay? They're slightly different. You know, in context like this, it can be a little hard to hear the difference sometimes. But they are a little different. So in order to turn a major scale into a minor scale, we're going to lower by one half step, the, the sixth, and the seventh. 73. Finding Minor by the Whole-Half Pattern: Okay. Now let's look at the whole half pattern. Now, if you remember the whole half pattern for major, it was whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. Okay. That's what got us our major scale. Now, if we look at that for a minor scale, what we're going to get is whole step, starts the same, but then half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. Okay, so a simple otherther pattern to remember, whole step, half step. So whole step, half step, there's that minor third, and then who step, who step, half step, whole step, and whole step. Now, you might notice something funny happening here, and this is going to get us into our next thing. But have you noticed that the major scale and the minor scale are the same scale? Watch this. If I take our pattern, the whole step, and the half step pattern, and I lay them on top of each other. They don't line up. They're not the same pattern, obviously. But what if I did this? Okay? Now, if we continued this one forward, what we would get is that. So what we have is the whole step half step pattern just offset by an interval or two. Be once we get to here, it's the same pattern. Interesting, isn't it? They are the same scale. Now, these two are very different. They have three notes that are not the same, so how can they be the same scale? These are not the same scale. What we've discovered here is something called relative minor. I saw this in the circle of fifths, but let's explain it in its full detail now. 74. Finding Minor using the Relative Major: So what we're going to do here is called finding relative minors. So every major scale, and therefore, major key has a relative minor scale and key. So they're always paired together. So if we take C major, let's do this. All right. So let's say C major. But if we did this, let's get rid of these last two, this is just consistent. Here's our minor pattern. Let's lay that on top. It's actually going to lay right there. It lays right there, that's where we laid it last time. But if we just shift it forward to where it restarts, it starts right here. That means this node is the start of this pattern, whole half. Half. Then if we go back to the beginning, it's going to be whole whole half. That means this note is the start of our relative minor. What node is that? That's an A. That means that A minor and C major, are the same notes. They're not the same scale or a key entirely. They're relatives, which means they're close. They do have one thing different. I'll come back to that in a second. The key that you have to remember here is that it's the sixth. If we're in a major scale, and you want to find the relative minor, you're going to go up to the sixth note of that scale. That is the relative minor. That's going to get us to A. Now, if you're in a minor scale and you want to find the relative major, you're going to go to the third. One, two, three. E flat major is the relative major to C minor. C major and C minor are not relatives. They're parallel. We'll talk about those next. One more time, if we're in a major scale, and we want to find a relative minor, we're going to go up to the sixth. If we're in a minor and we want to find the relative major, we're going to go up to the third. So what does that mean? That means that those two keys, let's say, C major and A minor, use all the same notes. They're the same notes. But they're not exactly the same scale or same key. The thing they have different is tonic. They have different tonics. In other words, the key of C major, the tonic is C. The key of A minor, the tonic is A. So if we're in the key of A, but we start treating C like tonic, it's going to start to sound like C major. If we're doing all this stuff that really emphasizes C, it's going to sound like C major. But if we're in the key of A minor, and we really start emphasize if we're in the key of C major, and we really start emphasize A, the pitch A. It's going to start to feel like a minor. What you treat as tonic is important. Now how do we treat something like tonic? We give it extra emphasis. We might have a core progression that has that 57 to one in it. That one is going to help us really establish what tonic is. This is something that you're going to want to do with your core progressions as you're writing songs. Make sure that you're establishing tonic clearly. If it's ambiguous, it can maybe not feel complete in a way. However, doing something ambiguous with your core progression is a technique that is fun to use sometimes. But most of the time, we want to make sure we establish tonic through your core progression. Cool. Now there's an Internet music theory guy. He's like a guitar shredder guy, and he talks about how there's only one scale and everything is the same scale and all this stuff. That's wrong. That's really wrong. I would love to say his name and just really docs the guy, but I'm not going to because I'm a classy person. But it's but it is wrong to say that something like C major and A minor are the exact same scales. They're not. They have different tonic and that's important. Anyway, moving on and let's talk about parallels. 75. Finding Minor using the Parallel Major: Okay, parallel keys are kind of exactly what we have here. So C major and C minor are parallel keys. So if I was in the key of A major and I wanted to play in the parallel minor key, it would be a minor. It's just taking the same tonic and then switching the scale, right? So versus relative, which is using different tonics in the same scale. Parallel means the same tonic and different scales. So E flat major, the parallel minor is E flat minor. G minor, the parallel major is G major. Same tonic. Relatively simple on that one. In a way, that's like the first thing we did. If you want to turn G major into G minor, you're going to have to go in and change the third, sixth and seventh by lowering them down a half step. Okay. So everything we just said is true about the minor scale. However, there's one little wrinkle in the way we deal with minor scales and minor keys that's different than the way we deal with major keys. And that little wrinkle is that there are three different flavors for each minor key has nothing to do with relative and parallel that we were just talking about. This is a separate thing. So let's go into a couple videos now and explain that really quick. 76. The Three Types of Minor Scales: Okay. The reason I don't want to spend too much time on this next thing is because I'm not so sure you'll need it. As songwriters, these variations of the minor scale are not something that comes up very often with one exception. There's one exception that I'll point out that you might do that is common when it comes to progressions. These other two scales, I'm going to show you. They're not widely used in pop music of any real sort, but I feel like I'm neglecting some professional responsibility if I don't show you what they are because it is an important thing that happens in music. So here we go. There are three different kinds of minor scales. What we've learned so far is called the natural minor scale. That's what this one is. That is the one we use most often. When we're doing relative and parallel scales, we're talking about natural minor scales. If someone just says the minor scale, they're talking about the natural minor scale. But there are two more. There's what's called the harmonic minor and the melodic minor. Actually, I was going to do this in three different videos, but I don't think we need it. Maybe we'll just do it all in one video. Here's the difference. When we take the natural minor scale, I'm going to paste it again, but this time, I'm going to take the seventh tone, and I'm going to raise it. Okay? Now, why is that? This is now called the harmonic minor scale. It's exactly the same as the natural minor scale, except our seventh tone is raised a half step. Which means our seventh tone is more like the major scale. Because if you remember to turn the major scale into the minor scale, I lowered that seventh scale degree by a half step. Now I'm raising it back up again. Now that seventh is like the major scale seventh. It's weird. But I still have my third and sixth lowered. It's mostly a minor scale. Why do we do this? The reason we do this sometimes is because this seventh tone is called the leading tone, and it really pushes us towards tonic. It's the thing that makes it go that feel like we're that tonic is important. That seventh tone pushes us there. It's got a lot of direction. Listen, what happens when I stop on this leading tone. The raise the leading tone. Right? Like, you really kind of feel that. And that can be important to helping us establish tonic. Whereas, the natural minor scale doesn't have that. This is flat, so it's not the same kind of push. Let's do the same thing here. Right? It's not strongly pushing us to It's pushing us there, but it's not as strong as the leading tone here. This helps us get to tonic. Now there's another reason. This is the one reason that I think this might be useful to use in your songs. That is that if we do the diatonic or progression with this raised, it changes a few chords, but the thing that it changes the most is it turns our minor five chord into a major five chord. Let me explain. If we go back to our diatonic core progression, where we have in major, we have major, major, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, and then major where it starts over again. The minor co progression is different. We're going to go through that in a minute. But the biggest thing that's different is that five is a minor chord. Remember we talked about how we need that five to push to one. That's like the whole that's like a big deal. That five, especially 57 goes to one. But if five is minor, it doesn't push to one. It just doesn't do it the way that we really want it to. But in scale. If we raise this leading tone, that makes that five a major chord. Now we're back to having a big strong five, seven that leads to one. So you don't have to switch your scale to the harmonic minor scale. In order to do this. But you can just use this as permission to raise that note when you need to, which will give you a major five chord in a minor key. So let yourself do that if that sounds good to you. Okay, let's go on and talk about the other scale, the other version of minor. And I guess let's go to a new video for that since this one's getting log. 77. The Melodic Minor Scale: Okay, so we looked at the harmonic minor scale. Now let's look at what's called the melodic minor scale. What we're going to do with that one is we're going to raise the leading tone, the seventh scale degree, like we've already done here. We're also going to raise the sixth. Okay. What we have now basically is a minor scale at the bottom and a major scale at the top. Here's what this sounds like. Weird, right? The reason for this is similar to what we just talked about. This gives us a major five chord. It also stops the weird leap that happens here. If I take this back down, what we have here is an A flat to a B natural, which is bigger than a whole step, right? It's actually a minor third. So that's a big leap in our scale. And that's kind of awkward, and it makes that kind of strange sound that happens right there. Listen. It's almost that eastern sound. So when you're writing melodies with this kind of scale, you might not want that big leap, and so we do this. That's why this is called the melodic minor scale. It's used for melodies. Versus the other one is called the harmonic minor scale. It's used for harmonies more or less. You can use both for melodies or harmonies, doesn't matter. The even weirder thing about this scale is that traditionally, when you're going down, you do the opposite. So when we're going down, we're actually going to lower those. So when you're going up, you're going to raise the sixth and seventh notes. When you're going down, you're going to lower the sixth and seventh notes. But that's crazy. That's traditionally how we teach this, but no one really ever does that in pop music. If you look it up in a textbook, it's going to say it's going up and lowered going down. That was true. That's how Bach used it, but we're not Bach. We're writing modern songs. So you don't need to do that. But if someone says anything to you about, you're not doing that, that's why. Don't worry about this going up and going down business. And frankly, don't really worry about the melodic and harmonic minor. Use a major five in your in a minor key core progression if you want to, if that sounds good. All of this is to say why that works. But it doesn't matter a ton. 78. Key Signatures in Minor: Let's go back and talk about key signatures, now that we know what minor keys are. If I add this key signature, we know the pattern to figure this out. We take the last sharp and we raise it by a half step, making this the key signature of G major. Now, this is also the key signature for a minor key. But which one? How do we figure that out? Well, what I do in my head is I always figure out the major and then figure out the relative from the major. So I'll say this is G major, and then I'll picture in my head the six scale degree of G major, which is E, and then I'll say this is E minor also. Okay. So when I'm trying to figure out what key a song is in, I'm going to look at this key signature, and I'm going to say, the key is probably G major or E minor, and then I'm going to go through the song and figure out what tonic is, and then I know what the answer is. There are other tricks to it. If we did this one, this is going to be the key of D major, and it's going to be the key of B minor. Is there a trick where you can take the last sharp and go down a whole step, C sharp down to B, and that gets you B minor. Let's see if that works. Is this F minor? This is a major F sharp minor? Yeah. You'd have to consider the other sharps in the key signature. F sharp minor. That doesn't work to take the last sharp and go down. Let's see what we do for flats. For me, I would say, this is the key of B flat major or G minor. That would get me there. How do I get a G minor from this? I'm not sure. For me, it's just easier to think about the relative major Think about the major key and then figure out the relative major key from there. That's just faster for me. Then I don't have to worry about multiple patterns here. So every key signature is going to give you two possible keys that we're in now, major or minor. 79. The Pattern: All right. Let's get back to diatonic or progressions. This time, in minor. Let's just take a look at what we're doing. Let's do it in a minor. I guess we'll start up here. Let's start way down here. A, B D E F G A, A minor scale. Now let's do it in thirds. We're going to get this. Okay. So here is our diatonic core progression in a minor. Cool. So let's look at the pattern. We've already looked at this a hair, but we'll do it. Our first chord is minor. Obviously, it's a minor. Our second chord is major. Our third is major. Our fourth is minor, O fifth is minor in natural minor. Our sixth is major, our seventh chord is major, and then we get back to our original chord. Which is minor again. So, I did something wrong. This isn't major, this is diminished. So this putting the diminished in here obviously makes it a whole lot easier to see the comparison between the major and minor and how they overlap. Because the major is major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished major. Now you can just line up those diminished to get how they overlap. But let's focus on the minor for now. So minor diminished, major, minor minor, major, major, minor. There you go. That is the pattern. Now let's talk a little bit about why we care about the pattern and a couple other things about it. 80. The V Chord and Leading Tones: Now, remember the power of the diatonic cord progression. It tells us all the chords in the key. In a minor, we have an a minor chord, a B diminished chord, a C major chord, a D minor chord, and e minor chord, and F major, a G major, and another a minor chord. Now, if you're wondering, are these the same chords that are in its relative C major? Yes, they are exactly the same chords. All the chords are the same. If we really want to be in a minor, we just have to establish a minor as Now let's also remember that trick that we talked about in the previous section. This five chord as minor is a little weird and sometimes it just sounds good to make it major. Check it out. Remember what we did to turn a natural minor scale into a harmonic minor scale. We raise the seventh. Now in the key of A, the seventh is going to be G. If we raise g to G sharp, That's right here. What that did is it turned this chord major by giving us a leading tone. It also messed up a couple other chords, this one and this one. These ones, this now becomes an augmented chord, and this now becomes a diminished chord. We tend to not use the, we tend to leave these as natural and just use this as a major chord. Here's what this sounds like now. But that gives us this nice 51 sound. So don't forget about that leading tone. If you don't want to think about the leading tone, just think about this. In a minor key, the five is minor, but it could be major. S. 81. 7th Chords in Minor: Let's look at seventh chords in a minor key. Everything works the same with these. If we add a seventh to all of these chords, Now let's look at what they're called. So let's see that up there. This one. We have a minor chord with a minor seventh. This is let's just name it. This is going to be a minor seven. We have a minor, and then this is going to be a diminished seventh. We can do that if we want. B diminished seven. Diminished chords, and especially diminished seventh, have some actual weird superpowers that get into, in heavy music theory to really pick a part. So if you want to go deeper down this road, look at my big, big, big music theory sequence. There are 21 parts in that sequence, and there's a whole class just devoted to the diminished seven chord because it's weird. But for now, let's leave it aro. Leave it a ron. Is that what I just said? Anyway, Our third chord becomes C major seven. That's a major seventh. Our fourth chord becomes d minus seven. We have a minor and a minor seven, minor tried and a minor seven. Now, our fifth chord, if we stay in the key is going to be, this is a d minor seven, and this is going to be an E minor seven. This would be an e minor seven. However, if we raised it and made it major, then it's going to be a dominant chord and just an e seven. But let's notate it the way it's rhythm written now, which is an e minor seven. Then we have F, which in this case, is going to be major with a major seven, that's F major seven, and then G which is going to be G B D F, that's going to be a G dominant seven. That's a tricky one because this G seven is going to want to lead to C. So because remember the dominant seventh chord want to resolve down a fifth, which is not tonic in this case. This is a chord that you may want to avoid in the minor key. It's easy to remember because avoiding this chord is the same as in a major key, we avoided the seventh chord built on the seventh scale degree because it was the diminished chord. Now it's this G seven chord, which we want to avoid. You can use a G major chord here without the seventh just fine. You can use that G seven if you want. It's just going to push you over into the relative major. Let's leave it like that. Then our last chord is going to be min, A minor seven, same as that one. Group. There you go. Seventh chords work the same in minor as they do in major. 82. Minor keys and the Circle of Fifths: Okay, let's get back to the circle of fifths. So what has changed? So now we can see in our circle of fifths are relative minors really quick. C major, relative minor is a minor, g E minor, d B minor, E flat major, C minor. They're all here in the circle of. What about our chords that we were doing before? If I want to know all the chords in a minor, it's still the same shape. We're going to go like that and like that and like that. The same chords that are in C major, all these six plus the diminished chord, it's the same in A minor, we can use all of these chords. The shape itself hasn't changed. For writing a song in C minor, we can just go just center C minor, and these are the chords that are going to work for us. G minor, F minor, A flat major, E flat major, B flat major. The circle of fifth still works the same. We just look at the relative minor. 83. More Options for “Closely Related Keys": Let's go back to exploring closely related keys again. We remember that if we're in a minor, here are chords. Okay. Now, what about closely related keys? If we want to borrow from a closely related key, we can basically do the same thing. We can extend out. To get these ones. Now we're going to be out of key for B flat and g minor. If we're in a minor, B flat major is a great chord to use in a minor. I actually love it. G minor is a great chord to use in a minor. B minor is a pretty good chord. It's going to dodge the diminished for us, and D major in key of a minor also works great. Keep in mind those closely related keys still work when we're looking for more chords to do in minor. 84. All Too Well, Taylor Swift (Song Analysis #3): All right. Now you can read music. Let's go back to the very beginning of the class when we looked at a couple of lead sheets and said, I think you're going to be able to read these by the end. So let's see how we did. Let's start with All Too Well by Taylor Swift. So we've already analyzed these chords. That should mean something to you by now. We've analyzed them in the key of C major because we have these C five, basically kind of power chords on the guitar. I have an A minor chord here. Based on this first line, I'd say we're in the key of C or a minor, probably C. You can play these chords A minor. Yeah, I only have the first page of the score. All we have is c5g5 and A minor F five. And we know that we have a one, five, six, four chord progression, and then it repeats. So really quite simple on this one, You could probably tell me all the notes in these chords to if you wanted to. In a C five, it's really just the tonic, the root C, and then a fifth above that, which is count five notes from C and you're going to get G. C and G. Same thing here with G five, it's going to be G and D. A minor is a full a minor chord, so you could figure out what those notes are if you really wanted to. A C and E, and F five is the same thing, it's a fifth ord, F and then a fifth above it, C. Relatively simple. Let's look at one of the harder ones. 85. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye (Song Analysis #4): Okay. Let's look at what's going on. It starts on this E Major seven chord. Do you know what that is? It's a Major seven chord. That whole intro is that, and then the lyrics come in. We're on an E Major seven. Feeling good. We switch to a C sharp minor seven. Now, is that in the key of E major? Yeah, it is. C sharp minor seven right there. Here's how to play one of those on the guitar if you really want to. And then we're back to e major seven. C sharp minor seven, we're alternating a little bit between E major and C sharp minor seven. Eventually, we get to an F sharp minor seven. Now, if we're in the key of E major, which it sure looks like we are, that's what our key signature is showing, and we're really sitting on this E major for a while. If we're in the key of E major, that F sharp minor seven chord is going to be a two chord, and it's perfectly in key. Sit on that a little bit. Now we're going to get to this F sharp minor seven over B. We looked at these at the very beginning of the class. But as a reminder, when you see a chord like this, the top part of it is the chord. We do F sharp minor seven. That's what we play. The B means whoever's playing bass or keys or whatever, they're going to play a B in the base. Now if you're playing guitar on your own, you can play that B as the lowest note and it'll sound rather nice. But F sharp minor seven over B means just there's a B in the bottom. B seven, add 13. That's a fun chord. They don't even give you a chord drawing for that. But we can figure out what that is. It's a B seven chord. Whenever you see stuff in parentheses like this, what it basically means is, you can leave off the parentheses stuff. It's not going to change anything about the chord. We're going to play a B seven chord, that's a B dominant chord. Then if we want to get a little more spicy with it, we can add 13, I should stop using the word spicy. That means several things. But you get the point. If we want to add a little more color to it, that's better. We can do this ad 13, and with that, we're going to do exactly what it sounds like. We're going to count up to a 13th. So if we count up the scale, an octave is going to be eight, so we keep going. Eight, ninth is going to be a two, a tenth is going to be a three, 11th is going to be a four, and a 13th is going to be a five. It wants a five on the top. There's a F sharp minor seven with a B in it back to our e major seven, C sharp minus seven. There's a coda, A minor nine right here. A A minor chord, if you want to add a nine, you can, a nine is going to be a two because eight is the top of the scale. If we keep going, we get 29, which is two. There's probably going to be a B in that or somewhere. It's right there. It's that long held note. And that's where we're sitting for a whole bunch of the song. A over B, that's going to be just an A major chord with a B at the bottom. That's it. Now you can play through this and know a lot about what's going on. 86. "Real Books" and "Fake Books": One kind of fun aside related to lead sheets like this, but kind of separate. There are books you can get called real books and fake books. If you want to learn like hundreds and hundreds of songs, You should get one of these books. You can go to a music store and find a real book or a fake book. They're big fat books like this, and they just have tons of music in the m. Now, there's a lot of lore about this, and it's really actually fascinating. I think there was just a podcast I listened to about the origins of this or maybe it was a YouTube video. But basically, fake books means that they have a whole bunch of music in the m, and it's all been licensed so that you can use it. The real book, though, is harder to find. It's kind of easier to find now. But in the old days, you had to go to a music store and use like a password and you would get a copy of the real book if they trusted you enough to sell you because the real book, the real real book, had no copyright stuff. It was just a whole bunch of photo copied music, and that's what this is. This was, I very distinctly remember going into a very specific music store. Uh, telling them a secret word. And I think I had to say, who sent me, And I was able to buy the real book. It does have a cover. Mine's just been ripped off. You can see this is a lot of wear and tear. But there's a ton of songs in here from basically everyone. So if you can get your hand on one of these, They're really great to have, just because what these have, every single song has just the melody and the chords. A couple of them have a little bit more than that, but it's really just the melody in the chords. And that's all you need for almost all songs. So pick yourself up a real book if you can find it. 87. 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 flu just like what we did last time, just to give us a melody and harmony. So let's come up with a core progression. Um L et's do the same thing. What key do we want to be in? I can be a minor, but let's do something a little more interesting. How about E minor? Let's start on a big e minor quart. 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. This is key signature for g. Let's put a big old E at the bottom here. 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 going to make a little riff here by doing an A minor and then inversions of it. This is all e minor, e minor, e minor, but I put the E on top, e minor, but I put the g on top, minor, but I put the E on top. Nothing too fancy. What are notes in in minor? Let's look. Here's E minor, Let's go like this. Whoops. That's okay. Whoops. Now it got a little bad. It's hard to draw with your mouse. Sometimes. It's hard for me to draw with sometimes. Here's what we've got. We can do CG D, A minor, B minor, minor. I could get weird and go outside to one of these other. But let's stay inside for now. Let's maybe do on 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. I maybe I'll go down this time. Okay. Next, let's do maybe a D. Oops. D major. So that's going to be D F A ops. Okay, then one more. Let's see we're on D. I want to get us back to E minor. So let's do B minor. I could do this as major because it's the five. 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. Go down here and go to B minor. B, and then we'll go B D F sharp. Some is going to 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've got sort of a sequence kind of happening here 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. Let's see if we like that better. Oh, I do like it better in this case. It's just got a fun new groove. Let's keep it at that. Let's analyze what we've got here. We have here E min, 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. Then Put it again. We'll just do it twice. Sure. We could if we wanted to do something fun, could do something a little different with this baseline. Just to liven things up. I'm going to create a rhythm here. Let's tie that. Yeah, that's cool. Now, I'll just use this for all of these. This is an A. This is a D. And this is a B. Cool. All right. 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. 88. Chorus Chord Progression: Okay I have a different idea for the chorus. Let's figure out our chords first. 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. 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 realize on the chorus, this is the same thing we did on the last chorus. But because this is what I like to do, but you don't have to do this every time. All right, so we're going to go to D minor. That's going to require an accidental. Now, let's go to C major back in Key. L 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 B D F A. If I want this to be a seventh, I need B D 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 Es. But I want this. I just want solid eight notes all the way through here. And then here, I just want D. Just solid, just cooking. And then see Stop jumping around on me. B. That's an interesting little line moving down. And, let's label those chords real quick. What we have here is E minor, and then D major, C major and B seven. Cool. All right. 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 on it a little bit. Watch this. I'm going to move my base note to the next or just a little early. 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 All right. That should be good. I guess I'll do it here too. All right. 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. Then we'll do our verse again. Maybe our verse twice just for fun. Now we have the very bare bones song. Let's do some melody stuff. 89. Verse Melody: Okay Let's find a melody in here. Our intro, we're going to leave without a melody. But then here we'll start to add one. Let's see. We could really do anything we want here. We do have something a little more up tempo with this motion happening in the base. Let's go Right now, I'm just doing kind of chord tones here. Let me find a way to kind of mirror that first bar. A minor. I can go down to E. Okay and then this note, let's go. Et's go to F sharp, and then G A. So we're getting some non cord tones in here. So what we have right here is a non cord 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 going to tie that. And then Okay. We'll tie that together. Oh. Yeah, that's rather nice. Maybe I'll just copy that same thing again for our second half. But take this down and octave. Yeah. That works just fine. Okay. Let's hear it. Nate, sounds fine. Alright, let's figure out our chorus. 90. Chorus Melody: This chorus has this line in it, going E D, C, B. But I'm using that in the base, so I don't really want to do it again in the melody. I could do an Ostinato thing again. Didn't I do an Ostinato in the last one? I think I did. I kind of want to just do this. Let's try it. But I want to change there. D sharp. And then let's go 16th notes. So I'm going to do a quick little scale run here. I got to figure out which scale to use. So we're in E minor. But we do have that D sharp in here. So I should just be able to run up E minor. C is natural is fine. D sharp. And then E. Let's do that, and then we'll repeat this again. But we'll start it out. And maybe tie these notes together. Sure. Cool. Let's take those three. Put them there. All right. 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 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. Go. Okay. So let's do some studio magic, and see if I can make 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 and the next thing, and then we'll be back with the full song. Here we go. 91. Full Song: [No Speech] 92. What Have We Learned?: Okay, we are nearing the end. I want to circle all the way back to the beginning, 1 million years ago and revisit for just a second, the original goals we had for this class. We talked about what would music theory give you the ability to do with your songwriting. There are two main things that we talked about back then, and I want to bring those up now. The first is speed. If you have to write songs fast, music theory can help you with that. No, I am not someone who believes that writing music fast says anything about the quality fast or slow that you write. Doesn't mean anything. However, there are some situations where we just have to write fast because maybe we only have a few minutes to write a song, or maybe we have a deadline from a film or show or whatever. So when you have to write fast, you can say, Okay, I'm in this key, I can use these chords. Here we go. These notes are going to sound good, these notes are not going to sound good. And you can really streamline what you're doing by just thinking about the music theory side of it, saying, I know what's going to sound good, so you just go. So that is a great asset for so that is a great skill that you now have, knowing some of the basics about music theory. The other thing we're able to do now is think about maybe we're working on a song and we've used all of our chords and we're like, nothing sounds good. What do I do here? Well, we have a number of options to answer that question now, right? We can go outside of the key, we know how to do that, we can go way outside of the key. So we know what's going to sound good now in terms of chords, and what's going to sound maybe really cool. The thing I always tell people, and I've said it before in this class, I'm going to say it again is that if you use every rule of music theory, correctly, you will write a lot of very fine music. Not good, not bad. Just fine. It'll be perfectly average. And that can be great. But if you start to experiment with going outside of the key, doing some chords that are a little different, That's where you have the really great moments. Another thing you know how to do now is look at someone else's song, analyze it, put Roman numerals on it, and then take those away and use them in your own music. You can say, Hey, this Taylor Swift song uses a one, 465 progression. I love that. I love the sound of that. I'm going to use that in my song. That is totally legit, that is totally legal. You can do that all day long. So you have a lot of skills now to help you with your writing by using music theory. Okay, that's what I wanted to say about that. Let's do just a couple other quick wrap up things. And then we're down. 93. What Comes Next?: Alright, what comes next? We're wrapping this course up or you know a good amount of stuff about music theory now, and you're going to apply that knowledge to your songs, and that's great. But how much music theory do you know? You know When someone goes to college and they decide to major in music to be a music teacher or something like that. They have to take four semesters of music theory. Four semesters, two years worth of music theory you have to take in college in the United States. Typically, some schools do it different, but that's typically how it's done. You now know about half of the first semester of music, college music theory. That's great. That's really great. But there's a whole lot more. And when I say four semesters of music theory in college, that's like the basic music theory. That's the basic stuff that any professional musician should know. It goes past that. People get PhDs in music theory, write books on music theory every day. There's new books coming out about music theory. So you can go a farther. So what should you do next? If you want to continue learning more about music theory, I suggest taking a big old music theory class. And I have one. My class that's called Music Theory Comprehensive is a traditional music theory class. It is 21 classes long. It is. And it goes all the way through those whole four semesters that college students have to take. So you'll learn all of this stuff. Having taken this class, should you start on the first class in that series. Probably not. If you're comfortable with reading music, start on Part three of that sequence if you want to keep going. Skip parts one and two, that'll be redundant with what we've just learned. If you're not comfortable now reading music, go back and start on Part one. It'll be a little redundant, but the redundancy won't hurt. It'll just help reinforce things. If you want to do more music theory, I highly recommend that course. It's been really great. It's been really popular. So, there's plenty more to learn if you want to. But if you don't want to do more music theory, and you just want to get writing songs, then turn off your computer, get to your piano or guitar, and go climb a tree and write some music. That's my professional doctor's orders for you. 94. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my e mail list here. If you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make ads 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. Please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.