Music Theory in 90 Minutes: Practical Skills for Musicians

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to music theory in 90 minutes. Now, I know what you're thinking. No way. This is a huge topic, and you've tried to learn it before, and there's no way that you're gonna get it in 90 minutes. Trust me, we can do it. Now, I'm not going to get you a master's degree in music theory in 90 minutes, but what we're gonna do here is we're going to understand the few core principles about how music theory works, what it does. And how you can use it to understand music and ultimately even write music with the principles of music theory. So, what we're going to do is we're going to spend some time learning the patterns that are in music theory that make up music theory. Then we're going to explore what we can do with those patterns. Then we're going to write a song. That's what we're going to do. And by the end of our 90 minutes together, I think you'll understand how these things work together and how the basic function of music theory works. Enough for you to be able to write your own songs, or if you're already writing songs, write better songs, or write songs faster, understand music differently, listen to music differently, or just achieve this goal that you've always wanted to do, which is to understand music theory. So, let's dive in and let's learn music theory. Spend 90 minutes with me, and I promise you'll understand more than you ever thought you would know about music theory. Let's get started. Clock's ticking. 2. My Approach to Music Theory: All right. So let's dive in. If you don't know me yet, my name is Jay. I make a lot of online classes, and I love making online classes. I've made a ton of music theory classes going all the way up into some of the really advanced stuff. In this class, we're going to keep it pretty simple. This is a very kind of one oh one class. So, I've written a couple of books. This is actually the same book, but this was a Spanish version, and this is the English version. There's also an Arabic version out there. I actually have a few other books almost out. I've done a lot of work on music theory, and making it really kind of accessible for every person. So in this class, the way I'm approaching music theory is very much just kind of assuming you have a little bit of experience, music notation. Here's the thing about music notation that I want to just say right off the bat. You don't have to be good at reading music, okay? This isn't a race. There's no speed quotient here. You just have to know where the notes are on a staff in order to get started, okay? So if you can find a note by looking at a staff, then that's great. You don't need to be able to sight read. You don't need to be able to know what's going on. In fact, if you can't find your way around the staff, you're probably fine for this class anyway, because we're going to talk about the patterns and things that exist in the staff and how we find music that sounds good using the staff. You can also use a DA and use the piano roll editor. However, you're going to have to do a little bit of a translation into notation for that. Um, I do have another class that is just using the notation editor called Music Theory for electronic music producers. I would recommend that if you're not skilled at all with music notation. But even if you have almost no experience looking at the staff, looking at this five line staff thing, you're probably going to be okay, right? My style of teaching music theory, especially in this intro level, is very much to emphasize that in music theory, there are often multiple right answers. Um, and music theory is a tool that we use to understand what sounds good and why. That's what music theory is all about. So let's go into another video where I'm going to talk a little bit more about what we should be expecting out of music theory. A lot of people approach it and just expect that if they get really good at music theory, it's going to be able to write music for them. And that's not really true because that's not really the purpose of music theory, at least not in my mind. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 3. What is Music Theory?: Okay, what is music theory? I kind of just said my kind of core belief in it in the previous video, and that is that music theory tells us what sounds good and why, okay? Now, if you study music theory and you get really good at music theory, does that mean you're going to write just brilliant music all the time? No, because that's not what music theory is for. Let me tell you the best use case for me as a composer and a songwriter of music theory. When I'm sitting and writing music, what I'm thinking about is and I think this is fairly typical in a lot of composers and songwriters. What they're thinking about is not music theory while they're writing music. No, they're not. They're thinking about what's gonna sound good next, right? Like, so I've written some chord, and I'm like, Cool. What's gonna sound good coming after that chord? Or what's gonna sound good in this song? That's what I care about. I don't care about what works, what doesn't work, you know, any of these music theory rules. I don't care about any of that. What I care about what's gonna sound good here, okay? Now, how do I know what's going to sound good? The reason I know what's going to sound good is because the other day, I was listening to a song, but I don't know. Let's pick a hypothetical thing. I was listening to that new new to me Lincoln Park song. And I heard that the way that they used this chord progression in the chorus, I just really liked that vibe that it created. So I looked it up. What are the chords? I did a little analysis, and I said, it's a I don't know what it really was, but let's just say it was a one flat three chord progression. You don't need to know what that means. But what I did is I could then extrapolate that and say, Oh, I really like the sound of a one flat three chorre progression. So when I'm writing a piece of music next and I want that kind of dark sound, I'm going to use a one flat three or progression. So I'm using music theory to kind of extrapolate what I like, the sounds that I like, not just in chords, but in melodies and form and all kinds of other stuff. I'm extrapolating what sounds cool to me, and then I'm incorporating that into my own vocabulary. That's what music theory is really good for. It's really good for putting terms on things so that we know what we like, and we know how to use them in our own music. Cool. Now, that is, I suppose, quite at least a little debatable. There are some people who will say, you can't write music without understanding music theory. I think that's hogwash. But people do say that, and some people believe that, and they're welcome to believe it. I don't believe that music theory and music composition are two separate things, but they are related in that one will help you get faster and better in some ways at the other. So that's what music theory is all about. So what we're going to do in this class is really, we're going to not really learn to write music. We're going to learn how to look at someone else's music and find the things that sound really cool to us that we will then be able to use in our music. So we will talk about how to use those things in your music and how to find those things in other music. But this is how music theory has worked for, like, centuries, you know, composers have studied other composers for centuries, and that's and they put names on stuff so that they can use it. And that's where music theory comes from. So, let's do it. Alright, a couple more things that I want to just kind of get out of the way as we dive in. Things we're going to cover in this class, tools you'll need, things like that. Let's do that in the next few videos. 4. What We Will Cover in this Class: Okay. What we're going to cover in this class. So, like I said earlier, we're not going to cover reading music, okay? The big thing about music notation, traditional music notation like this that people get wrung is that they need to be able to sight read. I hear people say all the time, Well, I can't sight read, so I can't really read music. That's not true at all. Like, sight reading is a very specialized skill. Like, I can read music really pretty good. I have a PhD in this stuff, you know? I'm not a great sight reader. Kind of a good sight reader, but it took a long time to get good at sight reading. So you don't need to be able to read music really well. You don't need to be able to do any of that stuff. Hopefully, you understand that when I put notes on the staff here, each note is a pitch, and maybe you play an instrument, and you can find that note if you thought about it for a few minutes. So that's kind of what I'm expecting you can do a little bit if you even play an instrument. But if you can't do that, you'll be just fine. But we're I have other classes on how to read music, and we spend a lot of time on that. So I'm not going to do that here. I'm going to keep this kind of separate so that we can focus really on the music theory stuff. Cool? Alright. Let's move on. Oh, and next thing I want to talk about is tools, and I've got a couple tools that I want to give you for this class. 5. What are Scales? Why do we Care?: Alright. Let's dive in to scales. Now, what are scales, and why do we care? Here's the thing about scales. If you took any music lessons in the past, maybe when you were a little kid or, you know, maybe you took piano lessons or you played in your concert band or whatever, you had to learn scales. And you probably said, This is dumb. Why am I playing scales, and I'm just playing notes going up and down, and this doesn't mean anything to me. Cool. So here's what they mean to you. Here's what no one told you. Scales do a few different things. When you were a kid in band class or playing your piano lessons, scales are teaching you kind of muscle memory and kind of how notes work. In music theory, they're very important because scales tell us all the notes in a key. The scale and the key can be the same thing. So if we're in the key of G major, then if you want to know all the notes in the key of G major, then you just play the G major scale, and that's going to tell you all the notes in that key. It's also going to tell us all the chords in that key. And that's where we really start getting into music theory is when we start building as many chords as we can with a scale because then we start getting into harmony and learning how to write songs and stuff. So that's what we're going to do. Now, here's the other thing about scales. When you learned scales as a kid, if you did, if you didn't learn scales as a kid, it's fine. You don't have to know scales because we're going to learn them now. But if you did learn them when you were younger, you maybe memorize like four or five different scales at most, probably. That's not what we're going to do here. I'm not a big fan of just like, Let's memorize as much as we can. Instead, we're going to look at one scale. We're going to figure out how it works, and then we're going to figure out how to figure out any other scale. Okay? There's a pattern to the scale. If I had I I wrote a music theory textbook, which I guess I have, but if I was writing one from scratch, I might consider calling it there's a pattern because nearly everything has a pattern. You don't need to memorize all the scales. You just need to memorize the pattern to find them. Okay. So that's what we're gonna do in the next few sections. Right now, we're going to go on and talking about the chromatic scale, kind of why that matters and what scales are. So let's go on and do that. 6. Definitions: Chromatic and Diatonic: Alright, first things first. Let's define two very important words chromatic and diatonic. Okay, two different things. Let's start with chromatic. Chromatic. If we pick apart that word chromatic, Chrome Chroma comes from color, right? All the colors. Chromatic means all the colors. And we don't work in colors, we work in notes. So it means all the notes. We'll actually find this is really interesting to me, anyway. The way we describe music, once you get into, like, music theory and just in general, the way we describe music, we don't have great words for it in the English language or any language that I've really studied. So we often borrow from other disciplines. So we might say music music is very colorful. We might say, This sounds dark. This sounds bright. We so we borrow a lot from the visual medium to kind of make up for our not having great words for sound. Anyway, so we often talk about color. So chromatic means all the color. It means all the notes to us. If you are writing chromatic music, you are writing music where any note is possible, and you can just peep. Paint notes. There's a whole bunch of really interesting ways to write chromatic music, and I encourage you to check out some chromatic music. It can be very hard to listen to because chromatic music is very dissonant and it's very complex, usually. And it's hard to listen to. I'm guessing you probably don't want to write chromatic music. But the opposite of chromatic is diatonic. Diatonic means a subset of notes, a smaller group of notes that sound good together, okay? So a smaller group of notes that sound good together. So it's a smaller subset, and it's basically notes that sound good together. That's why they've been put into a scale. So most scales you know are diatonic scales. Diatonic also means that we're in a key. There is some kind of more important note. So if we're in the key of C major, then the pitch C is kind of more important than the other ones than the other pitches. It is the root. It is what we call tonic, more on that word later. So chromatic and diatonic scales, there is one chromatic scale because it has all the notes. There are hundreds of diatonic scales, but really only a few that we use all the time. Okay, chromatic and diatonic. Moving on. 7. Ordered Pitch Class Collections: Okay. Okay, so let's look at a scale, and I'm going to put a really fancy word on it. Generally, when I talk about music, I really well, actually, just anywhere in my life, actually. I'll tell you a little bit about my life. I hate pretentiousness. It drives me insane. So when we have, like, really fancy words for a very common thing, it just strikes me as pretentious and drives me nuts. So I'm not going to give you those except for this particular moment right now. There's another thing we can call a scale, and it's actually kind of interesting to pick apart. And that would be ordered pitch class collection, okay? Let's look at a scale. Okay, there's our scale. C major scale. So this is a fancy way to say a scale. So what does that mean? Ordered is the first word. So a scale is notes in an order. If I did this, Oh, what have I skipped? Yeah. Okay, if I did like this, this is not a scale because it's not in an order, okay? You could find a scale in that, but a scale is ordered notes. Ordered pitch class collection. So let's talk about pitch class. Pitch class is a silly way to say all octaves, okay? So this is a weird concept, but let me try it. So when we use the pitch C, in a scale, when we say the note C is in this scale, that means all Cs. Cs of all octaves are in that scale. That's what pitch class means. It is the pitch class C, and we can use any C. Okay? The pitch class of C sharp, if that's in a scale means all octaves. The pitch class of C Sharp is not in this scale, so therefore, no C sharps in any octave are in this scale. It's kind of obvious in a way, but it's kind of not. So ordered pitch class collections. Collections group of notes. So maybe that's a helpful way for you to think about it. But that's what that means. Let's play around with the chromatic scale. 8. Chromatic Scale: So let's do it let's do it with eighth notes. So, a chromatic scale, remember, it's using all the notes, and no notes are more important than any other notes. So it doesn't matter what note we start on. It's gonna result in the same group of notes. So let's start on, I don't know, A. How about? Sure. And now we're just gonna go chromatically up from there. So we can use sharps or flats. It doesn't really matter. Usually, if I'm going up, I'm going to use sharps. So there's no B sharp, so we go right to C, and then we go to C sharp, D, D sharp, E, there's no E sharp. We go to F, F sharp, F sharp, G G Oops G sharp, A. A sharp B. There's no B sharp, and that gets us back to C. Alright, a chromatic scale. Sounds like this. Right? Now, if you do play an instrument, chromatic scales are really good for your fingers. If you are learning an instrument, chromatic scales are really good play to get in your fingers. I'm a guitar player, so that's why I do this when I talk about scales. Chromatic scales are really good for strengthening the muscles in your fingers. But, um, we are going to leave them behind for now. We're going to focus primarily on diatonic stuff, okay? Typically, when one teaches music theory, you spend about three semesters on diatonic music, and then at the end of the fourth semester, you get into a little bit of chromatic music. But chromatic music is very, very rare and very strange and very weird. If you're trying to write pop music, dance music, anything like that, you're not writing chromatic music. You're writing diatonic music. So let's move on. Talk about diatonic scales. 9. Whole Steps and Half Steps: Okay, so in this lesson, we're going to talk about whole steps and half steps, okay? Here's what we need to know. The distance between two notes is called an interval, okay? So if I say a C to G is a fifth, that means the distance between the pitches C and G is a fifth, okay? And a fifth, in that case, means if you count up the scale CD EFG, you're going to get five, okay? So that's an interval of a fifth. So we're going to learn some intervals along the way. The fifth is an important one. But right now, we're going to start on a second, okay? A second can be two different things. It has two flavors, okay? So if I say these two notes are a second away, they could be a major second or a minor second. Um For example, let's look at our C major scale, okay? Okay, cool. C major scale. Now, let's take our first two notes. C and D, okay? Now, these are a second, one, two. That's a second. An interval of a two, okay? Now, we can call this interval a major second or a minor second. Now, in this case, it is a major second. The reason we know that is because a minor second is the smallest possible interval. Okay? So if you have no possible notes in between two notes, it is the smallest possible interval, and that is a minor second. This is a major second because we could have a note in between there. We could have a C sharp, right? C, C sharp D. So we have a major second here because there's a note that's being skipped over. That's just the easiest way to remember. Now, major and minor seconds have another term that we use, and other term is half steps and whole steps, okay? You may see some people use the terms half tone and whole tone or semitone and whole tone. Those all mean the same thing. You can use whichever one you want. I like half steps and whole steps. Okay? So a whole step is the same as a major second. Okay? A whole step means that there's a note in between. Like, if we look at a piano, here's a piano, Let's make it a little bit bigger. Okay. If we go to C, let's go lower. Higher. Okay. If we go to C and I say, What is a whole step higher? It's going to be D. Okay? And it's because here, there's a node in between, right? So C to C sharp is a half step. C to D is a whole step. You could also think of a whole step as just two half steps. Get you to the same spot. Okay, so a half step is the smallest amount of distance we can possibly move. So this is a half step. C sharp to D is a half step. D to D sharp or E flat is a half step. Every note in the chromatic scale is a half step apart, okay? So, half steps and whole steps. When we look at the major scale, the major scale is made up of some half steps and some whole steps and nothing else. Okay? So let's go in and look at what that pattern is to make the half steps and whole steps. 10. The Whole/Half Pattern: Okay, so let's look at the pattern. Now, this pattern will work for any major scale, okay? So if you say, What is the G major scale, you just got to start on G and do this pattern. The C major scale, start on C and do this pattern. The G minor scale, minor scale is a different pattern. We'll learn that later, okay? So this is just the major scale pattern. Right? And that pattern is, why don't do this? I'm just going to tell you the pattern, and then we'll figure it out together. Okay? So let's go here. The pattern is whole hole, half, whole, whole hole, half. Okay? So Ws are wholes and Hs are halfs. I don't know why I do the Hs in lowercase. There is, you'll find in music theory, various reasons to put things in capital on lowercase. We'll get to that soon. This kind of isn't really one of them. It's just a habit. So use capitals, lower case, whatever. But this is the pattern. Hole hole half, whole hole hole, half, okay? So let's pick a scale. Let's say F. Okay? That's an F. So all we have to do is this pattern on an F, and we're going to have an F major scale. Okay? So first whole step. F to G is a whole step. If we look down here, F to G, there's a note in between, so that makes this a holestep. Okay? Next is another hole step. G to A. You see, G to A is a whole step apart, right? So whole step holestep now half step. So A up a half step. That's going to be to the nearest possible note, which is that one. Okay? That Is it B flat. Okay? Now, after that, we have whole step. So what is a whole step above B flat? It's a tricky one. It's C. Okay? Because this to B natural would be a half step. To C would be a whole step. C. Okay? And then another whole step to D, and then another whole step to E. And then a half step gets us from E. A half step above E is an F. And that gets us our major scale. So that pattern gets us a major scale. Here's what it sounds. Cool. Let's try another one. Let's try E major. All right, so we start on E, and now we go whole step. So whole step above E is what? This note. That note is an F sharp. Okay? Another whole step above F sharp is this note cause we're gonna skip that one. So G sharp. Okay. Now a half step above G sharp. We are here. Half step is going to be A. Okay? Now, a whole step gets us to B. A whole step above B is there's a half step, there's a whole step. C sharp. And a whole step above C sharp is going to be D sharp. And then a half step is E. So there is your major scale pattern. 11. Tonic!: Okay, time for another vocabulary word. So the vocabulary word of this video is tonic, okay? Now, tonic is a very important word, okay? And you're gonna hear me say it like a bajillion times. Tonic means a lot of different things, okay? So when we're talking about scales. Whoops. When we're talking about scales, tonic can mean the root of the scale. The tonic of the scale is the note that the scale is named after, okay? So an F major scale, tonic is the pitch F, G n E major scale. Tonic is the pitch E, okay? Once we start figuring out what key a song is in, for example, you will hear a song, and someone might say, I hear it in C major, and another person might say, I hear it in A minor, okay? Those two keys are very close to each other, actually. More on that later, but they're very close. And so what I would say is what sounds like tonic? Like, what pitch sounds like the most comfortable pitch, the pitch that you could end the song on, that you could start the song on, maybe it's the high note of the song. It all depends. But that note is probably tonic, not always, but probably. And Tonic tells us what key we're in, what scale we're in, what note the song is really built around, right? A lot of time we talk about Tonic being home. That's like, kind of the thing of it. What that means is Tonic feels like like you start there, but you always want to go back there. Let me give you an example. If I play this F major scale, but I end on this E, you're going to probably you might feel like you want to hear an F because that's tonic of this scale, right? F is tonic because this is an F major scale. If I leave you hanging on something that's not tonic, it can feel a little unsettling. Let's listen. So here I just want to get F in your head. Okay? Here's the F major scale. Right? You want to hear that note, right? That's tonic. That's home. That's, you know, all kinds of stuff. Let's keep going. 12. Practicing Music Theory: A Okay, a word about practicing really quick. So you're not going to get good at music theory by just absorbing it through me talking. You got to practice a little bit. So I'm going to give you some worksheets that'll help you practice. Okay? In the next little thing will be the first worksheet. This will be a PDF. You can download it. You can print it, and you can write all over it and put in the answers. You can also just do it on your computer. If you want, you don't have to print it, whatever you like. But identify what you're having a hard time grabbing onto and then go back and watch those videos again, okay? Um, I stopped doing these worksheets for a while, and then I just heard from so many students that they just love these worksheets. So do them, use them to practice, use them to identify what you're not fully getting. And then, you know, post questions, do whatever you like. And I will be happy to help you. Okay? So in the next thing, your first worksheet, and then we will continue on to using scales and writing melodies to get us started using scales. Off we go. 13. Using Scales to Write a Melody: Okay, let's talk about using major scales, okay? So we're going to learn in a minute how to use major scales to make chords. But for now, let's just talk about what's in the scale and what we can do. There are a couple of things inside of a scale. Every note inside of a scale has a fancy name. Let's make a D major scale. Here we go. D major. So we like to put fancy names on all the notes. We already know this one. This is tonic, okay? This one, the fifth is called the dominant. This one, the seventh is called the leading tone, okay? These are three most important ones. Tonic always feels like home, right? The dominant, the fifth note usually wants to lead back to Tonic. Now, that doesn't mean you always have to do it, but check this out. If I did this and I just play up through the five, you'll kind of see how this feels like it wants to go back down to. Right? It goes, boom, boom. So the five, the fifth note likes to lead back to one. We call this it has sort of a tendency of leading back to one of tonic or one. The leading tone, as we already saw, really wants to lead to tonic, okay? So if we stop there, you very much want to hear. Okay, so the five wants to lead down to tonic and the leading tone, which is what we call that wants to lead up to tonic. Now, all the other notes in the scale tend to want to lead one place or another, also, but they don't matter as much. They're not as strong as those ones. Okay, so with that knowledge of the tonic, the dominant and the leading tone, let's write a melody. That takes advantage of that. What do we know about a melody using these notes? Well, we know that we definitely want to start an end on tonic. Now, again, you do not have to start an end on tonic. That's just going to be the easiest way to make something sound good. So let's do that for our very simple melody. We want to get us back to tonic. One quick way would be to land on the five, the dominant because that'll help us do a leap down to tonic, and that'll sound good, or the leading tone, and then that'll push us to tonic. That also means I don't want to, like, sit on the leading tone for a long time, right, because that just feels really unsettled. Okay? Now there's one more trick. Before we write a melody, I want to talk to you about just, like, a little melody rhything technique called steps skips and Leaps. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 14. Steps, Skips, and Leaps: Okay, so if we wrote a melody using a scale and we just went up and down the scale, that would be a very boring melody, now, wouldn't it? So instead of that, there are basically three things we can do. Let's stay in D major. And let's start on tonic, okay? Now, I'm just going to use quarter notes for this. We'll make it more interesting later. Actually, no, I take that back. Let's use a real rhythm. So I'm just going to kind of switch up what rhythm I use here. Okay, so I have a D. So my next note could be one of three things a step, a skip, or a leap, okay? Or technically, there's a fourth thing, which is the same note again. So a step would be going to the next note in the scale up or down. Okay? So I could go from D, I could go down to C sharp, or I could go up to E if I do a step. A skip would be to jump over a note and go to another note, the next note. So I could jump up to an F sharp, or I could jump down to a B. Okay? That would be a skip. And then a leap is any jump bigger than this third. So I could go, Here's a skip, here's a leap. This would be a leap, this would be a leap, and this would be a leap, okay? If I'm going up. So those are basically your three options. So let's do a leap up to five. Now, remember, five doesn't have to go back to one, so I could just do this. Let's do that. And now, so I have a leap and then two steps in the opposite direction. This is a very common pattern to use. A leap and then a skip in the opposite direction is very, very common or a few skips in the opposite direction. We try to limit how many leaps we have. If you're trying to write a very standard, normal, singable melody, you want two leaps, okay? Or less. Okay, so let's go to a GIP to there. And then let's walk down it again, and we'll do a step. And then let's do an eighth note here. So we'll go down step and then step. And I'm just kind of eyeballing it here. Skip let's make that a half note. And then we'll go step, step, step. Stop. And then I'll go step up to that A, and then I can use that A to plot me down back on D. Okay. So let's hear our little melody in D major. Oh, I forgot to add in my accidentals. F Sharp. F sharp. C Sharp. Okay, let's try it again. Okay, it's weird in short because it's only three measures, but, um, that's what I wanted to do for this example. Having a fourth measure would be good. In fact, let's add a fourth measure. Let's see if we can find a spot. Actually, you know what I really want to hear? Let's make that a leading tone. And then this just a whole note on the upper octave of D. Okay, so now we're going to use that leading tone to push us to tomic. Nice. That is a very pretty melody. Okay, so steps, skips and leaps. 15. Melody Analysis: Alright, let's kind of analyze this melody a little bit more, okay? And just point out a little bit more explicitly what's in it. So first, we have a leap of a fifth, okay? Leaps of fifths are great. They very often sound good. We have step, step, another leap step, step. So after this leap, we have a step down, a step down, a step down, a step up, a skip up, a step up, step, step, step, step, skip step. Okay? So we only have two leaps right here and right here. We start and end on tonic. We use a leading tone to get us back to tonic, okay? So that's a fairly well constructed melody. Um Okay, so there's our melody analysis. 16. 19 WhatItMeansToBeInKey: Alright, one question I get asked all the time. What does it mean to be in key? So if someone says, This is in key or this is not in key, what key is it in? How do we know? Here are some guidelines. First of all, um, to be in a key means that there is a tonic, okay? It means that some note sounds like home, okay? That is the most important thing. Everything else just kind of our clues, okay? Now, like, we could easily say here that this is the key of D major, okay? And there are a couple clues that tell me that. One clue is that it starts on a D, another clue is that it ends on a D. Another clue are the notes in it. We have F sharp and C sharp. If we put all those together, we can make a D major scale. That's a pretty good clue. That's probably one of the best clues. But all of that goes to establish tonic. Okay? That is the most important thing. And when we're in a key, what we know is that all the notes in that scale, whatever scale we're using, will sound good, okay? So if you're writing a song and you're in the key of E, what you can E major, what you know when you're thinking like, Okay, what note should come next? If you're in the key of E major, you can say, A note in the E major scale is going to work, is going to sound pretty good. So that's what being in key tells us. Now back to what I was saying a minute ago, it's all about what is tonic. Is there a case where the key is debatable? Sure. Like, totally. There are lots of them. So in my college classes, how do I tell if a student is right or not? Well, it kind of comes to justification. Like, if I say, tell me what key this is in, and a student says, This is in the key of D, I'm going to say, you're right. If someone says, Well, it's in the key of B minor, I'm going to say, Okay, tell me why B sounds like tonic to you. And if they can say, Well, you know, there's a leap to a B. There's a, you know, this B is the longest note. There are a couple things that kind of point us in that direction. Then I would say, Okay, you could be right. So it is music theory, right? Like, there are people hear different things, different ways. 99% of music theory is pretty sound, but there are debatable things, and you'll see them a lot. So just keep that in your head for now. Okay. All right. Let's move on and start talking about chords. 17. What are Chords?: What cards okay. All right. Let's talk about chords. So what are chords? Strictly speaking, chords are are more than one note happening at the same time. That's cool. It's pretty easy. We have a whole bunch of different kinds of cords. So let's just put a C major scale on the screen here. Just for reference. Okay, there's our C major scale. So we could do this, two notes, right? That's a chord. That's a specific kind of cord called a diad. Diad means a two note cord. It's kind of rare that we use or analyze diads. We tend to like to have a more full sound. Uh so we typically use three or four note chords. If we're talking about pop music, we typically use three note chords. Okay? And they're going to be these three notes. Okay? And this makes us a chord. A three note chord. Now, if a two note chord is called a diad, a three note chord is called a triad. You got it. So we're going to focus on triads first. Sounds like that. Okay, now we do have more notes. Here's a fun thing about music theory that'll drive you nuts. A two note chord is called a diad. A three note chord is called a triad. A four note chord is called Right, a seventh chord, 'cause that makes good sense. But it is true. It's called a seventh chord. If we had a fifth note, what do you think it's called? A ninth chord. A sixth note, 11th chord. A seventh note, a 13th chord. But we do use these chords. You know, it's not a bad sound. You just have to know what notes to put in for those upper notes. The more notes we have, this is a very broad generalization, but the more notes we have in acchord, the more jazzy it sounds. That's not always true, but as just kind of a broad thing, it's basically true. So if we get rid of some of these, we're gonna get down to a triad, which is much more poppy. Okay, so let's figure out how to know what notes go in accord. 18. Building Triads: Okay, so how do we know what notes go in this thing? Well, I have good news. There's a pattern. There's a pattern. Here's what we're going to do. We've got a C major scale. From a C major scale, we can build a C major chord very easily. We're going to take the first note. We're going to skip a note, then we're going to take the third note. Then we're going to skip a note, and we're going to take the fifth note. Okay. So it's every other note of the scale. That's what makes the chord. Now, remember what I just said. I said, there's this hilariously dumb thing where if you take a fourth note, we call it a seventh chord, which makes no sense, but it kind of does. Be check it out. First, skip it out, third, skipping out, fifth, skip a note seventh. So if we take a next chord, we just switch to calling it what note it is in the scale, which is a seventh. Okay. We're not going to do that quite yet. So first, third, and fifth, every other node of the scale gets us a C major chord, but we have to know the C major scale, right? Now, we can do more. We can make more chords, right? Check it out. What if we started on D? D. Again, we're just going to take every other node of the scale. D F, G A. That makes us a chord. Now, this is a different chord, okay? Because the C major chord was built out of the C major scale. So we know that it is a C major chord. But this chord was built on the second note of C major. So that gets a little more confusing. It's still a triad. It's still a chord. This one is a minor chord, okay? So how do we know that it's a minor chord? We'll come back to that in a minute. Let's do another one. E. So if we did E and then skip a note, G. Whoops. And then skip a note B. Whoops. I can't type today. That gives us another chord. This is an E chord. This is also a minor chord. So we're going to talk a little bit more about major and minor chords shortly. But the important concept here first, third and fifth, skip a note of the scale, and a scale can make more than one chord. A C major scale can make more than just a C major chord. We can also make a D minor chord, an E minor chord, and then a bunch more an F major chord, a G major chord, and an A minor chord, and then a funky weird B chord. We'll come back to that in a second, too. So there's a lot of chords we can get out of one scale. And that brings us to another important term, and it is called the root. So let's talk about what the root of a chord is. 19. Roots: Okay. So, we talked about tonic already. Tonic is great. But when we talk about chords, we're talking about the root of the chord. Okay? It's kind of like tonic, but it applies to just the ord, and the root is the note that the cord is named after, okay? So C major chord, the root is the pitch C. A D minor chord. The root is the pitch D. A D major chord. The root is the pitch D. Okay? So it's just a pitch, and it's always going to be the name of the cord. Okay, now, the root is important because it's not the same as tonic, right? It's Tonic is the whole key, right? And the root is just for the cord. 20. The Diatonic Chord Progression: The diatonic chord progression is all the chords we can make with a given scale. So let's take the C major scale, and let's do what we just did. I'm going to do it with half notes so we can kind of hear these. So we can make a C major by going every other in C, right? We can start on D and go D, skip one, F, skip one A, D F, A, can start on E, E, G, B. Start on F, F, A, C. Let's start on G, G, B. Now, we got to circle around again. This C and this C are the same thing, so we go to here, D. And then we go to A, A, C, E. Now we go to B, B, D, F. And now we're back to where we started with C. So let's go C, E, G. All right. There we go. Va. Alright, let's just hear this diatonic chord progression. All the chords in C major. Very nice, right? Lovely. No, we can get this in another way. What we could do is let's go down here. Another way to look at what we're doing here is we're just stacking the scale. So if I go C major, Okay. Now I'm going to go up back here and I'm going to start on E, but I'm just going to make a C major scale, but starting on E. E, F, G A, B, C, D, E. Now I'm going to go back and make a major scale, a C major scale starting on G, not a G major scale. A C major scale starting on G. G A B, C, D, F cheap. Okay? Now, this is the same as this. Different rhythm, but same chords. Cool. So the diatonic chord progression shows us all the chords in the key. But what chords are they? Let's go back up here, let's put some names on these. Now the kind of shorthand for writing chord names is that if it doesn't say anything but the root, if it just says a letter, like C, then the assumption is that it's major. Okay? If it has a lowercase M after it, it's minor. Sometimes we use a capital to show that something is major. C, D, E. Okay, this is E minor. C major, D minor, E minor. And this will be F major. Oops. G major. A minor. And then this one is the weird one. B diminished. I'll explain that in a second. And then we're back to C major. Okay, so these are all the chords in the diatonic chord progression, C major. Now how do I know that these are major and minor? There's a few ways. Let's talk about two of them. One is that I could count half steps, where C to E is going to be four half steps, whereas D to F is going to be three half steps. That's going to tell us major and minor. If there's four half steps here, C to C sharp, C sharp to D, D to D sharp and D sharp to E four half steps. Okay? That means it's major. Here you go, D to D sharp, D to D sharp, D sharp to E and E to F. That's only three. Okay? So that makes that minor. So you can do that with any chord. Now, another thing you could do is memorize this pattern, right? This pattern, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. That's going to be the same all the time. Let's write that out. So the pattern is major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished. And then major again repeats. Okay? So again, capital M for major, lowercase M for minor, in this case, major, minor minor, major, major, minor, diminished. Major, minor minor, major, major, minor, diminished, major. Okay, so let's talk about what we can do with this pattern now that we know that it exists. 21. The Pattern: All right, so now that we know the pattern, we can find any chord in any key pretty quickly, okay? All we have to know is the scale and the pattern. Okay? So let's pick a random scale. Um Random major scale. Let's say, E major. Sure. Okay, so let's go down here. Okay, E major scale. It's gonna be We can figure this out by doing our half steps and whole steps. But because there's zombies coming after us, I'm just gonna do it from memory. Okay. Here's E major scale. Now, we don't need to do this, like, write all this out, and we don't need to write all this out. All we need is this. Let's pull that down so I can see it a little bit better. That didn't really work. Okay. Let's move that. So all we need is this pattern and this scale because this matches up to that. This matches up to that. So if we say, what chords are in E major, I can tell you that it's going to be the following chords. E major. F sharp minor. G sharp minor. A major. B major. C sharp minor. D sharp, diminished, and E major. Okay? Now, let's talk about that diminished chord real quick. That diminished chord is pretty ugly sounding chord. It's usually in pop music, we kind of skip over it and we don't use it very much, but it is used a lot in other styles of music. Even in pop music, sometimes we do use it. Diminished chord is kind of like a super minor chord. Here's what it sounds like. Right? It's crunchy. It's a little tense. It's not major or minor, okay? It's, if anything, super minor, which it's not really. That's just kind of a weird term I come up with. But one thing it does really, really well is push us towards this cord. It's just like the leading tone pitch pushed us up to tonic. This cord really pushes us up to the tonic cord. But by itself, a diminished chord is not particularly pleasant sounding. It's a really good transition chord to get us from one spot to another, okay? There are not a lot of pop songs that use it because, well, for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is there's not, like, a great, like, open chord on the guitar. That's a diminished chord. Like, B diminished is kind of you can do, but all the rest of the diminished chords are kind of funky on guitar, so they never really latched on for pop music. That's my theory. Anyway, right, let's move on to talk about Roman numerals. 22. The Different Types of Triads: Let's keep going. Let's talk about the different types of triads. Now, there are four, and you have seen three, sort of. You've seen three. The different types of the three that we've seen are major triads, minor triads. Diminished triads. And there's one more called an augmented triad. Augmented triads don't happen in the diatonic core progression. They happen sometimes with some different kinds of scales, but we're not going to encounter them very often now. But in order to explain these four, let's kind of pick these apart. We talked about how you can tell a minor triad by the interval at the bottom, right? So this is called a third. And if this is four semitones, it's major and if it's three semitones, it's minor, right? Here's another funny thing about triads is that the second third on the top. So this is the first third, but they also have a second third, this one. This one's going to be opposite of the lower one in most cases. So in a major chord, this is going to be four half steps, and this is going to be three half steps. In a minor chord, this is going to be three half steps, and this is going to be four half steps. Okay? That's like the anatomy of a triad, okay? Is those things that a major triad is this four half step thing which we would call a major third is what this would be. And it's got the three half step, which we would call a minor third on the top. So major on the bottom, minor on the top. A minor triad is minor on the bottom, major on the top. A diminished triad is minor on the bottom and minor on the top. And an augmented triad, which looks Let's make one F is going to be a major triad with sorry, it's going to be a major third on the bottom, with another major third on the top. So an augmented is kind of like supermajor whereas diminished is like super minor. Okay? Augmented sound, in my opinion, even worse than diminished ones, diminished triads. That's an augmented triad. They do have some purposes, though. But those are four types of triads. 23. Inside the chord: The Third Holds the Power: Okay, last thing on this topic, I want you to notice one other thing about triad is that let me put let's go down here, and let's put all three or all four right in a row. Let's build them on C. Oops. C, C, C, C. Okay, so I'm gonna make a major triad. A minor triad. Ooh. A an augmented triad. Okay, here they are. So here's what I want you to notice. For these first two, the bottom note and the top note are the same. The difference between major and minor is just the third, the middle note that we call the third, the third changing one half step. That's the only thing that separates a major chord from a minor chord is just dropping that third by one half step. That changes. Here we're changing the top note as well. But for most chords, the third is the magic secret weapon that holds the answer to everything. So if you want to take a major chord and you want to make it minor, you just need to lower the third by a half step. If you have a minor chord and you want to make it major, you just have to raise the third by a half step. So the third is like the magical note. 24. Octaves and Inversions: So octaves and inversions. Okay, let's talk about this. So if we make a chord, let's say C major. We can keep going and we can add more notes to the chord. But these don't change the name of the chord at all. All these are is adding octaves of other notes. So the C is the same as that C. This E is the same as that E. We could keep going and add more notes all day long. And it's not going to change the name of the chord. We just have a big C major chord here. So what I want you to understand is that when you add octaves, as long as you're not adding any more new notes, you haven't changed the chord in any real way. Similarly, if we have a chord as normal, but we rearrange the order of them. So this G at the top, let's take down to the bottom. Okay. This is still a C major chord. It's just not in root position. Root position is what all of these are. It means that the root of the cord is at the bottom. This is in an inversion, and it's still a C major chord. It's just in a different inversion. Um so nothing really about it changes. It does make it a little harder to spot. Like, when we see a triad, you know, it's this nice, perfectly lined up thing. And here, it's a little different. So if you see something like this, and you're trying to figure out what chord it is, try moving the notes around by octave until it lines up like that, and then you'll know what the root is, right? Because with this other way, you can't it's harder to tell what the root is. The same is true as if we did this. It's still the same notes. Doesn't really change anything. 25. The Circle of Fifths: So you may have seen this thing called The Circle of Fifth on the wall in your school or whatever. But it's actually a really useful tool. So what we have here is a great songwriting tool. So I'm going to show you how to use this to write music and apply some of the theory that we've learned so far. So imagine all of these are chords. They're really keys, but if we go to the right, we're always going up five notes of that scale. So if we imagine the C major scale, and we go up five notes, we'll get to G. If we imagine the G major scale, we go up five notes, we'll get to D. The A major scale, five notes, we'll get to E, E major scale, we'll get up five notes, and we'll get to B. Now, at some point in the bottom, we have to switch from sharps to flats. Otherwise, we're going to get to have 1,000 flats or 1,000 sharps. So that's why these look like this. We're just going to switch at some point. Okay. So it keeps going. All the way to F, and then F, if you count up five notes from F, you'll get back to C. So an interesting little phenomenon happens here that you can also go backwards and it'll be a circle of fourths. So C, if you count up four, you'll end up on an F. F, you count up four of the F major scale, you'll end up B flat, an E flat and A flat and so on. Okay? Now, the other thing that circle of fifths typically shows us is that every major key has a relative minor key. I know we haven't talked about minor keys yet, but so the relative minor key is going to have all the same notes in it, but a different tonic, okay? So C major, the relative minor is A minor. That means that A minor has all the same notes as C major. It's just that it has a different tonic. Now, with this, let me see if I can draw with this. We can see all of our cords from the diatonic chord progression right here. Okay? So, sure. So if you look at these, if we're in the key of C, these are all our cords except for one, the diminished chord is not showing up on the circle of FS. That's okay. But these are your other cords, okay? If we say the key of D, the cords are going to work in the key of D are These six plus that diminished cord. So it's very handy for seeing all of our cords in a given keith. 26. Going Outside of the Key: When you're writing a song and you're wondering what chords will work, all you have to do is say, My key is D, for example, So that means that any of these chords will work. But there's one very important thing about writing songs. And that's that those chords, the chords in the diatonic chord progression will always work. They're always going to sound good. But if you only write songs using those chords, you're going to write a whole bunch of very kind of boring music. You got to go outside every once in a while for that really cool sounding thing. So there's a bit more you can do with circle of fifths. I give myself a different color. So if we're in the key of D, these are diatonic chords, but we could also reach outside of our key this way and this way. Try using a C major chord. Try using an A minor chord. Try using an E major chord or C sharp minor chord. That's playing outside of the key. It's also called modal borrowing or using closely related keys. But doing that is going to get you something that sounds really cool, okay? So, give it a try. It'll sound really cool. In fact, I think let's try writing a song. Let's do that in the next few videos. 27. Verse Chord Progression: So let's try to write a song. Okay. So first, let's start with a verse chord progression. We're just going to write a verse and a chorus chord progression. Let's do it with just whole notes. Okay, so what key do we want to be in? Let's keep it simple. Let's say key of C. Sure. Okay, so let's start off with a good old C major chord. Whoops. Maybe add another octave up there, too to make it sound nice and full. And then let's see. If we look at Circle fifths, we could go C F G, E minor, A minor D. Let's go E minor. I'm just kind of picking stuff. There's our E minor. In the base, we could put a C and then E. Usually put the roots in the base unless you're doing something fancy. Let's go G major, and then A minor. No, other way around. Let's go A minor. And then G major. Okay, and let's just hear that. Okay, that's rather nice. One thing we could do to kind of keep it sounding better to adjust these octaves. Let me take this E down an octave. That just makes these two chords kind of closer together. So the smaller leap you have between chords, the better. Okay, so let's say that's our reverse. That's cool. We'll do it again, maybe. Then let's put a double bar line. All right. That's a good start something. We could add a melody. Let's try to add a melody. 28. Verse Melody: Okay, let's try to add a little melody here. And remember what we know about writing melodies. We have steps, skips and leaps. So let's just start. And we're in the key of C major. Okay, so let's go down here. Okay. And then I'm just going to delete that first note. So I added a melody instrument up here. I know you're probably thinking we would do a voice, but when you ask the computer to play back voices, it always sounds terrible. It's always going like, Ah. Terrible. So I just use a violin. We can pretend it's a voice. Okay, so the chord is C major, I'm just going to put a C. Here, the chord is E minor. So we could do a B would be a step. And then Let's do. Let's do a skip step. Skip. And then here we have an A minor. So we go back to an A, but then let's immediately do a big leap. And then a step, step, step. So here we're on a G chord. Am I put that A there? This is called a suspension. It's just gonna kind of land on the A and then fall right back down to that G. It's kind of a nice sound. Then let's maybe hold on to that G for another second tying it together. And then A B. And let's go A, and now we're back to a C. So how about that same kind of gesture again. The same thing again, except we'll go the opposite way. No, I take that back. Let's do that. Not a big leap. Let's go E. And then we're on a E minor, so let's go EF G on this A chord. So let's go. Get A. Oh. And then we end on a G. So let's let's just hold that. All the way to here. And then down. To that G, so let's tie that. Okay, so it's kind of random what I'm writing here, but let's listen to it. Okay. Not bad. Um, let's leave it alone for now and come up with a chorus. 29. Chorus Chord Progression: So let's try to go outside of our key here. So in the key of C major, let's try to use one of these other cords. Those are going to be your safest things to use. Let's try Let's try a G minor. Okay, let's actually just use like quarter notes just for fun. Okay? So G minor is gonna be G, B flat, D There we go. G O we ended on G major. So that's kind of weird to do G major. Whenever you go G major to G minor or any major chord to minor chord, it's Does it sound awesome? Let's do another bar of that. Trying to just copy it. Okay. Now let's see what else? So we jumped right in on that G minor. So let's try going to maybe a D minor and then an F. Okay, so let's take this and just go There's a D minor. D minor. And then let's go to an F major. Okay, make that major. I copy that, and there we go. Alright, there's our choruse. Let's hear it. Oh, well, we need one more chord. I think we need a C. So back to C major. It's here to go. Sounds like about 1 million other songs, but I think it'll work well. So let's add a double bar line. We put double bar lines places just to kind of mark a section. Then let's maybe add a verse again. I'll give you this file at the end. Whoops. There's a verse, maybe two verses, just for fun. There. I guess that's to the end. All we need is a melody in this chorus. Let's do it. 30. Chorus Melody: Okay, the last thing for our funny little song here is just to write a melody for our kind of our G minor chorus here. So just to recap, we have this short little what we're calling a verse, which was sort of a mini song. Short little verse in C major. And then we borrowed from a nearby key, this G minor, and then the rest of it is back in C major. And then we're going to repeat the verse melody again, and then that'll be the end of our song. So let's add a nice little Uh, melody here. So for the chorus, we maybe we want to do something that repeats. That's kind of fun. So let's think about maybe maybe half notes, and we'll go up a little bit higher. Can be nice. So we're on a G here. I don't want to go up too high. That's kind of screaming. We could go. Ooh. How about this? Just to create a little bit different kind of motion and see some faster notes. I maybe repeat that. Um, Down to that B flat. We'll see if we can make this work. This might be a little too jarring. And then now we're on a Dord. So what's going to be a good note to use there, DFA? We don't have to use only notes in the chord, of course, but it is good to start on a note in the chord. Let's talk F. And then we'll go, it's kind of a pattern. Then, oh, no, I'm in a tough spot I don't want to go down to a C or a B. I'd have to go all the way down to an A to land on a note in the chord. But I could stay on a B on a D. Let's try that. Ooh. And then let's see if we can go make our big moment right here. We'll and we'll get up to an A on this F chord. Maybe on a quarter note. We've got our big moment to be, you know, kind of three quarters of the way through. Then we'll get up to the real screaming part. If this was a real singer, that is definitely the high note. And we'll just let him go for it right there. Sit note two. Alright. Sure. What the heck? Right? And then we'll say this is the end. Oops. That's final bar line. Alright, so let's hear our whole little song. Oops from the top. Nice. I think it kind of works. If this was a real song, I would want to, you know, extend the chorus, extend the verse, maybe put a bridge in there, do a lot of stuff. But for starters, it's not bad. Kind of fun. I'll give you this file to play around with. If you're using uscore, you're welcome to do it. Do whatever you want with it. Yeah. No, it's fine. Okay. 31. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.