Music Theory in a Zombie Apocalypse

1. Introduction: Oh 2. My Approach to Music Theory: All right. So let's dive in. If you don't know me yet, my name is J. 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. I know there's some weird stuff going out in the world right now. There's this new pandemic or something. I don't know. It doesn't matter. We're, I think going to successfully just ignore that pandemic and talk about music theory. So I've written a couple of books. This is actually the same book, but this is a Spanish version, and this is the English version. There's also an Arabic version out there. And I actually have a few other books almost out. I've done a lot of work on music theory and making it really accessible for every person. In this class, the way I'm approaching music theory is very much just 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 us 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, 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. 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. All 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. Music theory is a tool that we use to understand what sounds good and why. 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, 'cause 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 going to sound good next, right? I've written some chord, and I'm like, cool. What's going to sound good coming after that chord? Or what's going to sound good in this song? That's what I care about. I don't care about what works, what doesn't work, any of these music theory rules. I don't care about any of that. What I care about is what's going to sound good here, ok? Now, how do I know what's go to sound good? The reason I know what's going to sound good is because the other day, I was listening to a song by 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, I don't know what it really was, but let's just say it was a one flat three chore 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 or 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 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. Don't. I 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. That's what music theory is all about. 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 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. Like I said earlier, we're not going to cover reading music. The big thing about music, traditional music notation like this that people get wrong 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. Sight reading is a very specialized skill. Like I can read music really pretty good. I have a PhD in this stuff. 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 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? All right. Let's move on. Oh, and next thing I want to talk about is tools, and I've got a couple of tools that I want to give you for this class. 5. Tools You Will Need: Okay, tools that will make you successful in this class. There are two. Okay? One is optional, the other is free. I'm just going to give it to you. Let's talk about the free one first. Okay? So some staff paper. Like, this is staff paper. It's got these five lines on it. You can see me squiggling some stuff. I always keep a pad of staff paper nearby on my desk. It's really handy to have Now, I'm going to be using software for most of this class, but keep some staff paper handy, so sometimes like taking notes. It's a lot easier with staff paper if you're taking notes about music. So keep some staff paper. And you know, sometimes if you just want to be pretentious and you just write like a grocery list on staff paper, it looks pretty cool. I don't know. Some people think that. Okay, so you can buy, like, some nice staff paper on Amazon if you want. But I can also just give it to you. So I'm just going to give you a piece of blank staff paper in the next little thing here, okay? So download that, print out five or six copies. Keep it handy by your desk or phone or whatever you're using to watch this class on, okay? Keep it handy. Trust me. It'll be useful. Also, I don't know what's really going on here, but we've been having some weird, like, power grid things on occasion. Power's been going off and on a little bit. There's like Weird animals have been like chewing through power lines or something. I don't really understand it. There's weird stuff going up. So it's handy to have staff paper because if the power does go out for some reason, you can you know, keep practicing and working by just staff paper. That being said, assuming power is working as normal, there are a number of software tools you can use. Here's the deal on software tools. So, there are programs called notation editor programs. They're just like Microsoft Word, but instead of for text, therefore, music notation. Okay? There are three big programs. The three big programs in this area. And by big programs, I mean, these are programs that take a long time to learn. They're professional level programs. They're very tricky, actually. Those programs are called Finale, Sebelius, and Dico. Those are the three programs. If you really want to get into this, pick one of those and learn it well. I would suggest taking a whole separate class on using those programs. Now, of those three programs, Finale has recently announced that it is going under. So don't buy finale if you're just getting started, okay? Sebelius and Dico are the two. I've a couple of years ago, switched over to Dico. It's great. So Dorico is good if you want to make a serious investment in this. It's not a cheap program, and it's hard to learn. So probably best to put that off down the road once you're ready to really devote some time to this new passion of yours. In the meantime, this program that I'm showing you here is called Muse score mucore.org. This is a free or close to it program. This is what I'll be using in this class. So I would recommend you get Mu score. Okay. I got to tell you something about Mu score. Mu score used to be a free open source program, and it's not anymore. It might still be free, but that kind of changes, so it kind of depends on when you're watching this. If it's not free, it's like $1. There And that version of Muse Core that I'm talking about is the desktop version. So Macro PC or Linux. The tablet version is like a whole separate program, and it's expensive and weird. I don't really understand it, but I know it's had some problems. I've heard from students that didn't work very well. So if you're on a desktop computer or a laptop, get Muse Core. It's great. If you're on a tablet, maybe try one of the other ones. There's a whole bunch that are pretty good programs. I know on iPad, there's one called Notion that's really good, and there are some other ones, too. Virtually anything will work. All we need to be able to do here is click in notes, just be able to click on the screen and make notes, and then hear them back. That's our main thing we want out of this program. So I'm going to be using Mu score. You are welcome to use whatever program you want. As long as you can put in notes and Play them back. I would not recommend making the leap to Dico or Sebelius and definitely not to Finale. At this point, do that later. If you get really into this, New score should be plenty good for you now. All right. I'm going to give you that staff paper download and the next thing. Hopefully your electricity works better than mine does these days, and we'll go from there. Then after that, we're going to dive into the first big section. So off we go. 6. 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 muscle memory and 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. 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. That's where we really start getting into music theory as 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. 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 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. There's a pattern to the scale. If 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 out. Okay? So that's what we're going to 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. 7. Definitions: Chromatic and Diatonic: Alright. First things first. Let's define two very important words, chromatic and diatonic. Wow, my dog is just going crazy out there. Sorry. She'll come down. Must be the mailman. Okay, so chromatic and diatonic. Okay? Two different things. Let's start with chromatic. Chromatic. If we pick apart that word chromatic, rom 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. You'll actually find. This is really interesting to me anyway. That man, my dog. Is just going crazy. Mm. Weird. Where was I? Oh, yeah. You'll actually find that 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 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 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 p 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. 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 more important note. So if we're in the key of C major, then the pitch C is 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. Gosh, sorry. I really wish I could get my dog to stop barking. I don't know what she's barking at out there. It's crazy. Oh. 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. 8. Ordered Pitch Class Collections: 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 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. Now, ordered pitch class collect. There's like 22 birds that just flew right into my window. And I can see them. They're like, dead. That is so weird. So my dogs go crazy. There's birds flying into the windows. I just heard There's another one. There's just another one in the window out there. What is going on? Maybe it's this pandemic thing people are talking about. Anyway, Ordered pitch class collections will make it through this. 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, U. What have I skipped? If I did like this, this is not a scale because it's not in an order. You could find a scale in that, but a scale is ordered notes. Ordered pitch class collection. Let's talk about pitch class. Pitch class is a silly way to say all octaves. 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 the 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 all any C. The pitch class of C sharp, if that's in a scale, is going 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 obvious in a way, but it's not. Ordered pitch class collections, collections, group of notes. Maybe that's a helpful way for you to think about it, but that's what that means. Okay, there was another one. There was another bird that just hit the window out there. I could just hear it. It's a very distinctive sound. Anyway, it's crazy. Okay. Let's play around with a chromatic scale. There was another one. 9. Chromatic Scale: All right. There's some weird stuff going on in my neighborhood here. Really know what's going on. I can take a little break after this video and go explore. But first, let's talk about chromatic scales. So let's do 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 going to result in the same group of notes. So let's start on a I don't know, A. How about? Sure. And now we're just going to 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. 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 ops G sharp, A. A sharp B. There's no B sharp, and that gets us back to C. All right, a chromatic scale. Sounds like this. Right? Now, if you do play an instrument, chromatic scales are really good for your finger. There's another crazy bird, and now my dog is barking again. This day. What I was about to say is if you are learning an instrument, chromatic skies are really good to to get in your fingers. I'm a guitar player, that's why I do this when I talk about scales. Chromatic scales are really good for strengthening the muscles in your fingers. But 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 four 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. 10. Whole Steps and Half Steps: Well, I just went for a walk around, and it seems like everything is back to normal. Very strange. In fact, it's a little too normal. Everything got suddenly very quiet, and I can't there's like nobody walking around. It's really weird. But let's just keep going, and hopefully the world will come back to normal. 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. If I say a C to G is a fifth. That means the distance between the pitches C and G is a fifth. A fifth in that case means if you count up the scale, C d E FG, you're going to get five. That's an interval of a fifth. 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. A second can be two different things. It has two flavors. If I say these two notes are a second away, They could be a major second or a minor second. For example, let's look at our C major scale. Okay. Cool. C major scale. Now let's take our first two notes. C and D. Now, these are a second, one, two, that's a second, an interval of a two. 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. 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 node in between there. We could have a C sharp, 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 minor seconds have another term that we use, and another term is half steps and whole steps. 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. A whole step is the same as a major second. A whole step means that there's a note in between. If we look at a piano, Here's a piano. Let's make it a little bit bigger. If we go to C, let's go lower. Higher. If we go to C, and I say, what is a whole step higher? It's going to be D. It's because here, there's a node in between. 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 to the same spot. A half step is the smallest amount of distance we can possibly move. 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. So half steps and whole steps. When we look at the major scale, the major scale is made up of some half steps and whole steps, and nothing else. Let's go in and look at what that pattern is to make the half steps and whole steps. 11. The Whole/Half Pattern: Okay, let's look at the pattern. Now, this pattern will work for any major scale. So if you say, what is the G major scale, you 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. This is just the major scale pattern. Right? And that pattern is, why don't I do this? I'm just going to tell you the pattern and then we'll figure it out together. Let's go here. The pattern is whole whole, half, whole whole whole, half. So Ws are holes 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 and lower case. We'll get to that soon. This isn't really one of them. It's just a habit. So use capitals, lowercase, whatever. But this is the pattern. Whole half, who whole whole half. Let's pick a scale. Let's say F. That's an F. All we have to do is this pattern on an F, and we're going to have an F major scale. First whole step, F to G is a whole step. If we look down here, F to G, there's a node in between, so that makes this a whole step. Next is another whole step. G to A. You see G to A is a whole step apart. Hole step whole step now half step. A up a half step. That's going to be to the nerest possible node, which is that one. That is a B flat. Now, after that, we have whole step. What is a whole step above B flat? It's a tricky one. It's C. Because this to B natural would be a half step. T C would be a whole step. C. 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 F, and that gets us our major scale. That pattern gets us a major scale. Here's what it sounds like. Cool. Let's try another one. Let's try E major. All right. We start on E, and now we go whole step. So whole step above E is what? This note. That note is F sharp. Another whole step above F sharp is this note because we're going to skip that one. So G sharp. Now a half step above G sharp. We are here. Half step is going to be A. 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. There is your major scale pattern. 12. Tonic!: Okay, time for another vocabulary word. So the vocabulary word of this video is tonic. Okay? Now, tonic is a very important word. And you're going to hear me say it like a bajillion times. Tonic means a lot of different things. 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. An F major scale, tonic is the pitch F. E major scale, tonic is the pitch E. 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 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. 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. Here I just want to get F in your head. 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. So, remember that term T there's somebody knocking on my door. Hold on a second. That was really weird. It was like someone knocking on my door and I went to look for who it is, and it was just some dude standing there, like, grunting at me. I was really weird. So I told him to go away. This world we're living in, how strange. Okay. Let's keep going. 13. Practicing Music Theory: 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 it a little bit. So I'm going to give you some worksheets that will 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. 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. Then you post questions, do whatever you like. And I will be happy to help you. So 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. 14. Using Scales to Write a Melody: Okay. Let's talk about using major scales. 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. There we go. D Major. So we like to put fancy names on all the notes. We already know this one. This is tonic. This one, the fifth is called the dominant. This one, the seventh is called the leading tone. 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 here. Right? It goes bum, bum So the five, the fist 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. So if we stop there, you very much want to hear. 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. 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 entonic. Now, again, you do not have to start an end antonic. 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 sit on the leading tone for a long time, right because that just feels really unsettled. Okay? There's one more trick. Before we write a melody, I want to talk to you about just like a little melody writing technique called Steps skips and Leaps. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 15. Steps, Skips, and Leaps: Okay, 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? Instead of that, there are basically three things we can do. Let's stay in D major. And let's start on conic. 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. My next note could be one of three things, a step, a skip, or a leap, k? 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. 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. I could jump up to an F sharp, or I could jump down to a B. That would be a skip. Then a leap is any jump bigger than this third. 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. If I'm going up. Those are basically your three options. 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. Or less. Let's go to a gp 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. Step. And then I'll go step up to that A, and then I can use that A to plot me down back on D. Dogs still going crazy. I don't know what's going on. 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 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 tonic. Nice. That is a very pretty melody. Okay, so steps, skips, and leaps. 16. Melody Analysis: Alright, let's kind of analyze this melody a little bit more. And just point out a little bit more explicitly what's in it. So first, we have a leap of a fifth. Leaps of fifths are great. They very often sound good. We have step step, Another leap. Step, step. 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. 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. I'm getting these, like, weird messages on Facebook about all these people getting sick again. I don't know what this is about, but I think there's something going around. It kind of sounds worse than like the last the COVID pandemic. It's weird. I can't tell if it's a hoax or what. It's weird. Okay, so there's our melody analysis. O 17. What Does it Mean to be "In Key"?: All right. One question I get asked all the time. What does it mean to be in key? 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. It means that some note sounds like home. That is the most important thing. Everything else just our clues. Now, we could easily say here that this is the key of D major. 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. 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 any node in the e major scale is going to work, is going to sound good. 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. If they can say, Well, there's a leap to a B, this B is the longest note. There are a couple of things that point us in that direction. Then I would say, Okay, you could be right. It is music theory. The people hear different things different ways. Now, 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. 18. What are Chords?: Records. Okay. All right. Let's talk about chords. So what are chords? Strictly speaking, chords are any more than one note. Happening at the same time. It's cool. It's pretty easy. We have a whole bunch of different kinds of chords. 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 chord called a diad. Diad means a two not chord. 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. They're going to be these three notes. This makes us a three note chord. Now, if a two note chord is called a diad, a three note chord is called triad. You got it. So we're going to focus on triads first. Sounds like that. 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 a seventh chord because 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 and 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 accord, 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 going to get down to a triad, which is much more poppy. Okay, let's figure out how to know what notes go in accord. 19. 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 or very easily. We're going to take the first note. We're going to skip a note, and 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 a note, third, skip a note, 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. We're not going to do that quite yet. First, third and fifth, just every other node of the scale gets us a C major chord, but we have to know the C major scale. Now we can do more. We can make more chords. 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, because the C major chord was built out of the C major scale. We know that it is a C major chord. But this chord was built on the second note of C major. That gets a little more confusing. It's still a triad, it's still a chord. This one is a minor chord, a 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. Can't type today. That gives us another chord. This is an E d. This is also a minor chord. 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 minor chord, and then a bunch more, F major, major chord, and an A minor, and then a funky weird B chord. Come back to that in a second to. 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. Let's talk about what the root of a chord is. 20. 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. It's kind of like tonic, but it applies to just the chord, and the root is the note that the chord 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. So it's just a pitch, and it's always going to be the name of the chord. Okay. Now, the root is important because it's not the same as tonic, right? It's Tonic is my text messages are just blowing up right now. Tonic is the whole key, right? And the root is just for the chord. What is this going on? Have you guys seen this? Literal zombie outbreak. CNN has this confirmed pick. Whoa. Is there a zombie outbreak happening? This is crazy. I got to figure this out. 21. The Diatonic Chord Progression: Well. This is troubling. I guess, the best thing for us to do is press on with this class. Hopefully you're watching this as a distraction away from whatever is going on outside, I don't know if I really believe it. But you know, music can be a distraction. Education can be a distraction. So I feel obligated to keep going through this class and get it out to you. So that if you have nothing else, you have this to keep you moving forward. So, let's talk about the next thing on the list. Diatonic core progressions. Man. Okay. So, here's what these are. The diatonic core 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 and C, right? We can start on D and go D, skip one, F, skip one, A, D F A. We can start on E, E, G B. I start on F, F A C. I 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. B. Alright, let's just hear this diatonic or progression, all the chords and C major. Very nice, right? Lovely. Now, 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, 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. Okay? Now, this is the same as this, different rhythm, but same chords. Cool. So the diatonic or 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 shorthand for writing or 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. If it has a lower case after it, it's minor. Sometimes we use a capital to show that something is major. C D E. This is E minor, C major, d mi, e minor, and this will be F major, ops. G major. A minor. 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 or 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. That means it's major. Here, you d to d sharp, d d sharp, d sharp to E and E to F. That's only three. That makes that minor. You can do that with any. Now, another thing you could do is memorize this pattern. 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. The pattern is major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished, and then major again, repeats. So again, cap for major, lowercase M for minor. In this case, major, minor, minor, major, major, minor diminished. Major, minor, mi 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. 22. 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. So let's pick a random scale. Random major scale. Let's say E major. Sure. Okay, so let's go down here. E major scale. It's We can figure this out by doing our half steps and whole steps. But because there's zombies coming after us, I'm just going to 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. That. All we need is this pattern and this scale, because this matches up to that. This matches up to that. 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. 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 like a super minor chord. Here's what it sounds like. Right? It's crunchy. It's a little intense. 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 chord. It's just like the leading tone pitch pushed us up to tonic. This chord really pushes us up to the tonic chord. 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 a great open chord on the guitar. That's a diminished chord. Like B diminished kind 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, all right, let's move on to talk about Roman numerals. 23. Roman Numerals: One very important concept in music theory is Roman numerals. We use Roman numerals to identify chords all the time. We're not going to do a ton with Roman numerals in this class, but I do want to show you how they work, and we'll do a couple of song analysis analysis with them in just a minute. Here's how they work. For Roman numerals, we have two different kinds. We have traditional Roman numerals like you're used to, which look like this, IV, hoops, IV, is four, et cetera. So we're going to say one. Now, we're going to call this the one chord because its root is on the first note of the scale. That makes it a one chord. In fact, let's do it down here. It'll be a little easier. I think. L et's call this a one chord. Put this down there. Okay. Cool. Now, here's the other type of Roman numeral and that is lowercase Roman numerals. Maybe you've never seen lowercase Roman numerals. I have not found them used any other place. But basically, this would be lowercase Roman numeral two. I'm going to put that here. The reason is we use capitol Roman numerals for major cords and lowercase Roman numerals for minor cords. This lowercase I tells me a few things. If we're in the key of C major and I see that, I can tell you want a D minor chord. That's all I need. I don't need notes. I don't need anything. All I need is that lower case two, and I can tell a D minor chord is what you're asking for. We just go through this. Let's put a label on the rest of these by Roman numerals. Oops. It's weird. Now, in the diatonic or progression, what is the third? The third is a minor chord. It's going to be that. The fourth, The fourth is a major chord. It's going to look like that. The fifth is a major chord. It's going to look like that. The six is a minor chord. Looks like so. The seventh is that weird diminished chord. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do it lower case because it's minor ish. Then we can add a symbol like a superscript zero. I do it with option zero makes that. That's the symbol for diminished. Then this is going to be one again. So those are our chords. Now, why do we do this Roman numerals thing? Let me give you a situation, okay? So Let's say I have let's say I go to a gig, right? And maybe it's like a blues gig or a jazz gig. And I have never rehearsed with this band before. I don't know anything about any of the players or any of the music that they're about to play. And I walk up onstage with my guitar, and someone, whoever is in charge, calls out a tune. They say, we're going to play autumn leaves, which is an old Jazz standard. We're going to play autumn leaves in the key of G. Now, I know autumn leaves in the key of B flat. So in order to transpose it to the key of G in my head while I'm playing it is tricky, right? But if I know just the Roman numerals for autumn leaves and not the cord names, but just the Roman numerals, they're still correct in the new key, right? So this is much easier because now I have to do is think, Okay, 251 is how it starts. I don't know if it starts that way, but let's assume it does. It starts on a 251. Now, I know the 251 and B flat, but I can play 251 and G, that's easy. That's A minor D major G major, 251. So using Roman numerals lets us change keys in our head a lot easier. Are other reasons for using Roman numerals, but those are the biggest ones. All right. Let's look at some songs, and let's analyze them with Roman numerals, and you'll see how this works. 24. Song Analysis: All right, piano man by Billy Joel. The world can fall apart, but we still have piano man. So let's take a look. This is typical piano vocal guitar sheet music. I've got the names of the chords at the top. Let's look at them. Yeah, let's start at the beginning. Here there's a C, and so that just means C major. In the key of C, which it looks like we're in the key of C, we're going to call that one because it is. Here we have a new symbol F over C. What that means is that the first part of the fraction, F is the chord. F is the chord. O C means that the lowest node of the chord, we want to be a C. There's a C down here. It just means f is the chord, but put a C in the base. For analysis purposes, we can call that an F chord. C major seven is a type of C major chord. It's just got a fourth node on it, the seventh. We can analyze it as a C major chord if we want. Then F C over E, same thing, a C chord with an E in the base, and then a G. Let's do this. Okay. This first chord, we're going to call one because we're in the key of C major. And this F over C, we're going to analyze it as an F. We need to figure out what is, what number is F. The easiest way to do that is just walk up the scale. Four. F is four. It's going to be major because four is major in that key. C major seven. We can go back to calling that just a one, and then here we have another f, and here we have a c over E, which we can call one because C is the main part of that, and then a g, which is C d e f g, f Cool. There we have the first part of it. We could go on. This would be a one. This E minor would be a three CD E. This A minor would be a six, this C would be a one and the F would be a four again. That's how it goes. With Roman numerals. Now if I was looking at this, I could play this whole song just by knowing we're in the key of C major and reading the Roman numerals. If someone said we're in F, I could read those Roman numerals and I could play this song in F very easily. That's how Roman numerals help us. All right. Let's move on and talk about what's inside of a triad. 25. The Different Types of Triads: All right, everyone. It looks like there are larger outbreaks happening I've seen on the news. I keep there's some outbreak around me because I keep hearing people pounding on the walls they're trying to get in here. So I guess I'm going to keep going. I might relocate to a more secure place. My family and I are going to decide what we're going to do this evening, but we might go out to the suburbs or just kind of fortify where we are, I guess, what a world we live in. So until that happens, I'm just going to keep filming because I need something to do. Maybe I'll film from wherever I'm fortified. But let's keep going. Let's talk about the different types of triads. Now, there are four, and you have seen three. You've seen three. The three 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've talked about how you can tell a minor triad by the interval at the bottom. This is called a third, and if this is four semitones, it's major and if it's three semitones, it's minor. Here's another funny thing about triads is that the second third on the top. 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. 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. That's like the anatomy of a triad is those things that a major triad is this four half step thing with which we would call a major third is what this would be. It's got the three half step, which we would call a minor third on the top. Major on the bottom, minor on the top. A minor triad is a minor on the bottom, major on the top. A diminished triad is minor on the bottom and minor on the top. A augmented triad, which looks like this. Let's make one on 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. A augmented is super major, whereas diminished is super minor. Augmented sod, in my opinion, even worse than diminished ones, diminished triads. That's an augmented triad. They do have some purposes though. But those are our four types of triads. 26. 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'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. I'm going to make a major triad. A minor triad. Hoops. A and an augmented triad. Okay, here they are. So here's what I want you to notice. For these first two, the bottom node and the top note are the same. The difference between major and minor is just the th 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 it. Here, we have 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. O. O 27. Octaves and Inversions: Okay, as you all know, things are getting pretty scary out there, but I'm going to try to finish this class. It seems like the only right thing to do. So, we're going to start going kind of fast because I feel like even weird, not looking behind me. So, octagon 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 cord. But these don't change the name of the cord at all. All these are is adding octaves of other notes. 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 cord. We just have a big C major cord here. 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 cord in any real way. Similarly, If we have a chord as normal, but we rearrange the order of them. This G at the top, let's take down to the bottom. 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 chord is at the bottom. This is an inversion. And it's still a C major cord, it's just in a different inversion. Nothing really about it changes. It does make it a little harder to spot. Like when we see a triad, it's this nice, perfectly lined up thing, and here it's a little different. If you see something like this, and you're trying to figure out what cord it is, try moving the notes around by octave until it lines up like that, and then you'll know what the root is. Because with this other way, 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. Okay. Alright. What is going? It? Alright. We got to go. 28. Chords on the Guitar: Okay. Hi, everyone. It's been about a week. Since I made that last video. I've been on the run with a handful of people I met up with here in Minneapolis. We're just walking north, thinking that we'll be able to get away from this outbreak we just keep heading up north. We've heard that there's a commune up there, somewhere where we can stop and stay for a while and it's all fortified. So that's where we're heading. We're taking a little break now, and I thought maybe I would just hymn here and keep recording that class just to finish it and maybe give myself a little bit of sanity. So I think where I left off was I was about to talk about the guitar and how that works. So when we have so if you play guitar, you might know that it's funny. There's a guy who plays guitar in our little traveling troop here, who's walking with us. Keeps playing guitar all the time. If you're familiar with the guitar, you know that when you play something like, So chord, let's say a C major chord. You're strumming five strings. But if there's only three notes, how does that work? It works by you're playing three chords, you're playing triads, but there are two extra octaves in there. The notes that you're strumming in order from low to high are C E G C E, when you do that. The guitar is just built for this. It handles these kind of things really well. You stru and you Only playing a triad unless you're not, but if you are just playing an open chord, then that's how you've got multiple notes in there. In an E major chord, the notes you're strumming from low to high are E B E, G sharp, B E. In that case, you've got three es, two Bs, and one G sharp. So normally when I explain is I have a guitar in my hand, but I didn't happen to grab one on my way out the door. We're leaving. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, right on. We're packing up. It's time to keep heading north. As I get around to it, I'll chime in and film some more of these, but, you know, obviously, it's not my priority staying alive it's the priority right now. I hope you're doing well. Go. 29. The Circle of Fifths: Thank you. Okay, so here we are. We've been walking for about four weeks. If you know if anyone ever watches this, we're up, just past Duluth. If you know where Duluth Minnesota is. So we're going to keep going in a few weeks. We should make it to Canada. We here just cross the border. There's a safe haven, even though I think the outbreak has happened up there too. But the new revelation is that our friend Rodney here, who's part of our troop, the survivors. He's pretty crafty with electricity and he managed to rig up a solar panel. So I was able to fire up my laptop. And I think I'm going to film this as best I can. Obviously, I'm in a tent camped out. So, you know, when you can't do anything else, you talk about the circle of fifths. So, here we go. You may have seen this thing, this thing on the screen. Around. I have to every time there's a wind, I'm like, scared to death. So you may have seen this thing called the Circle of fifth on 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. That's why these look like this. We're just going to switch at some point. It keeps going. All the way to F and then if you count up five notes from F, you'll get back to C. An interesting little phenomenon happens here that you can also go backwards and it'll be a circle of four. C, if you count up four, you'll end up on an F. F, you count four of the F major scale, you'll end up B flat. E flat and A flat, and so on. Now, the other thing that Circle of fifth typically shows us is that Every major key has a relative minor key. I know we haven't talked about minor keys yet, but I'm hoping to get to that at some point before zombies eat my brain. The relative minor key is going to have all the same notes in it, but a different tonic. 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. Okay. Now with this, let me see if I can draw with this. We can see all of our chords from the diatonic or progression here. Yeah, sure. If you look at these, if we're in the key of C, these are all our chords, except for one, the diminished chord is not showing up on the circle ofphas. That's okay. But these are your other chords. If we say the key of d, the chords are going to work in the key of D are these six plus that diminished chord. It's very handy for seeing all of our chords in a given key. Awesome. I'm going to wrap up there for this one. In the next one, when I get around to it, we'll talk about how you can use this to write music. Stay safe, everyone. 30. Going Outside of the Key: We're growing tomatoes up here. We've been camped out in the same spot for about two weeks. And Things are actually going fine. We're still outside of Duluth is where I think we were last time. I filmed a lesson. But feels safe here. We've got kind of an enclave of cars, and we've started gardens. Maybe we're gonna make it through this. I think it's going to be okay. So I guess, a couple of more things about circle of fits. 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, 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. If we're in the key of d, these are our 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, since things are going pretty well here, I think, let's try writing a song. Let's do that in the next few videos. 31. Verse Chord Progression: Alright, we found this abandoned house up here, and we're kind of camping out here for the night. There's been some rustling in the trees at night that are making us a little nervous, so we might keep heading north tomorrow. But for now, we're in this beautiful abandoned house. So, let's try to write a song. It will be awfully refreshing. Okay. So first, let's start with a verse core progression. We're just going to write like a verse and a chorus or progression. Normally, when I teach this, what I do is I do a verse core progression and a chorus or progression. Then I kind of put together an intro and a bridge, and then I pull it into my studio and like, make it sound really nice. But I don't have access to my studio because that is a long ago memory. So we'll just kind of put the basics of it together and hope it works. 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 the good old C major coops. Maybe add another octave up there, too to make it sound nice and full. And then let's see. If we look at the Circle fifths, we could go C F g e minor A minor D. Let's go E minor. I'm just picking stuff. That's our e minor. In the base, we could put 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 round. Let's go a minor. And then G matrix. And let's just hear that. That's rather nice. One thing we could do to kind of keep it sounding better octaves. Let me take this E down an octave. Okay. That just makes these two cords kind of closer together. So the smaller, leap you have between cords, the better. Okay. So let's say that's our verse. It's cool. We'll do it again, maybe. And then let's put a double bar line. Whoa, it's hard to do this without a mouse sit on the floor. Okay. All right, that's a good start something. We could add a melody. Let's try to add a melody. 32. Verse Melody: Okay, let's try to add a little melody here. 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. And then I'm just going to delete that first. So I added a melody instrument up here. I know we were 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 a. 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 step step step. So here we're on a G cord. Can I put that A there? This is called a suspension. It's just going to kind of land on the A and then fall right back down to that G. It's kind of a nice sound. And let's maybe hold on to that G for another second, tying it together. And then B. Then 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. Let back. Let's do that. I'm not a big leap. O. O. Let's go to E. And then we're on a E minor. So let's go B. U. O G on this A. So let's go. G A. 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. Let's leave it alone for now and come up with a chorus. 33. Chorus Chord Progression: All right. I'm back. It's been a few days. That house we were in was cool. But we saw some strange things around that area. There was a couple of sightings. So we decided to take off. So we're back on the road. Crashing in the tent. It's so strange. This class is just becoming like a diary o of what's happening, but it's fitting that I'm writing songs now. So let's try to finish this song. Where were we? Oh, yeah. Some kind of chorus. So, let's try to go outside of our key here. So on the key of C major, let's try to use one of these other chords. Somebody is sick. There's a storm coming. Now, when you hear somebody coughing like that. I don't know if that came through on the recording, but some people in our crew are coughing very hard. Concerns everyone. Well, let's carry on. So let's try to use something outside of the key. We're in the key of C. So B flat, G minor, B minor, and D, those are going to be your safest things to use. Let's try L et's try a G minor. Let's actually just use quarter notes just for fun. Okay. G minor is going to be G B flat D. You go. G, and 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 or, it's Doesn't sound awesome. To another bar of that. I can 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. Hey, so let's take this. Then just go. There's a D minor. D minor. And then let's go to an meter. Okay, that major. I copy of that. And there we go. Alright. There's our ors. Let's hear it. Oh, well, we need one more chord. I think we need a C. Back to see Major. Let's hear to you. It 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. Let's maybe add a first again. I'll give you this file at the end. Oops. There's a verse, k? So, we maybe two verses for fun. There. That gets us to the end. So all we need is a melody in this chorus. Let's do it. 34. Chorus Melody: All right, so there's a lot of people getting sick around here. I think we're going to keep on the road. There's also been a lot of sights of seeing things out there in the dark, especially. So don't normally see them during the daytime, but let's finish our melody, and we'll see what we can do here. So the next part of the melody will be We got to go. A. 35. What Comes Next?: Oh. A 36. 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.