Romantic Harmony 101

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my first course on romantic harmony. We're going to be exploring the harmony from the romantic era, and composers such as Chopin, List, Roch Mannof, Debussy, Eric Set, and so many more. From exploring the chords that these composers would so often use to discussing how they get used within common chord progressions and even talking about some patterns that we can use to apply within these chord progression, going to be covering romantic harmony from a few different angles. By the end of this course, you should be comfortable taking some chord progressions that you previously knew and understanding how to color them so that you sound a little bit more like a composer from the romantic era. I want to give a shout out to two modern composers that utilize romantic harmony a lot within their compositions. And these composers are Chili Gonzalez and up Beving. They are two of my favorite living composers to date, and having studied their music further and further throughout the years, I've come to realize just how much of an influence the romantic era has had on these two composers. So one of your first steps before you get into this course is to make sure that you've listened to some music that classifies as romantic era music. I'm not just saying music that makes you want to feel romantic. I'm saying music that specifically takes some of the aesthetics from the romantic era, specifically within this course, the harmony from that era. So, as many of you may romantic music came after classical music. So we're taking the fundamentals from classical Western harmony, and we're going to be adding to it so that we can get more of a colorful and romantic sound. Now, there is going to be a project within this course. As you're going through the classes, I want you to take note as to which harmonic device or trick or whatever you want to call it is your favorite. If you find that the minor six chord resonates really well with you, then take note of that. Once you have your favorite trick established, you're going to apply it to a chord progression, either from one of your own original compositions or from a previous composition from another artist or composer. By applying the harmonic trick that you like the most from within the course, you're going to take that chord progression and end up making it sound a little bit more romantic. So maybe the chords are one, four, five, one in C minor. And on the four chord, you're going to add that six. So it's a minor six chord. Now it sounds like this. So that one chord sounded a little bit more romantic, but of course, you're welcome to apply numerous tricks to various chords. So maybe now we have one in inversion, flat six diminished, four minor six, five Domino seven, flat nine, and then back to the root. That would be a great way to take all four of those chords and apply some of the romantic harmony tricks from various classes within this course. Now, I am going to be going through this project in much more detail within the next class, so make sure that you look out for that. So I believe that a lot of modern music is taking influence from jazz harmony, classical harmony, standard pop harmonic tricks. But the romantic era and its lush harmony, I think is still a little bit untapped. So if you want to sound a little bit unique as a composer and just add some really nice color to your harmonic chord progressions, then this course is definitely going to have something to help you develop your artistic vision in that direction. So personally, I use all of the harmonic tricks within this course in my own compositions. So I do think that it's going to give you a lot to work with. I'm very passionate about these sounds, and I hope that you grow to enjoy them, as well. So that's it for this intro. I'll see you in the first class. 2. Class Project: And Okay, so for the project, for this course, what you're going to do is find one of your favorite chord progressions, either from one of your own original compositions or from a song that you've covered or enjoy on the side, whether it be a Beatles song, a lady gaga song, a country song, doesn't really matter. Take a chord progression, most likely four chords, and try applying some of the romantic harmony tricks that I've given you within this course. Now, of course, the minimum is to apply at least one of these tricks, but I would encourage you to apply many of them. So if the chord progression is C major, D minor F major, G major, maybe you try something like C major first inversion, D minor seven, F major six, G seven flat nine, and then back to C major. Now, it doesn't have to be that many alterations, but the more you can add, the more you're going to tap into the sound of the romantic era. Once you've picked out the chord progression that you want to alter, I want you to record yourself playing the original chord progression and then the progression with the romantic changes. Now, if you want to supply more than one chord progression, I'm not going to stop you, but make sure that you cap it at two different chord progressions. Once you've recorded yourself playing this original progression, as well as the altered version using these romantic tricks, I want you to upload that video to either YouTube or Vmeo and take a public link and supply it within your project submission. So what that looks like is within the project description section, just upload the link there. And so because you can't supply technically a video file within Skillshare, all you're going to be able to do is supply the link, so make sure that it's a public link. Now, in terms of video quality, it doesn't have to be super fantastic. Whatever phone you have is most likely good enough for both the video and the audio quality that I need on my. I also don't need to see your face. As long as I'm seeing your hands, I don't have perfect pitch, it really does help me to see the inversions that you're playing and to visually see the chord progressions so that I have a bit more insight as to how to help you. Once I've viewed your submission, I'll be able to give you some feedback, and we can have a discussion as to what you really did well, areas of improvement, and what your overall thoughts were about the project and the course. Now, make sure that you're doing this project on a day where you really feel in the zone. I don't want it to feel forced. It should be a fun experience. So make sure that you're ready to be on camera, make sure that you're ready to play, and, of course, do the research and the due diligence ahead of time to make sure that you know what progression you want to work with and how you want to alter it. In other words, before you submit your project, make sure you put in some practice. So that's it for this course project. Of course, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. And if on skill share you haven't already given me a follow and you enjoyed this course, please do follow because I have a lot more courses coming soon. 3. About the Romantic Era: So what is the romantic era? Well, it existed 1820-1900, and it gave us some of the best composers, writers, and visual artists to date. The romantic era was all about having a deeper appreciation for the beauties of nature while also exploring the depths of human personalities. Emotions were celebrated over reason and senses were celebrated over intelligence. It was really about understanding how to feel and through our art, how to make people feel. Some of the biggest names from romantic music would include Chopin, List, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, Schumann, Schubert, and so many more. These are probably names that you've heard from time to time, but might not be quite as commonplace as names like Beethoven and Mozart. Just the same, these composers took many notes from the classical era and took it to the next level. But in a kind of weird divided way, in that romantic music in some ways, was more simple than classical music, but in other ways, was much more flourished, similar to the Baroque era, pre classic. So mid romantic era, we're looking at some really detailed ornaments by composers like List and Chopin. But towards the end of the romantic era, things really got boiled down to basic elements from a composer that stands out as being one of the best, which is Eric Satie. We Eric Sat sort of came at the end of the romantic era, so you could say late romantic or early modern. To me, he's sort of that dividing point of when we shifted to the next era modern. Now, for me, the music of the romantic era very much resonates with me, especially on a harmonic level. There was a lot more color added to harmony, but we were building off of this Western foundation of perfect cadences, plagal cadences, deceptive cadences, all of the sort of harmonic foundation that we got from some of the best composers in the classical era, we were able to then color, almost in dare I say, a similar way to jazz. Now, am I saying that Chopin sounds like Charlie Parker? No, absolutely not. But the rules got a little bit more loose. We were adding sixes and sevens to chords, nines, exploring diminished harmony a whole lot more. And to me, because harmony resonates with me so much, the lushness of this harmony in the romantic era really speaks to me, and so I really love the composers and the compositions coming out of this era. Now, I'd be lying if I said France didn't have a huge impact on the romantic era. In fact, Chopin, who's Polish, even moved to France to study it as deep as he could because he had such an appreciation for French music. But that being said, this genre, of course, was not limited to France. In fact, Chikovski, a Russian composer, had also a huge influence on this era. So romantic composers were taking a lot of the fundamentals of Baroque music and reviving them. What I'm talking about is ornamentation and improvisation, but taking those fundamentals and expanding them on the back of everything that we learned from classical music. Now, what's so interesting is it doesn't just sound like more ornaments and improvisation added to classical music. There was so much more color in the harmony and the melodies that romantic music really did stand out all on its own. And one other common trick that we would see in the playing of melodies during this era was a bit more separation from harmony. If I play a chord and a melody note at exactly the same time, who's to say that isn't just a bigger chord? Now because romantic era harmony was coloring chords so much more, here's another example. I'm playing a C major chord with an A at the same time. And to play them together would be to play, in this case, a C major six, a chord not as often seen in the classical era. But if I now separate and play my melody note a little before or after my chord, it stands out more as a melody note. So because harmony was getting more lush, we needed to find a way to separate this color of harmony or the color of melody responding to and acting with harmony. Compared to classical music, romantic music was built off of harmony that was more lush and colorful. The melodies were more detached and dissonant, and generally, there was more responsibility on the performer to interpret the music as they saw fit. So it's my hope in this course to dive deep into some of the harmonic tricks that these composers were using so that you can use them within your own compositions, improvisations and productions. So that ultimately you can really tap into that lush harmony of the romantic era. Now, using harmonic tricks from the romantic era is admittedly one of my secret weapons. When I'm improvising, if I want things to not sound too classical, but also not to sound necessarily like piano film music, romantic harmony really does hit that sweet spot that can allow people to really feel a lot of emotion without having to overthink what you're playing. So I would consider the harmony of the romantic era, sort of my secret sauce within my improvisations, and I'm very happy to share that with in this course so that you can tap into that sound, as well. So that's an overview of the romantic era. I would highly recommend, look more into it and also study it outside of the context of romantic music. Also, all the composer names that I said, I would highly recommend check out their music. You really want to ask yourself, how does this music sound so that you can best use the harmonic tricks that I'm going to teach you within this course. So that's it on the romantic era overview. We're about to dive into these harmonic tricks, strap on your theory boots because we're about to dive deep. I'll see you in the next class. 4. Minor 7 Flat 5: Let's talk about the minor seven flat five chord. This really is the harmonic foundation for the romantic era, especially within minor music. So this is a class that we got to start with, we got to talk about, and we're going to expand upon. So let's dive into how this chord sounds, how it's constructed. We'll put it within some progressions so you can hear it in context. So here it is. It sounds like this. Hmm. It's somewhat mysterious. It does take on some of the characteristics of a diminished chord, but it's a little bit softer because of this minor seventh that is applied on top. Now, to recap diminished harmony briefly, and we are going to do a separate class within this course diminished harmony. So I'm going to keep this brief. But basically, any note if you move up three semitones or a minor third and another three semitones or a minor third, and another three semitones or another minor third, you get a diminished seventh chord. The sound of a diminished chord is dissonant. It's not meant to be resolved upon. In other words, you wouldn't generally finish a song on a diminished chord. It's sort of like if you took a sentence and you didn't finish it properly. That wasn't me freezing, by the way. So here's the sound. This is B half diminished seven or minor seven flat five. It's called minor seven flat five because a minor seventh chord is a minor chord with a tone below the octave, and we've taken the fifth and we've flattened it. So we took a minor seven chord. And we've flattened the fifth. Half diminished seven refers to the idea that it's not a diminished chord with a diminished seven, it's a diminished chord with a minor seventh. So if we think of this as our root, this is our third. This is our flat five. Here's our octave. This is a major seventh. This is a minor seventh, and this is a diminished seventh. Now, the way you notate the diminished seventh is very important. So if B to A sharp is a major seven, B to A is a minor seven, B to A flat would be your diminished seven. Now, because of these sort of double flattened sevenths or diminished sevenths, quite often in diminished chords, you'll see a combination of sharps and flats. And if you've been studying music for a while, you know, generally that's not very common. We kind of stick with sharps or we stick with flats. But diminished chords are so diminished. They're so squashed that they end up pulling sharps and flats as their way of being notated, just because they're outside of the usual realm of how we would construct chords based on major thirds and minor thirds combined. So it sounds like this, but how does it function? Well, around this time, we were starting to add more notes to chords. We would see dominant seventh chords, which consisted of four notes, and even Beethoven was adding flat nines to these dominant seventh chords. So because Classical was starting to add more color to their chords, and Romantic era was going to take that one step further, the way we're going to start studying our harmony is to go through all of the chords in a natural minor with one extra skip. Now, romantic music might not have used seventh chords as much as jazz. There was six chords, and we were adding nines, and there was tons of diminished harmony. But for now, it's going to be safe if we just study it with one extra skip. So we're going through a natural minor, starting on a minor seven. Here it is. The two chord were already there, B minor seven flat five. We'll come back to it. C major seven, D minor seven, E minus seven, F major seven, G dominant seven, and A minus seven. Now, studying harmony in this way is admittedly a little bit closer to how you would study jazz harmony. Not all these chords are going to be used a ton within romantic music, but I wanted to show you that this two chord, in this case, B minor seven flat five was built very naturally out of the scale just by adding one extra skip. So the most common way for us to use this chord, this fancy two chord would be in a predominant chord progression 251, B minor seven flat five, E, dominant seven, to a minor. So I would recommend that when you're first starting to learn this chord, this minor seven flat five, think of it as functioning as a two chord. If you have some minor chord progressions that you like, let's say it's one, six, two, five, try it with this version of the two chord, and already, you'll see it adds a little bit more mystery and nuance, similar to how romantic harmony sounds. So as an example, one, six, two, five, one. Something worth mentioning is that I do go through in great detail how this chord can be used to modulate between different keys, but that's all covered within my full course on harmonic modulations. And even within the context of this course, we can easily make sense of how to use this as a modulator because it almost always functions as a two chord. So if I'm playing a minor chord, B minor, let's say I'm in B minor and I've just played a bunch of music in B minor. If I now change this chord to a B minor seven flat five, not really functioning within that diatonic world of B minor anymore. Now it's functioning as a two chord from A minor, like we discussed. So for example, B minor, F sharp dominant B minor. Now your ear is in B minor. Let's change it. B minus have a flat five to two to the five E dominant, and then to A minor. Now, if that's kind of confusing, I would recommend check out the course that I have on harmonic modulations where I break things down a bunch. But I did kind of want to segue between these two courses because I think they're very interrelated. Now, one composer that stands out as using this chord a lot would be Shopen. And I'd recommend checking out his prelude in E minor, as it's really one of his most simple pieces to learn, and the harmony of this minor seven flat five sound pops up quite a bit. Now, what's cool is the way he uses these cords is he sort of morphs from a different cord into the minor seven flat five. So I have some examples, and I don't know that he does these specifically, but I'll give you a few different ones. If we had B major seven, and then just raise our bottom note. Now we have C minor seven flat five, and again, we can then use that within a 251 context or potentially some other context. Minus seven chords. So B minus seven easily transition to these minor seven flat fives, and even basic minor chords can be switched to minor seven flat fives or even diminished seventh chords. You can raise any one of these notes by one semitone, and you'll get a minor seven flat five. What's also cool is if you lower any one of these four notes, you end up getting a dominant seventh chord. So diminished chords, really with just some little twisting can pull into some other very fundamental chords to help shape your progression further. Similar to how we can use these chords to pull into the minor seven flat five, we can also take a minus seven flat five and change it into one of those other chords, major seven, minor seven, dominant seven, or fully diminished seven. Now I'm going to play a couple of 251 chord progressions in a minor key. For example, B minus seven flat five, E dominant seven, this is an inversion, but still and then A minus seven. Then I'm going to transition from that key into a different key. I'll even add a melody over top just because I want you to hear how this chord sounds in context, but I am going to be speaking over top to give you an idea of what I'm thinking of as I move through this harmony. We're going to set a three, four pulse, something like this. Here we go. A minor is our key. That's our one, down to the two to the five, flat nine. We'll talk about that later down to the one. Let's try it again. One. Two to the five. A minor. Let's make it a minor seven flat five. Now it's the two of G minor. Here's our five of G minor. Now we're in G minor. Let's go to the four chord. Make it minor seven flat five, 25 of B flat minor. Let's do the same trick again where we move to the four chord. Minor seven flat five. Five. Now we're in C sharp minus seven, maybe a little too colorful at the end there, but you get the idea. So I was taking my minor one chord and changing it to a minor seven flat five, or I was taking my minor four chord and changing it to a minus seven flat five. Once I have the new minus seven flat five chord, I'm essentially just doing a 251 chord progression in whatever new key I'm in. Now, this cord is not exclusive to 251 chord progression. If you've ever studied jazz, you would understand that this is a progression that a lot of people know. It tends to be a really good place to start. But if you have other minor chord progressions that you like that use this two chord, feel free to replace whatever two chord you had with this minor seven flat five, and you should be able to hear right away your inching towards that harmonic sound of the romantic era. Now a big part of what we're going to be doing within this course is taking this chord and inverting it. Because it's so fundamental within the sound of the romantic era, we want to kind of squeeze as much juice as we can out of this orange. When we go into the next inversion, it's now functioning as a slightly different chord. And when we raise it to the next inversion, it's functioning as yet again another cord. So I'll briefly explain what I'm talking about right now, but I need to leave a lot of room to expand on these concepts within the following classes. So here's my B minor seven flat five. If I now bring this into first inversion, we need to remember we're in A minor right now. So what chord is this? This looks like D minor, but with a six, a minor six chord built off of the fourth note. You could say it's the minor seven flat five in first inversion, but it so appropriately sounds like a romantic era four chord within a minor key. Again, a minor six built off of the fourth. So something like one, four, one becomes one, four with the six back to one. Now I'm dipping my toes into the next class a little bit, but I wanted to show you how this chord, the minor seven flat five, ends up giving us some other very fundamental chords that we also use equally as much. So again, I basically want you to think of this minor seven flat five as the main harmonic sound within the romantic era, at least specifically within minor music. We've talked about how this chord is a diminished chord with a minor seven, a tone below the octave. We've talked about how it functions as a two chord, and I've shown you how it sounds within a short improvisation and using a few different modulations. Again, if you want to study how this is used as a modulator, check out the course that's specifically on understanding harmonic modulations. So let's continue to deep dive into our exploration of romantic harmony in the next class. I'll see you there. 5. Minor 6th Chords: No all right, let's talk about minor six chords. First, we're going to talk about how to construct a minor six chord, where you're often going to see them within diatonic harmony and how they generally function within chord progressions. First, let's talk about how you make a minor six chord. You can almost guess your way through this because what we're going to do is take a minor chord and add a sixth above the root. However, it might not function the way that you think it does. So if I was to take C natural minor CD E flat FG, a flat, B flat, C. You'll notice that C minor plus the sixth note. That scale gives you what you would assume is a minor six chord. But a minor six chord actually doesn't have a minor six or a flat six, in other words, a semitone above the fifth. It has a tone above that fifth. So this is our sound. So now all of a sudden, this A is not coming from C natural minor, C harmonic minor. We could say it's coming from C melodic minor or C Dorian, but really, for me, that's not the way that I think about it. This minor six chord generally doesn't act as a one chord. Instead, it acts as a four chord. And let's talk about why. So let's say we're in C natural minor. The two minor chords that I get are the one, in this case, C minor and the four F minor. And if I take either of those chords and take the top note and just go up a step in the scale, C minor would give us this minor six or flat six, F minor would give us this D, in this case, the major six, so there is a true minor six chord. I always used to think that a minor six chord would be a minor chord plus the interval of a minor sixth, and you put it all together. But it's a minor chord plus a major six, a tone above the top note of that chord if you're in root position. So let's go back for a second and re discuss how the minor seven flat five and this four as a minor six chord relate to one another. Again, if I'm in C minor, my two chord, if I add an extra skip is going to give us D minor seven flat five. So a two chord as a half diminished or minor seven flat five chord. If we put that in first inversion, we're already there. So I've talked about how this minor seven flat five is sort of the sound of the romantic era, but how can we get more out of it? Well, even as we put it in first inversion, we end up getting that four chord as a minor six chord. So these are very much interchangeable sounds that have similar flavors. And later in this course, we're going to talk about the other two options that are available with those inversions of the minor seven flat five. So we've talked about how to make it. It's a minor chord with a tone above the top note. I functions as a four chord, let's start to listen to it in a couple of different chord progressions. So this was the first romantic sort of harmony that I dove into, and it was just a 14 chord progression or what you might call a minor plagal cadence. We have C minor to F minor six. And I think part of the reason I love this sound so much is because I really like the sound of a nine on a minor chord. Works very well on the one chord, in this case. So C minor plus a D, then we get this F minor plus a D. C minor nine on the one, F minus six, built off the four. Let's try it out in the context of moving 1-4 chord progression. So a minor plagal cadence, but the one is going to have this nine on top, and the four is going to have this six. So with a melody in the right hand, It sounds very mysterious, haunting. It has that romantic sound, but it's never too dark. It always leaves a little bit of room for mystery. Now, if we expand that chord progression a bit instead of 14, 1414, let's try something like one, four, five, one. One of the first chord progressions that most Western musicians will stumble across as they're learning music theory. So something like one, four, five, dominant, back to one. So now we have h. Listen to that second chord again. Wow. Beautiful. Five, back to one. So there it is the minor six chord used in a few different chord progressions. So I don't want to gloss over the whole idea of modulations. I did mention it briefly, and I don't want to tease you too much with that. As I did mention, there's a whole course on that. I'm not trying to push you there. I'm just saying if you're interested in this stuff, there's plenty of other material on that. But because the one chord generally doesn't have this major six, we'd have this flat six. It must be coming from somewhere else. And how does the minus six chord function? Functions as a four, and we talked about that. In the natural minor scale, there are two minor chords. There's the one and the four, and the one doesn't supply this type of chord, this minor six chord. So it must be functioning as a four. So if you fall down a fourth, that takes you to a new minor key. So C minor, let's say I'm in C minor 151. Now I'm going to throw that six on there. Now I'm in G minor. I could do the same thing, throw a six on the G minor. Now I'm in D minor. It's a really, really smooth way to transition between minor keys. And you can literally go through a few keys, and it doesn't feel exhausting. It works almost as well as dare I say, a dominant seventh chord in terms of modulating to a minor destination. The dominant seventh chord would sound something more like this. Which also sounds fine. It's a bit more tense. But this minor six chord falling down a fourth makes for a super smooth transition modulation, whatever it is you want to call it. So I'd recommend taking some chord progressions that you like that are minor that at some point use a minor four chord and just try replacing it with this minor six chord and see if it gets you a little bit closer to that romantic sound. That's it for this class. I'll see you in the next one. 6. Major 6th Chords: Okay, so in the last class, we talked about minor six chords. Now let's talk about major six chords. And what's cool about these is they function a little bit more freely. In other words, you can use them on more scale degrees than you could in the minor example. So if we were to go through a C major scale, keep it really simple and throw a step an extra step on top of each of these chords. Let's go through and examine what type of six chords we would get. And keep a minus six chord, again, is like a major or a minor chord, plus some sort of six, generally a major six. But what's so great about the major six chord is that it actually functions in three different spots, and we're going to talk about that. So if you're familiar with seventh chords, they work very similar, but you're not choosing the seventh node of a scale or mode, you're choosing the sixth note. So we end up getting a major six, a minor six, a minor flat six because it's only a semitone above our top node. Another major six, another major six minor flat six. This is, like, a diminished with a six. I don't even know what you would call this. It's like a dominant seventh chord in first inversion. Let's call it that and another major six chord. So in three different spots on three different scale degrees, we got a major six chord built off the one the four and the five. So you'll see these chords used a little bit more freely. Before, in the last class, we talked about how the minor six only really functions as a minor four chord. Whether you're modulating or putting it into a progression, that's generally its function. But now the major six chord can be used in three different spots on three different scale degrees, the one, the four, and the five. Now, I didn't always love the sound of a major six chord. I know it sounds crazy to be like, I don't like the sounds of these types of chords. You want to grow into all of them eventually, or most of them. Just because you're a chef doesn't mean you have to love every flavor. But eventually, you might find a certain dish that highlights that flavor in a way that sort of unlocks it to your palate. But I do love the sound of minor seventh chords, like ACE G. Well, if I just put that in first inversion, I have a major six chord. And when I realized that, I felt kind of silly. How can I like a minor seventh chord so much but not its first inversion, in this case, a major six. So I told myself I'd like to explore a little bit more as to how this cord functions so I can come to appreciate it that much more. Now, the spot that I enjoy using the major six the most is still on the four chord. So if you take a 141 plagal cadence or chord progression and try throwing that six onto the four chord. So major one, C major. Major six on the four, which is F major, six, in this case. And then back to the one, it just adds some more color to this progression that we've heard so many times. Now, the six that we're adding wants to pull up. To this third of our one chord. And what's really cool about just those two chords, C major and F major six is they almost supply every scale degree in the C major scale. So we could have C major. In this case, D minor seven, but we're thinking of it as F major six in first, second, third inversion. Then we have a C major first inversion, F major six, C major second inversion, and then F major six in first inversion. Now, this B is not supplied within either of those chords, so you could play something like G major or some other chord that has this B, then you're back to C major again. So whatever your melody note is, providing it's not the seventh scale degree, you'd be able to get away with playing either the one or the four chord with a major six to help support that melodic note. I digress a bit, but what I want to say is that if something like that interests you, check out Barry Harris, who's a jazz composer, musician. He was the king of this sort of stuff, especially using diminished harmony and six chords. So I just want to mention that these six chords permeate into jazz, and they're very useful in terms of supplying harmony for almost any note within our major scale. So let's do a 1451 chord progression. I'm going to make the one ord a major six, and then as I run through it again, I'll make the four chord to major six. Then as I run through it again, I'll make the five chord to major six and to finish it off, we'll try all of them as major six cords. So first, I'll get your ear just sort of cleared with a basic one, four, five, one, one, four, five, back to one. All right. Let's put a six on the one. Let's try it again. Now let's put a six on the four. There it is. Let's put a six on the five chord this time. Now, let's put it on all of them. So Here we go? It sounds great. I definitely floats around a lot more when they all have that six. But again, my favorite spot just playing the basic one, four, five, is when it's on that four chord. And again, I think the reason I love this so much is that on my one chord, I love the sound of a nine. Doesn't matter if it's a minor one or a major one. That nine just sounds beautiful. And if we keep that nine there, as I play my next chord a major, it's now functioning as a six. So just to me, it kind of sits in the same sort of place in my brain as a nine built off the one. It keeps some of that extra flavor in check. Here it is and then back. You'll see this chord used plenty in Claire D Lun by debut C. One other thing I want to mention about this 46 chord is that if you put it in first inversion, you get a really cool alternative to a regular six chord, in this case, a minor, becomes this chord here. So like one, six, five, one. It's just a unique alternative to a basic six chord, or in this case, a minor chord built off the sixth scale degree. If we then put it in the next inversion, you end up getting a one on the bottom with a minor two chord above. So if you just alternate between one and this shape here, you end up getting some kind of, like, slash chord Disney esque sort of sound. It's very bright and cheery, but it never moves too far. So I'd also recommend exploring some of the inversions of this type of four chord, where you're adding a six, and then from there, inverting to some of the other options, and again, even a minor seventh chord. So take a major chord progression that you know that uses a four chord and replace it with this major six chord. You can again do this on the one or the five. I just recommend as a starting point, try it on the four, but all three of those are perfectly viable options, and you'll see them all used absolutely within romantic music. So have some fun with the sound of this major six chord built off the one, four or five. Try to find it in the wild, have some fun with it, play around with it, get used to the sound of it because it's not going anywhere. I'll see you in the next class. 7. Minor 7 Flat 5 (2nd Inversion) : Next up, let's get talking about the next inversion of a minor seven flat five chord. Let's say again we're in C minor, my two chord, D minor seven flat five. If I put it in first inversion, we end up getting a F minus six chord. Now if I put it into the next inversion, I'll be honest, this is a tough cord to name. It's built off of the flat six. It is a major six chord with a flat five. So I haven't found any fancy names for this chord, and I was really hoping there was a name for it, like the Tristan chord or the Neapolitan chord or whatever, but I haven't been able to find anything. I've scoured, read it, and talked to other music theorists and pianists and nothing. Haven't been able to find anything. But this is my favorite alternative to a flat six chord when you're in a minor key. For example, C minor, A flat major, G major, let's say one, six, five, one. Listen to it with this new chord. Beautiful. I love this. So mysterious. And again, it's the same sound similar, anyway, to the minor seven flat five because it's just an inversion of that chord. So if I had to name it, I would say it is a flat six major six flat five chord. Built off the flat six, it's a major six with a flat five. But that's such a mouthful. I would say just think of it as the second inversion of a minor seven flat five chord. I know it's still a mouthful, but it's the lesser of the two evils. So if we're here on our minor seven flat five and first inversion, second inversion, we have this flat six on the bottom of this chord. So let's find a couple of chord progressions that use a flat six within the progression, and we're going to change our regular major chord for this other flat six, major six, 55, whatever we're calling it, Cord, the new chord. So let's do A one, six, four, five. Let's change keys. Let's go into D minor. So our usual one, six, four, five is now going to be one, six, four, five, back to one. Now, what's happening when I demonstrate these progressions is briefly, it sounds like romantic harmony, and then it comes back to some kind of basic harmony. But if we were to start to sort of combine all the different ideas over time, we could get something that has a little bit more of a romantic feel consistently. So it might end up sounding something like one, flat six, four, five, back to one. I used a couple of techniques that we haven't talked about yet, but I wanted to show you that when each chord has its own little romantic influence, you kind of stay in that pond a little bit more. So this chord and the four as a minor six cord are also great and deceptive cadences. And if you don't know or don't remember what those are, let's say we have a 151 cord progression. Well, the five doesn't have to come back to the one. Let's say we sidestep to the six or in this case, the flat six. That's a really fun move. We can also sidestep to the four, and again, we'll make it a minor six chord. One, five, down to the four. With a melody, one, five. And then even that will take you back to a one, or you could do a four or 51. There's lots of options from that point. So I think the first time I used this cord was actually as a deceptive cadence, something like one, five, and then a variation of a six chord. It can sound really cool with contrary motion, right hands moving down as the left hands moving up, and then a little transition to the five. You can just float around here for a while. It all wants to come back to the one, but you get to choose when that happens. So we're here on the flat six. Here's that five. Then we're back to our one chord. Now, you'll notice that at the end of that progression, I didn't actually put the root down into the left hand. I had the third instead. So this idea of the one chord being less resolved or sort of floating around until that very final one chord, having that root grounded in the left hand is also pretty common in the romantic era, and we're going to talk more about that in the next class, so I'll see you there. 8. Floating I/i Chords : The So in romantic harmony, when we're playing our one chord, whether it be a major chord, a major one or a minor chord, a minor one, it's really common to not necessarily play the root down in the bass or as a pianist in our left hand. This was also very true in classical music, especially later classical music. But generally, they would start a song on the one chord and finish on the one chord, and quite often they would ground it with a root. In romantic music, even that initial one chord doesn't necessarily have to be grounded. A great example of this would be Claire Dalun by Debussy. We're starting with and it sounds great. No one's ever questioned the sound of that saying something sounds off. But if you look at the left hand, F is the lowest note. This is essentially a first inversion deflat major chord. It doesn't sound the same when you ground it. Listen. It feels very finalized, almost like a little children's lullaby. But now things float around a little bit more. We're looking out onto this crystal lake. I leaves a little bit more room for your imagination to feel what emotion this is invoking. This is true for major chords and minor chords. If we were to play a chord progression, let's say we're in D minor, one, flat six, four, five, let's make it a little bit more romantic sounding. One with the third in the bass, our fancy flat six chord. Our four as a minor six and a dominant five. We haven't talked about variations of that yet, so I'll keep it more simple. And then do I want the song to continue? If so, maybe I have my one chord with a fifth in the left hand or a one chord with a third in the left hand. But if I'm finishing, then finally, I can put that root down into the base. So, in the case of a minor key, we talked about how the minor six chord doesn't work really well on a one chord. It's not native or diatonic, like, true to a key. The four chord is, but the one chord is not. So what can I do with the one chord to make it sound more romantic? Well, this is the trick, Let it float around a little bit more and sort of unground it by changing the bass note to the third or the fifth of that chord. It's actually also quite common to put a seventh down into the left hand. So on a C minor, having something like a B flat. Because ultimately what this is, if we invert it enough times, is a major six chord. And you might remember major six is a huge part of the sound of romantic harmony. So you can play around with this however you want. If you put the flat seven down into the left hand, you have an inversion of a major six. If you put an A down into the left hand, now you have a minor seven flat five, potentially setting up some sort of modulation. I don't want to get too technical and too dense right now, but all I'm saying is on a C minor chord or C major chord, explore other notes other than C down in the bass unless you're finishing the song, then you can finally give them that grounded finished one chord. So that's it for this class. I'll catch you in the next one. 9. Pedal Tones: Next up, let's talk about pedal tones or drones, where we're keeping one note static at the bottom of the left hand as we change chords up above. It's certainly not uncommon to take some of these romantic chords that we've talked about like the minor six chord, half diminished seven, and diminished seven chords, and play those over top of this left hand drone. So if we were to take a 1451 chord progression in E minor, we might get something like this. E minor first inversion, A minor six, B, sus four, and then back to E minor first inversion. But with an E droning below all of that, it has a very different feel. First, I'm going to play that chord progression with the roots supplied in the left hand, EA, B E, and then I'll drone the E the second time, and you can see how emotionally it feels quite different. Here we go. Here's the E in the left hand. You can even maybe go down to the six and play the same thing. It just creates this lingering tension and adds a little bit of color, but at the same time, gives a very different feel and is sort of a way of recycling or repurposing the harmony that we had heard so many times one, four, five, one. At that point, you could almost say, It's overdone. So what can we do with it? That's kind of new? Well, in this case, something very simple. Just keep the root of the one chord down in the left hand that whole time. Let's try a different, slightly more random chord progression. Minor one. Now we're going to play the two chord, the minor seven flat five in third inversion, which actually does keep the E on the bottom, E F sharp A C. Then I'm going to play D diminished. This is a pretty random diminished chord. I'm not really thinking of it in relation to E minor. I just think at this point, you can start to play around with diminished harmony a little bit as long as you're resolving it properly. Then we're going to go to the second inversion of that F sharp minor seven flat five. It's a one chord, third inversion of the two diminish built on the flat seven, and then finally, the second inversion of that two chord, the minor seven flat five. With the left hand static or droning as a petal tone, it ends up sounding like this. And maybe it doesn't resolve to E minor, maybe it goes somewhere else, but that's just another example. Now, of course, this works with major harmony. Let's go to friendly old C major and play around with some of the chords we've talked about in the major key. Now, remember, diminished chords are still available, so maybe we play a B diminished seven. Maybe we play the four chord as a major six, and then the five dominant as a sus. And again, Now, maybe we have the left hand droning back and forth and we lineate the right hand. That might sound like this. Chromatic passing tone, but you get the idea. You can start to play around with this using some other conventional devices that you have available to you for chords, whether that be open voice chords. And that actually does happen in G. In the fourth bar after doing this sort of continuous open voiced, E flat minor left hand. So he keeps going for 3 bars. And in the fourth bar, he ends up doing something different. He ends up playing this a flat, diminished seven voice from the B or you could say, it's kind of hard to Like, this is where people get into arguments, right? Like, here's B diminished seven. If we omit the F and then bring this middle note up, it could be an open voice chord of B diminished. But the three notes that he's providing in this case, are the A flat, C flat and D natural. So it looks like an A flat diminished chord. And again, this idea of the four chord, which is usually minor being interchangeable with the diminished chord, to me, that makes more sense. So we have this E flat down below, and then he's essentially playing an A flat diminished. But again, he's reordering the notes a bit and making it a bit more open. So whatever harmonic devices you prefer, try it with a pedal tone. So you're keeping the root down in the left hand while up above, whether it's your left hand or right hand, you're altering this harmony in some of your favorite chord progressions with some of your favorite playing styles. It's a pretty simple concept. So this class is a little bit shorter and it leaves lots of room for experimentation. So go out, try some pedal tones, also known as drones, and I'll see you in the next class. 10. Diminished Harmony: No Okay, let's talk about one way that diminished seventh chords are used in romantic harmony, and it sounds fantastic and it's quite simple. Let's start off by breaking down what is a diminished seventh chord. Well, diminished seventh chord is a four note chord that is comprised of minor thirds or three semitones, three semitones, three semitones. In other words, the distance from the bottom note to the next is three semitones. That note to the next one is three semitones, so on and so forth. If you move up an additional three semitones, you find yourself back at the root. So the foundation is sort of from a minor chord. You flatten the top note. So this is now called a diminished fifth or a flattened fifth. And if this is a major seventh, C to B, a semitone from the octave, and this is a minor seventh, C to B flat, a tone away from the octave, then lowering it another time B double flat is a diminished seventh. So this is a fully diminished seventh chord. Now, where do we find this particular cord? Well, if we were to go through all of the cords in C major, we would find the diminished chord on the seventh scale degree. Relative to C major is A minor. If I was to move through the cords of A minor, the second cord provided is our B diminished in this case, and none of the other chords are diminished. So in a major key, a diminished chord is found on the seventh note, and in a natural minor key, the diminished chord is found on the second note of the scale. But notice I'm not saying diminished seventh. I wanted to first discuss where do we find our diminished chord within these scales, but now let's extrapolate them out into full diminished seventh chords. Now, as a quick side note, I want to mention that diminished harmony is more often associated with minor keys because it's a very haunting and minor sort of sound. So when you resolve to your one or whatever chord it might be, but generally, let's say your minor one chord, you're staying in that darker sort of atmosphere. Sure, a story can move from sad to happy, but the more extremely happy and extremely sad you get, the more disjunct that story can be. And harmony, at the end of the day, in my opinion, does provide us with a story or a sort of map for the story of whatever piece we're listening to. So if you're studying diminished harmony in Western classical music, more often than not, you'll find that the diminished chord resolves to a minor one chord, whereas the dominant seventh chord resolves to the major one chord. You are not burdened to this. You can use diminished chords to resolve to major or to minor. It's just kind of the starting point if you're studying classical harmony, so I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that. So in our major key, C major, we had B diminished. And if I move up another minor third, I get this G sharp, which is not coming from a C major scale. We could say, to some extent, it's coming from the C harmonic major scale, but I'll be honest, I almost never think of harmonic major. And I think most musicians, for the most part, kind of avoid that scale, and if they don't, they're probably doing something quite prolific. So already, you can kind of see that this doesn't really fit the mold very well in major harmony, but we kind of have to stretch things a little bit. But diminished chords are meant to represent tension anyway. So if we're playing some kind of outside notes, as long as we can justify it with some theory to back it up, then we can have an intent behind the tension of that decision. This diminished seventh chord, B diminished seventh, could resolve to C major. Now, I've mentioned before in other classes all the different ways that diminished harmony can resolve. That's not really what we're doing in this class. We're kind of just thinking of it as, how do I take a diminished chord to bring myself back to the one of our home key, in this case, C major. So that diminished seventh chord is built off the seventh, second, fourth, and flat six scale degrees. That's true for major. It's also true for minor. Things are just shifted. Because C major's relative minor is A minor, a skip away, and these chords are built off of skips, then we end up still getting this seven, two, four, and flat six relationship. I'll show you in A minor, the B diminished seventh chord is the second, fourth, flat six, and major seventh scale degrees just reordered. Okay, so, I've given you enough theory to kind of now dive into things. This is the meat and potatoes of the class. Let's get talking about it. And that is that the seven, two, four, and flat six scale degrees that are related to this diminished chord, you can use whatever functional harmony or chord progression that you're used to. Let's say you have a chord built off the fourth scale degree and you're used to making it a minor chord. Well, now a diminished chord is also available to you because the fourth scale degree is one of the notes of that diminished chord, and diminished chords are like any diminished chord is essentially four different diminished chords. This B diminished seventh is a D diminished seventh, is an F diminished seventh is A flat or G sharp diminished seventh. If you think of it this way, B diminished seventh in first inversion. You could call this B diminished seven, first inversion, but it also happens to be all the exact notes for D diminished seven. So when you're playing a chord progression, let's say we're in A minor. 14, five, one. The four, in this case, is minor, but we can make it a diminished seventh chord. Let's try it out. One, four, diminished seven, five, back to one, already sounding more tense, more dark, more minor, and generally more romantic. So that's an example with the four chord being interchanged for a diminished seventh chord. But as I mentioned, two, four, flat six, and the major seventh in this case can all be interchanged. Now, the major seventh is not really as fundamental. Like when we think about predominant chord progressions, 251, 451, and 651, we happen to get those same scale degrees I was just talking about two of A minor, four of A minor, and the flat six of A minor. So we can use any of these three notes in our predominant chord progressions. In other words, something 51, a chord 51. We can use these three scale degrees, two, four, and flat six as diminished chords instead of whatever you would usually play. Now, the two already happens to be diminished, but you can just make it a full diminished seventh. So let's say we have one, four, five, one. That example has been given where we could go one diminished four, five, one. We could also try one, flat six, five, one. Now the flat six in this minor key is F major, but we could make it F, diminished seven. Let's try it out. One, flat six, diminished, five. Back to one. Now, the two chord is already diminished. In A minor, the two is diminished. So if you're doing a 251, you'd already be working with some type of diminished chord, but it depends on how true to the key you want to be and which scale you're accessing these notes from. I've mentioned that the minor seven flat five, built off the second scale degree is super fundamental within the sound of romantic music. So in the case of B diminished seven flat five, we get the notes B, D, F, and A. Now this works in a two, five, one in a minor key, but we could also play a fully diminished seventh chord built off that second no. The second scale degree can host the minor seven flat five or the fully diminished seventh chord as a predominant. One, two, minor seven flat five, five, one or 12 diminished seven, 51. So all that is to say, if you're used to playing a 251, 451, or 651 in a minor key, try interchanging that 24 or six chord with a fully diminished seventh chord. Now, this whole concept also really opens up the idea of changing a chord on the spot. So the four chord, let's say in a minor key, usually it's a minor chord, but I want it to be diminished. I can interchange between that minor chord and that diminished chord before moving forward. It would sound something like this. One Minor four. Let's make it diminished to the five, and then back to the one. So that was minor one, minor four, diminished seven on the four, five, one. So sort of prolonged tension before we hit that 51 perfect cadence. Another example might be one, six. Let's make it diminished to the five, and then back to the one. Now, we've also talked about the minor seven flat five chord in second inversion. B minus seven flat five, first inversion, second inversion, it gives us a very unique flat six chord sort of sound. Right? So you're not going to call it a flat six flat five add six. Like it just gets really convoluted. So we're just going to say the minor seven flat five in second inversion. So now we have a one chord, a flat six chord. We're doing the fancy minus seven flat five second inversion to a diminished, and then to a five, and then back to a one. So all that is to say, let's say you want a flat 65, one chord progression. But you have three options for what type of chord you want to play on that flat six scale degree. Well, you can interchange between them. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't work as well. But generally, it just gives you this prolonged tension. And as long as you follow it up with that five to one cadence, things should sound relatively fine. So I wanted to take a moment to mention that if you have a couple of options for your four chord or your flat six or whatever it might be, try out a few of them together and see if they work. Now, generally, a 751 is not a classic predominant chord progression. However, in a minor key, if we're in A minor, going to this diminished seventh chord built off the seventh scale degree and then to the five, feels very natural because these four notes of the diminished seventh chord, if I was to add an E below it, we get a full dominant flat nine sound, which is also a huge part of the sound of the romantic era. We'll dive more into it in another class. So I wanted to mention it's almost like you're playing the top notes of a dominant seven flat nine and then playing the dominant seventh before heading back to the one. Again, it's prolonged tension, and it's all how you want to think about it. If you want to think about it as a diminished seventh chord, moving to the five and then back to the one, that works. In my head, that makes sense. But I also think about it as foreshadowing the dominant seven flat nine sound if I'm here on G sharp diminished seven and I move down to E dominant, we're still hearing that lingering F from the prior chord. So it sounds together like this dominant seven flat nine, a fancy five chord, we'll say. And then back to one. So we've covered one, two, five, one, where the two is a diminished seventh, one, four, five, one, where the four is a diminished seven, one, flat six, five, one, where the flat six is a diminished seven, and 17, five, one or the seven was a diminished seventh. Now, we've been in a minor key for a while. If we were to just jump back over to major, I want to mention, again, this works, but it can be a bit conflicted. And I think the best example that I can think of is Clare Delun by Debussy. So if we were to take something like a D flat major chord, understanding that the diminished chords available are C, E flat, G flat, and A or B double flat, this is our seven, two, four, and flat six. If we were to think about what chord is most common out of those available options, it's the four chord one, four, one, a plagal cadence. So what did Debussy do? He took that fourth scale degree and plays a diminished chord off of that set of notes. So we have this one and then the diminished. That diminished seventh built off the fourth scale degree. And then he comes back to a one chord. So again, 14, one, but instead of a major four chord, he made it a diminished seventh. So Deb C showed us that we can take that diminished chord on the fourth scale degree and come right back to one. But I still for now want to stay in this predominant sort of environment, one, something five, one, and that something is going to be one of our diminished chords. Sure, you can take the diminished chords straight back to one, feel free to do that. But I think that these predominant chord progressions are just tied to Western harmony so much that they generally give us a good sort of foundation to fall back on. So let's try them all individually. 17, five, one. Now we have one, two, five, one, one, four, five, one, one, flat six, five, one. Last time, we're just going to take them all straight back to one just to show you how that sounds. One, seven, one. One, two, one. One, four, one. And one flat six, one. They all work, and they give a very contrasted sound between those chords. So I know we've covered a lot in this class, and I believe that this class is going to be the toughest within this course. So feel free to review it as many times as you need to. Take these concepts to your teacher. Hopefully, you do take private music lessons if you don't discuss it with your musical friends and see how much you can deepen your understanding of these diminished seventh chords and how they work within romantic harmony. The last thing I want to say to recap is you want to remember the scale degrees seven, 24 and flat six because they work in both major and minor environments. If you want to play a chord built off the seventh scale degree, the second, the fourth, or the flat six, a diminished seventh chord can be a great option. Again, if you kind of want the diminished sound, but you kind of want the usual sound of whatever that, for example, four chord might be, then interchange between the two. One, four, diminished four, five, one. Prolonged tension, there's nothing wrong with it. So that's it for talking about some of the foundations of how diminished seventh chords are used within Romantic harmony. I hope you enjoyed that. I'll see you in the next class. 11. Coloring Major: Okay, you made it to one of the easier classes. After that diminished seventh harmony class, I'm sure your brains are racked a little bit, so we're going to take things down a notch, keep it a little bit more simple. And for this class, as well as the next two, we're just going to talk about how we can color our chords. This class is going to cover how to color major chords. So let's start talking about it. Now, there's going to be more options available than what I show you. But if I start to show you every possible way to color all the main chords, major minor dominant and seven you're not really going to digest it as much, so I'm just going to give you a few that I think are most commonly used and the ones that I go to the most as a composer. Also, I want to mention that these colorizations are not exclusive to the romantic era. In fact, classical music and even Baroque music are using these colors as well, but the romantic era just uses them more often and more freely. Now we've already covered the idea that a major chord can have a six added to it. This can be on the one, the four, or the five within a major key. So in C major, I could have a C major six, an F major six, or a G major six. And because this major six chord can be found in so many different spots within chord progressions, you will see it used on that 14 and five scale degrees as alternatives to, in this case, regular old major chords. So I wanted to cover that chord first because it can be played on the one, four and five scale degrees, you're going to end up seeing it a little bit more. So how does it sound? It sounds major, but with this six added, there's two ways to think of it. I think of it as adding a la, which is a pretty major sound, right? So if we have dough mi so thinking solfege or 135, we're adding a or this six. M is the most fundamental note for determining harmony, M or me, whatever type of third you have. But I believe that this sixth note of whatever scale you're playing either confirms the tonality or challenges it. So a major chord with a major six extra happy, a major chord with a flat six kind of challenge a minor chord with a minor six very sad, a minor chord with a major six kind of challenged. And in both cases, when we had major with a minor six or minor with a major six, there's a sort of mystery to the chord because we're blending major and minor in a way that's harmonious. It sounds fine. But it's an intriguing sound, isn't it? We have both of those at the same time, so it's somewhat mysterious. However, to challenge this, we could say that a major six chord is simply a minor seventh chord in first inversion. So I started to kind of also think of things from the other side of the fence. Could we think of this major six chord as a more minor sound? Well, it's a minor seventh chord in first inversion? But at the end of the day, I don't think minor seventh chord sound particularly minor. I think the top three notes outlining a major triad sort of water down the sound of that minor chord. So for me, a major six chord is still in my head, a very major sound. It's bright, it's sunny. It feels like you've just woke up. So I think the major six chord sounds quite happy. It's got this sort of optimism to it, and it's sort of like the clouds have parted and the sun is coming through. Now, another really safe note to add is a nine or a two. It's kind of the same idea. So if I take a major scale and I eliminate scale degrees four and seven, I get a major pentatonic scale. And you'll notice that if I just drop out the D, that is a major six chord, just with an extra root up on top. So the other really safe note from this pentatonic scale is that second scale degree. In fact, if I play the whole pentatonic scale, all at the same time, you'll see it doesn't sound bad. Super colorful. It's a bit dense and a little bit clustered, but it sounds fine. So for that reason, I'm covering this colorization second. Pun intended, I suppose, 'cause it is the second note within our scale. So just the nine by itself, also very optimistic. There's a lot of hope sort of associated with this sound, and again, it is quite major sounding. So let's just listen to a 451 major chord progression finishing on that sound. It would sound something like this. Four, five, one. Again, just super optimistic, but at the same time, hopeful, encouraging, happy, youthful. It has so many great sort of descriptors that you can play it and see what works best for you. And that takes us over to the last colorization that I think is very important, which is the major seventh. So on our major chord, we're now pulling out of this pentatonic sound and pulling the seventh scale degree out of our major scale. I don't believe that adding a major seventh makes a chord sound more major, because if you think about it, we're adding on now our top three notes, a complete minor chord. So C major and E minor happening at the same time gives you C major seven. So the major seventh actually adds a tiny bit of tension, but it's super light. It's like if you're having a really good day and you stub your toe, it's still a really good day. Now, maybe you just want to think of this as a really major sound, and that's fine, too. But this T, this seventh scale degree, the leading tone in classical music, does generally want to lead up to dough. And also of the three colorizations that I've given you, this is the only one that when you start to invert the ord, you get a semitone within these inversions. And that semitone is going to be quite crunchy and tense. But as far as tension goes in a chord, I think this is one of the lightest ways that you can apply it, and it's still very colorful, and at the end of the day, the bottom three notes are still a major chord, so it's going to be more major than it is minor. Now, I would not encourage you to play all three of these colors at the same time on a chord. It would sound fine. We end up getting which is fine. But I would say to start if you want to really internalize the sound of these colors, start with adding just one color to your chord and eventually two, and if you've been doing this for long enough, then try all three. So maybe you want the sound of our two and our six together or maybe our six and our seven or our two and our seven. There's lots of different options. So I want you to consider which sounds you like the most individually and then start to pair them together. Also, you can do these in inversions, and that's when you really start to get into this sort of floating colorful sound of romantic harmony. So if I took a what you would generally call a major 69 chord. We have our six and our two interchangeable with the scale degree nine. And I put this in first inversion. So now it doesn't really look like a C major chord at all, but we're thinking of it as a first inversion C major add 69. As you can see, you can go deep down this wormhole of all these colorizations and all these inversions. But at the end of the day, I believe that the composers from the romantic era found their favorite sounds just through experimentation. Sure, a bit of theory like what I'm teaching you right now. But I can't give you all the different ways to explore this. That's up to you. So I've given you the action figure or the doll, and now you have to use your imagination to think about how to play with it. That all being said, these are some great safe ways to start with coloring your major chords. So you can add a two, sometimes referred to as a nine, a six, or the major seventh, and start to even combine them in different ways. I hope you have fun adding some color to your chords, and I'll see you in the next class where we talk about coloring minor chords. 12. Coloring Minor: Let's get talking about how to color your minor chords. So they sound a little bit more like they're from the romantic era. So, again, I want to mention that classical music and Baroque music. They were not shy when it came to adding some color, but they weren't really able to, like, drench their compositions in these colorful chords and colorful harmony, whereas romantic composers just sort of opened up the floodgates in that department. So when we were coloring our major chords in the last class, I talked about how using the pentatonic scale gave us some very safe choices where you could plunk down all the notes of a pentatonic scale, and it would sound fine. So, surely, adding only some color from that scale would be quite safe. Well, as it turns out, a major pentatonic scale has all the same notes as a minor pentatonic scale just down one note within that scale. So in this case, C major pentatonic relates to a minor pentatonic, the same way a C major scale relates to the relative minor, a natural minor. So if I took all the notes of a minor pentatonic scale, let's sort of find out what colors are available within it. We end up getting the four, as well as the flat seven. So let's take those one at a time and discuss how those would color your minor chords. Now, the four on a minor chord is actually one of my more recent favorite sounds. What's cool about this is you can play a minor chord and simply just play one extra note within that same hand position. So let's listen to it for a moment and see how we feel about it. To me, it just sort of cools down the cord a little bit. I'm not saying it's a very cool chord. I think it is, but I mean, quite literally, it feels like we're taking minor and de escalating the sadness or the sort of terror or whatever emotion you relate to minor. We're de escalating it just a little bit. So you can think of it like, Yeah, my day felt pretty minor today, felt kind of sad or I was a little spooked at some point. But at least I had my favorite snack while it happened. A weird analogy. But I guess I'm just saying it takes some of the seriousness out of that minor sound and adds a kind of neutralized color to that sound. Next up, we get the flat seven also from the pentatonic scale. And to me, this adds a slight major feel. So you can think of it like C minor plus E flat major. It gives us, in this case, C minus seven minus seven because we're adding the flat seven, a tone below our octave to our minor chord. So if C minor seven, initially, you might say it sounds jazzy, but we can't say it sounds jazzy. Jazz wasn't around yet. So how are they thinking of this? Well, to me, it just sounds a little bit less minor and it has a bit of a major sort of sound up top. It is also a major six chord, right? If we just put that in first, second, third inversion, we get a minor seventh chord. So this is even where I get conflicted as a teacher, because the minor seventh and major seventh were getting used in romantic harmony, but these six chords, major six and minor six were used a lot as well. So was a composer thinking of a major six chord as a minor seventh chord, first inversion? Well, it depends on the context, and I didn't understand this till I started improvising. But if I wanted to play a minor seventh chord, let's say, D minor seven in first inversion, and that's my thought, then that's the feeling of that chord. It's the minor seven first inversion. But someone doing a harmonic analysis might say, no, no, no, this is a major six chord built off of the fourth scale degree. Well, this opens up a lot of room for sort of academic debates with the intention of composers. But I want to mention again, like, how you choose to feel about these chords in terms of how you're applying them. That's fully up to you. So I can describe things from all these different angles, but I think it's better to start off with a more narrow lens until you understand these sounds, and then you can start to invert them and change them around in ways that you see fit. So the sound of this minor seventh chord, just a little bit more happy on top of that minor sound. It's a smooth colorization. It's not particularly bright. Although major can be associated with a bright sound. It doesn't feel very bright. How do you feel about it? That's your minor seventh chord. We've talked about all the ways that we can color within the notes of the minor pentatonic scale. Let's play them all together. It starts to kind of neutralize at some point. I'm sure if you were to rearrange these notes, you could find some way to convince yourself that this is a major chord of some sort, maybe E flat major add six, add nine. It's kind of the same deal, right? But we're thinking of it as the C minor pentatonic scale. So the more colors you start to add, the less major or minor it starts to sound. It kind of pulls its way into this sort of more neutral territory in between the sad and the happy or the spooky and the enlightened or however you want to think of minors and majors. So now let's start to deviate outside of this minor pentatonic and pull back in the two or the nine within our minor chord. So I mentioned that the four is kind of more recently one of my favorite sounds to add to a minor chord. But this two or nine for years was my favorite sound on majors and minors, but especially minors, let's check out how it sounds. Here it is as a two quite mysterious. And let's listen to it as a nine up the octave. Still very mysterious, quite open ended. It's one of those like, but how did they do it? Guess we'll never know. It's like one of those transitional sort of cords in cinema, where it's minor, but there's kind of like this lingering question mark after it. Again, it sort of cools down the chord a little bit, but unlike the four, I think that the nine still keeps things pretty darn minor. Just listen. It's still sad, mysterious. There's that question mark. So to me, the nine feels a bit more like, that question at the end of the thought of something minor. Now, we can also add the major six, in this case, A to our C minor chord. And we've talked about how this is a super popular color within the romantic era's harmony, but it doesn't function so well as a one chord. So that A natural is not available in C natural minor or C harmonic minor, while it is available in the ascending version of the C melodic minor. This sound of this minor six chord is generally not that resolved sounding, at least to my ears. So I want you to think of it for now, again, like some sort of a four chord. So C minor six the four of G minor. Hear how well that resolves? So we've discussed its function as a four chord, but now let's talk about its color. So to me, this one is the most mysterious color you can add to minor. I mentioned that the nine is mysterious, and it is. It's a very dark type of mystery, like unsolved crimes, whereas the six, to me, is like, what is the universe? What is the point of life? It's a much bigger sort of mystery. So you can even add both. Here's a C minor, add 69. It's sad, it's very mysterious. It's very colorful. But again, these are the ways that I interpret the sound. I don't expect every single person to interpret it the same way. After all, Cilantro can taste different to different people. So why couldn't harmony sound different to different people? There will be some sounds that we can agree on, surely, like major and minor, being happy and sad. But when you start to get into this territory of adding color, it can be perceived slightly different from different people. To give another analogy, I have a friend who is color deficient. He sees colors slightly different than other people. It doesn't lessen his quality of life. It just gives a different perspective on colors. And since harmony can be colorized, I do believe that it's the same sort of idea where different ears can perceive these colors differently. I don't want you to feel boxed in, but if you agree with me on some of these sounds being mysterious or a little bit more major or whatever it might be, then use that as your starting point. If you disagree, then really listen deeply to these sounds and see how you interpret them and use that as your starting point for how you perceive those colors. So we've talked about adding a four a flat seven, a nine or a two, and a six to your minor chords and how they're all used within romantic harmony in tons of different ways. Again, feel free to reorder the notes, work with inversions, span them out across your instrument. And of course, this stuff doesn't only apply to piano. I can apply to choir music or guitar or orchestration or however you want to use and apply these colors. So that's it for coloring your minor chords. I'll see you in the next class, or we're going to talk about coloring dominant seventh chords. I'll see you there. 13. Coloring Dominant 7th: Alright, let's get talking about how to color dominant seventh chords. Now, I want to start by saying that the function of a dominant seventh chord outside of certain genres, like maybe the blues is meant to sort of be tense. It represents tension. This sound sounds like it wants to go somewhere. To resolve. And generally that is down a fifth. So in A minor, one, two, three, four, five, E dominant seven takes us back to A minor or E dominant seven takes us back to E major, because E is the fifth note of both of those major and minor scales. So I want to mention that a major chord colored with this flat seven now has tension, but at that point, it takes on a different role. That's why I didn't mention the flat seven as a color that you would add to a major chord. It now has its own name. It's a dominant seventh chord, or in some cultures, a major minor seven chord. So how do we add some color to this already relatively colorful and quite tense chord? Well, I want to kind of go back for a second and just talk about what makes a major scale sound major and what makes a minor scale sound minor. So in a major key do re Mfa sola te dough, our dough acts as a foundation. Rey is a colorful stepping stone to me, which makes it sound major. That is a big part of this major sound. Fa kind of wants to pull back down to that me. It's a little bit tense and floating up to the so, which is a more stabilized floating sound. La, the sixth scale degree, sort of confirms this major sound. If I just play dough, so, and, it doesn't sound minor. It's like hokey pokey old Western. It sounds quite major. And then we have T, which is another tense note, and in this case, it generally wants to pull up to dough. So the most major sounds from our major scale would be the third, me and the sixth. So if we consider that, let's now take me and a and play those over the dominant seventh chord from that key. So allow me to explain. We're in C major. Here's our dominant seventh chord, G dominant seven. And if I take me and La from C major, remembering C major is where this G seven or G dominant seven wants to go. These are great ways to color this dominant chord so that the ear is prepared for that major landing point. So if I have a G dominant seven, add six or sometimes called 13. We have that E, which is foreshadowing that major resolution. We can also add an A, which again is foreshadowing. The major resolution to C major. So E and A are the most major sounds within the C major scale. So over a G dominant seven, E and A are very good colors to add, if you want to resolve it to a major one chord. Just the same way we can go through our minor scale, and we have E flat and A flat, the M and the lay or flat three and flat six, lots of ways to explain this stuff. These are, again, the most minor sounds within that minor scale. This is all arguably so, but I think it's pretty convincing from my end, and my students generally tend to agree. So we have Again, I'll go through each of them, but we have a sort of stable foundation, a color on our way up to a very minor sound. After all, it is what determines a major or a minor chord, that third note. Fa is a nice sort of stabilized floating sound up to the so or the fifth, which again is another sort of stabilized floating point, but it's a bit more foundational for this chord. Lay, the flat six, quite minor. We have the flat seven, which is a loose pull up to our high dough. Just one way to think of all the notes within this natural minor scale. But you can hear that, again, if I just play dough, se and lay, it sounds quite minor. We don't even need that third. So with the third, it's definitely minor and with the flat six, now we're kind of leaning into that minor sound a bit. So let's do the same sort of experiment. Here's that minor third and here's that minor sixth in C minor. I'm going to play a G dominant seven, which is the dominant seven of C, right? So C one, two, three, four, five, that supports our dominant seventh chord. Here's our flat three and our flat six from our home key. How are we going to refer to these in relation to our G dominant seventh chord? Well, they would be the flat six or flat 13, one, five uppsemiton. There's our flat six or the flat nine just above the root of this dominant seventh chord. Again, if I play this flat nine, it feels like the flat six of C minor. And if I play this flat 13 or flat six of G dominant seven, if it feels like the minor third of C minor. What I'm saying and I know this can be a bit complex, but if you think of the three and the six as the most determining scale degrees of major and minor, when you're on a dominant seventh chord, try playing the third or the sixth of your home key. Maybe it's a major third or major sixth or maybe it's a minor third or minor sixth, and that will foreshadow your landing point. It doesn't have to, though. Like, you can play a flat nine and resolve to a major chord or a flat 13 and resolve to a major chord. And while that's a possibility in romantic harmony, again, I want to give you a foundational starting point so you can be confident with your decisions before you branch out to all these endless possibilities. So, again, let's say now we're in a minor. What is our dominant seventh chord? One, two, three, four, five, it's E dominant seven. What are the notes that make A minor sound the most minor? It would be M and L, the flat three and the flat six. So on an E dominant seven, those notes, I would recommend starting with choosing one or the other, but you can choose both. Very dark, mysterious sort of sound already. And then we're resolving it to a minor sound. But if I choose the major third and major sixth of the home key, so again, we're in A, so in this case, A major, one, two, three, four, five, six, me and a. We're adding that to our E dominant. It doesn't sound as minor. It sounds a little more major. There's a bit of a foreshadow. To that major resolution. So that works as a starting point. And again, if you want to add a flat nine to a dominant seventh chord and then resolve it to a major, you can do that. But just keep in mind, it's a very small rug pull to your listener. It's like saying, prepare yourself for a minor hat, psycho. It's actually major. So there's a bit more of that sort of contrast when you do something like that. But if that's what you're going for, then that totally works. The last colorization to a dominant seventh chord that I'm going to give you is a bit more tense, but it's also more neutral between your landing points of major or minor. And that is the sharp four or sharp 11. If we were to go back to this E dominant seven, E to A is a perfect fourth. So by sharpening that fourth, we have a sharp four. Listen to that sound. It's very tense. Now, that chord could go to a one, minor or major, but it's so tense off the start that this can often be a great colorization when you're doing something like a deceptive cadence and not pulling back to your one. So we can have something like E, dominant seven, sharp 11, going to F major seven or some other destination. It sort of washes up the playing field a little bit. So we talked about how the flat nine and flat 13 on a dominant chord often take us back to a minor one, or the nine and 13 on a dominant seventh chord will often take us back to a major one. The Sharp 11 is a little bit more of a sort of scrambled feeling, and it leaves a few more possibilities open to the composer. For jazz musicians out there, you would know that quite often a dominant seven sharp 11 or dominant seven flat five, very similar sort of idea is often working as a tritone substitution where it resolves down a semitone. So we're here to hear. I don't need you thinking about that right now. We're talking about romantic harmony. But if you wanted one possibility, you could try taking that dominant seven sharp 11 down a semitone to some sort of a major seventh or a major chord with a color of your choice. So while this is a class on romantic harmony, and this is sort of out of context, I just want to give you one pretty solid option, this idea that the dominant sharp 11 could be used as a flat two sort of dominant sound, that would take us down one semitone to a major chord or a minor chord with the colorization of your choice. Ultimately, I want you to think of this dominant seven sharp 11 as sort of a palette cleanser that you could take pretty much anywhere. It's very tense. So any sort of major or minor chord with appropriate colors is going to relieve that tension in a way where we're just kind of thankful to not be sitting on that dominant seven sharp 11 sound. We see this sound used a lot in today's neosul where these chords just sort of move around all over the place. They're all so tense and colorful that it's a whirlwind of harmony, and you never know where it's going to go next. Also, fun side note, the Dominant seven flat 13 Sharpnine. That was like one of Jimmy Hendrick's favorite chords, the purple chord. So it's used from rock to neosul to jazz, romantic harmony. That Dominant seven Sharp 11 keeps things pretty open in terms of what you do with it next. So the main thing I wanted to talk about in today's class on coloring these Dominant seventh chords is the idea of thinking of the home base key and what makes it sound major or minor. The third and the sixth scale degrees are those big determining factors. When we relate the third and six to our dominant seventh chord of that key, we end up getting a 13 and a nine. And the way we color that 13 and nine is going to help prepare the listener's ear for the destination that it's going to. On a dominant seventh, if you're adding a nine or a 13, quite often it will resolve to a major chord. And if you're adding a flat nine and a flat 13 on your dominant seventh, quite often it's going to resolve to a minor chord. But again, you don't have to. It's just a great starting point. So out of everything I just said, what's the most popular in romantic music, it's the dominant seven flat nine. We see this all the time, variations of it and inversions of it, quite often resolving to minor. But again, because it's used so much, composers got bored. And they would resolve into major chords as well, too. But I want you to think of all the colorizations that we talked about in this class as completely viable options. I would start with the flat nine, get used to that sound, and branch out from there. The last thing I want to mention about that flat nine is a dominant seventh chord has a diminished sound kind of built into it. And if I make that diminished chord into a fully diminished seventh chord, and diminished seventh is a huge part of that romantic sound, then we put them together, and we get a dominant seven flat nine major chord plus a fully diminished seventh, beautiful, tense sound that wants to. Resolve. So that's it for this class on coloring your dominant seventh chords, have some fun with that. Remember, dominant chords are already tense, so you can add whatever color you want without too much repercussion as long as you resolve it the right way. I hope you enjoyed that. Have some fun with it, and I'll see you in the next class. 14. V7sus: All right. Next up, let's get talking about suspending your dominant seventh chords. But first, we have to talk about what is a suspension. Or, really, there's actually a couple of types, so we're going to go through both. So there's something called SS two and SS four. For the younger generation that knows sus as being suspicious, we're not suspicious of these cords. They are suspended. So let's take a look at what's going on under the hood of these SS cords. So simply put you can suspend a major chord, a minor chord, a seventh chord, any chord that has a third. So when we're looking at C major, C E G, our third of that chord is the middle note, E. Likewise, when we have C minor, we have E flat as our third. SS two and SS four refers to suspending or essentially moving the third of the chord up one note within the diatonic scale or down one note. So the first five notes of C major, CDEF G are very similar to the first five notes of C minor, CDE flat FG. Only one note changes. E becomes E flat. So when we go to suspend this third E or E flat, we can suspend it up to the fourth note of either of those scales, they're the same note. So F, that would be your SS four because that's the fourth note of those scales, or you can suspend them down as a SS two. The second note of C major and C minor is a D. So SS two would be in replacement of the third E or E flat. Basically, instead of the first third and fifth note of a major or a minor scale, you have the first fourth and fifth. Or first second and fifth. So SS four, sus two. If that's making sense so far, let's jump forward into how we can now suspend a dominant seventh chord and the function of how we can use that suspension. Now, before we get talking about how you can suspend a dominant seventh chord, I first want to mention that there is a sort of default sus. Like, if you see CSS, what are they referring to? Is it SS two? Is it SS four? Well, four tends to be the default. And the way I explain it to my students is imagine I said you walked into a room and there was a piano suspended in the room. Would you picture it suspended above you or below you? Most likely above. It's suspended. Some ropes have been pulled, the piano is up, it's suspended up into the air. So the default suspension, if that's any help in terms of remembering, goes up from the third to the fourth. So the default is that sus four. So when we say sus, I want you thinking sus four. They're essentially the same thing. Jazz musicians will quite often use both, but I digress, we won't go into that territory. Also, there are other types of suspensions. If you've studied classical counterpoint, you'll recognize that suspensions can be used in all types of areas leading into new harmony. But for the sake of this class, we're just going to be talking about the regular old sus or sus four. But we are applying it to a dominant seventh chord. So let's start to jump into that territory. Dominant seventh chord again being a major chord with a flat seven or a minor seven, again, we're taking the third of the chord, in this case, B and suspending it up to a C. Now, in classical music, there's a really common sort of sass for on this dominant to the regular dominant, and then back to the one chord. And what this gives us is one of the most common melodic phrases, which is dot dough. So, here it is. Did you hear that little dot dough? It's like me, do, do, re dough, do te dough. These are really common ways to finish a melodic phrase because of how popular the perfect cadence is 151. But instead of 151, we're now trying something like five sus 51. So on our dominant seventh chord, again, in this case, we have G, the fourth note, C, D and F, and quite often this will resolve to a dominant seventh chord. Now from there, you could choose to go back to a one major or minor or you could move deceptively. Sus dominant and then to one of our more romantic sounding options. However, what I really love about the dominant suss chord in romantic music is it quite often doesn't resolve. It'll just linger and then move somewhere else. So we end up getting sounds like 57 sus two second inversion, minor seven flat five. 57 sus to a first inversion, minor seven flat five, which is the same as our four minus six or 57 sus to a one chord could be major or minor, throw some color on there. But it doesn't have to resolve 57 sus the dominant chord and then somewhere else. In other words, think of it just as a replacement of the dominant seventh chord. It's more lingering tension, and it's a little bit more color, but I didn't include this in the last class where we're coloring dominant seventh chords because it's not truly a dominant seventh chord, right? We don't have that major third. So I'm treating it as a little bit of its own sort of sound, just so you can sort of compartmentalize coloring a dominant seventh chord, having a suspended dominant seventh chord, and then eventually maybe combining the two together. Now, if you were to combine them together, I'd recommend coloring it with a flat nine. So we have G dominant seven, sus four. We're 57 sa, same idea, we're going to add a flat, the flat nine. Let's put it in a progression. We're going to play one, four, five, and then we're going to bring that to a deceptive flat six, which is our second inversion, minus seven, flat five. I'll go through it. So we have the minor seven flat five. We have D, minus seven flat five, first inversion, second inversion. And this chord is one of my favorites, but it's a mouthful. Again, we're not going to call it a flat six major six flat five. It's just it's too much. So second inversion, minus seven flat five. We're here up to inversions. Great place to move in terms of a deceptive cadence. So here's the sound without me talking. Then you can take that somewhere else, maybe. And then back. Alright, so we have this dominant seventh chord that's so popular in classical music, romantic music, and every new genre that you can think of pop rock, so funk, jazz. It's really, really popular. This suspension on the dominant seventh chord is also a pretty common movement, but to not resolve it is kind of what makes this unique. Take that suspended chord and move it deceptively somewhere else or maybe just come straight back to the one can be such a fun sound to work with. And again, adding a flat nine. Now we're really in that romantic harmony territory. So I'd recommend working your way up to this. First, work through deceptive cadences with regular dominant seventh chords, then try it with the suspended version of these chords, and then see if you like the sound of adding a flat nine on top of all that. So that's it. For this class on Dominant seven SS chords, I'll catch you in the next class. 15. Harmonic Clusters: H. Let's get talking about a harmonic device that was used tons in the romantic era, which is clusters. So what is a cluster? Well, that kind of. Let's break it down. It's basically taking notes, smashing them closer together, so we're not working so much with the conventional skips or fourths or whatever type of harmony we might be used to otherwise. So while a cluster would generally be three or more notes, let's start off with taking two note dissonant sounds and sort of using those as our foundation for our clusters. What I'm talking about is minor seconds and major seconds. Let's discuss those and see how they function so we can use them within our clusters. So a semitone we're half step. Two notes closest together can be very haunting. It's very dissonant and not so pleasing to the ears. But a major second is a little softer, a little more colorful. So we're going to be using major seconds as our primary sort of clustering device within our major, minor dominant chords. Whatever chord you want to add these two, this colorization of a major second is a great place to start. Now, I'm not saying minor seconds are off the table. I'm just saying that you're going to get a more safe colorful sound with major seconds and a more dissonant colorful sound with minor seconds. I often say that major seconds are colorful, minor seconds are crunchy, but ultimately they're both quite colorful. So knowing that we can keep both tones and semitones, we can start off by inverting any of our seventh cords. So if I took a C major seven chord and put it in first inversion, I now have a bit of a cluster up top, one of these semitones. If I put it in second inversion, I still have those two notes beside each other, and in third inversion, you'll see it on the bottom of the chord. And from my experience, this is actually where you're going to see those semitones and tones the most is underneath the foundation of a lot of basic chords like seventh chords. And what I've noticed is that this tone on the bottom of a harmonic shape is very common in the romantic era. In fact, if you want to see plenty of those, I'd recommend studying the harmony of Claire Dalun by Debs. He uses these clusters a lot. So if I took this C major seven chord, put it in first, second, third inversion, there's a great example of a sort of more clustered bottom end to this chord. Now, again, it might not be like a full cluster because it's just two notes, but we can define a cluster as semitones or tones. So while the cluster might be small, it's still there, and it's applying a bit of tension down on the foundation of that cord. It also works for minor seventh chords. First inversion looks like a major six, second inversion, third inversion, we get that tone on the bottom, and this is something you'll see a bit more than that semitone foundation on the bottom of a chord. The tone starting point leaves things very open ended, and you can start to really play around with some different ideas and colorizations within those clusters. Now, if I mentioned to you that clusters are just a lot of notes that are beside each other within a scale, your starting point might be to just take something like a minor scale and play it all at once. But that's too tense. So now we can use the pentatonic scale and play these all at once. So there's no D or A flat, no two or flat six. And now things feel more safe. And that's true for minor pentatonic and major pentatonic scales. You can smash all those notes, and they'll sound relatively fine. So this is getting into that gray area of, if I have these three notes down here and these notes here, that feels pretty clustered. But it's also just a way of coloring our major chord with a six and a two or a nine. So there's a gray area here of like. When we color a chord enough, it has to sort of get more and more clustered unless you're really sort of spacing these sounds out across the piano. But that's not the point here. We're allowing the sound to be a little more dense and to cluster that sound as a result of that. Something I'll recommend trying as a starting point is to add your nine. So if you have a major chord, start with the root and third with that nine or two in between. You're already starting with a cluster, and then you can choose to color it however you want up above. Maybe it has a fifth and a seventh. Maybe it has no fifth, and it has a six and a seven and another nine. And another three, you get to choose how you want to color from that point. That also works for minor chords. But now, instead of a tone and a tone, we're going to get a tone and a semitone. So we've balanced a bit of that color and a bit of that crunch as our foundation here. If I take that sound and add a fifth and a seventh, maybe a ninth and another semitone up above for another minor third, you can see we're getting very colorful but also very clustered. As you get more and more comfortable with these clustered sounds, you can start to play around with other types of scales. Maybe you like the sound of the whole tone scale. You can play all the notes of the whole tone scale. You get a very colorful sound, and it's certainly a big dense cluster of notes. So the point I want to make in this class is that if you're coloring your chords, but you're feeling like they're starting to get a little too dense, that's fine. That's totally acceptable within romantic harmony. We see it all the time, and it's a great way to break out of the more predictable sounds of basic led, major and minor chords in whatever inversion you're used to hearing them. Now, I would recommend keeping your clusters a bit lower than your melody. Otherwise, you will obscure the melody a bit. If I have a C minor chord and my melody note is E flat and I put my cluster on top, you can still hear that this E flat is on top, but it's being a bit veiled by the notes just below it. Whereas if I was to color, let's say I just smashed down the first five notes of C minor in my left hand with that E flat on top, listening, it's so much more separated and it sounds great. Lastly, what I would say is if you really do like this sort of sound with this cluster up top, but you know that it's veiling the top note a little too much, just drop the note second from the top down into your left hand, and that'll help keep a little more separation for that top note in your melody. This is called drop two. It's very common in orchestration and in jazz piano playing. I don't want to go too deep into it, but that's the basic concept. The note second from the top is dropped to help separate the melody a bit more. So there you have it harmonic clusters. You can find these within inversions of your seventh chords, within your pentatonic scales, or you can just add them wherever you would like, providing they sound good to you, remembering that tones are going to give a more loose, colorful sort of sound, whereas semitones are going to be a little bit more challenging to the listener's ear but colorful nonetheless. I hope you enjoyed that class on harmonic clusters, and I'll catch you in the next one. 16. Creative Harmonies: Something else I'm going to recommend that you try within your exploration of romantic harmony is unconventional non diatonic chord progressions. In other words, playing chords that are not really related to the previous chord or to your home key. A good example might be in C minor, one of the chords that we have available is an E flat major chord. But what if I tried it as an E flat minor chord? It's a very different sound. And this sort of experimentation was more and more common as the romantic era progressed. Now, we hear the sound a lot in modern cinema. We don't need to in cinema, always have these large chord progressions really taking someone through a full journey. It's very possible John Williams is great at that, but sometimes all we need is two chords. Here's an example of a song that I wrote for a short film called The Rage, where I took an F minor triad and an E major triad, and I pretty much based the whole main theme around that little harmonic shift of just those two chords. They're not really related to one another, but it can be very effective. And in this case, I'm keeping the middle note common between those two chords, which is something that helps justify that harmonic shift. But again, it's very much non diatonic. It's not true to a key. The theme sounds like this. Same move here from A minor to A flat major. So the point here is I'm trying to encourage you to play chord progressions that don't necessarily make sense in a key. Again, they are non diatonic. So I think there's two main ways that you can approach this to start to make sense of it, and then like most music rules, you can just sort of open the floodgates and do what feels right or what sounds right. But here's two approaches that you can try. The first one is, let's say we're in A natural minor, ABCDEF GA. The chords available are these ones here. So A minor, B diminished, C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G major, and A minor. Let's take any one of those chords other than A minor and just change its quality. So we had A minor, we had D minor. Let's change it to D major. Let's take F major and change it to F minor. Now, the more you do this back to back, the more jarring it's going to be but it can still kind of work a little bit better if you're sticking to the roots of the notes that are available within your home key. Notice I didn't play any chords that started up on the black notes. That's kind of step two. It's a bit more jarring because you're pulling notes that aren't even related to the home key. And then it doesn't matter if you play major, minor, dominant, none of it really technically works diatonically anyway, so there's tons of room for exploration. So whether you're choosing a chord that starts on one of the notes from that key and just changing its quality or picking a note from outside of the key, both of those can work as options for exploring new harmony. As an example of that second option, let's take A to C sharp to F sharp. C Sharp will make major, F sharp will make minor. Actually, come to think of it, that'll feel like a five to a one of F sharp minor. Let's try it out. Well, it certainly feels settled into F sharp minor. But again, at that point, you could use some other device or modulation to come back to A minor. At that point, it's really up to you. This whole class, all of this is just to say, explore some stuff that you otherwise might not have tried. In terms of chords, in terms of harmony, start getting really creative, picking notes outside of your scale or picking chords on the same notes that are available within your home key, but just changing their quality. Again, if you're using minus six chords or minor seven flat five or dominant seven flat nine chords, you're choosing chords that sound a little bit more like they're from the romantic era. So those are great options when you're exploring new harmonic options outside of your diatonic home key. So that's it. For getting creative with your harmonic choices, I'll see you in the next class. 17. Open-Voiced Chords: Oh Alright, let's get talking about how romantic Harmony approaches open voiced chords. In short, there's a lot of possibilities, and they get creative with it. But I want to give you one really proper example by Rock Mononof in one of his songs, Elige. Before we dive too deep into that, I want to first outline what an open voiced chord is. So a close or closed voiced chord would be a root position or any inversion of a basic triad. It could also be a four note or a five note chord, but we're not reordering the notes outside of just plain old inversions. Open voice chord, if we go back to our basic triads takes the middle note of that chord and moves it up one octave. So some standard patterns might be rocking back and forth, or in the case of something like three, four, one, two, and three. One, two, and three end. Now, there's lots of possibilities for chord qualities that you can apply this to. For example, if you take a dominant seventh chord and consider that C is very important in C dominant seven, the seventh is very important. As well as this major third, you can omit the fifth and find yourself playing root seventh third. Now, again, this is a root position, but you can also invert these. A basic triad. If we take a first inversion C minor in this case and take our middle note G up one octave, we would end up getting this. Beautiful sound for that first inversion C minor triad. The same thing applies to this three node version of our dominant seventh chord. CEB flat would become EB flat C. Now we take the B flat and move this up one octave. It's a very big stretch, but it would sound like this. This has all the notes that we need for the C dominant seventh sound. Now, of course, there's other options. So what would I do in the case of this four note chord if I wanted to keep all of the notes in an open voiced chord? Well, I could take my middle two notes and bring them up one octave as one option. Now I would have C B flat E and then a crossover. To this G on top. And the rhythm works really well, one and two, and three, one and two, and three end. If you're in three, four, or one, two, three, and four end, you can start to sort of zig zag your way around a bit to fill out that fourth beat. So already you can see, we're starting to get creative with what is the chord? How many notes does it have? And the main thing we're trying to do is take middle notes and bring them up one octave. We're opening up the voicing of the chord hence the name open voiced. So LAG by Rochman andov let's break down a little bit of what he's doing in the first couple of bars where he's taking an E flat minor triad in an open voicing and doing something a little bit unique with it. A standard E flat minor triad would be E flat, G flat, B flat. And to open up the voicing, we'd bring the G flat up one octave. It would sound something like this. Now, if I was to want more weight on that chord, I might consider a full octave down low before playing those top two notes. He then adds an additional root and fifth up top before coming back down to that weighted octave on the low end. It ends up sounding something like this. So that's just one example of how you can alter an open voiced chord to be a little bit more complex. You could even consider more notes from the scale itself rather than just chord tones. So something like So this creates a sort of counter melody in this tenor part with our thumb or whatever other fingers you might have on the top of this open voice chord, leaving room for a more proper or regular melody up in the right hand to complement that counter melody. Alternatively, your right hand could be playing chords, and this area here that I talked about, could be your main melody. So let's say your main melody is sofa me do 54321. You might end up getting something like this. And then some other sort of development from there. So whether this top part of the open voice chord is creating a more simple counter melody or even your main melody. And I find, like, composers like Chopin would do this sort of thing, because they're left handed, they love to sort of show off what that left hand is capable of. Even something like his prelude in B minor comes to mind, where he has this it feels similar to the same concept of this more elaborate open voiced chord. It's not quite the same thing. He's just strictly moving up through chord tones, but just to show you that you could have the chords in the right hand and the melody in the left really opens up that concept for the open voiced chords as well. So to recap, open voicings can work on standard triads, four note chords, or even chords with more than four notes, but you have to start to get a bit creative. They can work with inversions. So if we just take a standard C major first inversion, bring the middle note up one octave, it works the same way. We can add an octave down on the bottom to create weight. And then once we reach the top we can either play more chord tones to extrapolate that sound a little bit more or we can even play around with notes from the scale and or chords to create a little bit more of a melody, whether it be a counter melody, a sort of secondary melody, or maybe the left hand really gets to shine and it gets the main melody on the top of that open voicing. This can really help make sense of music where they have these big, open, lush left hand parts. And if you kind of understand the basics of open voiced chords, you can kind of see how these composers have just built on those fundamentals so that you can make sense of this stuff, and it really helps when you're trying to memorize these left hand parts. So that's it for open voiced chords within romantic harmony, I'll see you in the next class. 18. Outro: Congratulations on finishing this course on romantic harmony. This one was not necessarily an easy course to get through, so I would highly recommend that you revisit a lot of these classes to make sure that you fully understand the material that I've presented to you. I hope by now having reached the end that there was a couple of harmonic ideas that really resonated with you. For me, discovering that minor seven flat five chord and its inversions really opened up my improvisations and compositions and ended up making them sound a whole lot more romantic. Again, I believe that romantic harmony is still relatively untapped in modern music, and maybe there's going to be a new surge of composers that use this type of harmony, and maybe you'll be one of them. That I don't know, but what I do know is that I quite often get questioned. What was that neat thing you did there with that chord? And usually I'm just stealing tricks from these romantic composers. And now keep in mind, I say stealing, but technically harmonic chord progressions, there's no copyrighting that stuff. So if you like the sound course, feel free to use it. Don't forget you do have a project for this course. So make sure that you do submit it. And if you're not sure what the details are, do check out the class dedicated to the project details. I will check out your project. I will give you some feedback, and I very much look forward to seeing what you submit. If you want to learn more about me as a composer and as a teacher, you can head over to Cook hyphenmusic.ca. There you'll be able to find links to the social media platforms that I'm on. You'll be able to hear some of the music that I've done for film and video games, as well as some of my own personal passion projects. You'll also find a link to the Cook music store where you're going to be able to find some of the music that I've composed for solo piano, and of course, some of that music uses a lot of the tricks from within this course, so you'll be able to see how I use it firsthand. Also, I am trying to add some merch to the store. Usually, it's quirky music related stuff, so feel free to check that out as well. Lastly, you can also find me on YouTube at youtube.com slash at Cook Hyphen MusEC. There you'll be able to view some tutorial lessons that I don't necessarily include within my courses, as well as some videos of me playing piano, some of the music that I've done for music videos, video games, so on and so. I really am trying to grow that YouTube channel. So if you do like the stuff that I've presented on that channel, please do give a subscribe. Also, if you feel passionate about the stuff presented within this course, make sure that you bring it to your own private music teacher. Now, if you don't already have a teacher, I do run an online music school, and you can learn more about it at cookmusicschool.ca. There I have some like minded teachers that teach everything from classical instruments to band instruments and all the forms of music technology, including sound design, mixing, mastering, and so much more. That all being said, the reason I want you to take the information from this course to your teacher is so that they can give you their own sort of perspective as to how they view these harmonic tricks. They may also present some tricks not provided within this course. So it's really important that if you, A, don't understand some of the material within this course fully, they might be able to help you a little bit more, especially if you have a particular learning style, but they might also be able to give you some insight as to how they use it within their own compositions and what they feel most passionate about from within the subject of harmony in the romantic era. As always, thank you for taking this course. The more students that enroll in the courses that I provide, the more passionate I get about creating more courses, and I have a lot more coming down the line, so stay tuned. Now go out there. Have some fun with these romantic Harmony tricks, and I'll see you in the next course.