Music Theory in a Zombie Apocalypse

Sa.

All right, so let's dive in. If you don't know me yet, my name is Jay. I make a lot of online classes, and I love making online classes. I've made a ton of music theory classes, going all the way up into some of the really advanced stuff. In this class, we're going to keep it pretty simple. This is a very kind of 101 class. I know there's some weird stuff going out in the world right now. There's this new pandemic or something. I don't know. It doesn't matter. We're, I think, going to successfully just ignore that pandemic and talk about music theory. So I've written a couple books. This is actually the same book, but this was a Spanish version and this is the English version. There's also an Arabic version out there, and I actually have a few other books almost out. I've done a lot of work on music theory and making it really kind of accessible for every person. So in this class, the way I'm approaching music theory is very much just kind of assuming you have a little bit of experience. Music notation. Here's the thing about music notation that I want to just say right off the bat, you don't have to be good at reading music. Okay? This isn't a race. There's no speed quotient here. You just have to know where the notes are on a staff order to get us started. Okay? So if you can find a note by looking at a staff, then that's great. You don't need to be able to sight read. You don't need to be able to know what's going on. In fact, if you can't find your way around the staff, you're probably fine for this class anyway because we're going to talk about the patterns and things that exist in the staff and how we find music that sounds good using the staff. You can also use a DA and use the piano roll editor. However, you're gonna have to do a little bit of a translation into notation for that. I do have another class that is just using the notation editor called Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers. I would recommend that if you're not skilled at all with music notation, but even if you have almost no experience looking at the staff, looking at this five line staff thing, you're probably going to be okay. All right. My style of teaching music theory, especially in this intro level, is very much to emphasize that in music theory there are often multiple right answers, and music theory is a tool that we use to understand what sounds good and why. That's what music theory is all about. So let's go into another video where I'm going to talk a little bit more about what we should be expecting out of music theory. A lot of people approach it and just expect that if they get really good at music theory, it's going to be able to write music for them. And that's not really true because that's not really the purpose of music theory, at least not in my mind. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. Okay. What is music theory? I kind of just said my kind of core belief in it in the previous video. And that is that music theory tells us what sounds good and why. Okay, now, if you study music theory and you get really good at music theory, does that mean you're going to write just brilliant music all the time? No, because that's not what music theory is for. Let me tell you the best use case for me as a composer and a songwriter of music theory. When I'm sitting and writing music, what I'm thinking about is what I. And I think this is fairly typical in a lot of composers and songwriters. What they're thinking about is not music theory while they're writing music. No, they're not. They're thinking about what's going to sound good next.

Right?

Like, so I've written some chord and I'm like, cool. What's going to sound good coming after that chord or what's going to sound good in this song? That's what I care about. I don't care about what works, what doesn't work, what, you know, any of these music theory rules. I don't care about any of that. What I care about is what's going to sound good here. Okay, now how do I know what's going to sound good? The reason I know what's going to sound good is because the other day I was listening to a song by. I don't know, let's. Let's pick a hypothetical thing. I was listening to that new. New to me Linkin park song and I heard that the way that they used this chord progression in the chorus, I just really liked that vibe that it created. So I. I looked it up. What are the chords? I did a little analysis and I said, ah, it's a. I don't know what it really was, but let's just say it was a one flat three chord progression. You don't need to know what that means. But what I did is I could then Extrapolate that and say, oh, I really like the sound of a one flat three chord progression. So when I am writing a piece of music next, and I want that kind of dark sound, I'm going to use a 1 flat 3 chord progression. So I'm using music theory to kind of extrapolate what I like, the sounds that I like, not just in chords, but in melodies and form and all kinds of other stuff. I'm extrapolating what sounds cool to me, and then I'm incorporating that into my own vocabulary. That's what music theory is really good for. It's really good for putting terms on things so that we know what we like and we know how to use them in our own music. Cool. Now, that is, I suppose, quite, at least a little debatable. There are some people who will say, you can't write music without understanding music theory. I think that's hogwash. But people do say that, and some people believe that, and they're welcome to believe it. I don't. I believe that music theory and music composition are two separate things, but they are related in that one will help you get faster and better in some ways at the other. So that's what music theory is all about. So what we're going to do in this class is really, we're going to not really learn to write music. We're going to learn how to look at someone else's music and find the things that sound really cool to us that we will then be able to use in our music. So we will talk about how to use those things in your music and how to find those things in other music. But this is how music theory has worked for, like, centuries. You know, composers have studied other composers for centuries, and that's. And they put names on stuff so that they can use it, and that's where music theory comes from. So let's do it. All right. A couple more things that I want to just kind of get out of the way as we dive in. Things we're going to cover in this class. Tools, you'll need things like that. Let's do that in the next few videos. Okay. What we're going to cover in this class. So like I said earlier, we're not going to cover reading music. Okay. The big thing about music notation, traditional music notation like this, that people get wrong, is that they need to be able to sight read. I hear people say all the time, well, I can't sight read, so I can't really read music. That's not true at all. Like, sight reading is a very specialized skill. Like, I can read music really pretty good. I have a PhD in this stuff. You know, I'm not a great sight reader. I'm kind of a good sight reader, but it took a long time to get good at sight reading. So you don't need to be able to read music really well. You don't need to be able to do any of that stuff. Hopefully you understand that when I put notes on the staff here, each note is a pitch, and maybe you play an instrument, and you can find that note if you thought about it for a few minutes. So that's kind of what I'm expecting. You can do a little bit if you even play an instrument. But if you can't do that, you'll be just fine. But we're. I have other classes on how to read music, and we spend a lot of time on that. So I'm not going to do that here. I'm going to keep this kind of separate so that we can focus really on the music theory stuff. Cool. All right, let's move on. Oh, and next thing I want to talk about is tools. And I've got a couple tools that I want to give you for this class. Okay? Tools that will make you successful in this class. There are two. Okay. One is optional. The other is free. I'm just gonna give it to you. Let's talk about the free one first. Okay, so some staff paper, like this is staff paper. It's got these five lines on it. You can see me squiggling some stuff. I always keep a pad of staff paper nearby on my desk. It's really handy to have. Now, I'm going to be using software for most, most of this class, but keep some staff paper handy just so you sometimes like taking notes. It's a lot easier with staff paper if you're taking notes about music. So keep some staff paper. And, you know, sometimes if you just want to be pretentious and you just write like a, like, grocery list on staff paper, it looks pretty cool. I don't know. Some people think that. Okay, so you can buy, like, some nice staff paper on Amazon if you want, but I can also just give it to you. So I'm just gonna give you a piece of blank staff paper in the next little thing here. Okay? So download that, print out five or six copies. Keep it handy by your desk or phone or whatever you're using to watch this class on. Okay? Just keep it handy. Trust me, it'll be useful. Also, I don't know what's really going on here, but we've been having some weird, like power grid things on occasion. Power's been going off and on a little bit. There's like weird animals have been like chewing through power lines or something. I don't really understand it. There's weird stuff going on. So it's handy to have staff paper because if the power does go out for some reason, you can keep practicing and working by just staff paper. That being said, assuming power is working as normal, there are a number of software tools you can use. Here's the deal on software tools. So there are programs called Notation Editor programs. They're just like Microsoft Word, but instead of for text, they're for music notation. Okay, There are three big programs, okay, the three big programs in this area. And by big programs I mean these are programs that take a long time to learn. They're professional level programs. They're very tricky. Actually those programs are called Finale, Sibelius and Dorico. Those are the three programs. If you really want to get into this, pick one of those and learn it. Well, I would suggest taking a whole separate class on using those programs. Now, of those three programs, Finale has recently announced that it is going under. So don't buy Finale if you're just getting started. Okay? Sibelius and Dorico are the two. I've a couple years ago switched over to Dorico. It's great. So Dorico is good if you want to make a serious investment in this. Okay. It's not a cheap program and it's hard to learn. So probably best to put that offer down the road once you're ready to really devote some time to this new passion of yours. In the meantime, this program that I'm showing you here is called Musescore. Musescore.org this is a free or close to it program. This is what I'll be using in this class. So I would recommend you get Musescore. Okay, I gotta tell you something about Musescore. Musescore used to be a free open source program and it's not anymore. It might still be free, but that kind of changes. So it kind of depends on when you're watching this. If it's not free, it's like a dollar. And that version of Musescore that I'm talking about is the desktop version. Okay? So Mac or PC or Linux. The tablet version is like a whole separate program and it's expensive and weird. I don't really understand it, but I know it's had Some problems I've heard from students that didn't work very well. So if you're on a desktop computer or a laptop, get Muscore. It's great. If you're on a tablet, try maybe try one of the other ones. There's a whole bunch that are pretty good programs. I know on iPad, there's one called Notion. That's really good. And there are some other ones, too. Virtually anything will work. All we need to be able to do here is click in notes. Just be able to click on the screen and make notes and then hear them back. That's our main thing we want out of this program. So I'm going to be using Musescore. You are welcome to use whatever program you want as long as you can put in notes and play them back. I would not recommend making the leap to Dorico or Sibelius or. And definitely not to finale at this point. Do that later. If you get really into this, Musescore should be plenty good for you now. All right, I'm going to give you that staff paper download in the next thing. Hopefully your electricity works better than mine does these days. And we'll go from there. All right. Then after that, we're going to dive into the first big section. So off we go. All right, let's dive in to scales. Now, what are scales, and why do we care? Here's the thing about scales. If you took any music lessons in the past when you. Maybe when you were a little kid or, you know, maybe you took piano lessons or you played in your concert band or whatever, you had to learn scales. And you probably said, this is dumb. Why am I playing scales? And I'm just playing notes going up and down, and this doesn't mean anything to me. Cool. So here's what they mean to you. Here's what no one told you. Scales do a few different things when you were a kid in band class or playing your piano lessons, scales are teaching you kind of muscle memory and kind of how notes work in music theory. They're very important because scales tell us all the notes in a key. The scale and the key can be the same thing. So if we're in the key of G major, then if you want to know all the notes in the key of G major, then you just play the G major scale. And that's going to tell you all the notes in that key. Now it's also going to tell us all the chords in that key. And that's where we really start getting into music theory, is when we start building as many chords as we can with a scale because then we start getting into harmony and learning how to write songs and stuff. Stuff. So that's what we're gonna do. Now here's the other thing about scales. When you learn scales as a kid, if you did, if you didn't learn scales as a kid, it's fine. You don't, you don't have to know scales because we're gonna learn them now. But if you did learn them when you were younger, you maybe memorize like four or five different scales at most. Probably that's not what we're gonna do here. I'm not a big fan of just like, let's memorize as much as we can. Instead we're gonna going to look at one scale, we're going to figure out how it works and then we're going to figure out how to figure out any other scale. Okay? There's a pattern to the scale. If I had to, if I wrote a music theory textbook, which I guess I have, but if I was writing one from scratch, I might consider calling it There's a Pattern. Because nearly everything has a pattern. You don't need to memorize all the scales. You just need to memorize the pattern to find them out. Okay, so that's what we're going to do in the next few sections right now. We're going to go on and talking about the chromatic scale, kind of why that matters and what scales are. So let's go on and do that. Alright? First things first, let's define two very important words. Chromatic and diatonic. Wow. My dog is just going crazy out there. Sorry. She'll calm down. Must be the mailman. Okay, so chromatic and diatonic, okay? Two different things. Let's start with chromatic. Chromatic. If we pick apart that word, chromatic, Chrome, Chroma comes from color, right? All the colors. Chromatic means all the colors. And we don't work in colors, we work in notes. So it means all the notes you'll actually find. This is really interesting to me anyway. That man, my dog is just going crazy. Weird. Where was I? Oh yeah. You'll actually find that the way we describe music once you get into like music theory and just in general the way we describe music, we don't have great words for it in the English language or any language I that I've really studied. So we often borrow from other disciplines. So we might say music is very colorful. We might say, this sounds dark, this sounds bright. We. So we borrow a Lot from the visual medium to kind of make up for our not having great words for sound. Anyway, so we often talk about color. So chromatic means all the color. It means all the notes to us. If you are writing chromatic music, you are writing music where any note is possible and you can just paint notes. There's a whole bunch of really interesting ways to write chromatic music. And I encourage you to check out some chromatic music. It can be very hard to listen to because chromatic music is very dissonant and it's very complex, usually, and it's hard to listen to. I'm guessing you probably don't want to write chromatic music. But the opposite of chromatic is diatonic. Diatonic means a subset of notes, a smaller group of notes that sound good together. Okay, so a smaller group of notes that sound good together. So it's a smaller subset. And it's basically notes that sound good together. That's why they've been put into a scale. So most scales, you know, are diatonic scales. Diatonic also means that we're in a key. There is some kind of more important note. So if we're in the key of C major, then the pitch C is kind of more important than the other ones, than the other pitches. It is the root. It is what we call tonic. More on that word later. Gosh, I'm sorry. I really wish I could get my dog to stop barking. I don't know what she's barking at out there. It's crazy. So chromatic and diatonic scales. There is one chromatic scale because it has all the notes. There are hundreds of diatonic scales, but really only a few that we use all the time. Okay, Chromatic and diatonic. Moving on. Okay, so let's look at a scale, and I'm going to put a really fancy word on it. Generally, when I talk about music, I really. Well, actually, just anywhere in my life, actually, I'll tell you a little bit about my life. I hate pretentiousness. It drives me insane. So when we have, like, really fancy words for a very common thing, it just strikes me as pretentious and drives me nuts. So I'm not gonna give you those. Except for this particular moment right now. There's another thing we can call a scale, and it's actually kind of interesting to pick apart. That would be ordered pitch class collection. Okay, let's look at a scale. Okay, there's our scale, C major scale. Now ordered pitch class collect. There's like two. Two birds that just flew right into my window and I can see them. They're, like, dead. That is so weird. So my dog's going crazy. There's birds flying into the windows. I just heard there's another one. There's just another one in the window out there. What is going on? Maybe it's this pandemic thing people are talking about. Anyway, Ordered pitch class collections. We'll make it through this. So this is a fancy way to say a scale. So what does that mean? Ordered is the first word. So a scale is notes in an order. If I did this, What have I skipped? Yeah.

Okay.

If I did like this, this is not a scale because it's not in an order. Okay? You could find a scale in that, but a scale is ordered notes. Ordered pitch class collection. So let's talk about pitch class. Pitch class is a silly way to say all octaves, okay? So this is a weird concept, but let me try it. So when we use the pitch C in a scale, when we say the note C is in this scale, that means all Cs. Cs of all octaves are in that scale. That's what pitch class means. It is the pitch class C. And we can use all. Any C. Okay? The pitch class of C sharp, if that's in a scale, is going. Means all octaves. The pitch class of C sharp is not in this scale. So therefore, no C sharps in any octave are in this scale. It's kind of obvious in a way, but it's kind of not. So. Ordered pitch class Collections. Collections. Group of notes. So it's. Maybe that's a helpful way for you to think about it, but that's what that means. Okay? There was another one. There was another bird that just hit the window out there. I could just hear it. It's a very distinctive sound. Anyway, it's crazy. Okay, let's. Let's play around with the chromatic scale. There was another one. All right. There's some weird stuff going on in my neighborhood here. I don't really know what's going on. I'm going to take a little break after this video and go explore. But first, let's talk about chromatic scales. So let's do it with. Let's do it with eighth notes. So a chromatic scale. Remember, it's using all the notes. And no notes are more important than any other notes. So it doesn't matter what note we start on. It's going to result in the same group of notes. So let's start on a. I don't know, a How about. Sure. And now we're just going to go chromatically up from there. So we can use sharps or flats. It doesn't really matter. Usually if I'm going up, I'm going to use sharps. So there's no B sharp. So we go right to C. And then we go to C sharp. D. D sharp, E. There's no E sharp. We go to F. F sharp, F sharp, G. G. Oops. G sharp, A. A sharp, B. There's no B sharp. And that gets us back to C. All right. A chromatic scale sounds like this. Right now. If you do play an instrument, chromatic scales are really good for your finger. There's another crazy bird. And now my dog is barking again this day. What I was about to say is if you are learning an instrument, chromatic scales are really good to play, to get in your fingers. I'm a guitar player, so this. That's why I do this when I talk about scales. Chromatic scales are really good for strengthening the muscles in your fingers. But we are going to leave them behind for now. We're going to focus primarily on diatonic stuff. Okay. Typically, when one teaches music theory, you spend about 4, 3 semesters on diatonic music. And then at the end of the fourth semester, you get into a little bit of chromatic music. But chromatic music is very, very rare and very strange and very weird. If you're trying to write pop music, dance music, anything like that, you're not writing chromatic music. You're writing diatonic music. So let's move on. Talk about diatonic scales. Well, I just went for a walk around, and it seems like everything is back to normal. Very strange. In fact, it's a little too normal. Everything got suddenly very quiet, and I can't. There's, like, nobody walking around. It's really weird. But let's just keep going, and hopefully the world will come back to normal. Okay, so in this lesson, we're going to talk about whole steps and half steps. Okay? Here's what we need to know. The distance between two notes is called an interval. Okay? So if I say a C to G is a fifth, that means the distance between the pitches C and G is a fifth. Okay? And a fifth in that case means if you count up the scale C, D, E, F, G, you're gonna get five. Okay? So that's an interval of a fifth. So we're gonna learn some intervals along the way. A fifth is an important one. But right now we're going to start on a second Okay? A second can be two different things. It has two flavors. Okay? So if I say these two notes are a second away, they could be a major second or a minor second. For example, let's look at our C major scale, okay? Okay, cool. C major scale. Now let's take our first two notes, C and D. Okay? Now these are a second, one, two. That's a second, an interval of a two. Okay? Now we can call this interval a major second or a minor second. Now, in this case, it is a major second. The reason we know that is because a minor second is the smallest possible interval, okay? So if you have no possible notes in between two notes, it is the smallest possible interval. And that is a minor second. This is a major second because we could have a note in between there. We could have a C sharp, right? C, C sharp, D. So we have a major second here because there's a note that's being skipped over. Okay? That's just the easiest way to remember it. Now, major and minor seconds have another term that we use. And another term is half steps and whole steps, okay? You may see some people use the terms half tone and whole tone. Or semitone and whole tone. Those all mean the same thing. You can use whichever one you want. I like half steps and whole steps, okay? So a whole step is the same as a major second, okay? A whole step means that there's a note in between. Like if we look at a piano. Here's a piano. Let's make it a little bit bigger, okay? If we go to C. Well, let's go lower. Higher. Cat. If we go to C and I say, what is a whole step higher? It's going to be D, okay? And it's because here there's a note in between, right? So C to C sharp is a half step. C to D is a whole step. You could also think of a whole step as just two half steps. Get you to the same spot. Okay? So a half step is the smallest amount of distance we can possibly move. So this is a half step. C sharp to D is a half step. D to D sharp or E flat is a half step. Every note in the chromatic scale is a half step apart, okay? So half steps and whole steps. When we look at the major scale, the major scale is made up of some half steps and some whole steps and nothing else, okay? So let's go in and look at what that pattern is to make the half steps and whole steps, Okay? So let's look at the pattern. Now, this pattern will work for any Major scale. Okay, so if you say, what is the G major scale? You just got to start on G and do this pattern. The C major scale. Start on C and do this pattern. The G minor scale. Minor scale is a different pattern. We'll learn that later. Okay, so this is just the major scale pattern, right? And that pattern is. Why don't I do this? I'm just going to tell you the pattern and then we'll figure it out together. Okay, so let's go here. The pattern is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Okay? So W's are wholes and H's are halves. I don't know why I do the H's in lowercase. There is. You'll find in music theory various reasons to put things in capital and lowercase. We'll get to that soon. This kind of isn't really one of them. It's just a habit. So use capitals, lowercase, whatever. But this is the pattern. Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Okay, so let's pick a scale. Let's say F. Okay? That's an F. So all we have to do is this pattern on an F. And we're going to have an F major scale. Okay? So first whole step, F to G is a whole step. If we look down here, F to G, there's a note in between. So that makes this a whole step. Okay, Next is another whole step. G to A. You see, G to A is a whole step apart, right? So whole step, whole step. Now half step. So A up a half step. That's going to be to the nearest possible note, which is that one. Okay, that is a B flat. Okay, now after that, we have whole step. So what is a whole step above B flat? It's a tricky one. It's C. Okay, because this to be natural, would be a half step to C would be a whole step, C. Okay? And then another whole step to D, and then another whole step to E. And then a half step gets us from E. A half step above E is an F. And that gets us our major scale. So that pattern gets us a major scale. Here's what it sounds like. Cool. Let's try another one. Let's try E major. All right, so we start on E. And now we go whole step. So whole step above E is what, this note? That note is an F sharp. Okay. Another whole step above F sharp is this note. Because we're going to skip that one. So G sharp. Okay, Now a half step above G sharp. We are here. Half step is going to be A. Okay. Now, a whole step gets us to B. A whole step above B is. There's a half step. There's a whole step C sharp. And a whole step above C sharp is going to be D sharp. And then a half step is E. So there is your major scale pattern. Okay, time for another vocabulary word. So the vocabulary word of this video is tonic, okay? Now, tonic is a very important word, okay? And you're gonna hear me say it, like, a bajillion times. Tonic means a lot of different things, okay? So when we're talking about scales. Whoops. When we're talking about scales, tonic can mean the root of the scale. The tonic of the scale is the note that the scale is named after. Okay? So an F major scale. Tonic is the pitch F, G. An E major scale. Tonic is the pitch E. Okay? Once we start figuring out what

key

a song is in, for example, you will hear a song and someone might say, I hear it in C major. And another person might say, I hear it in A minor. Okay? Those two keys are very close to each other. Actually, more on that later, but they're very close. And so what I would say is, what sounds like tonic? Like what pitch sounds like the most comfortable pitch. The pitch that you could end the song on, that you could start the song on. Maybe it's the high note of the song. It all depends. But that note is probably tonic. Not always, but probably. And tonic tells us what key we're in, what scale we're in, what note the song is really built around. Right. A lot of time we talk about tonic being home. That's like kind of the thing of it. What that means is tonic feels like, like you start there, but you always want to go back to there. Let me give you an example. If I play this F major scale, but I end on this E, you're going to probably. You might feel like you want to hear an F because that's tonic of this scale, right? F is tonic because this is an F major scale. If I leave you hanging on something that's not tonic, it can feel a little unsettling. Let's listen. So here's. I just want to get F in your head. Okay, here's the F major sc. Right? You want to hear that note, right? That's tonic.

That's home.

That's, you know, all kinds of stuff. So remember that term. There's somebody knocking my door. Hold on a second. That was really weird. There's, like, someone knocking on my door, and I went to look for who it is, and it was just some dude standing there, like, grunting at me. It was really weird. So I told him to go away. This world we're living in, how strange. Okay, let's keep going. Okay, a word about practicing really quick. So you're not gonna get good at music theory by just absorbing it through me talking. You gotta practice it a little bit. So I'm gonna give you some worksheets that'll help you practice. Okay? In the next little thing will be the first worksheet. This will be a PDF. You can download it, you can print it, and you can write all over it and put in the answers. You can also just do it on your computer if you want. You don't have to print it. Whatever you like, but identify what you're having a hard time grabbing onto and then go back and watch those videos again.

Okay.

I stopped doing these worksheets for a while, and I just heard from so many students that they just love these worksheets. So do them. Use them to practice. Use them to identify what you're not fully getting. And then, you know, post questions. Do whatever you like, and I will be happy to help you. Okay, so in the next thing, your first worksheet, and then we will continue on to using scales and writing melodies to get us started using scales. Off we go. Okay, let's talk about using major scales. Okay, so we're gonna learn in a minute how to use major scales to make chords. But for now, let's just talk about what's in the scale and what we can do. There are a couple of things inside of a scale. Every note inside of a scale has a fancy name. Let's make a D major scale. There we go. D major. So we like to put fancy names on all the notes we already know. This one, this is tonic. Okay? This one, the fifth, is called the dominant. This one, the seventh, is called the leading tone. Okay, These are our three most important ones. Tonic always feels like home. Right? The dominant, the fifth note, usually wants to lead back to tonic. Now, that doesn't mean you always have to do it, but check this out. If I did this and I just play up through the five, you'll kind of see how this feels like it wants to go back down to here, Right? It goes. So the five, the fifth note likes to lead back to one. We call this. It has sort of a tendency leading back to one of tonic or one. The leading tone, as we already saw, really wants to lead to tonic. Okay? So if we stop there, You very much want to hear okay, so this, the five wants to lead down to tonic. And the leading tone, which is what we call that, wants to lead up to tonic. Now all the other notes in the scale tend to want to lead one place or another also, but they don't matter as much. They're not as strong as those ones. Okay, so with that knowledge of the tonic, the dominant and the leading tone, let's write a melody that takes advantage of that. What do we know about a melody using these notes? Well, we know that we definitely want to start and end on tonic. Now again, you do not have to start in a non tonic. That's just going to be the easiest way to make something sound good. So let's do that. For our very simple melody, we want

to

get us back to tonic. One quick way would be to land on the five, the dominant, because that'll help us do a leap down to tonic and that'll sound good or the leading tone, and then that'll push us to tonic. That also means I don't want to like sit on the leading tone for a long time. Right. Because that just feels really unsettled. Okay, there's one more trick before we write a melody I want to talk to you about. Just like a little melody writing technique called steps, skips and leaps. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. Okay, so if we wrote a melody using a scale and we just went up and down the scale, that would be a very boring melody now, wouldn't it? So instead of that, there are basically three things we can do. Let's stay in D major and let's start on tonic. Okay, Now I'm just going to use quarter notes for this. We'll make it more interesting later. Actually. No, I take that back. Let's use a real rhythm. So I'm just going to kind of switch up what rhythm I use here. Okay, So I have a D. So my next note could be one of three things. A step, a skip or a leap. Okay. Or technically there's a fourth thing which is the same note again. So a step would be going to the next note in the scale, up or down. Okay, So I could go from D, I could go down to C sharp or I could go up to E. E. If I do a step, a skip would be to jump over a note and go to another note, the next note. So I could go. I could jump up to an F sharp or I could jump down to a B. Okay, that would be a skip and then a leap. Is any jump bigger than this third. So I could go, here's a skip, here's a leap. This would be a leap. This would be a leap. And this would be a leap. Okay, if I'm going up, so those are basically your three options. So let's do a leap up to five. Now, remember, five doesn't have to go back to one. So I could just do this. Let's do that. And now, so I have a leap and then two steps in the opposite direction. This is a very common pattern to use. A leap and then a skip in the opposite direction is very, very common. Or a few skips in the opposite direction. We try to limit how many leaps we have. If you're trying to write a very standard, normal, singable melody, you want two leaps. Okay. Or less. Okay, so let's go to a skip to there. And then let's walk down it again. And we'll do a step. And then let's do an eighth note here. So we'll go down a step, and then. Step. And I'm just kind of eyeballing it here. Skip. And let's make that a half note. And then we'll go step, step, step, Step. And then I'll go step up to that A. And then I can use that A to plop me down back on D. Dog's still going crazy. I don't know what's going on. Okay, so let's hear our little melody in D major. Oh, I forgot to add in my accidentals. F sharp. F sharp. C sharp. Okay, let's try it again. Okay. It's weird, in short, because it's only three measures. But that's what I wanted to do. For this example, having a fourth measure would be good. In fact, let's add a fourth measure. Let's see if we can find a spot. Actually, you know what I really want to hear? Let's make that a leading tone. And then this just a whole note on the upper octave of D. Okay, so now we're going to use that leading tone to push us to tonic. Nice. That is a very pretty melody. Okay, so steps, skips, and leaps. All right, let's kind of analyze this melody a little bit more. Okay. And just point out a little bit more explicitly what's in it. So first we have a leap of a fifth. Okay. Leaps of fifths are great. They very often sound good. We have step, step, another leap, step, step. So the after this leap, we have a step down, a step down, a step down, a step up, a skip up, step up, step, step, step, Step, skip, step. Okay? So we only have two leaps, right here and right here. We start and end on tonic. We use a leading tone to get us back to tonic. Okay? So that's a fairly well constructed melody. I'm getting these, like, weird messages on Facebook about all these people getting sick again. I don't know what this is about, but I think there's something going around. It kind of sounds worse than, like, the last. The COVID pandemic. It's weird. I can't tell if it's a hoax or what. It's weird. Okay, so there's our melody analysis. All right, One question I get asked all the time. What does it mean to be in key? So someone says, this is in key or this is not in key. What key is it in? How do we know? Here are some guidelines. First of all, to be in a key means that there is a tonic, okay? It means that some note sounds like home, okay? That is the most important thing. Everything else just kind of are clues. Okay? Now, like, we could easily say here that this is the key of D major, okay? And there are a couple clues that tell me that. One clue is that it starts on a D. Another clue is that it ends on a D. Another clue are the notes in it. We have F sharp and C sharp. If we put all those together, we can make a D major scale. That's a pretty good clue. That's probably one of the best clues. But all of that goes to establish tonic. That is the most important thing. And when we're in a key, What we know is that all the notes in that scale, whatever scale we're using, will sound good. Okay? So if you're writing a song and you're in the key of E, what you can. E major. What? You know, when you're thinking, like, okay, what note should come next? If you're in the key of E major, you can say, any note in the E major scale is going to work, is going to sound pretty good. So that's what being in key tells us. Now back to what I was saying a minute ago. It's all about, what is tonic? Is there a case where the key is debatable? Sure. Like, totally. There are lots of them. So in my college classes, how do I tell if a student is right or not? Well, it kind of comes to justification. Like, if I say, tell me what key this is in, and they. And a student says, this is in the key of D, I'm gonna say, you're right. If someone says, well, it's in the key of B, B minor. I'm going to say, okay, tell me why B sounds like tonic to you. And if they can say, well, you know, there's a leap to a B. There's a, you know, this B is the longest note. There are a couple things that kind of point us in that direction. Then I would say, okay, you could be right. So it is music theory, right? Like there are. People hear different things different ways. Now 99% of music theory is pretty sound and. But there are debatable things and you'll see them a lot. So just keep that in your head for now. Okay. All right, let's move on. Start talking about chords. All right, let's talk about chords. So what are chords? Strictly speaking, chords are any. Are more than one note happening at the same time. Cool. It's pretty easy. We have a whole bunch of different kinds of chords. So let's take, let's just put a C major scale on the screen here, just for reference. Okay, there's our C major scale. So we could do this two notes, right? That's a chord. That's a specific kind of chord called a dyad. Dyad means a two note chord. It's kind of rare that we use or analyze dyads. We tend to like to have a more full sound. So we typically use three or four note chords. If we're talking about pop music, we typically use three note chords. Okay. And they're going to be these three notes, okay. And this makes us a chord, a three note chord. Now if a two note chord is called a dyad, a three note chord is called a triad. You got it? So we're going to focus on triads first. Sounds like that. Okay, now we do have more notes. Here's a fun thing about music theory that'll drive you nuts. A two note chord is called a dyad. A three note chord is called a triad. A four note chord is called write a seventh chord because that makes good sense. But it is true. It's called a seventh chord. If we had a fifth note, what do you think it's called? A ninth chord, a sixth note, an 11th chord, a seventh note, a 13th chord. But we do use these chords, you know, it's not a bad sound. You just have to know what notes to put in those. For those upper notes. The more notes we have, this is a very broad generalization, but the more notes we have in a chord, the more jazzy it sounds. That's not always true, but as just kind of a broad thing, it's basically true. So if we get rid of some of these, we're gonna get down to a triad, which is much more poppy. Okay, so let's figure out how to know what notes go in a chord. Okay, so how do we know what notes go in this thing? Well, I have good news. There's a pattern. There's a pattern. Here's what we're going to do. We've got a C major scale. From a C major scale, we can build a C major chord very easily. We're going to take the first note, we're going to skip a note, and we're going to take the third note. Then we're going to skip a note, and we're going to take the fifth note. Okay? So it's every other note of the scale. That's what makes the chord. Now, remember what I just said? I said there's this hilariously dumb thing where if you take a fourth note, we call it a seventh chord, which makes no sense, but it kind of does because check it out. First, skip a note. Third, skip a note. Fifth, skip a note, seventh. So if we take a next chord, we just switch to calling it what note it is in the scale, which is a seventh. Okay, we're not going to do that quite yet. So first, third and fifth. Just every other note of the scale gets us a C major chord. But we have to know the C major scale, right? Now we can do more. We can make more chords, right? Check it out. What if we started on D? D again. We're just going to take every other note of the scale. D, F, G, A. That makes us A chord. Now, this is a different chord, okay, because the C major chord was built out of the C major scale, so we know that it is a C major chord. But this chord was built on the second note of C major, so that gets a little more confusing. It's still a triad. It's still a chord. This one is a minor chord. Okay, so how do we know that it's a minor chord? We'll come back to that in a minute. Let's do another one. E. So if we did E, E. And then skip a note, G. Whoops. And then skip a note B. Whoops. I can't type today. That gives us another chord. This is an E chord. This is also a minor chord. So we're going to talk a little bit more about major and minor chords shortly. But the important concept here, first, third and fifth, skip a note of the scale. And a scale can make more than one chord. Right. A C major scale can make more than just a C major chord. We can also make a D minor chord, an E minor chord, and then a bunch more. An F major chord, a G major chord, and an A minor chord, and then a funky, weird B chord. We'll come back to that in a second, too. So there's a lot of chords we can get out of one scale. And that brings us to another important term, and it is called the root. So let's talk about what the root of a chord is. Okay, so we talked about tonic already. Tonic is great, but when we talk about chords, we're talking about the root of the chord. Okay? It's kind of like tonic, but it applies to just the chord. And the root is the note that the chord is named after. Okay? So C major chord, the root is the pitch C. A D minor chord, the root is the pitch D. D major chord, the root is the pitch D. Okay? So it's just a pitch, and it's always going to be the name of the chord. Okay? Now, the root is important because it's not the same as tonic, right? It's tonic is. My text messages are just blowing up right now. Tonic revolution is the. The whole key, right? And the root is just for the chord. What is this going on? Have you guys seen this? Literal zombie outbreak. CNN has this confirmed pick. Whoa. Is there a zombie outbreak happening? This is crazy. I got to figure this out. Well, this is troubling. I guess the best thing for us to do is press on with this class. Hopefully you're watching this as a distraction away from whatever is going on outside. I don't know if I really believe it, but, you know, music can be a distraction. Education can be a distraction. So I feel obligated to keep going through this class and get it out to you so that if you have nothing else, you have this to keep you moving forward. So let's talk about the next thing on the list. Diatonic chord progressions, man. Okay, so here's what these are. The diatonic chord progression is all the chords we can make with a given scale. So let's take the C major scale, and let's do what we just did. I'm gonna do it with half notes so we can kind of hear these. So we can make a C major by going every other in C, right? We can start on D and go D. Skip one. F. Skip one A. Okay. D, F, A, and start on E. E, G, B. And start an F, F, A, C. Start on G, G, B. Now we Got to circle around again. This C and this C are the same thing. So we go to here, D,

And

then we go to a, a, c, e. Now we go to b, b, d, f. And now we're back to where we started with C. So let's go C, E, G. All right, There we go. Voila. All right, let's just hear this diatonic chord progression. All the chords in C major. Very nice. Right, lovely. Now, we can get this in another way. What we could do is. Let's go down here. What? Another way to look at what we're doing here is we're just stacking the scale. So if I go C major, Okay, Now I'm going to go up back here, and I'm going to start on E. But I'm just going to make a C major scale. But starting on E, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E. Okay, Now I'm gonna go back and make A major scale. A C major scale starting on G. Not a G major scale, a C major scale starting on G, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Okay, now this is the same as this. Different rhythm, but same chords. Cool. So the diatonic chord progression shows us all the chords in the key. But what chords are they? Let's go back up here and let's put some names on these. Now, the kind of short shorthand for writing chord names is that if it doesn't say anything but the root, if it just says, like a letter, like C, then the assumption is that it's major. Okay? If it has a lowercase M after it, it's minor. Sometimes we use a capital M to show that something is major. C, D, E. Okay? This is E minor, C major, D minor, E minor. And this will be F. Oops. G major, A minor. And then this one is the weird one, B diminished. I'll explain that in a second. Then we're back to C major. Okay, so these are all the chords in the diatonic chord progression, C major. Now, how do I know that these are major and minor? There's a few ways. Let's talk about two of them. One is that I could count half steps where C to E going to be four half steps, whereas D to F is going to be three half steps. That's going to tell us major and minor. If there's four half steps here, C to C sharp, C sharp to D, D to D sharp, and D sharp to E. Four half steps, okay? That means it's major. Here you go. D to D sharp, D to D sharp, D sharp. To E and E to F. That's only three. Okay, so that makes that minor. So you can do that with any chord. Now another thing you could do is memorize this pattern, right? This pattern. Major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished major. That's going to be the same all the time. Let's write that out. So the pattern is major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished and then major again repeats. Okay, so again, capital M for major, lowercase M for minor. In this case major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished major. Okay, so let's talk about what we can do with this pattern now that we know that it exists. All right, so now that we know the pattern, we can find any chord in any key pretty quickly. Okay. All we have to know is the scale and the pattern. Okay, so let's pick a random scale. Random major scale. Let's say E major. Sure. Okay, so let's go down here.

Okay.

E major scale. It's gonna be. We can figure this out by doing our half steps and whole steps. But because there's zombies coming after us, I'm just gonna do it from memory. Okay, here is E major scale. Now we don't need to do this, like write all this out and we don't need to write all this out. All we need is this. Let's pull that down so I can see it a little bit better. Oh, that didn't really work. Okay, so all we need is this pattern and this scale. Because this matches up to that. This matches up to that. So if we say what chords are in E major, I can tell you that it's going to be the following chords. E major, F sharp minor, G sharp minor, A major, B major, C sharp minor, D sharp, diminished and E major. Okay, now let's talk about that diminished chord real quick. That diminished chord is pretty ugly sounding chord. It's usually in pop music we kind of skip over it. We don't use it very much. But it is used a lot in other styles of music. Even in pop music, sometimes we do use it. Diminished chord is kind of like a super minor chord. Here's what it sounds like, right? It's, it's crunchy, it's a little intense. It's not major or minor. Okay. It's if anything super minor. Which doesn't. It's not really, that's just kind of a weird term I come up with. But one thing it does really, really well is push us towards this chord. It's just like the leading tone pitch pushed us up to tonic. This chord really pushes us up to the tonic chord. But by itself, a diminished chord is not particularly pleasant sounding. It's a really good transition chord to get us from one spot to another. Okay. There are not a lot of pop songs that use it because. Well, for a few reasons. But one of the reasons is there's not like a great, like, open chord on the guitar. That's a diminished chord. Like be diminished is like, kinda you can do. But all the rest of the diminished chords are kind of funky on guitar. So they never really latched on for pop music. It's my theory anyway. All right, let's move on and talk about Roman numerals. Okay. One very important concept in music theory is Roman numerals. We use Roman numerals to identify chords all the time. We're not going to do a ton with Roman numerals in this class, but I do want to show you how they work, and we'll do a couple of song analysis. Analyses. Analysises with them in just a minute. So here's how they work. So for Roman numerals, we have two different kinds, okay. We have traditional Roman numerals like you're used to, which look like, you know, this IV. Oops, IV, you know, is four, etc. So we're going to say one. Now we're going to call this the I chord because its root is on the first note of the scale. Okay. That makes it a I chord. In fact, let's do it down here. That'll be a little easier, I think. Okay, so let's call this a I chord and put this down there, cap. Cool. Now here's the other type of Roman numeral, and that is lowercase Roman numerals. Maybe you've never seen lowercase Roman numerals. I have not found them used any other place. But basically this would be lowercase Roman numeral 2. And I'm going to put that here. Now, the reason is we use capital Roman numerals for major chords and lowercase Roman numerals for minor chords. Okay? So this lowercase I I tells me a few things. If we're in the key of C major, and I see that, I can tell you want a D minor chord. That's all I need. I don't need notes. I don't need anything. All I need is that lowercase two and I can tell a D minor chord is what you're asking for. Okay, so we just go through this. Let's put a label on the rest of these by Roman numerals. Oops. Okay, now, in the diatonic chord progression, what is the third? The third is a minor chord. So it's going to be that the fourth. The fourth is a major chord. It's gonna look like that. The fifth is a major chord. It's gonna look like that. The sixth is a minor chord. Looks like. So the seventh is that weird diminished chord. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do it lowercase because it's minor. Ish. And then we can add a symbol, like a superscript zero. I do it with option zero. Makes that. That's the symbol for diminished. Okay? And then this is going to be one again. Okay? So those are our chords. Now, why do we do this Roman numerals thing? Let me give you a situation. Okay? So let's say I have. Let's say I go to a gig, right? And maybe it's like a blues gig or a jazz gig. And I have never rehearsed with this band before. I don't know anything about any of the players or any of the music that they're about to play. And I walk up on stage with my guitar and they. And someone, whoever is in charge, calls out a tune. They say, we're gonna play Autumn Leaves, which is an old jazz standard. We're gonna play Autumn Leaves in the key of G. Okay? Now, I know autumn Leaves and in the key of B flat. So in order to transpose it to the key of G in my head while I'm playing, it is tricky, right? But if I know just the Roman numerals for autumn leaves and not the chord names, but just the Roman numerals, they're still correct in the new key, right? So this is much, much easier because now I have to do is think, okay, 2, 5, 1 is how it starts. I don't know if it starts that way, but let's assume it does. Okay? It starts on A, 2, 5, 1. Now, I know the 251 and B flat, but I can play 251 and G. That's easy. That's A minor, D major, G major, 2, 5, 1. So using Roman numerals lets us change keys in our head a lot easier. There are other reasons for using Roman numerals, but those are the biggest ones. All right, let's look at some songs and let's analyze them with roman numerals, and you'll see how this works. All right? Piano man by Billy Joel the world can fall apart, but we still have Piano Man. So let's take A look. So this is typical kind of piano, vocal guitar sheet music. Okay, so I've got the names of the chords at the top. Okay, so let's look at them and let's. Yeah, let's start at the beginning. Okay, so here there's a C. And so that just means C major. Okay? So in the key of C, which it looks like we're in the key of C, we're going to call that one because it is here we have a new kind of symbol, F O over C. What that means is that the first part of the fraction, F is the chord. Okay, So F is the chord over C means that the lowest note of the chord we want to be a C. See, there's a C down here. Okay, so it just means F is the chord. But put a C in the bass so that. So for analysis purposes, we can call that an F chord. C major 7 is a type of C major chord. It's just got a fourth note on it, the seventh. So we can analyze it as a C major chord if we want. Then F, C over E. Same thing. A C chord with an E in the bass and then a G. So let's do this. Okay, so this first chord we're going to call A1 because we're in the key of C major. Okay? And this F over C, we're going to analyze it as an F. So we need to figure out what chord is F, what number is F. So the easiest way to do that is just walk up the scale. So C, D, E, F4. So F is 4. And it's going to be major because 4 is major in that key. C major, 7, we can go back to calling that just a 1. And then here we have another F.

And here we have a C over

E, which we can call one because C is the main part of that chord. And then a G, which is C, d, e, f, g5. Cool. So there we have the first part of it. We could go on. This would be a 1. This E minor would be a 3. C, D, E. This a minor would be a 6. The C would be a 1, and the F would be a 4 again. So that's how it. That's how it goes with Roman numerals. Now if I was looking at this, I could play this whole song just by knowing we're in the key of C major and reading the Roman numerals. So if someone said we're in F, I could read those Roman numerals and I could play this song in F very easily. So that's how Roman numerals help us. All right, let's move on and talk about what's inside of a triad. Alright everyone, it looks like there are larger outbreaks happening.

I've seen on the news.

I, I keep hearing there's some outbreak around me because I keep hearing people pounding on the walls. They're trying to get in here.

So I guess I'm gonna keep going.

I might relocate to a more secure place. My family and I are gonna decide what we're gonna do this evening. But we might go out to the suburbs or just kind of fortify where we are, I guess what a world we live in. So until that happens, I'm just going to keep filming because I need something to do. Maybe I'll film from wherever. I'm fortified. But let's keep going. Let's talk about the different types of triads. Now. There are four and you have seen three, sort of, you've seen three. The three different types of triads or the three that we've seen are major triads, minor triads, diminished triads, and there's one more called an augmented triad. Augmented triads don't happen in the diatonic chord progression. They happen sometimes with some different kinds of scales, but we're not going to encounter them very often now. But in order to explain these four, let me, let's kind of pick these apart. We talked about how you can tell a minor triad by the interval at the bottom, right. If this is. So this is called a third and if this is four semitones, it's major and if it's three semitones, it's minor. Right. Here's another funny thing about triads is that the second third on the top. So this is the first third, but they also have a second third. This one, this one's going to be opposite of the lower one in most cases. So in a major chord this is going to be four half steps and this is going to be three half steps. In a minor chord this is going to be three half steps and this is going to be four half steps. Okay? That's like the anatomy of a triad. Okay. Is those things that a major triad is this four half step thing with which we would call a major third is what this would be. And it's got the three half step, which we would call a minor third on the top. Okay. So major on the bottom, minor on the top. A minor triad is a minor on the bottom, major on the top. A diminished triad is minor on the bottom and minor on the Top. And an augmented triad which looks like this. Let's make one on F is going to be a major triad with another. Sorry, it's going to be a major third on the bottom with another major third on the top. So an augmented is kind of like super major, whereas diminished is like super minor. Okay. Augmented sound, in my opinion, even worse than diminished ones. Diminished triads. That's an augmented triad. They do have some purposes though. But those are our four types of triads. Okay, last thing on this topic I want you to notice. One other thing about triads is that. Let me put. Let's go down here and let's put all three or all four right in a row. Let's build them on C. Oops. C, C, C, C. Okay, so I'm going to make a major triad, a minor triad. Oops. A and an augmented triad. Okay, here they are. So here's what I want you to notice for these first two. The bottom note and the top note are the same. So the difference between major and minor is just the third. The middle note that we call the third, the third. Changing one half step. Okay, that's the only thing that separates a major chord from a minor chord is just dropping that third by one half step. That changes it. Here we have. We're changing the top note as well. But for most chords, the third is the magic secret weapon that holds the answer to everything. So if you want to take a major chord and you want to make it minor, you just need to lower the third by a half step. If you have a minor chord and you want to make it major, you just have to raise the third by a half step. So the third is like the magical note. It. Okay, as you all know, things are getting pretty scary out there, but I'm gonna try to finish this class. Seems like the only right thing to do. So we're gonna start going kind of fast because I feel like even weird having like not looking behind me. So octaves and inversions. Okay, let's talk about this. So if we make a chord, let's say C major, we can keep going and we can add more notes to the chord. But these don't change the name of the chord at all. All these are is adding octaves of other notes. So the C is the same as that C. This E is the same as that E. We could keep going and add more notes all day long. And it's not going to change the name of the chord. We just have a big C major chord here. So what I want you to Understand is that when you add octaves, as long as you're not adding any more new notes, you haven't changed the chord in any real way. Similarly, if we have a chord as normal, but we rearrange the order of them. So this G at the top, let's take down to the bottom. Okay. This is still a C major chord. It's just not in root position. Root position is what all of these are. It means that the root of the chord is at the bottom. This is in an inversion, and it's still a C major chord. It's just in a different inversion. So nothing really about it changes. It does make it a little harder to spot. Like when we see a triad, you know, it's this nice, perfectly lined up thing. And here it's a little different. So if you see something like this, you. And you're trying to figure out what chord it is, try moving the notes around by octave until it lines up like that. And then you'll know what the root is. Right? Because with this other way, you can't. It's harder to tell what the root is. The same is true as if we did this. Still the same notes doesn't really change anything. Okay, I. What. What is going on up there? All right, we gotta go.

Okay, so here we are. We've been walking for about four weeks. If, you know, if anyone ever watches this, we're up just past Duluth, if you know where Duluth, Minnesota is. So we're gonna keep going another few weeks. We should make it to Canada. We here just cross the border. There's a safe haven, even though I think the outbreak has happened up there too. But the new revelation is that our friend Rodney here, who's part of our. Our troop, the survivors,

he's pretty crafty

with electricity, and he managed to rig

up a solar panel.

So I was able to fire up my laptop. And I think I'm gonna film this as best I can. Obviously, I'm in a tent camped out. So, you know, when you can't do anything else, you talk about the circle of fifths.

So here we go.

You may have seen this thing, this thing on the screen

around. I have to, like, every time there's

a wind, I'm like, scared to death. So you may have seen this thing called the circle of fifths on your. On the wall in your school or

whatever, but it's actually a really useful tool. So

what we have here is a great songwriting tool. So I'm going to show you how to use this to write music and Apply some of the theory that we've learned so far. So imagine all of these are chords. They're really keys. But.

But

if we go to the right, we're always going up five notes of that scale. So if we imagine the C major scale and we go up five notes, we'll get to G. If we imagine the G major scale, we go up five notes, we'll get to D, the A major scale, five notes, we'll get to E. E major scale, we'll get up five notes, and we'll get to B. Now, at some point in the bottom, we have to switch from sharps to flats. Otherwise we're going to get to have a thousand flats or a thousand sharps. So that's why these look like this. We're just going to switch at some point.

Okay?

So it keeps going all the way to F and then F. If you count up five notes from F, you'll get back to C. So an interesting little phenomenon happens here that you can also go backwards, and it'll be a circle of fourths. So C, if you count up four, you'll end up on an F. F. You count up four of the F major scale, you'll end up B flat and E flat and A flat and so on.

Okay?

Now the other thing that the circle of fifths typically shows us is that every major key has a relative minor key. I know we haven't talked about minor keys yet, but I'm hoping to get to that at some point before zombies eat my brain. So the relative minor key is going to have all the same notes in it, but a different tonic.

Okay?

So C major, the relative minor is A minor. Okay? That means that A minor has all the same notes as C major. It's just that it has a different tonic.

Okay, now with this.

Let me see if I can draw with this.

We can see all of our chords

from the diatonic chord progression right here.

Okay? So,

yeah, sure. So if you look at these, if we're in the key of C, these

are all our chords except for one.

The diminished chord is not showing up on the circle of fifths. That's okay, but these are your other chords. Okay, if we say the key of D, the chords are going to work in the key of D are these six plus that diminished chord. So it's very handy for

seeing all

of our chords in a given key.

Awesome.

Okay, I'm going to wrap up there for this one. In the next one, when I get around to it, we'll talk about how you can Use this.

Write music.

Alright, stay safe, everyone.

We're growing tomatoes up here.

We've been camped out in the same spot for about two weeks and

things

are actually going fine. We're still outside of Duluth, where I think we were last time I filmed a lesson, but feels pretty safe here. We've got kind of an enclave of cars and we've started gardens. Maybe we're gonna make it through this. I think it's gonna be okay. So I guess a couple more things about the circle of fifths. When you're writing a song and you're

wondering what chords will work, all you

have to do is say my key is D, for example. So that means that any of these chords

will work.

But there's one very important thing about writing songs, and that's that those chords, the chords in the diatonic chord progression will always work. They're always going to sound good. But if you only write songs using those chords, you're going to

write a

whole bunch of very kind of boring music. You got to go outside every once in a while for that really cool sounding thing. So there's a bit more you can do with circle of fifths. Give myself a different color.

So if we're in the key of

D, this, these are our diatonic chords chords. But we could also reach outside of our key this way and this way. Try using a C major chord. Try using an A minor chord. Try using an E major chord or C sharp minor chord that's playing outside of the key.

It's also called modal borrowing or using closely related keys.

But doing that is going to get you something that sounds really cool.

Okay, So give it a try.

It'll sound really cool. In fact, since things are going pretty well here, I think let's try writing a song. Let's do that in the next few videos. All right. We found this abandoned house up here and we're kind of camping out in here for the night. There's been some rustling in the trees at night that are making us a little nervous, so we might keep heading north tomorrow. But for now, we're in this beautiful abandoned house. So let's try to write a song. It'll be awfully refreshing. Okay, so first let's start with a verse chord progression. We're just gonna write like a verse and a chorus chord progression. Now normally when I teach this, what I do is I do a verse chord progression and a chorus chord progression. Then I kind of put together an intro and a bridge and then I pull it into my studio and like make it sound really nice. But I don't have access to my studio because that is a long ago memory. So we'll just kind of put the basics of it together and hope it works. Let's do it with just whole notes. Okay, so what key do we want to be in? Let's keep it simple.

Let's say

key of C. Sure. Okay, so let's start off with a good old C major chord.

Whoops.

Maybe add another octave up there too to make it sound nice and full. And then let's see, if we look at circle fifths, we could go. C, f, g, e minor, a minor, d. Let's go e minor. I'm just kind of picking stuff. There's our E minor in the bass. We could put a C and then E. Usually put the roots in the bass. Unless you're doing something fancy. Let's go G major and then A minor. No, let's other way around. Let's go A minor. And then G major.

Okay.

And let's just hear that. Okay, that's rather nice. One thing we could do to kind of keep it sounding better, to adjust these octaves, we take this E down an octave.

Okay.

That just makes these two chords kind of closer together. So the smaller like leap you have between chords, the better. Okay, so let's say that's our reverse. It's cool. Do it again maybe. And then let's put a double bar line. Whoa. It's hard to do this without a mouse sitting on the floor. Okay. All right. That's a good start. Something. We could add a melody. Let's try to add a melody. Okay, let's try to add a little melody here. Remember what we know about writing melodies. We have steps, skips, and leaps. So let's just start. And we're in the key of C major. Okay, so let's go down here. Okay, I'm just gonna delete that first note. So I added a melody. Instrument up here. I know we were probably thinking we would do a voice, but when you

ask the computer to play back voices, it always sounds terrible.

It's always going like, ah, terrible. So I just use a violin. We can pretend it's a voice. Okay, so the chord is C major. I'm just going to put a C here. The chord is E minor. So we could do. A B would be a step. And then. Let's do a. Let's do a skip, step, Skip. And then here we have an A minor. So we go back to an A. But then let's immediately do A big leap. And then step, step, step. So here we're on a G chord. And I put that A there. This is called a suspension. It's just going to kind of land on the A and then fall right back down to that G. That's kind of a nice sound. And let's maybe hold on to that G for another second, tying it together.

And then. B.

Then let's go A. Now we're back to a C. So how about that same kind of gesture again? The same thing again, except we'll go the opposite way. Now I take that back. Let's do that. And then a big leap.

Let's go e.

And then we're on an e minor. So let's go

e,

f, g on this a chord. So let's go g up to a quick a. And then we end on a G. So let's just hold that. All the way to here and then down to that G. So let's tie that.

Okay.

So it's kind of random, what I'm writing here, but let's listen to it.

Okay. Not bad. Let's leave it alone for now and

come up with a chorus. All right, I'm back. It's been a few days. That house we were in was cool,

but

we saw some strange things around that area. There was a couple sightings, so we decided to take off. So we're back on the road. Crashing in the tent.

This.

It's so strange. This class is just becoming like a diary almost of what's happening. But it's fitting that I'm writing songs now. So let's try to finish this song. Where were we?

Oh, yeah.

Some kind of chorus. So let's try to go outside of our key here. So when in the key of C major, let's try to use one of these other chords. Somebody is sick. There's a storm coming. Now, when you hear somebody coughing like that, I don't know if that came through on the recording, but some people in our crew are coughing very hard. Concerns everyone. Well, let's carry on. So let's try to use something outside of the key. We're in the key of C. So B flat, G minor, B minor and D. Those are going to be your safest things to use.

Let's try.

Let's try A G minor. Let's actually just use, like, quarter notes just for fun.

Okay.

So G minor is gonna be G,

B flat, D. We go,

oh. And we ended on G major. So that's kind of weird to do G major. Whenever you go G major to G minor or any major chord to a minor chord.

It's. Doesn't sound awesome. Do another bar of that.

Just copy it. Okay, now let's see, what else? So we jumped right in on that G minor. So let's try going to. Maybe a D minor and then an F. Okay, so let's take this and just go. There's a D minor, D minor, and then let's go to an F major. Okay, make that major. F. Copy that and there we go.

All right, there's our chorus. Let's hear it.

Oh, well, we need one more chord. I think we need a C.

So

back to C major.

Let's hear it again.

It sounds like about a million other songs, but I think it'll work well. So let's add a double bar line. We put double bar lines, places just to kind of mark a section. Let's maybe add a verse again.

I'll give you this file at the end. Whoops,

There's a verse. Okay, so we maybe two verses just for fun.

There.

That gets us to the end. So all we need is a melody in this chorus. Let's do it. All right. So there's a lot of people getting sick around here. I think we're gonna keep on the road. There's also been a lot of

sights

of seeing things out there in the dark especially. So don't normally see them during the daytime. But let's finish our melody and we'll see what we can do here.

So the next part of the melody will be. We gotta go.