Analyzing The Chords of John Lennon's "Imagine" - Perfect Progressions #4

in 1971 john lennon released the song imagine it was a commercial and artistic success and in my opinion it consists of a perfect chord progression in this video i'd like to take a deep look at every single chord in the song to try to see how it relates back to the music theory that we might already be aware of and also take a look at some of the production decisions used that help give this song its unique signature vibe at its heart this song is very very simple but there are little layers of complexity and nuance that are added to that simple core that really adds to the overall richness of this composition to begin our analysis let's take a look at the key that this song was written in which is fortunately c major that means we're only going to be using the notes c d e f g a b c and with just those notes we can make the following triads we can make a c major a d minor an e minor an f a g an a minor and a b diminished and that can all resolve to a c major what i'd like to do is let's play our one chord which is c major and let's play our four chord which is f and what i want you to do is i want you to really listen to the difference as i change between my one chord and my four chord i just want you to try to recognize how does it feel what does it feel like to change from a one chord to a four chord also pay close attention to what my bass note is doing as it changes between those chords right there right now my bass notes playing c and then on the f it's f and then it moves back to c so the change of a one chord to a four chord is a pretty strong change it's it's it's a kind of a soft landing change but it's a bold direct change from one to four and i want you to feel that that it's a very distinct clear cut and dry chord change now let's play the same two chords but with one giant difference we are not going to change the bass note at all instead we will keep c on the bass for our f chord and that would simply be thought of as a f in second inversion because c is in my f chord so instead of playing an f with the f on the bass we're keeping the c there and it gives us this progression instead which is c major and then f slash c now do you feel how different this chord progression feels it's the same progression but hopefully you agree that it doesn't feel as bold it doesn't feel as big it feels a little smoother we have that constant reminder of our tonic c e on the bass that tether back to home base kinda makes this chord progression just a little slidier a little more mellow less direct less confrontational when a bass note stays the same across two different chords like this we consider it to be a pedal tone and it's a pretty common thing to hear especially across the one chord and the four chord but we're going to make a few more modifications here now that we have a one chord to a four chord that's being pedaled over a constant c note what i'd like to do is take a closer look at the actual voicings of these chords high notes in the higher register have a tendency to sound and feel a little brighter and a little happier meanwhile low notes have a tendency to elicit a more foggier or hazier vibe and the voicing that we use here for this c chord is simply just a root position triad c e g with the g note on top the voicing that we're going to play for the f major over c is just this simple voicing of c f a and by playing these two chords in this tight compact voicing in a low register it might sound a little foggier a little hazier a little less lucid than if we play the same exact chord progression up here in a higher voicing and keeping in mind that you know the song is called imagine i'm pretty sure it's supposed to elicit that daydreaming kind of feeling and the arrangement of keeping it in that lower muddier register between those two chords i think is a big part of kind of giving it that daydreamy vibe now that we have the simple little compact chord progression of c major to f major slash c what i'd like to do is modify things a little bit what we're going to do is play the c chord three times but then the fourth time we'll play a c major seven that has a high b note in it then we can go to this compact little f slash c and by doing this by playing c c c c major seven f slash c look at the melody that is naturally created within the voicing of my chords the highest note is g g g b a a a and that melody of g b a that is the same melody that john lennon chooses to sing over these chords imagine there's no heaven he's singing g g g b b a so it you know obviously the melody he's singing works right there in with the chords and i would suspect i wasn't there for the songwriting but i would suspect that the chord progression was written first and that melody naturally followed with it now we're almost done with this verse progression there's a few more things we've got to talk about we've got the three c's the c major seven the f slash c and now we get a touch of chromaticism with this little lick like this and what we have is the natural sixth note of the scale which is a it gets moved up to the augmented sixth a sharp and then to the flats of the natural seven b so it's some chromatics going up to the seventh note and that kind of implies it kind of nudges us towards the tonic right it kind of implies that we should go that would be like the natural way that note is heading up to a c but instead of resolving up to a c they resolve us down to a g and i think that's a funny signature movement of this entire song even though we're supposed to be talking about chords here this little passing tone between those natural notes is maybe the most distinct element of this entire verse riff that quirky little passing tone there to kind of drop us back down to that g note now there is one more thing we have to talk about regarding this verse riff after we are done with that little chromatic scale run it's pretty common to resolve to a c add nine that add that added d on top the only problem is in the production it's very inconsistent if you actually analyze this track you'll realize that the piano part was recorded twice and one of those performances is in the left speaker and the other performance is in the right speaker and it's actual two different performances and he didn't play the exact same thing both times so there are moments where there is that little d note floating around in there there are moments where it isn't there's moments where one piano is playing and the other one isn't it's very inconsistent and it doesn't seem to come up at a traditional time so my advice for you if you're performing this is just use it to taste if you like the sound of that that knife in there then use it when you want i personally do enjoy the sound of it just resolving back down to the c triad but obviously both are completely legitimate there if you listen to the song another thing to keep in mind is it's not that common to double track pianos in the style that we just talked about right there and i think it's another reason why this song sounds so imaginey daydreamy hazy cloudy it gives it this natural chorusy reverby phasey effect that really isn't common i i defy you i challenge you to find the many examples of double piano in modern productions i think this is one of the rare cases where it worked because those little discrepancies between the two performances can get a little cluttered it can create a little bit of a mess but in a production like this i think that's kind of what we want that dream dream-like kind of sloppiness so moving on after we played our verse progression several times we're gonna finally play our chorus progression and that chorus begins on an f on real f in root position and in my opinion this feels like a brand new chord it feels like this is the first time we've heard an f chord in the entire song because every time we heard it before it was inverted and it didn't have that weight that that big that big drop down on the bass so it feels to me like a brand new appearance like the first time we've ever heard it and from here what's going to happen is the bass is going to move down all the way to c it's going to go from an f to an e to a d to a c just walking down the scale and what i'd encourage you to do is i'd encourage you to stop the video and try to write your own chord progression in the key of c only using these notes and chords that can accommodate a bass line of f e d c there's a billion trillion options you could do which online opts for is to play the f major and then an a minor slash e and then a d minor seven and then an f slash c now this f slash c i'm gonna say is a mystery chord it's played differently both times and it's another one of those things where if you listen to each piano track on its own it's a little different so i feel there was just a little bit of sloppiness in there and the actual recording that makes it very difficult to deduce exactly what chord this is because sometimes i hear a g in there which wouldn't make it an f c um so i could accept other interpretations of this chord uh you might just call it a c major uh but i'm going to give it my best shot and call it the f slash c anyways after that so we have the f a minor slash e d minor seven f slash c and then finally we get the dominant chord g major for the first time then we're going to add in the 11th and then we can make it a g7 and of course g7 is going to help us resolve back to our tonic of c major now a cool little thing here to note is that in our verse progression the bass note stayed the same right the bass note stayed at c while the things on top of the change here it's the exact opposite pretty much everything's staying the same on top we're always going to have the c in this a but what's happening underneath it is changing it's going from an f to an e to a d to a c so it's a fun little uh symmetry or um you know good good contrast to what we heard before these these pedal tones just occurring in different forms now there is one last progression we have to talk about it's after this chorus progression after we do the entire walk down and after we get to that dominant chord we have a section of the song which you might want to call a refrain um but it starts on an f chord i'll play the chords for you first it's got f g c c major seven e and e seven and then that repeats all over again really wonderful set of chords and what i'd like to do is let's take a look at these chords but let's just rearrange the order a little bit if we started all of this chord progression on the chord c it would make a lot of sense it's a pretty common thing to see c major e major or e seven and then f and then g this is a really common progression c e seven f and g resolving to c that's what we've got except we're starting it on f [Music] so it's a pretty funny kind of roundabout way to dance about our tonic where the you know the tonic isn't actually occurring until the third chord we've got this chord and then finally here that's our actual root right and then so finally that's where it resolves at the end of the song and finally resolves on that c major but there's a little bit more to talk about right here f is my four chord g is my five chord c is my tonic by making it a major seventh chord it kind of brings a little bit of interest in there brings the voicing down and helps me get into an e major chord which also has a b in it now e i'm going to consider as a secondary dominant this is an advanced topic that i have taught in my video on secondary dominance but essentially e major should pull us to an a minor chord that's the natural landing zone after an e7 is an a minor and they don't do that here they just use it as a nice little harmonic device to add interest i think of it as a major three chord instead of really a secondary dominant because it's not functioning as a secondary dominant it's functioning as a cool chord with tension so instead of it resolving us to a minor it doesn't really resolve to f just goes to f which pulls us up to g to finally temporarily resolve to c c major seven e major add in the seventh right there so it's just a lovely set of chords and it's a great use of that major three chord which i mentioned in my secondary dominant video is probably the most common chord to see that is out of key if you find a chord that is out of key and if it's not a borrowed chord if it's it's probably going to be that five of six chord very very common to see now many of us would agree that john lennon was a brilliant songwriter but hopefully you would agree that this isn't really that complicated this is really basic stuff with just little levels of nuance added in i mean 99 of this all derives from the c major scale and then there's a little bit of chromatic interest and a little bit of secondary dominant it's just lots of good songwriting choices the choice of inversion the choice of having a pedal tone the choice of when to present a chord in root position the choice to double track a piano and make it sloppy and bad and hard to actually um you know determine what's going on there these are all good musical choices that all add up to the production that we call john lennon's imagine but at its heart it's just really simple two chords c and f so i've mentioned this before in my videos i've said it like a mantra it's not about what you write it's about what you do with what you write a million people have written a chord progression that just goes from one to four but only one person turned it into this song imagine so i hope you learned something from this video and i hope you enjoyed it if you did like this video please leave a like or a comment or subscribe to this channel all that kind of stuff helps me out if you really like this video you can consider joining my patreon page which is for members that like to support these lessons going forward really these lessons would not exist if it were not for my patreon supporters so they do deserve your appreciation and mine as well thanks for watching and i'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 175,183

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: x02jj3UNCI8

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020