Analyzing the Perfect Chords from "We Are The Champions" by Queen

in 1977 Queen released the song we are the champions and to this day it is still a relevant and iconic anthem there are a lot of reasons why the song is so popular and so well received and I think one of those reasons is because of the absolutely perfect chord progression it is constructed from so in this video what I want to do is take a deep look at that chord progression and try to figure out how and why it works and how it relates back to some of the music theory that I've taught on this channel we're gonna see some things like secondary dominant chords modulations and modal mixture as well as some things that I've actually never seen before so to get started let's just take a look at these first few chords that introduce our verse section it sounds like this we have a C minor and then we have this collection of notes which is a C and a the B flat and a D and these two chords are played in 6/8 time and the melody over the top sounds something like this I paid my dues [Music] I'm at the time so what we can hear is that we have a strong C minor tonality right C minor feels like home right now so we might want to just make the assumption that we're in the key of C minor and clearly our first chord of C minor the second chord though this C F B flat and D what chord do we call this well it could have a few different names and the first chord I'm thinking of is it's clearly just a B flat major triad these three notes are a B flat major triad and then we're just playing a C on the bass so we could call this just a B flat C that's a totally acceptable chord name and if you look at the key of C minor which we think we're in right now you'll see B flat is just the seventh chord in the key of C minor if I'm in C minor I can go back to the B flat major and it sounds just fine however this isn't quite what I'm hearing when I hear this chord I'm actually hearing more of a 5 chord in the key of C minor the 5 chord is G minor and you can extend it to a G minor 7 and later on the bass is actually gonna play some G notes so I actually want to interpret this collection of notes I want to interpret this as a G minor 7 / C because later on we are gonna hear it as a context of G minor and it feels more like a 1 to 5 change here's a C minor - a G minor and that feels more like when we were just nearing than if I play a 1 to a 7 to b-flat so long story short we're just gonna call this chord progression C minor and then we're gonna call it G minor 7 / C but I would accept other names there as well so we're gonna cycle between those two chords a few times and then we're gonna introduce a new flat major chord which is gonna be really bright really warm it's gonna kind of feel like the Sun is coming out and the melody on top and bad mistakes now E flat major is the 3 chord in C minor and E flat major is the relative major key of C minor so I'm gonna think of this as a relative modulation because all of a sudden a flat really feels like home and when we use all these chords and C minor feels like home were in the key of C minor but if we use all these chords in E flat major feels like home we're in the key of E flat major they are the same key but the tonality really makes a difference what is home base for now and for the rest of the song C minor will no longer be our home base so it's kind of deceptive to say that we're in the key of C minor from now on I'm gonna call this the key of E flat major and I'm gonna retro actively change those Roman numerals instead of calling this a 1 to a 5 I'm actually gonna call it a 6 chord to a 3 chord because that's really what it would be if we think of a flat major as our tonic but that soft little progression changes into something really exciting and energetic to kind of give us momentum going into the chorus so we're gonna go from this a flat major B flat over D to a C minor to an F to a B flat and if we look at those cords one by one it makes perfect sense you flats are tonic P flat over D well that's just our five chord we've inverted our five chord and then we stopped off at the sixth chord notice that it doesn't feel like home right it did feel like home but right now it just feels like a pit stop to get to f7 and then after f7 we're going to go to B flat which is the dominant now that f7 was out of key that f7 is a secondary dominant it leaves the key temporarily but it resolves us to that B flat chord which is our five so f7 is the five of five the five seven of five it's just a secondary dominant that helps us resolve back to this five chord now those first three chords are extremely common where you have your one chord and then you invert your five chord and then you play your six chord and a lot of times we'll just follow that up with like a 5 or a 4 and that's like really common really cliche not really unique what is unique though is to interrupt it with a secondary dominant I feel like that gives it a lot more interest right there and also if you look at just those last few chords there C minor to f7 to b-flat that's a 2 5 1 in the key of B flat so we have that little movement there helping us land on to B flat and B flat is the dominant chord right we're in the key of E flat and we've played this B flat chord they're gonna hang out on this B flat chord for a little too long and you know what that's supposed to do right 5 chords are supposed to take us back to our tonic and we're supposed to land there and that's not what they give you instead they give you this out in the middle of nowhere they jump you up to a C which is totally a tacky but C will launch you into the key of F and that's where the choruses are gonna begin now over that five chord there's a lot happening and you actually have to listen very closely to hear at all going on but essentially Freddie Mercury ends up singing these little triads here he's got like an a-flat major triad and then an Augmented triad and then an F minor triad and that's all kind of pivoting back to that that B flat chord so he's singing like a a C D flat C D flat C B flat at the same time he's singing an A flat to F B flat to F a flat to F and then the low harm and he just goes flat and then F and you put those together you get this your little chromatic thing going on and it's all happening over the note B flat but I want to bring up you don't want to always be using chord names to try to describe everything sometimes you just want to look at the sheet music because to try to parse this as a chord progression when each one of these little triads I'm talking about only takes up like an eighth note it doesn't really seem like an efficient or convenient way to convey this information so hopefully you get the idea of what's going on there but actually compressing it all into a coordinating to like strum on your guitar I don't really think is that practical of an idea anyways moving on we had our hilarious 5 chord that jumps up to C and that is gonna be the 5-7 of two but it just helps us modulate into a key of F so now we're a whole step higher than we were before and we get to play our course which is actually a very simple chord progression F major a minor d minor and then B flat to D to C and that's just a tonic a one chord and then a three chord a six chord and then the four and the five and that's really simple stuff I mean that's so simple you might have accidentally written it when you were following my three rules on how to write a chord progression it's really basic generic cliche stuff but I do want to bring up the fact that this F major to a minor that's a really sad change that's about a sad of a chord change as you're gonna find an a major keep going from the 1 to the 3 and I've made an entire video on that change from the tonic to the media and even after that we go to the sad D minor so like what's all that sad stuff doing in my song about victory right doesn't that seem a little out of place well this is explained in the lyrics and hopefully you get the idea I've paid my dues it's been no bed of roses we'll keep on fighting till the end not will keep on relaxing and being awesome till the end we have to keep this up and that's a burden right any champion anybody who's experienced a real victory knows that it came in at the expense of a lot of blood sweat and tears and pain and I think a real champions anthem would reflect that the dark side of that success as well I feel it almost be arrogant and inappropriate to write a victory song that's all just like big major chords and epic and you know it it doesn't really reflect the reality of what a real victory looks like and I feel like that that emotional sorrow within this victory song might be one of the reasons why we resonate with it so well anyways after we do that really basic progression at a minor D and then the 4 and the 5 we do almost the same thing for another eighth and then another a minor but now we just go straight to the B flat and then we do this lovely scale run and what we did there is just walk down the F major scale we went A and G and then we stopped off on F sharp instead instead of landing on F now on that F sharp we're gonna play an F sharp diminished chord and you might wonder where that comes from but if you look what happens next we're gonna end up on a G minor seven chord and that's the two chord and you can basically approach any chord in the key from a half-step underneath it just by playing a diminished 7th there so if I wanted to get to my two chord right my two chords G minor seven if I want to get here a great way to do it is to play the dominant chord of G minor 7 that would be d7 that'll take me back to G minor seven but I could also do a secondary leading tone chord and you just go back a half step to F sharp and you play a full diminished chord there or even a half diminished would work as well but a full diminished is gonna give us that really nice crunchy resolution back to our G minor seven now we could also parse this F sharp diminished 7th as being a d7 flat nine it's just being played over F sharp there's a lot of tones that are similar there the only thing is an F sharp diminished you don't have access to an open D note a regular D and in d7 flat nine you do and brian bay actually at the very last second he let Cedeno ring through [Music] so it might give it more credence or more credibility to this idea of a d7 flat 9 but really I'd accept either cord name right there they both serve the same purpose they both serve dominant function to get us to G minor 7 for the next part of the song that and right there it is a G minor 7 but the vocal harmonies over that next part actually end up spelling out a little bit of a c7 over my G minor 7 and that's all diatonic that's all gonna be in the key that 2 chord and everything that's happening on top of it has not left the key however right after that we go into the best two measures of the entire song we borrow the 4 chord which is B flat minor and we borrow that from F minor what we also did is we added the natural 6th in from b-flat and we get a B flat minor 6 really beautiful chord and I want you to look at the notes of this B flat minor 6 we have a b-flat a d-flat and F and a G those four notes spell out of the flat minor 6th and those are the notes that Freddie Mercury is belting out as part of the Harmony lines now if you took just that F note and if you flatted it if you basically play a b-flat minor 6 find all the FS and flat them they become E's with the notes of a fool diminished order diminished seventh chord and that could be a b-flat diminished a D flat diminished an e diminished G I don't care what name you call it because it's gonna kind of be a little murky here but Brian May just ascends up through those notes if you listen his guitar part he plays B flat D flat E G and that's happening while Freddie Mercury is singing the notes of this b-flat minor six chord and eventually those harmonies kind of change a little bit to match the diminished tonality after so really what we've got is a measure of b-flat minor six and then the diminished really comes out we have an e diminished with an ad at 11 because that's the note that Freddie Mercury singing he's singing that note a on top and then it goes regular G fool diminished so again D flat minor six and then II diminished with an added 11 and then she diminished to take us back to death that's a really nice resolution a diminished at 11 G diminished F major now once we get to that F major there's gonna be a lot going on here and what I want to do is just let's listen to it first and then we'll try to pick apart these chords one by one we start with that F major no time for losers cuz be the chickens if we go through those cords one by one well first let's just take a look at the melody we want to kind of divorce the melody from the chords here the melody is very simple it's just in the key of F we have the third note of the F scale and then the root and then the fourth so it's third fourth third root simple and then we do the same thing except it kind of switches to minor we have flatted third root or flatted third so I'm kind of dividing this melody into two parts right we've got stuff that kind of outlines a major tonic we've got a major third and a root and then we have stuff that outlines a minor tonic so I expect some modal mixture will be involved just by looking at that melody now if you look at the bass line just look at the bass notes you'll notice that the first note is gonna be F and then it goes up the notes of the F minor scale we go to a G which is shared between F major and F minor and then we go to an A flat and then a B flat and then eventually we end up on a C and this reminds me of like an opposite of a lament bass we talked about the lament bass in George Harrison something and a Talon that bass here would be a walk down from earth to that fifth and whatever way we want to do it we could kind of get a similar effect by walking down to our five but it doesn't have that Victorious effect does it right climbing up is gonna give us a little bit more of that successful feel and that's what's going on here the bass coming up every single note and actually getting into a little bit of minor territory to get us to that five chord now the actual chords here we have an F major just our tonic and then this next chord is a real Messier we got an E flat with an added nine and a sharped 11 but it's all being played over a G and there's really no way I can play all those notes together on the guitar so here's my little abbreviated version of it and if you're wondering where that chord comes from I would just think of it as being borrowed from mixolydian it's pretty common to bring in a flat seven chord while your major tonic is still kind of intact here and since we still have the major third being present and all of a sudden there's this flat seven chord I feel like it's good idea to parse that chord as being from mixolydian now the next chord is a flat six this could come from the parallel minor right it could come from F minor but I want to think of it as being from F Dorian instead because if you look at the next where the next chord is B flat seven and B flat seven is actually diatonic to Dorian as well so you could think of this a flat six is being borrowed from minor and then you could think of this B flat seven as being borrowed from Dorian I think it's easier to think of them both as being borrowed from Dorian also you could just say hey we took this B flat and we made it bluesy by making it a seventh chord I personally think that's a completely valid interpretation because when you just throw that that seventh chord in there it just blues ease up any chord and not everything has to make harmonic function sense sometimes you can just kind of add tension to a chord by adding in something like that flat seven now finally when that's all done it takes us to our c7 sus4 which is supposed to be like our big tense dominant chord and it still has tension right it does want to take us back to F you can feel that that it's it's building us up with it but the fact that it's suspended for it means it's missing out on the extra tension that's present with that major third so I really like set 7sus4 chords to me they're very like hollow and unresolved and and I know there's just a lot of space and space in there that I really enjoy and what's funny here is that you know we're supposed to resolve back to F major right that's where we were at and they kind of hinted that but if you really listen they just play the F bass note and then the piano rings out the rest of an F minor chord so after that surprise resolution to F minor we bring in a b-flat major chord get a little bit of a Dorian tonality developing back to F minor and then we go to that ambiguous chord we saw at the intro and all of these notes are in dory and they're all in after Ian and what we end up doing is finding that ambiguous chord again hanging out there and letting our ear just kind of reset back to C minor or a flat major whatever you want to call it and I think that's pretty funny because F Dorian and E flat are actually the same key so we didn't actually perform a key change here but we certainly have performed a relative modulation you know to to call F minor our tonic and then all of a sudden C minor is now our tonic and pretty soon a flat's gonna be our topic quite a bit of relative modulation there just a small amount of time now don't you think it's only appropriate that after all those crazy complex chords we are left with a mind-numbing ly simple format of structure it's literally just verse chorus verse chorus chorus end and come on these guys know what they're doing they know how to write complicated structure Bohemian Rhapsody it broke every single structural rule for radio play and it still ended up working so they could have made something complicated and wrapped all of this into some you know arcane 15-minute structure but do you really think it would become the victory anthem if they had done that you know this is supposed to be played right after the tidal weight fight this is supposed to be played at the championship match and everyone's gonna be singing along they don't bore us they get to the chorus it's perfectly manufactured for consumption and even though it is a very commercial and acceptable and you know well-received song there's just morbid complexity within that chord progression and I really enjoy music like that I enjoy music that might sound simple on the outside and it's very acceptable and very easy to digest but if you go deep inside there it just gets scary and I feel like that's like my favorite form of art is it's it's simple on the outside but you get deep inside there and you realize there's a lot more complexity than you may have recognized initially now I just want to talk about the things that I learned from analyzing this chord progression that are gonna stick with me for a while first off is that ridiculous modulation if you really listen to it I just think it's completely unexpected I mean I'd heard the song a billion times before but I never really listened to it and listening to it I litter laughed at hearing that surprise c-major and over the key of e-flat and you've got the dominant chords building you up it's building you up and then all of a sudden of the middle of nowhere the see just a pop you into F it's it's really funny it's like it's a comical and unexpected change and it works really really well I'm also kind of embarrassed at the fact that I never put together this connection between minor six chords and diminished seventh chords essentially if you take the fifth of any minor six chord and flat it and all of a sudden becomes a diminished seventh chord that's an interesting little unique property their diminished chords are weird like that they have a lot of relationships to other chords like altered dominance also if you take any note of a full diminished chord and you flat any tone in it it becomes some inversion of a dominant seventh chord and speaking of diminished what was really weird to me was that e diminished with an added 11 it's really not that appropriate to be naming diminished chords with added tones on top a lot of times it's gonna be functioning as a five chord or something else like that but really there's no harm in saying hey play a diminished chord and add a hi melody tone on top of it but I really began to question you know how much of our vocal melody should we be compressing into our chord vocabulary you know if you're in a band and one guitar player is playing a C and your piano player is playing an E and you're singing the note G well altogether that forms a C major chord but nobody in the band is actually playing a C major chord so do you really want to notate that as a C major chord or do you just want to look at the sheet music and see how it all works out I think both interpretations are valid since I really only play one instrument I am totally cool with the idea of saying hey let's try to compress all of this information and give it one chord name so I really had a lot of fun and I learned a lot by going through this chord progression and I hope you did too if you did you have to thank my awesome patreon supporters for making this video possible and most of my other ones they have been my sponsors for a while really the only sponsors I'd like to work with and they deserve your gratitude and mine if you'd like to join them you can there are links below in the description but if you can't do that that's fine I would appreciate a like a comment a subscribe all that kind of stuff really helps me out so thanks for watching and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 183,230

Keywords: queen, we are the champions, chord analysis, song analysis, music analysis, analyzing queen, studying queen, queen music theory, music theory analysis, chord functions pop, we are the champions chords, how to play we are the champions, understanding chords, analyzing chord, analyzing a song, chord progression study, chord progression lesson, signals music studio, jake lizzio, music theory lesson

Id: sUuB7zs4ej4

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019