Backdoor progressions

[Music] back door dominance back door 25s what are they how do they work where can we use them so in the most simple terms a back door dominant is a dominant chord on the flat 7° of the scale or no way to think about it is a tone down a whole step down from the tonic that's the long and short of it really so in the key of C our flat 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 flat 7 B flat a dominant seven chord on the flat 7 so A B flat 7 chord that resolves to the C now often when we use non-diatonic dominant chords in our progressions like these and secondary dominants and trone substitutions it's pretty common to precede that dominant chord thinking of that dominant chord as a five chord with its two chord so let me give an example if we're using a secondary dominant chord for example so we want to move from our one chord to our two chord and we're going to use the secondary dominant of the two chord the five of two to lead us to that two [Music] chord now what we could do is thinking of that five chord that A7 has a five chord we play the two before as well so we create a two five and then thinking of that D Minor as the [Music] one we can do the same with trione substitutions so rather than in a trone substitution just putting in the the substitution there we can put in the two of that five chord as well [Music] and it's really common to see the same thing done with our back door dominant so we create a back door 25 that leads us to resolve to our atonic chord now theoretically that 25 is a 25 in E Flat Major but we're not resolving to an E flat here we're resolving to a C major so in the context of C that back door 25 is actually a minor four followed by a dominant flat 7even that resultes to the one chord so we call it a 25 because it it'ss relationship to each other but also because of how it functions in leading us to a one chord so that's what a back door progression is or back door 25 is so now you could work it out in any key so in E Flat we're going to build on the fourth degree we're going to have a minor 7 chord so a flat minor 7 and on the flat 7 flat 7 is a dominant chord d flat 7 so we could have a progression [Music] like nice now let's explore a little of what's going on and why it works if we start off by looking at the back door dominant in comparison to the primary dominant so we stay in the key of C G7 is our primary dominant and that movement of the five cord to the one chord the G to the C it's called a perfect Cadence in traditional theory and it has the strongest pull to resolve to the one chord now if we have a little look at why we get that pull we'll discover some reasons for why the back door dominant also resolves nicely to the one chord so I think that with that G7 the strength of the resolution comes from the third and the seventh of the chord now that third and seventh creates a trone which creates this sort of dissonance and instability that feels like it wants to resolve and in this case each note wants to resolve a semitone up or down to become the C so in this case our third of the G resolves upper semmit tone to become the root note of the C and our seventh of the G resolves down a semitone to become the third of the C if we we take a look at our B flat 7 our back door dominant obviously this is a dominant seven chord just like the G7 and contains that trone that creates that distance instability and that kind of need to resolve but here we're going to take our seventh and our fifth that want to resolve down semmit tones to become the third and the fifth of our tonic so rather than having resolving the third and seventh to become the root and third we're taking our seventh and Fifth and resolving to the third and fifth so it's not quite as strong a resolution as but there's definitely a comfortable resolution I think this is also a good time to talk about the close relationship between dominant seven chords and diminished seven chords if you take any dominant seven chord and you raise the root note by semmit Tone you get a dominish s chord I'll just let you think about that for a second now because these chords Share three notes including the trone that we have present in our dominant 7 chord it means that this diminished chord also nicely resolves to the same chord that our dominant 7 chord does so we think about this in relation to our G7 and it's pull to C we take our G7 and we take our root note and move it up to semitone create a diminish chord now that diminish chord also resolves nicely to the C chord because we've got that same movement that's present in that G that I talked about the resolution should I do it here with the diminish chord still got that that's going to move to there and if we play that diminish chord over a g bass note given a g context what we've created is a g seven with a flat nine and not only does that flat nine create a bit more tension that wants to be resolved it also creates a note that can also fall a semmit tone to Res resolution so not only do we have the F and the the B that want to resolve a semmit tone to the root and third of C we've now got an this a flat that would also fall to become the fifth of the chord so we've got this little shape here and that's not all with this shape our G7 flat 9 if we're resolving to a major 9 chord which is pretty common in a lot of environments then not only do we have this nice resolution chromatically down to the third and 7th of the C that we have some voice leading going on here where we've got our B and D can stay and become the the major 7 and major 9 of our C now let's get back to our back door dominant so if we take our B flat 7 and we do the same thing we raise our root note up a semitone we've created that same diminished chord as the G7 so it should come as no surprise that A B flat 7 resolves to a c in the same way that g does especially if we play that B flat 7 as a B flat 7 with a flat nine because we know that those three notes they're all going to drop a semmit tone to become a C major chord I've done a separate video All About dominish chords we're going to a lot more detail so if you've not already seen that check it out okay while we're on this an interesting little as side well I think it's interesting anyway maybe someone out there could help me get my head around it now in particularly in jazz we have these really common ways to approach our tonic chord so we've got our really standard 251 and then we also have our back door 25 that we're talking about today we also have a trone sub okay so three really common ways that we approach that you see in lots of Standards it's all over the place now the reason that these are all connected and work so well is because the dominant chords of those so are G7 and our B flat 7 and our d flat 7 all share that connection with the diminish chord that we talked about before so we take our G and we put that semitone up we got that diminisher B flat we've done the same but it's the same for d flat 7 put our root note up a semmit tone we've got that diminish shape again but a diminished chord is a symmetrical chord and it is in fact four chords in one so this is not only an F diminished it's an A flat diminished and a b diminished and a d diminished so that diminished shape should include four different dominant chords that all lead us to that same resolution we've seen that we've got a G7 and a B flat 7 and a d flat 7 so what is the fourth chord so if we take our chord we let lower the top note we got a d flat s if I lower this note I get my B flat 7 if I lower G7 if I lower this I'm going to get E7 so an E7 or an E7 flat n should resolve to a c and it does so if we were to put a 25 it works but my question is why do we never see this when it's really functioning in exactly the same way as a as a trione sub or a back door 25 why do we never come across now it doesn't sound as strong to me but why is that okay let's get back to what we're supposed to be talking about now like lots of Music Theory ideas there's often more than one way that we can find a reason as to why something works now with backdoor 251s or backdoor progressions another obvious explanation is that it's a simple use of modal interchange now modal interchange is where we borrow chords from a parallel key to use temporarily within our existing key I've done a separate video All About modal interchange if you're not too familiar on the subject so BR the Key C major [Music] a parallel key to C major would be C natural minor and the chords that exist within C natural minor now if we're playing something within C we could borrow chords from C natural minor two chords that exist within C Natural Minor f- 7 B flat 7 that's just another reason why this progression works so nicely it's just modal interchange but here's a bunch of ways that we can use our back door cords but essentially what they're all doing and the purpose of a of a back door 255 is to return us back to that tonic cord so let's start by taking a um a 16251 um and just replace our primary dominant with the back door dominant okay nice now let's just add in keep it as it is but add in that two chord before [Music] it nice okay now let's take away our original two chord the D minus 7 and use our f- 7 that minor 4 Chord as our two chord [Music] nice we could even keep the two and the five chord and add in the back door 25 after it so we could have [Music] a so it's not replacing our dionic 25 we're just adding in the back door 25 after that dominant [Music] chord so another idea would be to precede our back door 25 with a progression that actually leads us to that minor 4 Chord so in C to lead us to that F minor 7 we could put the secondary dominant C7 in there [Music] or equally we could use an e half diminished there e half diminished is a very similar chord to a C7 but what it'll do is create a a stepwise movement up to that that f for us in the in the [Music] base a back door 25 is often used in conjunction with a four chord it's a really common progression to have the the four chord or common Cadence to have the four chord and then the four minor that resolves to the oneand it's called a minor plor cadence so typically you know you'd hear it four 4 minor one minor plal cadence but this is um often used to introduce a a back door 25 turnaround so we would um maybe move to our four chord and to get back to our one chord we can turn that four into a minor add the turn [Music] around or maybe rather than approaching from beneath we descend down from our tonic down to that minor four chord so something [Music] like um or equally like a minor line cliche [Music] nice so there you go if this idea was new to you then hopefully you can start to recognize some of these movements in the pieces that you're playing um but equally if you're a composer this is a great way to add some interesting movement to your pieces too also before you go I'm pleased to announce that I've also jumped on the patreon bandwagon so you can now support 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Channel: Michael Keithson

Views: 42,684

Keywords: backdoor jazz, backdoor 2 5, backdoor progression, backdoor harmony, backdoor dominant, jazz harmony, music theory, music education, harmony, chords, non diatonic, diminished chords, diminished, harmonic device, boring chords, jazz piano, lesson, tips, tricks, jazz guitar, guitar theory, keithson, kiethson, Fm7 Bb7 C, Nord stage, musician, learn, tritone substitutions, 251, ii V I, jazz progressions, chord progressions, Interesting progressions

Id: -cRHKWOh1Uc

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024