Composition 105: Modulation

foreign did you miss me I know it's been a while work and life got in the way of YouTube but here we are finally I didn't have time to put makeup on so this is what you're gonna get deal with it I do hang out on a Discord server that I help moderate quite a bit so I'll put the link in the description if you want to hang there's a lot of professional composers on there as well who can answer a lot of questions so join us also I want to use this opportunity to say I am going to travel to Austria at the beginning of August I would be giving a Hollywood Music Workshop about musical storytelling it's going to be interactive I will be there I'll link to their website where you can sign up if you want to join and as usual I'll be putting the midi from this video up on buy me a coffee also going to put the link in the description anyway let's get to it modulation it's when you go from one key to another that's it that's the definition now when do you modulate that's kind of up to you some traditional classical forms require specific modulation like the Sonata form for example but then again it's the 21st century so you can do whatever you want even composers during late Romanticism went a little crazy and were just modulating all over the place to the point where sometimes you can't even tell really what key you're in because the tonal Center just keeps shifting Wagner was very known for that in film it really depends on the composition style and also kind of on the scene um personally I usually try to tie modulations to something that's happening in the picture so I kind of look for a justification to do modulation you don't have to it's up to you but I just find that otherwise it can draw too much attention to itself but so it can be a great tool to keep your music interesting or to highlight a specific moment in the movie by Shifting the tonal Center now let's take a look at my favorite ways to modulate these aren't all the ways that you can modulate uh that wouldn't really be possible because there's kind of an infinite amount of possibilities but you can use this as a primer to learn about this and then obviously you can dig deeper if you want to know more alright so let's take a look at what I've prepared here's a music example from John Williams just a theme I made a piano transcription of it just to keep it simple keep it you know contained let's listen to it [Music] right so this is it it's in C major keeping it simple let's go to the first way I love to modulate this is my favorite way of doing it you'll find that in a lot of my compositions let's make that a little smaller so we can see it there we go this one uses a lingering note to modulate it's it's also called common tone modulation this works best if your Melody ends on a different note than it started on so this melody starts on C and it ends on D which is great and then you're going to use the the end of the melody the last note as a starting point for the new key let me show you what I mean by just playing this back so this is going to be where we shift the tonal Center [Music] thank you so we went very effortlessly from C to d right here by just using this D as a lingering note a common common tone because this is G major which is the dominant to C so we're using this common tone of D and then I start the melody on D which we weirdly accept because we have this note in our mind you can also do this with chords by simply holding one chord tone longer than the other chord tones like the other ones just Fade Out you hold a note and then you introduce a new key that shares that note with the previous key that's why it's called common tone modulation because you're using the common tone between the two to connect them now another Super common way is to use a secondary dominant chord a so-called pivot chord to get us into the new key here's what that sounds like let's listen to it first [Music] foreign [Music] right so in this case we easily went from C to a um by here's the G that we end on where the melody ends and then I simply decided okay if I want to go to a the easiest way to get to a is by using the dominant chord 2A which is e major so you kind of think backwards you think of the key you want to go to in this case I decided it's going to be a um and then you pick the dominant chord to that key in this case e and you put it before that so that the dominant chord leads you into that new key it helps if there's common chord tones as well like in this case we go from G major to E major E Major seven but they have the um B in common and they have the D in common so it's kind of it sounds better if you know there's common chord tones still between um you know the shift the reason why this works is because dominant seven chords have a tritone in them and the tritone wants to resolve a very specific way so in this case it's the the D and the G sharp one to resolve to these two [Music] right this one always wants to resolve down and this one really wants to resolve up and so it logically leads us through this strong tendency to move in a specific Direction it leads us into the new key and establishes the new key this could have been done a little more elegantly like in this case it's fine it's just for demonstration purposes I could have taken a little more time to get from A to B but whatever that's not the point here if you watch my scene walk through for Fearless for the action scene you can see me do this a little bit better um because there I use this very same technique to increase the tension and the drive in the action scene so I use secondary dominance to modulate and in order to increase tension throughout the scene so if you want to watch that you can see it actually applied to a piece that I did now the next thing we have is the sequence it's a baroque technique where you take a fragment of the melody a motif and you spin it further with the same kind of movement and then you can get to a new key let me show you what I mean you can see the sequence right here oh [Music] foreign pops and clicks but we'll we'll live with it for now so you can see I just used this this one Motif these four notes and just made a sequence out of them and you can spin that further as long as you like and then you just stop on the key where you want to you know be so in this case I stopped on E and then use that again as a pivot chord because it's the dominant to a so I just went from the e to a so we just effortlessly again went from C major to a major it just kind of uses the fact that you just hear the same Melody fragment repeated but in a sequence and so you just kind of accept when you just vastly go to different Keys pretty much and the possibilities with this one are pretty much Limitless um you can see this a lot in Baroque music you can see this a lot in classical music from classicism in particular they did this a lot and you can use any part of the melody any Motif and just spin it into wherever you want to go you can also go up you don't have to go down I just did it here because it felt logical um but so Limitless possibilities with this one now we got the diminished chord the diminished chord is a symmetric chord which means it's the same in every inversion and it's one of the most versatile ways to modulate it can draw a little too much attention to itself in film music so I do use its parsley there but it's very versatile in that you can take any of the four notes and lower it by a half step which will turn it into a dominant seven chord a different one every time that will lead you to other keys or you can raise every single of those notes by a half step which will turn it into a half diminished chord which can also be used as a pivot Court to go to completely different keys so you can go to almost any key by using the diminished chord let's look at some examples and at the end I will do a little recap and now I will I will show exactly what I mean but you know let's just go through this first so I'm using a diminished chord right here to get to the to a different key from C major to E flat major let's listen to it foreign [Music] right so here we have the G major chord that we had before and then I go to B diminished which is diminished seven which is um the one that belongs to the c major scale so I just use that so that's this chord [Music] right it has a very strong flavor and then what I chose to do here this time is I took the B of it and lowered it by a half step and that created B flat major seven [Music] and that wants to resolve into E flat there you go that's how you can use it now here's an alternate version um since we have so many options with this let's listen to this one foreign right so in this case we we got the G here again G major coming out of c and then I once again took the B diminished seven that belongs to C and then this time I took the F in the chord and lowered it to e which in this case gives me e major 7. [Music] and that chord wants to resolve into a [Music] and that's how we get from this to this here's another alt version [Music] right this time we're going from C to F sharp major or G flat major however you want to see it doesn't matter but so this time again we got the G major chord that was the end of the melody originally in C um B diminished seven and then in this case I lowered the D to the C sharp and what that does is we end up with C sharp major 7 or d flat major seven foreign and that wants to resolve into F sharp major or g flat major [Music] there you go now here's another way that I personally like I don't know how common it is I don't see it all the time but I like this so I just wanted to show this as well it's where instead of using a dominant five I'm using I'm turning the five of C in this case so G major I'm turning that into a minor chord so G minor in this case and then I spin a sequence further from there which gets me into a completely different key thank you [Music] all right very different vibe so instead of here resolving to G major I'm resolving to G minor and then I'm using that for this sequence I decided to end it here but again you can spin a sequence further however you like um but again I took this little Motif thingy or this little sustain and just use that to logically spin it further um and then I ended here which is E flat major seven first E flat major then I add a 7 to it to kind of again create a pivot chord dominant seven secondary dominant two the new key which I decided was going to be a flat major I didn't have to do that I could also just have stopped on the E flat major and just you know done the melody in E Flat Major I actually have the alt version here where I don't turn the E flat major into a seven chord to go somewhere else but where I just stay right there foreign [Music] from C to E flat now some people are going to say Anne why are you not talking about modal interchange because that's what this is I have a whole video scripted out about model interchange we're not going to get into that today but it's coming relax now another chord that is often used for modulation is the German five six chord there's also a French and an Italian five six chord but we're not going to talk about those today if you really want to know in detail what these are about and how tonally they are connected and all that stuff you can Google it there's plenty of websites dedicated to this stuff um but for practicality's sake the way I just always remember what it is is it's a dominant seven chord that is a half step above your target tonality that's the most practical way that I can remember it otherwise like it's nice to know the theory behind it but you know it doesn't necessarily contribute to uh how I write so I always try to find ways to remember things in a very practical way the reason it works is it has the same tritone that the dominant seven chord of that key has and so if you resolve it properly the way you would with proper voice leading it sounds strangely logical and will just kind of accept it as a pivot chord it'll kind of sound like a dominant seven chord even though that's kind of not what it is in relation to the new key but doesn't matter let's just listen to it so in this case here's the G again that would normally lead us back to C um but in this case I just lingered on the G made it a G7 and then use that as a German five six chord to land in F sharp let's listen to it thank you [Music] right it sounds weirdly logical even though it's kind of weird but you have the tritone that wants to resolve and it just kind of works so that's just how I remember this chord and I use it all the time sometimes I also use it just instead of dominant 5 just because you know just for variation purposes it's fun and it's also interesting how some of these really lead us from C to F sharp which is as far away as you can get from C I mean it's the tritone key away from C if you look at the circle of fifths it's literally on the opposite side of it so it's very interesting how was just one chord you can actually get that far away from your original tonal Center here's an alternate version where from the G major I go back to the C first but I turn the c major into a C7 and then use that as a German five six chord to B major so let's listen to that [Music] weird but it works and just so you can hear the comparison normally C7 would be the dominant chord to F so I just want to play you the example of the same thing where I have the G I go back to C turn it into C7 but instead of going to B I go to F which is what we would normally think where this should go foreign pivot chord going to a completely different key it's just a question of voice leading to make it make sense anyway there's a ton of ways to use this chord again I use it all the time but so there's tons of online resources just look up German five six chord and you will get a lot of a lot of resources about also the Italian and French six chord that are just interesting to use and they're nice for modulation but they're also nice for just generally variation and keeping things interesting and then one last thing I want to show before we kind of go into a recap of the chords is using the circle of fourths or fifths again we're not going to get into that just just Google it it's kind of like a cheat sheet to tonality to keys to how they're related and you can just use that for your modulations again there's plenty of resources that get into that so you know just look it up um but so here's I'm building a sequence using the circle of fourths that's what this sounds like foreign [Music] so we went to again weirdly F sharp I don't know why I keep going there um but this basically just modulated through the entire left side of the circle of fourths circle of fit and it depends on which way you want to look at it so if you look at it it goes from C let me change the bass notes so it makes more sense so C F B flat E flat a flat d flat let's listen to it like this [Music] right with the with the bass notes it kind of sounds like it makes more sense um but anyway yeah I sometimes do that if I really need to get really far away from my original key then this is just kind of a way to do it one of many ways I mean we've seen several other ways how you can get really far away from your original key and again this is kind of something you can do endlessly so especially in film scoring sometimes sequences are a good way to uh fill time you know we have a lot of music to write so some of it is going to be filler so here we are so I just wanted to recap the chords just so we're um so it's a little bit clearer so this would be dominant 7 to see right so this is G major 7 to C resolve to Z [Music] this would be the German five six resolve to C so d flat major seven let's call it that it's not technically and harmonically correct but don't worry about it um d flat major 7 to C [Music] and so you can see this shares the same tritone as the G chord right the G chord has the tritone here b f resolving down to c and e this down this up and it's the same here it's just the other way around so um now you have the B on top foreign still resolving up to the Sea and then you have the F resolving down to the e so it's still the same tritone and that's kind of why it works that's that's the simple explanation of why it works some Counterpoint people are now going to point out that this creates parallel fifths yes it does which you're not technically allowed to do in traditional Counterpoint voice leading but this is one of the few times you're actually allowed to do it some people actually call these particular fifths parallel fifths the Mozart fifths because he did this a lot if Mozart does it we can all do it it's allowed I mean it's the 21st century nobody cares about this anyway but you know if if you're into traditional Counterpoint and you're like oh but how do I avoid the fifths you don't you just have them and they're allowed and it's fine and yes before you get into it I also have a video in the works about basics of CounterPoint I haven't figured out yet how to make it understandable for everyone yet so I don't know when that's coming but it's it's coming at some point and then here I just want to showcase the diminished chords because it's kind of easier to see them like this than seeing them in the piece the first four are the resolutions going to Major chords and then you can do the same obviously also going to minor keys so you can go anywhere so this is the B diminished every time and then we can see where that can go so every time I lower a different note of the chord which creates a different dominant seven chord which goes to a different key [Music] right I put a little emphasis on this um on these so you can hear the difference all right so here goes this one's going to resolve to C [Music] now same chord lowering this node wants to go to a foreign next one lowering this note and it wants to go to F sharp foreign [Music] lowering this note and it wants to go to E flat [Music] right you can go to so many keys with this by just lowering one note of the chord by a half step and then let me just play through the minor examples as well so you can just hear them foreign [Music] and here we are now some people might point out that there's also obviously this thing where you just go from one key to the next without actually having a pivot chord or anything um I think in in at Conservatory we call this truck drivers gear change because it's just very rapid a lot of old songs do this a lot as well Abba comes to mind like where they just shift the key up like in the last turnaround they will just you know um I we were debating at Conservatory whether this is actually modulation because some people would say that modulation means that there has to be a logical Journey from one key to the next I don't really have an opinion on that I don't really care but it's something that you can do [Music] um obviously so I think I also did that in my Fearless scene walk through there are Parts where I literally just shift everything up by you know a whole second or buy a whole step or a half step or whatever you can do that or if you have median chords as well I have a video about median courts if you haven't seen that um with median chords you can also since they have so many notes in common you can also actually just kind of go from one to the other this would kind of fall under common tone modulation I guess but it's very easy to go between median chords without needing you know excessive modulation so do with that information what you will I hope this was helpful um again the midi for this will be up on buy me a coffee and uh I'll see you next time go practice

Channel: Anne-Kathrin Dern

Views: 52,461

Keywords: Filmcomposer, Filmmusic, Soundtrack, Tutorial, Composition, Orchestration, Instrument, Sample Library, Music Production, Music Producer, Mixing, Mastering, Film, TV, Video Game, Game Music, Filmcomposition, Songwriter, Songwriting, Filmscore, Media Composer, Mockup, Template, Modulation, Music Theory

Id: snqQqk8-sVQ

Length: 33min 32sec (2012 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023