Extreme jazz fusion reharmonization

last week I released a cover of a pop song that used a lot of chords [Music] how would you come up with an arrangement of a pop song like this one and more importantly why would you do something like that the world was introduced to this style of rearrangement through the music of dirty loops the swedish power trio in july of 2011 their syncopated Andry harmonized take on a lot of pop songs like Justin Bieber's baby made an immediate impression on a lot of young musicians borrowing heavily from gospel and jazz fusion their arrangements are very refreshing and fun the kind of music that dirty loops makes isn't particularly new they're simply continuing a tradition that is existed for a long time among jazz musicians beginning roughly in the 1950s jazz musicians took popular Tin Pan Alley songs and American musical songs and songs from American movies and turn them into vehicles for jazz improvisation in the new hard bop style this is exemplified in recordings like Shawnee Rollins's version of Surrey with the fringe on top in the musical Oklahoma or Miles Davis's take on someday my prince will come from the movie Snow White and Seven Dwarves audiences were immediately familiar with the source material because it came directly from the popular culture of the time like Justin Bieber is today but they were treated to a more harmonically adventurous approach to the music once you get a taste of more advanced harmonic concepts it can kind of be difficult to go back to simpler triadic harmony look you get one taste a delicious delicious jazz chords the stuff ever satisfies you ever get rest well how does one go about arranging pop music like this well let's start with the basics step 1 pick a pop song so let's find a simple pop song what are the kids listening to these days alright Ed Sheeran's the shape of you let's here are the first four bars of the chorus sound with its original harmony I'm in love the shape of the cushion pull like a magnet Abdullah I'm in love with you buddy all right how can we spice this up well let's start with diatonic reharmonization an easy way to change the feeling and color of a song and a minor key is to simply change the chord so that they reflect the relative major I'm in love with the shape of the shampoo like a magnum of the love engine I'm in love with you buddy well that's certainly different you can hear how harmony really affects the mood of a song you may have noticed that we change the melody a little bit because in the original all the ends of phrases and on the note D we change those to F just to make sure that the melody and the chord progression fit a little bit better but if we don't want to change the melody or use this technique another thing that we can do is use non-cyclic chord progressions the original harmonization is an example of a cyclic chord progression a short grouping of chords that progress with little sense of final cadence this is extremely common in pop music as well as electronic music sometimes the stems from the work flow from programs like Ableton Live where looped corporations are easier to work with this can be convenient but limiting what if we extended the progression so it encompassed all four bars instead of two bars I'm in love with the shape of the shampoo like a magnet Yamaha is falling I'm in love this tells a little bit more of a story we start an F major and then we use the a7 which is the dominant seventh chord in the key of D minor to pivot to D minor by the third bar even still this progression is a little bland until very the harmonic rhythm harmonic rhythm is the speed at which chords change from one to the next so far we've been using a harmonic rhythm of half notes where the chords change every two beats this feels pretty good but it does tell a little bit more of a nuanced story to speed up the harmonic rhythm at certain points in the progression as the music develops I'm in love with the shape of the cushion flow like a magnet of the my heart I'm in love with you buddy all right okay I see what you're doing here this is fine it's great but I came here for the extreme reorganization where's the jazz where's that sweet luscious jazz okay we can do that yeah the easiest way to make something sound jazzy is to add some tensions first try using diatonic chords built on the same roots as the original progression stack thirds up from the Triad to get sevenths 9th 11th or even 13th this makes the progression sound familiar but adds a little bit more harmonic color I'm in the shape of pushing pull like a magnet of the LA I'm in though with you by going beyond this to make it sound especially jazzy you can use cycle five root motion with seventh chords root motion that goes through the cycle of fifths is extremely common in jazz arranging and in jazz composition so you can use that here advantage for reharmonization like jazz music use seventh chords diatonic to the key and voila instance jazz I'm in the shape of the Shimpo like a magnet I'm in love with you guys all right that sounds jazzy but what can we do to make the sound even more so tritone substitution tritone substitutes are passing chords which are built on a root a tritone away from the related dominant five seven of a target chord so if your target chord is f the related five seven chord is c7 the chord a tritone away from c7 is G flat seven this is the tritone sub you can think of the tritone sub as the dominant seventh chord a half step above a target chord G flat seven is a half step above F tritone substitution is a great way of getting chromatic interest into your chord progressions check out this example I'm in love with the shape [Music] I'm in love with you guy oh yeah that's the jazz that's what I watch that's that you has I'm what the judge how can we take it further I want more yeah before we do that we kind of have to talk about a pretty crucial part of harmonization technique that we kind of alluded to earlier besides the first example where we changed the melody to fit the key of F we've largely ignored how the melody relates to the chords traditionally speaking the notes in the melody should be part of the chord that accompanies them however even if there's a note in the melody that's not explicitly part of the chord our ears generally will recognize that note as sort of an extension of that chord especially in context where the harmony is a little bit richer and denser for example this G on this F major seven the sixth example we kind of will here as a 9th even though it's not part of the f major seven chord this can only go so far because once we start including chords from outside of the key we're going to really need to make sure that the notes in the melody match the chords that accompany them I have this bass line which descends chromatically down from the root D what we're going to do is we're gonna find chords whether or not they're in the key or not that are built on the roots of this bass line that we've created that fit the melody I'm in love with the shape are pushing for like a magnet until my heart is falling you buy oh yeah so jazzy oh yeah but I don't really understand what's going on here like I could get with the program with the other ones but this is a little bit more confused and can you explain exactly what you're doing all the chords and chord progressions that we've used so far can more or less be understood by their function within the key of D minor or F major this means is that we can give a reasonable analysis of where the chords are expected to go the beauty of having a strong simple diatonic melody is we don't actually need to pick chord progressions which have functions within any particular key and instead pick chords which do not have a function our ears genuinely do not know where the chord progression is going next because the chords are not from the key and they don't seem to be guiding us to any particular key the melody on the other hand is in the key the key of D minor and the chords are kind of this wash of color behind the melody for example the second chord in this chord progression a D flat major seven sharp five is not part of the key of D minor nor is it diatonic to any scale related to D it exists solely because the melodic pitches which are stressed a and F are part of a D flat major seven sharp five chord one thing that our ear does notice and helps guide the general flow of the harmony is the stepwise nature of the bassline in order to use this technique you don't actually need to descend strictly by half steps you could also use whole steps and it also doesn't need to descend it could go up also consider this example of an ascending bass line I'm in love with the shape of the shampoo I'm in I mean yeah okay so it's jazzy but I still don't really understand like why would you pick certain chords versus others is there like a specific theoretical framework for the chords that you're choosing no sort of but not really instead of tried-and-true descriptions of where chords should go and how they might work in a particular key you now have the infinite vastness of the harmonic spectrum at your fingertips you're left to rely upon your ears instead of diatonic functions and all that stuff we're just left with general compositional techniques that composers have found useful for creating non-functional harmony and there are quite a few of them the specific technique that we just use is what we nos called melody baseline technique but this technique is just scratching the surface of the many other techniques that have been developed in the past century all right well that's why I'm watching this video what are those techniques can you tell me any of them alright well here are a few possibilities check out this first one this particular technique is called intervallic mirror technique where the right hand is an intervallic mirror of the left hand across the pitch D the tonic of the piece of music good friend of the channel Bayla Bartok was a huge fan of this technique we can get some weird chords that don't really seem to have names they're just colors which were in Vaca t'v of this particular intervallic sound whether or not you like the sound is just well completely up to you what about this particular example I'm in the shape of like that this was an example of constant structure major7 harmony cycled in major thirds across consecutive multi tonic systems and having the melody also altered to fit the harmony multi tonic systems are when you have multiple key centers which are equidistant from one another in the circle of fifths John Coltrane was a big fan of multi tonic systems and pieces like giant steps and countdown constant structures are simply multiple iterations of the same kind of chord quality like in this case major seventh chords what about this example [Music] this was a cereal 12-tone reharmonization and recomposition of the melody the melody was rewritten to fit a 12 tone row and the arpeggiated piano part was based upon five note groupings of consecutive chords from that same row uh so to quote jeff goldblum but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think of they should this is totally off the deep end it doesn't sound good to me I honestly don't know if I want to use it maybe not and honestly that's totally fine the more complicated dents and dissonance you get with harmony the higher likelihood you're going to lose some people along the way dirty loops released their first videos in July of 2011 but later in 2011 in November electronic music duo Noah released a fairly unusual cover of dubstep song promises by the band nero knowers arrangement of promises mangle the harmony and melody with kind of gleeful abandon nero got a kick out of it and shared noah's cover of their song on social media and the reaction from Nero's fanbase was well less than appreciative this is so bad this is really bad not gonna lie Nero sins wish I never came Nero brought me here frowny face sounds like or crap just noise you should take yourself much less seriously or just get a lot better at music either would agree WTF did I just listen to I thought my Mac speakers were up or sitting terrible protip make sure the symptom the vocals are in the same key there's a little bit of a lesson to be learned here there's only so far you can push the harmony of a piece of music before it becomes alienating the thing is by this point most musicians simply wouldn't care if the music was alienating if the music was an authentic expression of what they were trying to convey John Coltrane certainly did not care about alienating anyone when he took the song my favorite things from The Sound of Music these are a few of my favorite things and turned it into an hour long impressionistic vehicle for avant-garde improvisation I imagine fans of the original movie musical would say similar things about John Coltrane's take on my [Music] sounds like she utter crap chest noise should take yourself much less serious here just get a lot better at music I don't where WTF did I just listen to I thought my Mac speaker for up or stuff this is Tara it make sure the sin from the vocals are in the same key the kinds of extreme harmonic coloration that I used in my last three examples are jarring when in juxtaposition to the pop music that they accompany if that's your artistic intent though that's fantastic I myself love this sort of thing I like the challenge and I love the effect of recontextualizing pop music into new forms just like the jazz greats of the 1950s and 1960s did with the music of their time anyway guys thank you for watching this has been Adam mealy this was a lot of fun to put together I hope you enjoyed this lesson on extreme pop music reharmonization if you enjoy what I do please consider commenting please consider liking and also please consider subscribing definitely click the ring notification button thing on the subscribed thing just so you're alerted to whenever I have new videos coming out generally speaking they're going to be coming up on Monday afternoons but I also release certain things throughout the week occasionally whenever I feel like it but at the very least every Monday afternoon I have a new video whether it be a lesson or vlog or something like that if you really enjoy what I do please consider please consider joining my patreon I'm really appreciative of the people these particular folks who have donated their hard-earned cash to the cause that's through their support that I'm able to do this sort of thing week after week and I'm very appreciative to them and also to you if you haven't joined patreon yet for your continued viewership they're fresh syncopated Andry harmonised take on pop songs like Justin Beiber's BB really Justin Beiber's BB they're fresh bass

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,235,402

Rating: 4.9675436 out of 5

Keywords: adam neely, dirty loops, jazz reharm, jazz theory, jazz chord, jazz harmony explained, jazz chords explained, jazz harmony piano, dirty loops harmony, dirty loops baby, knower, jazz theory lesson, music theory, music theory lesson, jazz composition, jazz composition masterclass, berklee jazz, berklee jazz composition

Id: JXfQsHT5c30

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ads215]

Just an awesome vid. For those wanting to learn how it's done there's a T O N of great info on this vid. May take you a while to work through them but you'll be a better musician by the time you do.

[u/[deleted]]

LMAO those title screen jingles

[u/shiner_man]

"Cycle 5 Root Motion with 7th Chords"? I'm not really understanding that one.

If you have something in C major, you just change the progression to something like:

Cmaj7 - Fmaj7 - Bb7 - Eb7 - Ab7 - Db7 - C

I mean, you quickly end up outside the key if you cycle through by 5ths.

[u/Arvidex]

TheLick