How to Modulate to ANY Key (Easy to Difficult)

today's video is sponsored by me and my brand new compose and Conquer Community super excited to chat about that more in a bit so unsurprisingly the easiest way to modulate is just to do it we call that direct modulation we could be playing in c minor for example and now we can just move to B major with direct modulation you don't have to set it up at all and that's the feeling you're gonna get it's going to feel surprising now that's just one of many emotional tools that we could use to tell musical stories because that's what modulation is all about telling stories so let's find something that feels a little bit more resulting like like it was inevitable that's going to be our circle of fifths modulation now if you don't know how the circle fifths works we have five to one chords so if we start in C major and we count up the scale degrees G major is called the five in C major now fives have this pull this gravity that leads us to one there's a couple reasons for that we're not going to get too into the reasons but one of the reasons is this leading tone the leading tone being the seventh scale degree one two three four five six seven right so this wants to pull up to the one because it's a half step away there's this famous story that they used to wake Beethoven up by just playing the scale and stopping before the one [Music] that he would wake up and hit the one the one that was probably before he couldn't hear but anyways if we follow this system of logic we can use these fives as ways to propel us to new keys so we could do G to C but now we could do c as the five to a new key and C is going to be the five in F one two three four five so using the circle of fifths we can Propel ourselves forward now we're in F and we can use f to go to B flat now we can use B flat to go to E flat right so we're using the fives to go to ones and then the ones become fives that go to new ones now another relatively straightforward way to modulate is using chromatic modulation and that's just as simple as us moving to an adjacent key chromatically remember when I talked about the leading tone and I said that the seven goes to one because it's a half step away well that kind of logic actually works for entire chords so if we play C major [Music] it's very easy for us to shift to B major because all of those notes are half steps away so they kind of want to fall or potentially rise so using this logic chromatic modulation allows us to push and pull in new directions thank you right so I'm just using chromatic modulation just moving half steps away between these chords another straightforward way to move through Keys is to use chain modulation now this is one I didn't know of but I've used it before I had to look it up and chain modulation is just us moving intervalically so in a lot of cases it's going to be thirds minor or major thirds but you could move in other ways too so we could take C major and move down a minor third that's going to be three half steps one two three to a major and then to really make this feel warranted we're going to want to keep doing that so we'll move another minor third down to F sharp major right and then we could even move another right so we could do things like this foreign so because I'm moving in this continuous sequence of the same interval it kind of feels to your ear eventually like oh I know what's going on and so the effect that we get is a little bit of surprise but then a little bit of expectedness which is great for modulation now let's talk about a couple more complex modulations but before we do that I want to give a shout out to my own compose and Conquer Community we've got a huge library of YouTube videos and articles that I have painstakingly organized by topic tag title and anything else you can think of to search we also have a private Discord where you can ask questions about topics from the library share music to get feedback or just chat with other composers if it sounds cool and you want to join our community all you have to do is be a patron I've linked that in the description and for the next week I'm running a seven day free trial to anybody who wants to try it for themselves even after your trial ends I'll still keep you in the Discord because I don't want to exclude communities ongoing patronage gives you access to the library for as long as you're a member and I'm currently working on a second tier the pro-member community which is going to have access to a private Discord some courses downloadables and lots of other exclusive content I highly recommend this I'd love to see them Community thank you so much for your support and back to the video so the next two modulations are going to be modal meaning we're going to actually talk about how we use modes to move through other modes if you don't know what modes are I recommend you look that up beforehand I'm not going to get into that in this video but if you're part of the compose and Conquer Community you'll find some videos on it so our first modal modulation is going to be called parallel modulation and it's pretty straightforward if we're in C major we're actually using the same notes as lots of other modes for example D Dorian right now we're not even changing the scale degrees as we move through these so parallel modulation means we're kind of Shifting our tonal Center using the same scale so C major moving to D Dorian now for this to really feel like a modulation you're going to have to lean into those new modes that you're in that means that the root has to be centered on the new area so if you were in C you got to lean into C you got to use that V chord the G to get into C so it feels like it's rocking back and forth then when you go to D Dorian you want to lean into those scale degrees that make it the mode that it is so D Dorian has this raised sixth right this so you have to lean into that for it to feel like d Dorian otherwise it's gonna feel like the whole thing's in C major now the other type of modal modulation is to actually keep the same root note but change the mode this is a really interesting one I actually explore this with a lot of my students in coaching to show them how we can change from modes to go from Bright to dark without ever changing the root there are tons of modes that have different brightness and darkness levels I've done some videos on it like I talked about lydian is a very bright one for example sample [Music] but if we keep c as our root we can actually shift to something darker without ever changing the root note so we could go for example to C phrygian which is going to be a lot darker and we're using the c as a way to ground us between the two so we could do something like this thank you right so I'm pulling between those modes but keeping that route the same the whole time now let's talk about a more complex one the altered common tone this is super fun the altered common tone is when we take a chord that's in the key that we're in we make an adjustment usually chromatically and that adjustment actually sets us up for something new in a new key it's a little complex so let me explain what I mean so for in C major we have some chords available to us C D Minor E minor F major G major a minor B diminished and C these are all diatonic chords meaning they exist inside of the scale of C but if we adjust any note chromatically we adjust one of those intervals chromatically we can get totally new possibilities so if we're in C but we change our G to an F sharp for example we wind up with this interesting chord and then maybe this chord leads us to move down like this so now suddenly we're in B major or if B is the five like we talked about in circle of fifths B major could pull us to E major so foreign now let's take an E major for a second what happens if we take this e major and we take this B and we make this B flat [Music] right now we're getting some interesting chords now this could pull us in a lot of different areas right this could go here [Music] right [Music] now going back to C let's start with the c major chord if we take the C in that chord and we change that to a C sharp we're suddenly working in diminished Harmony and diminished Harmony if you've seen the compose and Conquer library video on it can go in four different directions right so we've got D major from here we've got G major we've got a flat major we've also got B major and we can move to the respective miners as well so it opens up all these possibilities just by changing one note of our chord now there are three more modulations I did not talk about in this video if you want to learn what they are and how they work I highly recommend you check out the composing conquer Community I've got them posted over there already ready to go let me know in the comments what your favorite modulation was I learned some new ones doing this and I thought it was super fun to do so I hope you did too leave a like if you enjoyed don't forget to subscribe and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Zach Heyde

Views: 154,172

Keywords: composer, music, music composer, film composer, animation composer, fantasy music, dnd music, animation music, commercial composer, trailer composer, commercial, trailer, how to, tutorial, composer react, composer reacts, music breakdown, music analysis, orchestration, composition, logic pro, mattia chiappa, guy michelmore, marc jovani, cinematic composing, thinkspace education, media composer, media music, film music, orchestral music

Id: Z4MSF3hIznE

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023