How To Sound Like A Music Genius (In About 14 Minutes)

reharmonization it's a subject usually gatee kept by a bunch of humorless Berkeley grads who spend their evenings jerking off to the idea that Cara delvine has basic muscle memory and then they run screeching to any Forum or corner of the internet that will have them and usually these are people who are just so deluded by their own musical ability that for some reason they just inevitably end up making these really pretentious YouTube videos about music theory like well reharmonization is a huge subject but this is how I wish it was explained to me rather than by my crabby ass music theory teacher who was about as much fun as a colonoscopy with a pineapple pointy end up let's take a look at something like a basic character theme from a video game scorer as an example here so something like this oh wonderful we're drifting and dreaming and floating ooh a hint of melancholy [Music] perhaps some lessons to be learned along the [Music] way lovely and we resolve and all is well in the Kingdom so if I were to hand you that right now and you just straight up raw dogged that bad boy you'd probably come up with something like this [Music] or maybe you go for some bonus points on the end there dang that's wonderful and before I say anything else that's great and anyone who tells you otherwise that's a super functional and sensible piece of music and sometimes you have a character who's really clearcut with like really straightforward motivations they're just one of those characters that kind of walks in and slaps their balls on the table like one of those wacky sticky hand things and in that case that works great but for a moment maybe consider something like this [Music] dang that is a spah heisy meatball isn't it so what did I just do how does it work and most importantly how can you learn to do this for yourself to put to shame all of the pfia simps out there who squee their shorts anytime Tim Henson plays a diminished chord reharmonization what does it mean it's made up of two parts re meaning to change to alter to modify to adapt to re and harmonization meaning to combine two or more tones to create Harmony so put it all together and what does that spell mostly a bunch of really pretentious music theory it's really hard to understand so instead I'm going to break this down for the rest of us normies here who just want to kick out the jams man what reharmonization is really about I guess is just finding chords to replace other chords with that sound more interesting and that's exactly what I did with the beginning piece and this video I had this really basic chord progression and I just wanted to find some other chords to use instead that would sound more spicy so instead of just aimlessly flapping your hands about the keys like wet noodles these are some techniques that I think you can use to do this stuff a little more effectively and reliably and kind of effortlessly reharmonization works by taking an existing Harmony and changing it that's it that's really all there is to it so as we know a Harmony is anything comprised comprised of two or more notes in music so if we took a c here and harmonized that with a G we could change this G to an E or an A flat or an F or an E flat or a d an octave up and so on and that's pretty much reharmonization in a nutshell and this exact idea applies to basically anything else in music so as ort of a brain lubrication measure here I'd like you to just try something like rocking a C and G in one hand and then finding other harmonies with that with just a single note or [Music] something or maybe you get a bit more advanced and try some Triads with it [Music] and you know that's pretty much it that's reharmonization kind of but Venus you brilliantly Mustachio deaner of All Things music and stuff I hear you say I thought that was it I thought I did it and yeah but not totally but we're getting there I promise there's a lot of ways to reharmonize things but let's take a look first at maybe just the most basic examples I think first up is just extended chord voicing so if we had to play a C for example we could add a d here and now we have a C9 and that's a really lovely super straightforward way to reharmonize something we could also look for matching tones so if we play a C I know this is c e and G and I know that the relative minor of C is a minor and it shares two notes c and e here while adding the a so instead of playing the C I could maybe move up to an a with an e and now we've got this sort of melty in between chord that works really nicely another really basic one is just flipping Majors into minors or minors into Majors so let's say I had this chord progression that goes from a g to a c instead of this G to C both being major I could reharmonize by going from G to C minor or on the inverse I could go from a G minor to a c and that changes the feel of that pretty significantly this is really borrowing from parallel keys but I already did a video covering this so you could check that out if you want some more information on that technique in order to really effectively reharmonize something we need to not only understand its place in the melody but also try to go one step deeper and understand its function glossing over a whole bunch of theory stuff in functional Harmony chords fall into one of three categories and the chords Within These categories can all basically just be substituted with one another so functional Harmony super super quickly we're just going to take a look at the major side the minor side is more or less the same just the major versus minor is going to be different so let's say we're in the key of C major as always and we have a progression of f g c cool in the tonic chords we could replace the C with either an E minor or with an A Minor great so let's try that we have f g and then we substitute the C for E minor and that's pretty interesting and instead of that we could do f g and then we're going to spice things up a little bit with a minor and that's kind of cool as well so those would be tonic chords the one minor 3 and minor 6 moving on to subdominant chords this is the four and minor 2 so let's say we have oh I don't know let's just do the the same thing of g f c so we're just walking on down so we could play the g f c and instead of this F we're going to substitute that for the minor 2 or D minor and then a c so that gives us this and transforms it into this and that works really really well finally we have dominant chords so let's just say I don't know once again we've got f g c great so instead of the G we could actually go for a b diminished and then walk home to see and this is a really super common resolution because this just like oh man makes my butthole pucker sweet release so instead of going f g c sorry f g c uh we can go f g b [Music] diminish bam and that is functional Harmony super super easy and effective way to break into this sort of stuff in order to really get into this stuff though and start turning it into sort of your hidden musical superpower I think the better way to go about it is by using every musician's secret weapon the circle of fifths and there's a lot of other Theory stuff we're going to gloss over behind this but there are a few formulas I just want to show you that make this stuff super easy okay so with the circle of fifths there are a few formulas that I find really effective for finding reharmonization SL chord substitution options slash different ways to to move about a piece of music the first one is what I would call single stepping so in the key of good old C major I can move a single step to the left or right on the circle of fifths when I'm playing a C so instead of moving from a g to a c i can move one step to the left and go from a g to an f and that would work pretty well otherwise going to the right if I was going from an F to C I could go from an F to a g and that would also work really well and this is because C Major G major and F major all share a pretty good number of tones the next Formula is relative minor so this is going from C to its relative minor directly below it on the circle of fifths which is a minor so if I need to play a C as I showed earlier I could instead just play an A Minor and that's going to work just as well because a minor and C major share all the same notes so it's a really good quick substitution the next Formula is single step relative minor at least I guess that's what I would call it so instead of our C using the circle of fifths we could see that we could move down to a as the relative minor and if we move a single step to the left or right we have D minor and we have E minor so if I were to play a C in this progression I could substitute that instead for a D minor or move to a d D minor and that would sound pretty decent and also I could instead of going from C I could go from E minor and the nice thing is if you think about these both D minor and E minor as well as F major and G major are all diatonically in the key of C major so they make really decent substitutions next up we have the quarter turn so this is turning the circle of fifths a quarter to the right or to the left so in the key of C major if I go a quarter turn to the right we have a major and this is actually a really nice cinematic movement also going to the left we have C and we can go to an E flat major this would maybe be more commonly referred to as a chromatic mediant because E flat major is not in the key of C major nor is a major so this would be a chromatic submediant both of these work really really well and chromatic median are a lot of fun and you hear this all over most Hollywood soundtracks and stuff the final one I want to talk about is a quarter plus one so we're going to go a quarter turn plus one and a quarter turn minus one so in the key of C major instead of going to our a major here we're going to go to an E major instead and this is also a chromatic median but it just sounds really nice and on the inverse if we go go a quarter turn from C down we would get our E flat but instead we're now going to go for an A flat so we've got a flat major to C also a very heroic progression you can also start to experiment with the relative minor but this does sometimes get kind of spicy sounding and I think is somewhat a little more difficult to navigate unless you have a better idea of what you're doing so we would go from a c to an F minor really nice minor 4: one movement and then we've got a C sharp minor which is going to [Music] be pretty spicy but also a lot of fun so yeah that's pretty much it that's what I wanted to share in this video and there's a lot more to this and a lot more to explore so I'll leave the fun Parts up to you you know go wild and see what you can come up with and do whatever you want just remember to always put the pineapple and pointy side down [Music] or don't [Music]

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 160,034

Keywords: Venus Theory

Id: R3Tr4vpckkw

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024