How to Write Chord Progressions with Extended Chords, Secondary Dominants and Chromatic Mediants

hey everyone i've had a really good request come in from rasco wristage who wants to know how to make my own jazzy chord progressions so what we're going to do today is look at how you can write your own progressions for improvisation practice or songwriting or production or whatever i'm going to interpret rasco's word jazzy pretty broadly and think about how we can build progressions that go beyond the plain vanilla chord to the straightforward c a minor f g seven kind of thing and learn how to incorporate some more interesting and richer sounding chords and changes along the way i'm going to give you a few exercises you can use to develop your skills if you enjoyed this tutorial don't forget to hit like say hello in the comments and subscribe to my youtube channel by hitting the red subscribe button in the lower right hand corner of the screen also check out my books right now i have a bundle deal running on the digital editions of my three current books so that's how to really play the piano the stuff your teacher never taught you an introduction to cocktail piano and seven studies in pop piano you can get all three for 18 pounds 95 as part of the bundle deal which is a 30 saving on buying them separately and if you've already got one of them don't worry because you can still get a discount on the other two head over to billspianopages.com bundle to find out more about that deal let's start with a quick crash course in some fundamental music theory concepts scales diatonic chords tonics dominance and things like that now if you're on top of that stuff already then skip on forwards to the next chapter but if you're not or if your knowledge is a bit rusty then stick around but don't worry if you don't absorb all of it right away now any major key c major f major g major whatever has its very own major scale here's the scale of c major going up one octave and here's the scale of f major [Music] and the scale of d major major scales like any scale follow a particular pattern of notes a pattern of intervals as they go up the piano keyboard now i'm not going to go into how to build scales here okay it's quite a big subject i i don't want to get bogged down in it what i'll say for today is if you want to know the scale of any major key just google it for now okay google will tell you the scale of any major key now here's the important thing from our scales we can grow chords and the way we do that is by using a simple chord shape called a root position triad here's a root position triad that has c as its root note its lowest note now if we take that chord shape and run it up the scale of c so that the root the lowest note of each chord is a note of the scale and the other two notes of the chord are built using only notes from the scale then we get seven chords one two three four five six seven and they all have names c d minor e minor f g a minor and b diminished before the whole thing starts again because we get back up to another c and we can repeat the scale going up and up the piano let's do the same thing in the key of f major so there's the scale of f major with that single black note the b flat here's our root position triad starting on f so we go f g minor because we've got that b flat in the scale we can't play g major it has to be g minor a minor b flat c d minor and e diminished all i'm doing is taking that simple root position triad i'm running it up the scale using the notes of the scale to build the chords let's go back into c major now those chords that we can grow out of the major scale are what we call the diatonic chords of the key and here's why diatonic chords are important if you have a song in the key of c major then most and perhaps all of the notes in that song will come from the c major scale and most and perhaps all of the chords in that song will come from that list of seven diatonic chords or extensions of them like seventh there's a g7 chord which is a simple extension of a g chord also within that c major song's chord progression those diatonic chords will each do particular jobs functions we call them that give the progression its structure and keep it moving one more thing we need to know before we start building some progressions and this is really important we can also give the diatonic chords of a key numbers using uppercase roman numerals for major chords and lowercase roman numerals for minor and diminished chords one two three four five six seven and then we're back to one at the top of the scale we can even give them names we call the number one chord the tonic chord the number two chord the supertonic number three is the mediant number four is the subdominant number five is the dominant number six is the submediant number seven is the leading tone chord those names and numbers also apply to the underlying tones okay which we sometimes call the degrees of the scale first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh one two three four five six seven and back to one those names and numbers are really really useful because they let us talk about harmonic principles across keys okay so we can say talk about the relationship between the dominant chord the five chord and the tonic chord the one chord whether we're in c major or f major or a major or whatever because all of those different keys will have different chords as their tonics and dominant okay that's the end of the crash course let's look at how we can build progressions out of those chords let's start out by thinking about how to build basic chord progressions and then we can dig into some ways of making things more elaborate now the first thing you need to know about chord progressions is that the clue is in the name a progression always goes somewhere it makes progress you can think of a chord progression as being like a journey or a series of journeys now that journey almost always ends on the tonic chord which is the chord that feels like home so if we're in the key of c major in our progression we might go through all sorts of different chords but we're likely to end on the tonic chord number one chord that feels like home it feels like we're at rest now most of the time by no means always but most of the time your chord progression will also begin on the tonic chord between that first chord whatever it is and the final tonic chord a progression will typically go out and back home to the tonic out and back home to the tonic maybe several times it's kind of a process of tension and release the further away we get from the tonic chord in terms of tonality the way the chord sounds and that's not necessarily the same as distance away in the scale or on the piano keyboard then the more the tonic wants to drag us back it's kind of like going for a walk from your front door but with a bungee cord tied to your back and anchored into the ground yeah the further you go the harder you're being pulled back now of our seven diatonic chords the most distant point we can usually get to from the tonic is the five chord the dominant that's g in the key of c major and there i'm playing g in a different shape from the one we've seen so we first saw it in that tonic triad shape but here it is in a different shape a different voicing remember you can always do that with chords on the piano keyboard yeah now that g if you listen to it really wants to take us back to c the tonic especially if we add the seventh and make it g7 that's an f a dominant seventh chord yeah when that g7 drags us back to c when it resolves to use the technical term we call that a type of cadence which to simplify things is just a technical term for what happens when one chord takes us to another this particular cadence is five one let's play it in a different voicing dominant to tonic yeah an authentic cadence to use with technical terminology i don't want to get too deep into cadence terms here because they do get kind of messy but it's worth knowing that they exist now thinking back to what we said earlier about chords having different jobs or functions in a progression we would say that the job of the tonic is to be the chord that sounds like home and the job of the dominant perhaps expressed as a dominant seventh is to be the chord that really really wants to take us back home it's the furthest chord out it really wants to take us back to the tonic dominant tonic five one so many chord progressions will start on the tonic then go out to the dominant chord and then come back to the tonic chord and then go for another little adventure out to the dominant and back to the tonic five one dominant tonic now i was playing all of those chords in different voicings and inversions those are just for technical terms meaning i was using different shapes but they were all basically five and one chords in the key of c major either g or g seven and c okay five and one dominant tonic in the key of c major now a chord progression can be as simple as that you could have a progression in c major that just went c g c g and so on but most progressions have more to them than that the dominant and tonic chords tend to be the most important ones they're the kind of tense poles holding up the whole structure but there might be other chords strung between them especially on the journey between tonic and dominant and that's where our other diatonic chords come in because all of those diatonic chords in any major key have different functions we know about the functions of the tonic and the dominant but other chords have functions as well so some of those other diatonic chords their job is also to sound a little bit like the tonic whereas some of them have a job that is to lead us naturally to a dominant chord let's have a look at a mini progression where you can see that in action you might have seen someone sit at the piano somewhere sometime and do this [Music] billions of people can do this it's really annoying but it nicely demonstrates that kind of progression we've got four chords c a minor f and g we're in the key of c major you can see where the tonic and dominant are there's our tonic and there's our dominant but between the two we go through a couple of other chords we go from c to a minor which sounds a little bit like the tonic has a little bit of that home feeling not quite as much as c but it still has that tonic feeling then we get to f the number four chord and that is one of those chords that naturally wants to lead us to the dominant chord we could go back to the tonic chord from there but it's a natural one to take us to the g to the five chord one six four five and back to one yeah so very often we have other diatonic chords on the journey out between one and five sometimes less often but still plenty often enough you will also pass through other chords on the journey back from tonic from dominant to tonic okay it kind of tends to happen most often in blues and jazz and things like that if you think about 12 bar blues in the key of c major then towards the end of a 12 bar section we get to the dominant chord but then we pass back through a four chord a subdominant to the c rather than going straight from dominant to tonic but that is less common now this isn't a tutorial on chord function and it would all get very technical very quickly if we started talking about all the different functions of all the different diatonic chords and you don't really need to know them to get started writing your own progressions so we're going to stay away from that particular rabbit hole today but before we move on to thinking about how to make your progressions more jazzy to use rasco's term i want to give you a couple of exercises you can do to help you firm up your grasp of the basics of how to build chord progressions yeah so you can either pause the tutorial and do them now or you can skip back to this bit of the video when we're done i'll make sure that it's nice and clearly marked in the chapters okay so i've got two exercises you can try first of all find a chord progression for a major key song that you like you can either find it online or even better get it out of a song book it's much more likely to be accurate if you get it from a song book now look at that progression and try to analyze it figure out how it works how is it engineered in terms of the theory we've just talked about so what key is it in what are the tonic dominant chords and how does the song find its way from the tonic to the dominant and back again if indeed it does if you can try to choose a song that starts with the tonic chord as well as ending with a tonic chord it'll just make things a little bit easier also don't try to analyze a whole song because you'll get complications like middle eights and things like that just look at the first eight bars the first eight measures or something like that progressions by the way and this is useful to know when you're writing your own tend to come in multiples of four bars four measures so four eight sixteen they don't have to but over the years composers and songwriters have found that those lengths give the most balance and structure to their chord progressions second exercise pick a major key like c and work out its diatonic chord so you'll need to know the scale to do that then try to come up with your own basic progression using those chords now you can do that in one of two ways either you can kind of feel your way by ear going from the tonic and experimenting with the sounds of your chords to try to get you to the dominant okay and that's maybe a good way to start out because using your ear is always good alternatively though you can kind of paint by numbers so if you draw a two by four four grid so you've got eight bars eight measures and write the tonic chord in the first and last bar and the dominant chord in the last but one bar okay then try filling in the rest again fiddle around with the chords on the keyboard you might you know you might put other dominant chords in there here's a tip a good place for another dominant chord might be in bar four or you might not put the dominant chords in there again play around and listen to the different sounds you can create trust your ear to tell you what works and what doesn't let's move on and think about that word jazzy that rastko used how do we take our basic plain vanilla chord progressions and make them more interesting and exotic and elaborate and richer well one of the easiest ways to add interest to a chord progression is to extend the chords okay let me show you exactly what i mean by that if if chord extension is not a concept you've come across before if we go back to the little progression we were using a minute or two ago c a minor f g we know it loops round and round and round it's a really straightforward progression i'm playing it in slightly different voicings there but they're still the same chord c a minor f g now let's look at what happens if we just extend each one of those chords by adding particular types of seventh we get c major seven a minor seven f major seven g seven straight away you can hear that things are beginning to sound richer and more interesting but all the sevenths that we've added are diatonic to the key which is c major so if you look at the extra notes that we've added here all of them come from the c major scale so we're not doing anything tremendously adventurous but we are enriching the sound with simple extensions we can make extensions way more complicated than that okay so for example uh let's push the boat out let's chuck a c major 13 chord in there that's a c major 13. playing in a particular voicing to make it easy to play some of its notes are missing but that is the basic chord and it's very different from a basic c chord but it will still function as a c chord within the progression [Music] yeah now extension chord extension is a huge subject and i'm not going to be able to show you everything you can do with every chord in this one tutorial but if it's something that's new to you i can give you some pointers so you can dig around in my other tutorials or on other youtube channels or books or whatever to find out more some chord extensions are really really common so for example we've already seen g7 a dominant seventh chord and all it is really is a simple extension of a basic g chord so there's g and there is the seventh added okay now that is a diatonic chord naturally occurring chord in the key of c major because the f we're adding appears in the c major chord the c major scale the effect of the dominant seventh is interesting what it does when it's on the five chord like that is intensify the dominant effect of the five chord so there's the basic g chord in c major and that's a reasonable pullback to the tonic but if we add the seventh and make it a dominant seven chord it's a stronger pull back to the tonic but if we were to create dominant seventh chords on other notes of the c major scale very different things would start to happen so we know that f for example is diatonic in the key of c major but what if we play f7 [Music] suddenly we've got that kind of edgy bluesy sound same thing happens if we take it to the tonic chord and we play a c7 so and both of the notes we're adding there aren't diatonic to c so e flat on the f7 doesn't appear in the c major scale b flat doesn't appear in the c major scale so there's an important lesson we know that chords have different effects depending on the context depending on the key they're in but so do their extensions so a g7 um in the in the key of c major sounds very neat and tidy and very upright and proper all it's going to do is take us to c but if we were to play that g7 in the key of g then right away it would sound very bluesy and very very different so context is everything and this is yet another reason why it's good to get to the piano play around with these chords and listen to the effects that they have let's investigate extensions a little bit more and we'll do that by moving into the key of g major here's the scale of g major okay it's all the white notes between g and g except the f is sharpened to give us an f sharp and the diatonic chords of g major are g a minor b minor c d [Music] e minor and f sharp diminished now let's take our tonic chord our g chord if we wanted to make that into a seventh chord if we wanted to extend it diatonically within the key we would add the f sharp there is g major seven just like the c major seven we looked at a second ago when we were going through our little chord progression as you can hear it's a very different effect from the dominant seventh sound it's not going to resolve us anywhere because we're in g major and this is the tonic chord but all of a sudden the sound the quality of the chord has changed major seventh extensions work really well on the tonic and subdominant chords of a key so in g major that will give us g major seven and then the sub dominant the four chord one two three four c major seven the marvelous thing is you don't have to stop at seventh you can play major ninths major elevenths major 13th even if you want to okay or you can do it on minor chords so a minor is diatonic in g major and we can have a minor 7 a minor 9 a minor 11 a minor 13. yeah you can start missing notes out if these chords are getting too chunky like that c major 13 we looked at a minute ago you could play that in there in g major as well actually it would be diatonic to g major and i'm missing several of the the notes of the chord of c major 13 out there just to make it comfortable to play i've still got enough of the notes in there to give me the character of that chord there are simpler extensions you can do things like create sixth chords there's c6 it's just a c c chord with an a at it or an add nine chord there's c add nine with the d in there look those chords up try them out see what they can do basically as you're probably realizing if you want to make your progressions jazzier to use rasco's word then there's a ton of stuff you can do just by using extensions once again don't try to learn all the theory before you sit at the piano and play around with these things that's the classic mistake of adult learners okay instead here's an exercise find a major key song with fairly simple chords and see if you can extend them if you like you can use the chord progression that you came up with for yourself in the exercise that we did earlier look up the chords if necessary that there are loads of chord lookup tools online or i've got a video called all the basic piano chords in one epic tutorial that will help you and just play around with those extensions on your basic progression and listen to and learn the sounds so we know we can make our chord progressions sound more interesting by playing around with the chords within them yeah we've looked at some ways of extending those chords to get a richer sound but what happens if we start to play around with the structures of the progressions themselves this is where we get onto the territory of non-diatonic chords in other words building chords into our progressions that aren't diatonic that aren't naturally occurring in the key we happen to be in so if we're in the key of c major we know that our diatonic chords are the ones we can grow out of the c major scale c d minor e minor f g a minor and b diminished and any diatonic extensions of those chords but there's no reason why we can't drop in a chord like b flat if we do then we're using a non-diatonic chord and if you are after jazzy sounding progressions or rich interesting sounding progressions non-diatonics are incredibly useful because they are kind of sit up and take notice chords they are usually very striking but you need to have your wits about you when it comes to handling them effectively now to come up with non-diatonic chords for your progressions you can just sort of play chords at random and choose what sounds good and actually i'd strongly recommend you do that at least sometimes because as you know by now just messing around and listening is always a good thing but there are also conventional tried and tested ways you can use non-diatonic chords in your progressions and one of those that's really common in jazz is to use what we call secondary dominant chords that's where we use a chord that's not diatonic to the key to act as a dominant that takes us to a chord that is in the key but which isn't the tonic because the tonic already has a dominant if that sounds mad let me show you an example let's say that we're writing an 8 bar chord progression in the key of c major and we're around about halfway through and we're sat on the tonic chord c what we want to do is get to a final dominant chord g or g7 that will take us back to the tonic at the end of the progression now if we wanted to be all kind of plain vanilla we would do something like this c a minor d minor seven g seven and back to c okay at the end there we've got one of those two five one progressions incredibly common yeah now all of that is very diatonic and straightforward if we were to introduce a secondary dominant it would give things a little bit more zip okay let me show you how we would do that we're on our c chord but then instead of going to a minor we go to a7 now a7 definitely isn't diatonic to c major because it's got that c sharp in it and that's not in the c major scale but it does act as a strong dominant to what comes next the d minor chord d minor 7 in this case if you know a little bit about intervals you'll know that a is a fifth above d so if we were in the key of d minor then a7 would be a strong dominant chord not the only dominant chord because minor keys are a bit complicated but let's leave that for now so instead of our playing old c a minor d minor seven g seven back to the tonic we've got c a seven g seven c kind of a jazzier sound if we were actually playing jazz of course we would be extending all of those chords c major seven a nine that b gives us the a9 uh sound to d minor seven d minor nine to g seven what i would probably do if i were playing jazz would be to use a tritone substitution there a little bit beyond the scope of this tutorial but it would be that okay that's a d flat seven chord over g to take us back to c and now i'm playing a c add nine again for a little bit of a richer sound so that's for secondary dominant we're we're borrowing a dominant seventh chord that doesn't belong in the key of c to give us a stronger lead into a chord that does d minor yeah if we wanted to go really crazy we could use two non-diatonic chords and do this c a7 d7 which is strongly dominant to g7 and back to c if you listen to a lot of traditional blues you will hear that kind of progression yeah there we're using d7 as a secondary dominant to take us to the g7 which means that the a7 is kind of a tertiary dominant yeah and this whole run down a7 d7 g7 to c is part of the circle of fifths if you've come across that concept before you can have quite a lot of fun hunting around for other non-diatonic chords to add interest to your chord progressions again it's a huge subject but let me give you a couple of examples of things that you can do i'm going to look at these in c major again now it's important to say that you need to practice this stuff in other keys as well don't get trapped in c major i'm just using it for clarity okay an important thing to remember there anyway here's our c major scale and our basic unextended c major diatonic chords that grow out of that scale are c d minor e minor f g a minor and b diminished the function of that seventh chord to be diminished by the way is pretty much the same as the five chord the g it's pretty strongly dominant but it's not as stable as g you can think of it as being the top end of the g7 chord anyway that's by the by now one non-diatonic that i really like is to take the number two chord the supertonic which is usually minor in major keys and make it into a major chord say a dominant seventh okay now we've already seen d7 used as a secondary dominant in the key of c but we can do other things with it as well the trick to using non-diatonic chords in a progression is finding a smooth way off them back to a diatonic chord of the key otherwise you wind up giving yourself a key change which you might want but you might not and if you don't want it it can take some undoing okay so let's look at this one c to d7 i call that jump the magic second yeah that's just my pet name for it it's not official or anything but i quite like it c to d7 where could we go next well what we could do if we're looking for a diatonic chord to go next is go to f so that's from the tonic chord to a major dominant seventh up version of the number two chord back to a diatonic four chord can you see why that works smoothly it's basically because many of the notes of d7 and f are either very close to each other or identical okay both chords share the a and the c and this f sharp in d7 is just a semitone away from f now you could make that transition even smoother by using add nine chords here's c add 9 which is c with a d dropped into it lovely warm sound note that i'm missing out that c there that would sound muddy if i put that in i've got one there and one there but i'm missing out middle c so we don't have too much of a clash with the d next to it okay here's c add nine and if i move to d7 [Music] and then to f it's even smoother yeah can you see why that is it's because the d add9 already the c add9 already has the d in it so we've got a shared tone with the next chord [Music] and it smooths out our progression even more okay so shared notes and notes in close proximity are really important c add 9 to d7 feels like a less dramatic jump than a straightforward c to d7 play around with that in a few different keys and see what you can do another type of non-diatonic chord that gets a lot of air time is the chromatic mediant now if you believe half the stuff you read online you would think that the chromatic mediant was some kind of ancient magic yeah people are like oh wise one inductors into the secrets of the ancient law that is the chromatic mediant but they're not mysterious at all chromatic mediums are actually pretty straightforward and they are really handy as non-diatonic chords to drop into your progressions but also as pivot chords if you want to modulate into a distant key different topic i know but it's a useful thing to know about movie composers in particular are really fond of chromatic mediants to help them modulate but let's look at what these things actually are let's go back to our good old scale of c major c d e f g a b c as we know we can give those notes numbers as well one two three four five six seven and back to one and as degrees of the scale they also have names tonic supertonic mediant subdominant dominant submediant leading tone and back to the tonic and the chords that we grow off of those tones the diatonic chords take those names as well tonic supertonic mediant subdominant dominant submediant leading tone chord and back to the tonic so obviously the ones we're interested in here are the mediant and the submediant some people say that chromatic mediants only grow off the mediant chord but that is not the case we'll come on to the arguments that circle around chromatic mediants shortly okay so in my definition a chromatic mediant chord is a medium to a submediant so that's e minor or a minor in the key of c that has been messed about with in some way and typically that will be one of two ways either it will have been made major when it should be minor whoops so e major and a major are both chromatic mediant chords in the key of c major or the other way it can get messed around with is by flattening flat flattening it a semitone so instead of e minor we could have e flat major or e flat minor and instead of a minor we could have a flat major or a flat minor now i don't think those flat minors are very effective okay although they might technically be chromatic mediant chords depending on how you define them i don't think they're that useful i think if you're in the key of c major the useful chromatic mediants are e major a major e flat major a flat major okay one of the great problems and wikipedia will back me up here because it does say this i did check one of the great problems with chromatic mediant is that there is not wide agreement among theorists about what they actually are okay some people define them one way some people define them another way as far as i'm concerned the useful chromatic mediums in major keys are the ones that i've just shown you we've already seen one chromatic mediant chord at work in the key of c major when we used a7 as a secondary dominant to take us to the to that d minor seven chord a few minutes ago okay the a7 is a chromatic mediant and there it was functioning as a secondary dominant but chromatic mediants are useful as standalones in their own right just like the d7 chord was a minute or two ago so let's try a couple let's say we're in c major and we can go c whoa you know very radical sound but it's quite easy to get back to to a diatonic chord we could go to the g to take us to the c or there's that chromatic median again we can go to the subdominant the f as well yeah let's try it on a different one let's go now the reason that those chords work pretty well as non-diatonics is as was the case with that d7 chord their proximity to diatonic chords that exist in the key okay so if you look at the a flat chord in particular we've got the tonic of our original key in there c and we're very close to the a natural okay so that's why going from there to there sounds reasonably cool and also we're super close although there are no shared notes to the dominant yeah same kind of principle works for e flat now as a very very very general rule so general that i can immediately think of billions of exceptions to it but as a very general rule if you want that kind of ethereal kind of way out sound then the chromatic mediants to go for are the flattened ones the a flat or the e flat try not to use them in succession or if you do be very careful because it starts to sound like a key change whereas if you're going for the major ones on the existing mediant and submediant notes you know that's when you get into the territory of winding up using secondary dominance and things like that as usual the rule is play around with them and see how you get on there are no hard and fast rules just try dropping a chromatic mediant into one of your progressions and see what happens okay i have four final tips to give you number one don't get obsessed with the rules remember that music theory isn't there to tell you what you can do it's there to describe and explain what musicians do do yeah always trust your ears first number two make sure that you're playing around with this stuff in keys other than c major i said this a few minutes ago but it's really important c is great for grasping the principles but you don't want to become an expert in c major and a clutch in every other key okay number three although the best way to learn this stuff is to play around with it for yourself the second best way and it's a close second is to look at how other people do it so to go back to rastko's question if you want to learn how to build jazzy chord progressions you won't go far wrong if you get hold of a song book of jazz standards or r b or funk classics or whatever and look at how those guys do it you can learn an incredible amount in an hour sat at the piano with a battered old song book number four remember you can also play around with timing we've been looking at things mostly in four four time you can do it in three four you can have two chords in a bar you can have three chords in a bar four chords in a bar as many as you want one very common way to add complexity and interest to a chord progression is to put in for example passing chords which have been a little bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about today but again if you dig around in other people's work you will see them borrow them drop them into your own progressions experiment see how they sound okay so there we go rasco i really hope that answered your question even if it was in much more detail than you bargained for if anyone else has any questions give me a shout because i'm always happy to respond to good ones some of the best tutorial ideas i get come from questions from you guys now if you've enjoyed this tutorial don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel like comment do all of that stuff and also check out my book bundle deal at bills piano pages dot com slash bundle or click the little youtube card that you'll find in the top right hand corner of the screen that's a really great deal that i've got running at the moment have fun playing around with your chord progressions and i'll see you next time

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 82,000

Keywords:

Id: CCwHWoJGY9I

Length: 40min 24sec (2424 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021