How to write lofi hip hop chords WITHOUT samples

hi I'm underbelly and you suck at producer making lo-fi hiphop is easy all you have to do is sample some dead guy playing two chords over vinyl crackle and there you have it an easy way to make money without ever having to require anyone to be fully awake but what if you didn't want to pillage the hard work of dead people to make streaming revenue well in today's lesson we're gonna learn how to write our own lo-fi hip-hop style chords and actually practice playing them with an app called melodic s-- let's get started okay check it before we can build chord progressions let's go ahead and pick a scale in this case I'm gonna write in the key of E and let's build the E major scale by starting with the root and going whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step wowsers and that's the formula to build any major scale now here's how it sounds like it sounds so happy and jubilant I wanted to sound like some dead guy playing jazz music so let's go ahead and take the 3rd 6th and 7th notes of the scale and lower them a half-step that's how you turn any major scale into a minor scale wow there's much better let's go ahead and highlight all the notes here go ahead and hit ctrl or command D hold down shift press the down arrow key to put it down an octave press the left arrow key highlight all of these push them to the left of the loop bracket so that they don't play hit the full button and wowzers now whatever note we put in the middle here is automatically gonna be within the scale amazing just so that we don't have to do this every single time let's go ahead and rename this E minor scale and click and drag that to the left now whenever we want to rebuild that a minor scale we can just drag it into whatever project we're working on and allows errs there it is let's go ahead and build the scale step wise like so let's hear it okay it's a little fast we're not trying to be Mozart over here let's go ad and hit x two and make each note twice as long I wish I was twice as long geez [Music] now let's go ahead and build a triad out of every note in the scale starting with this root to build the tried it's really simple all you have to do is take the root note whatever chord you're trying to build here skip the next note in the scale in this case f-sharp take the note after that in this case G and do it again skip ad' and then we can just go ahead and repeat that same shape again up on every note of the scale is here but let's go ahead and take it a step further we're going to add a new note on top of each core just by continuing that leapfrog game so skipping the seek note adding the D and doing that once again for each chord here and here we have Wow okay so now we're starting to get into jazz territory here these are called seventh chords and there's many different kinds of seventh chords so let's take a little detour here I'm going to go ahead and take this seventh chord this G chord right here create a new clip and copy it over let's hear it let's go ahead and examine this for a second this bottom three notes here looks like it makes up the major chord because we can see that there are four and then three half steps but if we take a look at the distance between the bottom note and the top note of the chord you can see that it's basically an octave G - G - a half step whenever you see that interval it's called a major seventh interval the G - the F sharp and then if we take the major chord the G major chord and add this major seventh on top you guessed it it's called a major seventh chord wowzers now let's go ahead and do something a little different here for the second G chord I'm gonna go ahead and take that F sharp lower it a half step and let's hear the difference oh Jesus now this just sounds like the barbershop quartet that you know Derrick joined in school before we had to take him out sounds super annoying intense and this is because you can see that the court at the bottom is this G major chord and then the F is natural on top so that the distance between the G and the F is not eleven half steps as it was before but now it's only ten these ten half-step interval is called a minor seventh so we can see that this chord is made up of the major chord at the bottom plus the minor seventh interval on top that is called the dominant seventh chord and this chord creates a lot of tension it's very useful in jazz and low farm now if this is confusing to you I've also included in the video description below a cheat sheet that shows you how to build each one of these different kinds of seventh chords wowzers okay let's see if we can use our newfound knowledge of seventh chords to build a sick low five progression I'm going to copy over this II - scale clip we made earlier we're gonna build a progression called the two five one now this is a super common progression in jazz music but because Lofa is the unwanted bastard child of jazz like the derek of jazz if you will would copy over a lot of the same progressions over to Lofa so let's go ahead and take the two chord copy it over take the five chord copy it over and finally settle on that soon one chord copy it over let's make the one nice and long take a listen okay it's too fast we don't want to sound like we're trying too hard I mean we're making low fie hip-hop after all let's hit times two to make this twice as slow okay so that's not bad but I feel like we could improve this progression a lot so let's go ahead and see what we can do here first off when in doubt you could just add more notes so for example you could turn the seventh chord here into a 9th chord by playing the Leapfrog game again we can skip the f-sharp and the g on top do the same thing for that last chord there skip the e add the f-sharp extended take a listen that's got a little extra flavor but the chord progression is sounding a little bit unbalanced because first chord has 5 chord five notes scuse me escort has five notes middle court only has four so let's see what we can do there maybe let's take out say a middle note a note that isn't super important in that first chord same thing with the last take a listen okay so that's sounding a little bit more balanced but there's something about this little cord that's just not super satisfying to me let's go ahead and hit the fold button see what's going on here so looks like this middle cord this five cord here is composed of a B minor chord at the bottom right because we got three half steps between the bottom in the middle four half steps between the middle and the top plus this minor seventh interval on top so B to a that's ten half steps okay so it looks like this is just a regular old minor seventh chord now to add a little bit more tension to this let's go ahead and turn this into a dominant seventh chord remember dominant seventh chord sounded like this there that barbershop quartet chord and they're composed of a major chord at the bottom with the minor seventh on top let's go ahead and hear how that sounds it's a little bit better let's go out and see what it sounds like if we take the root notes of each chord and put them down an octave just add a little bit of beefiness to this [Music] okay okay here we go let's make this a little bit more smooth by taking that a in the second chord there in the five chord and putting it down an octave so that's just holding down the same a from the first to the second chord here let's take a listen one more time [Applause] okay we're getting there now one last thing you can do if you want to add a little bit of extra flavor and tension in this court is to take that f-sharp the fifth of the chord and raise it a half step so that we're getting a sharp five let's hear it [Music] Jesus okay now I'm really ready to write some wolf I hip-hop in fact I wrote a whole song called Speak Easy using this exact same chord progression then I teamed up with the good people at melodic Stu create a lesson around it so you can learn to play it yourself for those of you who haven't seen my previous video on melodic s-- it's a super dope app that helps producers learn how to play piano let's check it out okay it shouldn't be too hard I mean I only wrote the song so okay totally totally figure that out okay I'm easy bassline I'm totally okay oh okay it's not problems so easy whatever man [Music] [Music] okay looks like we had a little lemon a mistake here okay so check it you can try out playing this lesson yourself and also sign up for Milotic s-- by clicking on the link in the video description below for those of you who would like to take it a step further join my discord we're will be hosting a sweet challenge to see who can write the dopest Lofa song using the techniques and tips I described in the video thanks for watching feel free to share if you found this helpful I'm underbelly have a great day you [Music]

Channel: You Suck at Producing

Views: 991,039

Keywords: lofi hip hop, ableton live, ableton live 10, writing lofi chords, how to write lofi, how to write lofi hip hop chords, chillhop, you suck at producing, you suck at music theory, 7th chords, music theory, jazz music theory, how to write jazzy lofi chords, hip hop production, underbelly, ableton live 10 tutorial, ableton lofi tutorial, fl studio, hip hop

Id: djQlIr1ZYt8

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019