Jacob Collier Q&A: Key Change Hack, Advanced Triplets, Breaking Rules, Ear Training, Music School

can you give a brief lesson on key changes what key chains you prefer well if you want a secret weapon a key to the castle of key changes do you know what i'd recommend exploring i would recommend exploring diminished chords i'll give you a quick explanation as to why this is my shadow this is my hand this is c major this is a triad it's a three part chord a triad and a diminished chord is this and a diminished chord is a chord where all of the notes in the chord are the same distance apart so minor third minor third and minor third and there are actually only three diminished chords that exist that exist within the piano because that's the same as that one you see there are only three and every diminished chord is a i like to think of it as a four-way crossroads because the thing about diminished chord is it leads you to loads of different places and a good way to think about this actually if you lower any note in any diminished chord uh by by a half step or as we say in the uk a semitone then it will lead you to a different location and it's a bit of a short shortcut it's like a a life hack so check this out this is c diminished if i put the c down to b takes it to e if i put the e flat down to a d takes you to g i put the f sharp down to an f takes you to b flat i put the a down to an a flat takes it to d flat now can you believe that can you believe that and that is really really cool um and it means that when you're playing and you find yourself at a diminished chord you can go anywhere you want to anywhere you want to go absolutely anywhere it's a beautiful thing because diminished chords are actually kind of fun and they're in a lot of songs especially old jazz standards come on and obviously dominant chords are just triads with a dominant thing on it so basically every time you play a triad you're playing a diminished chord and so every every single chord is every single other chord period when it comes to harmonizing stuff if you have control over all the different voices then uh then you have ultimate power to be uh to be a storyteller because you can do whatever you want and if you if you compound knowledge with freedom then then you're then you're really talking freedom is way more important than knowledge for like freedom of thought and freedom of experiment being fearless is like crazily important a lot of people sit around worrying about this note is wrong or what if there's no it doesn't sound good or um what if i'm bad or what if there's a right way of doing everything and i'm not doing the right way of doing everything it doesn't matter it doesn't matter you can do whatever you want literally whatever you want and if you realize that it's just so capacious and so fun because you really start to dig the immense potential of kind of every sound basically it's it's about freedom and it's about play it's about play it's about playing recommendations for training your ear listening listening is the best way to train your ear active active listening conscious listening listening to things that you like and trying to understand them and figure them out that was how i learned music was by listening to musicians i really liked a lot and getting every note of people's musical universe i i had like in my dna in my in my mind in my body in my in my ear it's it's the way it's honestly the way have i thought about becoming a hogwarts professor not really i don't know the words to any songs i just know i because i listen to the music i mean i know that's a silly thing to say but honestly i spend so much time um being conscious of the musical elements that i sometimes just completely forget to listen to words like period i just i just forget do you recommend going to music school i'm worried it won't make me a better artist i don't think you need to go to music school i don't think you need to go it's completely up to you i think that learning is something that you do for yourself and as yourself and i think that education is something that other people do to you and both have to exist at different points in your life i'm very grateful for certain teachers in my life who came into my life at different times but a lot of my best teachers were people who were either friends of mine or people i was listening to like whose albums i was listening to um i think that sort so musical education can provide a pretty risky and dangerous set of values where there's like right and wrong and this is the way you do it this is the way you don't do it and and the thing about the rules is that all the rules are arbitrary there will be people who say this is how you do it and if you do it a different way then you're wrong or i'm right and do it the way i think it's right and i'm the master and anyone who ever tells you that they know all the answers have simply stopped learning basically what we've been doing is this is my room um hello and what i've been doing on the floor just now is signing um these posters for you and if you want a poster then you can get one how to get better at actually feeling what you're playing and to understand what you're feeling and put into a musical context sing the notes in the chords you play sing if you sing then you you you emote it's like an instantaneous thing and obviously experimentation just experiment with a with a with a feeling right if i go and then i go and then i go [Music] and i go [Music] [Applause] because you're singing you feel your way through it's like geography when i started to experiment with chords with singing then i started to uh understand each of the notes of the chords slightly more strongly and after i did after i'd done that it was easier to identify with each note and therefore with the motion of each note and the stronger the motion of each note between the chords are the more um sensitive and nuanced and high resolution your narratives can be we can divide evenly by three but it's more interesting when we don't right like genoa music from morocco which i often talk about does this lilty thing with threes where instead of it being like it's like it's a similar thing you're like great british folk music funny you should ask take a train but then people like grits and there's this myth that like the grid is correct but actually actually it's not and triplets can be really flexible and dynamic and interesting if you let them be free from the grid if you could be an animal what animal would you be i've always had a real affinity with ring-tailed lemurs

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Id: Sa3A72qnFgI

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021