Jacob Collier Qwest Masterclass (Paris)

so harmony is extraordinary does anybody here like harmony you don't like it okay fair enough harmony is what happens when we put more than one note next to each other and they happen at the same time so this is a D this is an a this is harmony how many gets more more exciting than more notes you add you also have increased amount of responsibility the more notes right because every note has to have a place to go does anyone know what a triad is great at Ryder's is three notes this is the C major triad can I hear you sing that triad [Music] very nice and now let's say you sing C minor ok so that's that's the foundation of a lot of music is based around those chords and just with try as you can achieve so much harmonic motion let me show you so so okay so so a triad is a triad is three notes and the root is on the bottom and the fifth is on the top and the third is in the middle very nice and even without rearranging these notes there's there's a lot of description you can do just using triads right it's lovely now what happens when we start to rearrange the notes in triads is that we get a more more descriptive narrative I suppose work ways in which we can never get between key centers so this is C major one that you just sang so beautifully this is in root position which means that the root C because C is the anchor it means that the root is at the bottom of the chord if we move the root up into the middle of the triad so if get if we go c e and g and we move to C up to the top then we get E in the base like this that's a very different sensation from this one right similar color but it's less balanced you know it's less like it's less substantial maybe it wants to move somewhere and then my personal favorite inversion is is the second inversion which is when we put the third the e at the top of the chord again so we've done all possible combinations of these three notes so we've got C and the babes be in the base and then G in the base I love this one because it's so at home but is it's not home either it's really really special and in classical music lock the time you have this cadence where it goes we call it a one c-51 or you don't have to call it that but some people do and the nice thing about it is it saying this is where we're going but we're not there yet and now we're going to go there and I love I love arriving in the key center on this sound so say I'm an E flat major for example [Music] it's like someone's opened a window to a new key but you haven't been forced through it you know you're not falling out the window and to see major it's like it's good you just visiting you just brushing against it and this is before we even add other notes so this is really just try out so so does that make sense inversion the difficulty inversion so we've got root position and in first inversion second inversion and then we're back to root so within those combinations there's all sorts of emotions possible and all sorts of of motions possible well I have a theory which are very pleased with which is that all major chords are fifths and all minor chords are fourths if you extend them properly let me demonstrate that so see those are the first five notes of the of the C fifth cycle and that's actually all of the notes in the C pentatonic scale do you guys know about pentatonix so those five notes so for me that is C major in its most unbiased form this which is C F B flat E flat a flat D flat that that for me is is the most opposite sound possible right because what you've got is fits and forth so one opens out and one closes down and the strange thing about this is that forth sir chief it's upside down so what you have is minor is actually a reflection of major which is kind of insane but basically speaking I feel like when we want to extend a cord when we want to extend a major chord adding fifth this is a very successful way to do this and in jazz are there any jazz musicians here okay cool in jazz a lot of the time we think about climbing up from it from a note in thirds so we have C major that we started with and then we have a seventh and we keep on adding so we got a ninth and an 11 and a 13 and a 15th and 17th and a 19th 21st etc and they're essentially infinite notes to be added and in a minor kind of direction I feel like this when we clamp up in fourths this is things sink extremely deep into the case enter an extremely bright is the fifth version so that there's the major and there's the minor that's kind of how I think about it and dominant chords I suppose a different flavor of this because dominant chords mean we're going somewhere and then that the major in the minor that's kind of where we arrive so for example this cadence that we started with which is like c7 to F what our ear primarily hears is a little bit of tension and then a bit of release and that that's the most important thing here so it's all about motion so if I if I choose to add a note in this chord like say for example I add this note right I have to keep that that note of a place to resolve right so for example I might do yeah it's nice so all of those notes have a place to go which is very nice if I choose to add a different note say for example those are two notes this is a nice chord on my favorites does anyone know what this chord is called [Music] flat nine is great and unnatural thirteen exciting so this courtier this note here wants to move down yeah or it can move up it's also very nice but essentially speaking you can add as many notes as you like as long as they have a reason to be there because the worst thing is notes that have no reason to be there in fact that's not the worst thing there are worse things than that like shipwrecks and so one thing I became interested in is well if you have a dominant chord and the only thing that matters is is tension then why don't we try being as tense as possible and see how we can how we can get out of it so one thing I became interested in for example is you take this which is C 7 and then you climb from D up and d-major to an E major agent like this this is a ridiculous cord right it's it's definitely not resolved in any way right however you can resolve that if you very careful about it you can make sure those noes have a place to go right it's okay and so you just have to be careful about about the notes that you out but I like doing this I like I like superimposing are the keys up on other keys so what that chord really is is it's emajor over D major over C so it's like a tertiary stacked chord it's like a triple decker bus and it's very very very rich and very dense and when it comes to improvising it's just it's like a another thing that you can try and use you know so rather than like diatonic resolution suddenly if you think okay I mean c7 when I'm going to superpose emajor over it then you're free to do whatever you want to do and it's something about it's crazy but the reason it works is because E wants to rise so they all have a place to go and you can you can pretty much do that with anything which is which is really cool another thing I'd like to talk about with Caden Singh which is this idea of resolution is this idea of perfect Cadence's versus political Cadence's do you guys know about Playgirl cancers and you're good you're really good so a perfect Cadence's is five to one right a legal cadence is four to one and we hear Playgirl Cadence's a lot in like church music for example so where is he in classical music and even in in jazz to an extent if I'm kidding to f-major as you just make it easy I'm gonna cadence to see which is right on the line of the stump so D G C is like a two five one right do you guys like two five ones you do no I'm not I'm not super keen myself but um but that's okay so yeah two five one this is our new home C major so it sounds quite classical it definitely sounds resolved because you cannot argue with now somebody like Keith Jarrett do you guys know Keith Jarrett someone like Keith Jarrett would maybe do which is really nice and that's beef fat FC and so whereas in traditional jazz you might have like e a D G and C as a way of resolving in in in plague in in in the land of Playgirl Cadence's that that would translate as like a flat E flat and see and there's actually as much gravity in my opinion when in terms of how much you want to arrive there but there's something really wholesome about it because for me if you're in a doing C major and you go like you know they sound that thing it's it's it comes from the minor side of the key if you think about C major and C minor it comes from within the keys and it comes from that the darkness of the key Center and for that reason arriving at the key feels like you're opening rather than closing because if you if you move anti-clockwise then you're you're getting darker yeah you're getting darker you're going it's like resolving right as opposed to play glee it's like we're dark and we're gonna open this is this is just my opinion but I think it's really really important that you understand play go Cadence's because i think they're as important as perfect answers and i also think that when it comes to improvising there's so many more possibilities when it comes to play go Keynes's you can pretty much double your your your routes to a key center if you if you consider using play your Cadence's as opposed to just perfect instance because people practice all of their lips do you guys practice licks really oh man so the people people practice licks a lot of time over dominant chords you know that one but what about like this kind of stuff and you can actually you can even start being plagued with cadence from E which is really weird because instead of going you can go and it's something so elegant about it don't you think it's cool yeah I think it's really cool that's why I'm telling you about it because it's like it's like the end of the road is bright too rather than the end of the road is find but I think when it came to songwriting it's it's a very different thing because when you when you compose a song you imagine that this song has a long lifespan it's it's gonna last probably longer than you hopefully longer than you and so you have to leave room in that song for people to see themselves because if people just see you in the song then it doesn't rehab anybody other than maybe you and if they can see themselves in it then that's what will make them fall in love with it and for me as a listener of music I guess the interesting thing is I yeah I didn't grow up being like the the the the chops kid you know when I was at school I wasn't the guy I wasn't the kid you could do like really but it wasn't like I I wasn't that guy I will I could hear what was going on but I couldn't I didn't have that that technique to play and being pretty much self-taught I think that one of the kind of challenges was thinking my ear is up here and my technique is down here how can I get them to be married without one getting smaller and and so gradually I guess you have to work your skills you have to work your technique because that's how this gets closer to the ear but all the way through my life I don't know about you guys but my ear has always been ahead of my technique and I think that's actually a good thing because I can net I can still not do what I'm capable of doing and I still can't do what I'm I can hear in my head and as long as that's true I'll always have someone to grow and that's a really cool thing in my opinion every note that you can make every note work with it with every chord that's like one of my mottos and and so I think that it's not really I know it's supposed to be there oh no it's not supposed to be there it's not like right and wrong it's it's more there are strong decisions and there are weak decisions specifically with with motion like motion of notes so for example if I said like does this chord sound good and I played this court you must say it's a bit weird I'm not quite sure I understand what that sound is but then if I went then all those notes make sense and so the amazing thing about about kind of horizontal composition rather than vertical composition is that you can validate every note and so I don't think there's such a thing as this note is wrong or this note is right and that's why I set myself that challenge of like save B major over g7 it doesn't really work because you've got G and F sharp and F in the chord so it's like they're all spread out and so you think we'll rather than say okay so I wouldn't put that in my in my text book of sounds you think well how can I justify that as a sound and the answer is well this can go up and this can go down yeah and that opens up your your your improvisational language a lot as well because then you can play all these weird sounds over the top kind of thing so I think that rather than say this note yeah rather than say this note is good and this note is bad it's more this note hasn't found its consequence yet or this note is in the wrong context and then that's how you can move things forward but I don't think you should ever reject a note from a chord before trying all of the possible solutions to that chord and as far as how do you know if it's right or wrong I think you just you know because you can hear it and if it feels right then it's probably fine and like when I was 7 years old I didn't I didn't have necessary that the skill to validate this poured and and now I have more skill so I'm able to validate that chord but if you played me this I probably would have still felt okay about it and I think that you probably underestimate your own ear to to solve problems and sometimes it's just matter of staying with a problem until it's been solved it's those bundles of things that you get into places and you get out of I love that I love it so much and you can be so inventive with it you know this right [Music] right crazy or [Music] and then and then the challenge is how did you get out of something like that you know [Music] you have to you have to weave your way around these things without without it's been called called called called cord here's a little bits all about relationships and so for me you know with something like that when it comes to arranging I mentioned I've got lots of my composition skills from arranging when it comes something like that the manatee always is is it's the one constant thing and then you can push the harmony and you can even push the rhythm because the melody has something that about it which is stable and I think it's important when you think about composition and arranging to make sure that something is always stable you will this little baby notes inside every everyone has those it's like little hairs on your arm so so that that's what makes that's what makes the universe work or something because every every sound every sound is is constructed in a slightly different way in terms of harmonics that allowed in quiet there are infinite number of harmonics essentially you have a fundamental and then you have a number of ratios above which create what this note feels like and this is actually the way that this is constructed is it's called a formant and safely lump you play a vibraphone note and then you play a violin you play a violin note that what what sets those apart from each other are the way in which the harmonic series are construct because you can play the same note B flat right on the Y referred and what's different about them is that they have different they have different formats because they're different sounds but they have the same fundamental frequency if you strip all the harmonics off it's exactly the same sine wave at the bottom now many might argue this is how harmony came about because if you go yeah it's a bit flat because the harmonic series is really in tuned the piano is actually out of tune that's a different master class yeah a major chord a major chord exists within every sound incredible and I think that's kind of why we were drawn to it perhaps as human beings because when you put two things together and then you add a third thing the natural place to put it in terms of harmony is a triad because tries exist in nature basically rhythm which I start with rhythm you okay speed up okay so we're gonna divide this space up into a few different numbers we're gonna start with to 750 purposes and perfectly purpose it's a multi-purpose it's a multi-purpose imperfectly purposes are multi-purpose it's a multi-purpose about 2 3 4 5 8 budgeted for fascism it's a beautiful 9 most people most people versus certainly most people okay that's cool so the amazing thing about about rhythm is that again it operates on many different levels that what you just did is is the number of beats in every beat and traditionally we think about music as being number of beats in every bar right there's three beats in the bar or four beats in the bar I become more excited about rhythm when it's about music that when it's about rhythm that it's not so much about there's four beats nabarro in the seven beats and about here it's about there's four beats in there in every bar but within every beat look up well look what's going on into gravity because it's all about tension releasing you can do it in very very minut ways one one major pioneer of this was a producer called J Dilla do you know J Dilla nice very cool another words D'Angelo no James Lowe very nice so J Dilla turned the quantize button off on his mp3 NPC 3000 and do you guys know what quantizing is a little bit quantizing OOP I can demonstrate this with my MIDI controller okay so cool so if I go like super advanced super advanced thank you so here's what the note side has played this is logic by the way do you guys know about logic to use logic logic portals ooh Cubase Reaper Oh crazy reef is the best one okay so so here all the here all the thingies I displayed and you see this button here qq4 quest TV if I if I quantize all these divisions it will go watch carefully right and now at no one will know I ever played that badly cool and that's that's different from I said let me turn the click on so you need to click I like that one actually that's good so you understand focusing does it rounds everything to the nearest division and in so doing destroys every element of soul present in the music not quite true because there is some cool music that's been quantized but in general quantizing is dangerous because you don't realize the potential of the rhythm the don't realize how much potential was in the rhythm before he quantized it and there's lots of stars music in the world where rhythm is not quantized and it's way cooler I have a career but actually it's the same as when I was 10 because I'm just doing my experiments I'm writing the musical on the right and I'm pushing myself I'm learning and I'm interacting with people and I'm I'm discovering more and more about the music and about myself and that's all I could really wish for so you know rather than me thinking or in order to be more popular I'm gonna make this kind of music or in order to please my fans I'm gonna spend my time doing this thing or this thing it I don't mind about that stuff too much I it's more about what do you like and as I said the longer think that the lovely thing about liking things is that you don't takes no energy you just think that is cool that feels good I'm gonna go and do that and that applies to life decisions as well sometimes it's like I don't know if there's a good idea but it feels like a good idea so I'm gonna go and do it or this doesn't feel like a good idea I'm not gonna do it and it's like that black gut feeling is what drives a lot of us I think to do what we want to do whether or not we listen to that voice it still drives us so I would just say don't close yourself down and be a child for as long as you can and just create and go for it

Channel: Jacob Collier

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Keywords: Jacob, Collier, Jacob Collier, Masterclass, music, Paris, class, teach, harmony, rhythm, life, dominant chord, Colier, Djesse, Volume, Djesse Volume 2, Djesse Vol. 2, Djesse Vol. 3, new music, QwestTV, Qwest, Quincy Jones, chord, scale, polyrhythm, France, tour, circle of fifths, master, boogie, close to you, J dilla, quantize, beat, groove, resolution, live, album, song, theory, production, breakdown, logic, piano, audience, kimbra, daniel, tank, jojo, dodie, stevie, quincy, lionel

Id: mLJVvjqMjbo

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020