Jazz Pianist Reacts to Dua Lipa - Don't Start Now

cause it won't make any sense oh god somebody's gonna dub that the vast majority of people who don't live under rocks have probably heard don't start now by duolip at this point i for one do happen to live under a rock and while i've heard parts of the song and i'm generally kind of familiar with the gist of it i have never actually given it a listen so i thought that's exactly what we'd do and for whatever it's worth i'll submit my opinion as to whatever i like or don't like about it which absolutely nobody asked for but in an effort to continue to educate myself somebody who i guess i would consider myself to be a recovering jazz elitist i'm curious to know more and learn more about what's going on in i guess mainstream music today what's happening that's surprisingly good and for some of the stuff that maybe isn't some things that maybe i would consider changing if it were up to me which it absolutely is not so who really cares let's dive into this and we'll see what it's all about [Music] okay so this is the part that i think a lot of people um are obviously that first that opening line is like i don't know it's the part i recognize i don't know if that's the same for anybody else but the other part that i think is the most recognizable is this bass line this sort of funk uh disco type thing that i think it caught everybody's ear and it's one of the big reasons why people keep gravitating towards this song and being like yes this is this sounds great [Music] that that little thing was nice what was that there's this little lick in there oh that's nice ah yeah yeah yeah that's nice [Music] i think that's i think that's what it is [Music] i think i think it's that i think that's what it is that's not that's nice that's really nice in the video i did on stuck with you by ariana grande and justin bieber i mentioned how the feel i felt like it was kind of going for this feel where it was just asking to be a little deeper a little more relaxed a little more pulled back i thought that it was just kind of it was a little bit too surface and and just a little too metronomic now in this particular field where we have it's kind of more of like a retro disco-ish type of thing with this funk bass line this is one of those scenarios where for this tempo and this rhythmic style that super locked in right on top of the beat feel that's kind of what you want and so for this style i really actually love this this this really really locked in feel you know it's funny it's like this this sort of uh i don't know guilty pleasure or something that i think sometimes people like me who in the past have kind of felt like they're not supposed to like this stuff man it's just fun like you wonder why they play it in clubs for people to dance to like it's fun it's locked in it's it's tight it's yeah it sounds great [Music] the melody in there i actually dig a lot i think it's nice it all fits super well it lends itself to moving through the changes really well i i like it i'm a fan of the melody in the chorus so what's actually going on here well we have two different things we have the sort of bursts and we have the the chorus and they're two different chord progressions kind of the part that we just heard there is this um so we start on this b minor um i'd have to listen closely i'm not sure if that minor seventh is in there if it's just straight minor it might just be straight minor i think it sounds good either way [Music] i don't know if they use the sus there but i mean the melody essentially is just it's just a sus resolving to the third dot [Music] i like that a lot where it's landing [Music] it lands on the ninth of this e minor i guess you could call it an e minor 11 sound which is a beautiful sound if we're getting super picky like we were in the in the last video about the harry styles song uh you could say that the four over this one chord can clash but i think the function here was as a passing because we only we only sit on that one chord to just resolve that rhythmic figure to to that um to that e minor 11 chord and so in that sense like it's i think it's functioning as a passing chord and it's fine yeah [Music] and the fact that it leads to that knife and lands there that's cool i like that [Music] b minor to d rhythmic thing to the e minor 11. f minor seven to uh g major seven i'd have to check and see if all those extensions like if they're actually using a major seven on the g i'm assuming probably yes but these are all super diatonic i mean it's all the song probably you'd consider to be in b minor um but or d major now d major and b minor it's basically the same thing so you would say that b minor is the relative minor of d right so the relative minor of any key is uh is the key a minor third below the whole step and a half step makes up a minor third so if we take d and we go down by one whole step that's c and then one half step there's b so that's our minor third the idea the reason we call it relative is because you can play if i play so take for example if i play d major the d major scale right what if i just start that same exact scale with the same notes but instead of starting on d i'm going to start on b well that happens to be b natural minor and it shares the exact same notes as the major scale of d hence the term relative minor or if we're going the other direction if we're starting in b minor and we say what's the relative major well we just go up a minor third and you know let's go the other way so from b up to d and the same exact scale would create d major so you can see this relationship that we're doing if you take any key and you go a minor third down play the same exact scale as you would for the major key it's the relative minor so when we talk about this song and we say well it's b minor or d major it's the same thing it's the same exact notes and so again when we bring it back to the terms of like now we're talking about this song is very diatonic what we mean by that is that we're utilizing sort of the bass chords that exist [Music] those those are just chords built on each note of the scale utilizing only the notes inside of or we're basically saying the same thing [Music] that's a really nice sequence i really enjoy that it's a very flexible harmonic bass that we're working from which means that the melody can go a lot of different directions and that's what's cool about some of these really really diatonic harmonic structures you can be flexible with the melody now that doesn't mean that we want to just take melody notes out of a hat we still want our melody to go somewhere to say a statement that makes sense that's pleasing to the ear all that stuff and of course that is subjective but if i were to just go [Music] like that might that might sound kind of neat just like pounding it out sure but if you were singing words you're not just going to write random notes to put words to cause it won't make any sense oh god somebody's gonna dumb that hey my buddy chris did chris did christopher bill uh classical trombone on youtube did a really brilliant dub of of me getting way too unnecessarily worked up over harry styles video and it was really amazing here's a clip of it somebody came up to harry with a hat and written on little pieces of paper in the hat are the notes of the major scale these are said hey harry uh pick five okay i don't know here okay sounds good uh do we have an order for this no order doesn't matter got it all right there's your melody oh no i'm gonna link his video in the description go check it out it was amazing thank you for doing that chris chris and i went to college together um and neither of us ever thought that we'd both be doing youtube he's great go check out his channel thanks for doing that man but anyways yeah point being like melodies work the best especially with lyrics when they're sort of tied to whatever the lyric sentence is and and just because it's my experience i mean if you want to see like really good examples of this look up anything frank sinatra or ella fitzgerald a lot of those jazz standards and and america great american songbook tunes were written with that in mind i think that this song does that really well in a scenario where almost anything will work the melody that was chosen here i like i think it's it's not random it's not it has purpose and it flows really nicely the other part is the uh where the cool bass line is the the verse i guess you might call it that one's a little different that one starts on e minor seven or just e minor i'd have to go back and look and then resolves to our b minor if we're considering this to be in b minor so that would be the one chord so it's like a four [Music] four to the one and then we go to g major [Music] to d major and then back and that's where that bass line fits in so let's see if i can do this here i know that bass line isn't there all the time but that was a really nice lick in the beginning there so i i just i don't know keep playing it but if you want to believe that anything [Music] so i guess this is a thing that that a lot of uh mainstream popular music has been doing for a while in terms of a bridge right what a lot of mainstream pop music has been doing is it'll just do the same chorus or whatever part that they use drop the drums out of it and give it like a like a like an ethereal kind of feel there's nothing fundamentally different about it it's just like there's nothing wrong it works it's fine there's a huge opportunity there that being said to actually create a bridge of some kind to give your ear something different to latch on to for eight bars or 16 bars or whatever there's just some really cool opportunity especially with this feel with these this sort of chord progression the way this kind of works there there could have definitely been something really interesting that you could do as a sort of bridge before going back to the final chorus out um it doesn't need it it sounds fine without it but that being said that's basically the end of the tune and i gotta say like i said before me from years ago would have really tried to find everything that i possibly could to just suggest that because of its inherent genre the fact that it's mainstream pop the fact that it is what it is that it's not good because of that and that's the thing that that over the years i've really been working on trying to get myself out of in the practice of doing so i've found some really cool stuff and this is one of those things that that i've heard and i was like fighting these stupid baseless feelings of like oh i'm not supposed to like this which is dumb because i do and that's just the that's just that's as far as it needs to go yeah i think this is great i think that feels awesome i love that bass line the chord progression is really cool it's very simple it sits right in that diatonic thing melody works well i don't really i don't have any significant criticisms for it at all guys that's going to do it for me thank you so much for watching this video let me know in the comments below what you thought of don't start now also let me know what you want to hear my thoughts on next i love being able to break this stuff down show you the chords show you some of the rhythmic stuff the harmonic stuff that's going on and i hope you enjoyed as well thanks so much for watching we'll see [Music] you

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 1,140,847

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Piano, Piano, Piano Cover, Dua, Lipa, piano guy, piano memes, piano covers, piano tutorial, piano lesson, dua lipa, don't, start, now, don't start now, don't start now dua lipa, dua lipa don't start, charles cornell meme, piano pop covers

Id: 8P_aHhHk5Kk

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020