Let It Be: Overrated or Genius?!

Let It Be is one of the most famous songs ever written so how is a song that used such a common chord progression able to stand the test of time and was Paul McCartney thinking thinking about D complex musical Theory Concepts when he wrote it or did the song just sort of write itself Let It Be begins with just four chords c g a minor a now this progression is also known as the one five six four progression and it shows up everywhere in pop music the progression is called the 1564 because it uses those scale degrees of the key it's in so if you have a C scale you can build chords using the first the fifth the sixth and the fourth notes of that scale and because those chords are from the same scale family they naturally sound really good together so now I understand the chords that were used to build this song let's talk about the intro to let it be because as soon as you hear the first couple of chords you know you're hearing let it be now this is because of the way that Paul plays these chords he doesn't just play them as straight root position Triads he uses a few really specific techniques to help them stand out first of all it's the path he takes through the chords using inversions to create a Melody through voice leading so what we're here hearing is this we've got C and then he uses an inverted G chord so you hear that g repeated becomes the melody and then we move to a minor and even though there's a passing chord as we move into this F major seven this e is repeated on top creating more of that Melody now the second half of the intro uses pretty much the same chords but again there's some subtle differences that make a huge impact he uses four note chords here instead of Triads which gives a much more rich and full sound so you get this and then he skips a minor completely we don't even have that chord this time and moves into this iconic Let It Be piano riff which locks us back down to Sea now another important thing to note is the left hand so the left hand is actually pretty rhythmic even though it's staying pretty close to just playing the root notes it's rhythmic and there's a bit of a surprise with the use of the F sharp to get to the G chord so he's approaching the movement from the one to the five chromatically and it just it's like this little surprise for the ears and it's super engaging now this pattern this approach pretty much repeats itself for the rest of the verses and leads us into the chorus the genius thing about the chorus is that while the chords are the same the order changes which totally transforms the mood the first half of the course begins on that minor six chord and that moves us down oh listen to that and it walks on even further and brings us all the way to C so it's this bit of a walk down and it gives us a mournful sort of introspective feeling and the other amazing thing and this might be my favorite is that the melody is primarily made up of the a minor pentatonic scale the pentatonic scale is the most popular and simple skill in the world it uses these notes there's just five of them and the reason people use this scale is because it creates incredibly catchy Melodies that will get stuck in your head and the chorus of Let It Be is no exception now here's where things get so interesting because the chorus The Melody of the chorus of this song is built on the pentatonic scale and the pentatonic scale is one of the oldest and most simple skills there is so if you look at it in the key of C it uses the one the two the three and the five and the six so if we've got c d e g a and those are the notes [Music] but the chorus is using and this is amazing because the pentatonic skill is a skill that has no tension and that's because there aren't any half steps it's all built up of whole steps so what you get is this super beautiful tension free series of notes unlike if you were to play the notes of a regular major or minor scale where you have those half steps in there so it's it's absolutely genius that we're in a chorus where we're singing about just letting things be and we have attention free scale that the melody is built on the chorus ends with a four to one chord movement which is also known as a plagal Cadence so a Cadence is simply a way to bring your ears to bring the song from somewhere else back to the one chord where everything sort of feels like it has a sense of resolution and a 4-1 Cadence or a plagual Cadence was super common in church music you know it would be a way to end a hymn and I feel like it really adds to the spiritual and almost sacred feeling of the song now we do have a full transcription of let it be inside the piano song Library so if you want to learn how to play this note for note make sure you grab the free seven day trial below this video and you can start playing it right now now when we get to the middle of the song just before the guitar solo we come back to those icon passing chords and the theme continues and when you look at the chords they're complicated looking chords but bear with me look at what's happening in the left hand it's just moving down a scale now Paul McCartney is a bass player and I think that influenced how he built this part of the song I highly doubt he was he was like I I'm gonna make some complicated chords here I think I should move from a G7 sus4 slash D to a c but rather he was just composing a bass line that moved down the scale and then he found chords that would fit into that picture now we can go even deeper with this because if you know music theory you might recognize the skill as being a c mixolydian again it's doubtful that Paul is like I'm gonna use a C1 mixolydian mode here but he adds this B flat into the progression which isn't part of the key of C it's not diatonic but it sounds amazing and this began a movement in popular music where many songs after let it be used this flat seven trick so if you look at the key of C B is the seventh note and B flat is just the flat seven so it's fitting that into the key even though it doesn't really belong there sounded amazing they used it later in Hey Jude and a lot of other artists like James Taylor Boston Green Day Guns and Roses all use this flat seven trick so now we have this amazing walk down happening with these beautiful chords and I want you to notice something else no minor chords are in this progression slash chords helped him to avoid having to play minor chords and the result of this is a really unique and iconic piece of pop music history so once the bass line was established all he had to do was attach chords to those notes if he would have just built root position chords based on the nose he had in that walk down it would have sounded like this [Music] which is fine that's not what Paul did he used inversions and slash chords so that he could move down that descending line in a really unique and smooth way so we get something that sounds more like this foreign just works so I think we can draw three main conclusions from this little Adventure number one playing multiple instruments can be a superpower I believe that the diversity and the instruments Paul plays made an impact on the success and the uniqueness of this song number two you don't need to know Theory to write an iconic song but moving into Point number three behind every iconic song is music theory so while let it be might seem like a very simple song at first glance when you begin to dig deeper the theory behind the song reveals layers of complexity and creativity that led to the Timeless success of Let It Be foreign [Music]

Channel: Pianote

Views: 179,365

Keywords: pianote, lisa witt, how to play piano, beginner piano lesson, easy piano, piano tutorial, the beatles let it be, the beatles, paul mccartney, george harrison, john lennon, paul mccartney songs, the beatles greatest hits, the beatles if they were a good band, john lennon songs, easy piano songs that sound impressive, the beatles yesterday, the beatles in my life, the beatles live, the beatles songs, the beatles hey jude, the beatles come together, beatles

Id: QgKqV2pEX0o

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023