Maschine: Chords Mode Masterclass! Essential Chords tips.

all right master class on chords and machine we're going to mostly be looking at chord mode bookmark this one it's going to be a resource for the future and hopefully answer all the questions that you might have about chord mode whether you're a very beginner with chords or whether you're more advanced with this kind of stuff so no fancy songs here but let's just crack right into chord mode and learn all about it so that you can make the fancy stuff so first off when you load a sound right now i've got a scarby rhodes here and with maschine you press keyboard mode to get individual notes and then you press chord mode to get chords and right now the default is set to a chromatic scale moving up this way with all major chords going chromatically up the keyboard would be like going [Music] so normally what you would probably do is go over here and say all right i'm going to set it to main and i'm going to set it to either major or minor those are going to be the most common ones that you would start with if i set it to major the next option that we have is the mode and here we've got either harmonizer or chord set so it's going to give you a certain set of notes above whatever note is listed here on the pads so this of course corresponds with the pads so we can see we've got one three five coming up from this c [Music] if we go to the next note we've got a minor chord and the reason we have a minor chord is because we are in the key of c major so this is where we define the key over on the right hand side and this is where we define whether in c major c minor etc so if i want to be in d minor all i have to do is take this up two semitones set this to minor and now the first chord is going to be a d minor chord same thing as this just to try it one three and five so when we see type right there that's what it means one three five the first note is the one second note third note fourth note fifth note so that's where we get one three five from if i go right here i can change this to one four five so that's going to be something like this if i play that hear those notes if i go to the e it's going to be like this [Music] same thing it's kind of crunchy but that's exactly what's happening it's just moving up the d minor scale let's make it a little easier on ourselves let's go back to c major for a second so i could be one four five in the key of c if i start on this note it's one two three four five one four five on that one so that's what these numbers mean they refer to the chord tone using the one as whatever note you're starting from so if i start from a g that we call that we think of that as the one in this situation one four five moving up the scale moving up c major scale four five one four five and then if we go to something like one three five seven that means that every note that we play is going to have a root a third a fifth and a seven as long as it's in the key of c major so because i'm in the keep c major every single chord i play start on an f one three five seven we still get the seven if we go to this one it's a different type of chord we actually call that a dominant seven chord but that's okay it's going to automatically do that for you here on the keyboard so one four there's that dominant seven chord and then there's an a minor chord and so on and so forth so i have an old video where i will point you to and this one i'll put in the description and that goes over some neosoul type chords where you are using something like the one three five and then you're adding one more chord above it just by playing two different chords at the same time so it'd be like going like this let's go back to the key of c it'd be like going like this going c and then adding another triad right there because all we're using is triads one three five and in fact we could go one three five and then do another one right here one three five and then do the same thing up here [Music] and so you can get some really crunchy cords by taking something simple like the harmonizer and combining them there we go this sounds really neat [Music] here we get some complex chords by combining just simple triads at the same time so there's a there's a really fun chord tip and if you want a little bit more detail on that go check out that other video the neosoul chords on machine so that's using the harmonizer and then here down at the bottom we've got some more weird ones and this one four seven one four seven it's really interesting because it's based on fourths so one two three four one two three four intervals and actually miles davis has a song we call that chortle harmony not chord dull harmony but cortol harmony and so go listen to so what and tons of music from the 50s 60s jazz era where they're really exploring modes and we won't worry about modes in this one although we can look at them here over our machine but let's not worry about that right now maybe another video about that one day now we'll look at the chord sets and the chord sets the way they work they've got eight major chord sets and eight minor chord sets and these chord sets are all arranged out here on the pads so you can see up top what chord they are exactly what chord they are so if you aren't a keyboardist and you end up using some chord set [Music] you know here are these chord sets they really work well with each other so and they get more complex as you go through them start adding some more different types of chords and we'll look at what these chords are later on so if i look at major six here we can see we've got c g d minor a minor you can hear how those chords work nicely together so it could be a really great way for you to start off a song you're kind of feeling at a loss for what to do instead of going to a loop you go to a chord set and now you're getting inspired by the arrangement of these chords that whoever put them into machine uh did and i got to say the chord sets are great they work really well with each other the main thing this is complaint numero uno and wish numero uno for me with machine is that they would add the ability to make your own chord sets because if we could do that we could make arrangements of chord sets for people for different genres of music you could have a neo-soul chord set you could have an edm chord set and the ability to have that machine would just be incredible so native instruments that's my number one request i know that sounds weird but it literally is my number one request you can almost play through them [Music] [Music] all right it's getting a little a little cheesy up in here but and and if we go to the major eight set that's where you're gonna really find the the complex jazz chords [Music] yeah these are working so well together [Music] one quick tip on what you could do to change this up there's no way to invert the chords that's where you take a chord and move the notes up and play higher up the keys are down further down the keys we want to make this a little bit more interesting but what you could do is take say this chord right here that's got the same chord [Music] let's just take this note right here and move it up the octave so right now it's an f and if i hold option and press up the keyboard boom we've just moved it up so now we've got [Music] and then maybe you want to take this one and separate it change it up a little bit from the other one hold option and move that down the octave there we go now we've got a different inversion of the right hand or [Music] okay and then what if we want to take this and flesh this out maybe put it with some base well no problem all we do is copy this pattern over here to our base instrument i've got a little base thing loaded up there i'm going to delete all of the top notes so now all we have out down here at the bottom is the root note or the base note a little too low so let's take these up the octave so i'll move them up right there [Music] and now that you have the baseline here's a really easy tip all you have to do is take your note and either play it up the octave and maybe cutting the note where a bass drum hits there's a bass drum hit right there so what i'll do here is just resize this and then option drag or alt drag this over i'm just going to draw in another note the same note an octave higher and then we'll resize it like that there we go [Music] and then i'm going to cut that out and then just keep a boom so we've got two bass drum hits right there and then sometimes dragging your note out until the snare hits and then cutting out at the snare is another nice tip for getting a sweet little groove [Music] shorten this guy [Music] and then maybe one more note right here that's nice and long or just take that up the octave [Music] so that's making a bass line out of the bottom note of whatever you put down on your chord tracks you don't even really have to keep track of what chords you were using another thing to keep in mind is you don't have to stick to just one chord set on your song so here we did this you know intro part in the key of c major well you can learn about relative majors and minors and c major the relative minor is a minor so we could actually set this now to a minor which happens to be all white notes as well and now we can go to a minor set and come up with a totally different section of a song that's really got a minor feel to it using the funky minor chords that they have here in the chord sets all right so we've got minor as we go through the complexity of the minor sets by the time we get to minor 8 we're into the really funky jazz stuff [Music] so now let's just talk about these chord numbers because that's kind of a big part of these chord mode and it will really help you to have some understanding of what you're looking at with these different hieroglyphics here so if we go back to the the major set for a second so c major e m i is e minor if it's just f it's just an f triad so whenever you see just regular old f or g that's going to be g b and d when you see just the letter it means major without any other extensions so we don't have a seven or later on we'll get ninths and elevens and thirteens next one we see is a sus4 and a sus means suspended so it's kind of like we've got one note that's being held up or [Music] so that's what the sus can do the sus chord can go either from here and resolve down to a regular old e minor or it could go to a major to an e major so we've got e sus 4 to e minor right there so we can play those together can i kind of hear what's happening but that's what the sus means sus4 next we've got the f add9 [Music] and that's where we add this extra note in the in the g triad so here's the g triad we add the nine we can put it wherever we want and what that means is we've got one two three four five there's our triad six seven eight and then nine there it is up there you sometimes see it written as you might sometimes see g two or add two and so it just depends on the chord usually when we see a nine that usually implies a seven and in this case add nine just means a g but only add the nine c over b so we've got a c and then we go to this one right here f add9 so i'm just following all four of these chords watch what happens we just keep dropping the bass note [Music] and we keep that nine up in the top and then it goes to f minor oh this this electric piano just feels like an old 80s tv show or something all right so let's hear that together [Music] so you can see how that this chord set works so well with itself the slash chord again just means there's a different note in the bass but this top chord is all a c major chord c with a b in the bass with an a in the bass the g in the bass and then we get to add nine and then we get to f minor and then we get the c sus4 where the four is in there suspended and then we got a minor seven so that's just a minor one two three four five six seven so we have the seven in there f and then we've got a g6 chord which is just a major triad with the six one two three four five six that's all that's happening there now let's look at the more fun chords let's go way down to the minor chords and we'll see if we can make sense of some of these in this case we see c minor six nine we got one two three four five six seven eight nine it's a cool chord let's take it out the octave there it is right there then we got d minor seven flat five now what does that mean we would take like a d minor triad one two three four five and when it says flat five or looks like a b5 that means flat five we make this five note flat and then we add the seven really cool chord and that one's also called a half diminished seven chord and then next we've got c minor eleven so where's the c minor one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11. so there's the 11 over a g man okay so let's go 11 something like this [Music] and then we got c minor nine and then if we look at some of these other ones there's another minor seven flat five just like that one and then we've got a flat major seven sharp five [Music] so there's a flat major and now let's take the five instead of making it flat like we did with that other chord we raise it next one we've got g7 flat 9 flat 13 this is one of my favorite kinds of chords so we've got g [Music] seven with a flat nine so where's the nine seven eight nine so we flat it and then we've got a flat thirteen where's the thirteen there's 9 10 11 if we go down here 11 12 13. so the 13 is an e we make it flat so the the funky notes in here g7 with a flat 9 something like that so something like this [Music] and then minor major seven so what we've got with a minor major seven is we've got a minor triad with a major seven usually a minor triad would have a minor seven and this one's got that james bond sound a spy movie sound um and then you do c11 one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven so the eleven would be the d really beautiful chord really clustery kind of sound i do have a jazz 251 video which is definitely worth mentioning here and that's where i talk about 251 progressions and how they are so important to jazz music it would definitely be worth having some understanding about that kind of stuff in my last machine expansion video which was electric touch i'll show you how to take a chord progression and look for a whole bunch of different versions of that chord through the chord sets sample them onto a track and then turn that into audio so that one is worth watching i won't repeat that here but go back and check the electric touch video i've even got it bookmarked for that specific little tip and it's very important so here's another little tip that you can do with chord mode i actually did this in my live looping video which i'll put a description i'll put in the description and i've done this with chord mode i've also done this with the scales you can play around with these complex chords and do what we call parallel motion between chords and in sort of this chill lo-fi stuff a really common technique is to take one chord with interesting voicings and just shift it down one semitone [Music] so all i'm doing is one minor triad moving down to another or what about a major one i'm gonna take a major nine chord with the seven and the nine and i'm just gonna shift it up [Music] and then shift it down so that could be a bit of a like an intro to a song on its own let's go to major 8 for a second and we're just going to play along [Music] all i was doing was moving the semitone buttons on the fly and would work really well in a live performance situation as well last little tip is of course you can play your chords in so there's our chords but what if i want to take the chords and just kind of play around with them a little bit so they don't sound so perfect well then we could go over to this variation button and so if i click variation and lock it up at the top go over to velocity range and time shift and that's just going to move them over ever so slightly so i've got it set to humanize not random random's gonna do some really funky stuff and i wouldn't necessarily recommend that but with this human eyes now what we can do is set our time shift to something like five or ten and if we hit apply and also make sure your your low velocity doesn't go too too far down or some of the notes will get moved really low right now we're at about 105 so i'm going to set the low range to about 98 and the high range to 127 maybe 124 and then i'm going to hit apply and all of the notes shift over ever so slightly we could try it one more time and watch the velocities as well you see them shift [Music] but you get the idea if one note is just a little bit too far over then you could just click on it and drag it over and make sure you hold command or control on a pc so that you can move it over without snapping if your snap is on and then that way you can sort of fix any of the notes that just went a little too far maybe one way or the other so there you go chord mode in machine it is an incredible feature and would be even better if we got our own custom chord mode in the future so i'm really hoping for that but even with what we have right now there is so much you can do with it if you're not a piano player and if you're not a piano player use the chord bone pay attention to what chords you're actually using and see if you can start remembering that stuff and then maybe start practicing the piano i'm a huge proponent of practicing i practice instruments every single day and i have a bunch of instruments that i practice and i don't practice for a long time but i practice every day and it's either i'm maintaining or i'm getting better but i'm rarely getting worse at my instruments and it means that i can pick up these different instruments and play them on a song when the inspiration strikes me and then it also means that i am going through phases where i'm getting a lot better at maybe one of my instruments so highly recommend practicing make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 7,352

Keywords: Maschine, Maschine MK3, Maschine Mikro, Native Instruments, Producer Basics, Music Production, Gibbons Creative, Jef Gibbons, NI Maschine, Maschine Basics, Maschine Tutorial, Maschine How To, Maschine Details, Maschine Beginner, Maschine Synths, Neo Soul, Jazzy Hip Hop, Hip hop, Neo Soul tutorial, Maschine chords, Make a Beat, Beat basics, RnB, 9th chords, 11th chords, 13th chords, Chords mode Maschine, Maschine 2021

Id: JdUqpvHjrwc

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021