Music Theory Chords Basics Every Producer should know! Maschine Tutorial

Jeff Gibbons here with another machine tutorial and in this one I'm gonna take you in to a little bit further depths of music theory that I feel is important for any musician to know and I've got a recent video on music theory that deals with notes so if you haven't watched that make sure you watch that one I'll put a link to that in the description as well as one that talks about rhythm but in this one we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about chords and there are ways that classically trained or jazz musicians think about chords and if you're new to music theory it'll be helpful for you to start thinking in these ways as well so first off I should mention that I'm using a program called meticulous that's put out by gospel musicians LLC there's a little free player I'm just going to use that so we can see the notes that I am playing we've already talked about the notes we've got c d e f g a b c that's the the notes of the c major scale so let's talk about the chords and the names that we give these chords so if you are in a major key every single scale degree gets its own chord so C major is the one chord so we call that the one chord classical musicians and jazz musicians will give these chord numbers Roman numerals so we think in terms of Roman numerals so that you could play in the key of C or you could apply it to a totally different key and you would still know what chord to go to based on the Roman numeral system so that's what we end up doing thinking about these chords as numbers so if I play this chord in the key of C it's the one chord we move on to the 2 chord the next scale degree and we get a minor chord so the first chord is major the one chords major the two chord is minor 3 chord is minor four chord is major 5 chord is major 6 chord is minor and then the 7 chord is a special chord it's a diminished chord it sounds sad like a minor chord that this would be a minor chord but with a diminished chord we lower the fifth if you were to play it sounds like kind of like an old black-and-white movie where the girls about to get run over by the train you know so the seventh chord is a special chord in the major key and it has that diminished sound not used that often in pop music so maybe one that you can forget about for now but but it definitely adds some color so we won't worry about the diminished chord so much right now but the most important chords to understand are the 1 chord the 4 chord the 5 chord those are the three major chords and then we've got the minor chords to the 3 and the 6 so in pop music the most popular chords are the 1 the 4 the 5 and the 6 so you see those YouTube videos where they're make fun of all the songs that have the same chord progression in them you know like the one a 5 6 and the for that is a very common progression and bazillion songs have been made with those chords so that's why I guess it is so easy to make those videos where you show all the songs that have those chords in them and we could do this one four five one we can do that in any key the problem is on the piano is that you have to learn which chords have which black keys so after you get out of the key of C major you start having to think about the Black Keys so let's look at say the key of a so there's the one chord there's the five there's the six and there's the four one five six four so once you start understanding the fact that you've got these Roman numerals which chords are major in a major key which chords are minor then you can start to learn to play in these different keys and very quickly think okay I'm going to go to the five chord I'm gonna go to the sixth chord or whatever so over on machine when you hit chords mode the first thing you get is major chords so when I play one pad I get one three and five not quite as self-explanatory in when you're looking at this chromatic scale remember a chromatic scale is just all of the notes in sequence so white and they go up one step so if we watch it on the pads we can see going through the chromatic scale let's go back to keyboard mode for a second so go back to chords mode and now since we are trying to break this down and simplify this let's just take this off of the chromatic scale and put it to the major scale so I take that over to major and now if I go to keyboard mode I'm in C major playing all the white notes I could switch to a totally different key by going down a few semitones and I'm in B flat B flat major much easier than playing in B flat on a keyboard if you're not a keyboardist so let's go back to C major for a second and we've got it on major I set it to chords and we're still on the major scale but now I've got my one chord my two chord three chord 4 chord five chord which is major six chord which is minor seven chord there's that diminished chord and they were back to the one or the tonic so one time so what was that common chord progression in major Keys it's going to be one six so let's just record that in here so what can we do to make this a little bit less you know heart and soul select the notes and then go shift pad 15 and it takes it down an octave and then I'm going to take these notes right here and these notes right here and shift them down the octave octave down and then maybe these ones as well octave down and then these ones also down an octave so all I've done is taking the chords I played in chord mode and shifted some of them down the octave so that the chords look in closer position just gonna sound a little bit better [Music] so already sounds a little bit more interesting obviously this is very basic but that gives you an idea of what you can do with the chords mode and then how you can shift things around in the software so it doesn't sound like you're jumping around like a beginner pianist would do so up till now I've been talking about major keys and the Roman numerals four major keys the same thing applies to minor keys when we're working on a song or listening to a song what does it feel like does it feel like a happy major song or does it feel darker like a little bit sad and then you probably guess that it's a minor song and you could think of the chords in terms of a minor key so there's a minor now let's look at the chords the Roman numerals for the chords of the key of a minor so where things get a little more confusing so the a minor chord is the one chord small I the two chord in a minor is diminished kind of reminds you of the seven chord doesn't it and we've got the three chord which is major three upper case eyes for the three chord the four chord is minor the five chord is minor as well but minor keys are a little bit different from major keys when we go to the five chord we can raise it up and we get this major sounding five chord all you have to do on the five chord to make it major is raise the third so we got one four five one and that sounds very complete you know the one chord the 5 chord making it major it just seems kind of stronger I might remind you of like some Christmas songs so try it out but you're gonna find that's a lot of songs in the sort of hip-hop genre will definitely work better without that major sounding 5 chord so you could do the same thing without the major sounding 5 chord so we got 1 4 5 1 so that's the 5 chord can be minor or major and we would write it small v for minor uppercase v for major then we got the 6 chord major 7 chord major and then back to the one chord so let's have a look at a minor key for a second so let's delete all those go over to a chord type and go to a minor so I'm going to keep C minor now and before I stalk about a minor which was just the white notes well C minor is much more complicated it's got three flats in it so learning that on the piano takes some doing you know or years of practice and stuff like that so on machine it's beautiful we set it to C minor and it's just ready for us right which is great go-to chords mode and now I've got the one chord the 2 chord which is diminished you remember that one sounds diminished it sounds very different from a minor chord but the 3 garbages major sounds happy 4 chord is minor 5 chord this is the 5 chord when it is minor there's the 6 chord which is major 7 chord major back to the one chord so let's take this down an octave [Music] so really common the one chord the sixth chord in the seven chord when you're in a minor key very very common million songs made with just one and six I know that sounds kind of ridiculous but it's true put this in as well our slow Tim all right so some basic chords in there what could you as a non musician do with this to then take this and make this more interesting the first thing I'd recommend doing is putting this on to another track and then we're gonna turn that into a bass track okay you could always just copy and paste the information from one to another so all I'm gonna do here is take this group I'm going to option drag it over to make a copy or alt drag on a PC and now that I've got that group over there I am going to go get rid of all of the upper notes so that I've got a baseline there we go so then with this one I'm gonna take it select it hold shift octave down take it down the octave and then now you know find some kind of bass instrument for this track right here so now I've got the bass line taken from the chords part I shifted it up an octave it sounded better and then I've got my chords right here which I can then play around with a little and then we can see if changing things out a root position makes us more interesting so I could take maybe all of these notes right here and go shift down the octave let's see how that sounds like [Music] so already it sounds kind of better it's just we've got something different happening than just root position chords like it's really boring after a while so if anything from this tutorial if I've shown you to get to start changing up your core positions that's gonna really help and what we're doing there is we're inverting the chord it's called an inversion so anytime you have a chord that's not in root position it's an inverted chord alright so there we've got the one chord we've got the six chord we've got the seven chord and at the end we've got the five chord and remember I said before the five chord could be major or minor what happens if we take this note right here and just move it up one semitone shift up one semitone on the Machine and then let's listen to what that sounds like right there so it has a kind of more final sound listen to it again and now listen to a minor and do that so there it is minor and then redo it here at major one more time so that note adds some tension we have these Roman numeral names the one chord the two chord the three chord the four chord etc but we also use regular numbers to specify which note of the chord you're playing like this we call this the one here's to call that a three and then the five so one three five of the C chord so we take a chord and we add a seventh to it so one two three four five six seven sounds almost loungy doesn't it right you get this kind of you do a couple of major seven chords in different positions and all of a sudden it's like ooh get like some Jamiroquai action or something like that if you tried adding major sevens into some of the pop songs that you love or rock songs you love you'd be like Oh what is going on this sounds so wrong right but certain genres of music it's perfect we can also do a major 7th chord on the 4 chord so we go to the 4 chord which is an F major and we had a 7 there and that sounds really nice too so let's listen to [Music] starting to sound like a 80s sitcom or something isn't it so the four chord ad the seven you got the major seven in there sounds a little bit jazzy but in certain contexts it works perfectly and then we've got the five chord which adds the seven and that is called a dominant seventh chord so dominant seventh is note right here sounds very different from this major seven chord if we were to make this a dominant seventh it would sound like this sorry to sound kind of bluesy so the dominant seventh chord has a very bluesy quality to it this dominant chord has a really strong pull to the one chord so that's what the dominant adding the seventh does is it adds more tension musics all about you know tension and release right so if we look at this we've got tension release so this chord can go that tension can resolve to that one chord next one we've got the sixth chord which would have just a nice minor seven up top and then the diminished chord [Music] that one gets a little more complicated because we can add a regular seventh up top or we can add a diminished seventh now you're really getting into that black and white movie with the Train and the girl about to get run over right diminished chord diminished seventh adds even more tension so that's adding sevenths and again the thing that you want to try to do is not play all of your chords in root position so if I want to go to the four chord I can start like this go to the four chord laces like that now let's go to the five chord all I'm doing is playing all of the notes of the root position seventh chord and then I'm going to this chord but I'm just taking these top notes and moving them down here here's the one chord again and here's the four chord and here's the five chord C I can keep my hand in such close position as I move around with these sevenths go over to machine I'm in chords mode and I'm gonna go minor and I'm going to add a seventh so I just jump over to a seven right there and then now would I play the chords C one two three four we could see four notes playing C E flat G and B flat so that is a minor seven chord we don't even need to worry about necessarily what notes they are using the chord mode on a machine the one let's go to the four chord also with a seventh [Music] let's go to the five chord [Music] six seven one now this is where it really starts to sound funny if you leave everything a root position but let's try a similar progression to what I just did but with the sevens there we go okay so let's quantize that I'm just gonna get rid of this one little chunk here alright so now we've got 7th chords in root position which also don't sound great if that's all you're doing so what we can do is do things like take the 7th down the octave if we do that we're letting the bass do the root of the chord and instead of having the 7th on the top we're now gonna have [Music] the five one two three four five we're gonna have that on the top might sound cool try other things take another note and shift it down the octave and see what that does get things a little crunchy ER and again we've got our five chord right here if you want to make it major make it that dominant seventh chord then what we do is we take the third scale degree of that chord and we raise it one semitone shift one semitone and then now we get a dominant seventh chord there so that's playing around with the sevenths shifting notes around using machine to shift notes around so what you can do now is start listening to other tunes and see if you can figure out whether they're major or minor and also figure out what key they're in that will then also apply to you importing samples into Maschine and trying to figure out what key it's in if you don't have an idea so hopefully this was useful for you make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell and stay tuned for more videos

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 41,992

Keywords: Maschine, Maschine MK3, Maschine Mikro, Native Instruments, Music Theory, Music Theory Lessons, Music Basics, Producer Basics, Music Production, Gibbons Creative, Jef Gibbons, NI Maschine, Maschine Basics, Maschine Tutorial, Maschine How To, Maschine Beat, Maschine Beats, Maschine Details, Maschine Beginner, Essential Music Theory, Producer Essentials

Id: TtJlmyKAsOY

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/meatballmakabushi]

Best Maschine tutorials in the community! Thanks Jef 😁

[u/xoree]

That was great!

[u/JonnyToonami]

Great resource, thanks for making this!

[u/voordom]

please do one for EQ because so far ive found it useless in the daw

[u/conceptmap]

One for drums to pleaseee thanks brother, and another to the theory of sampling