Music Theory For Dum-Dums 🎵 FULL BEGINNER COURSE 🎵

why is it that some people seem to have this innate ability to do awesome things like play by ear or write their own songs or even switch between different instruments whereas other people seem to struggle and always be stuck to me the difference the missing link is music theory right that's what enables you to write your own songs better to improvise music to play by ear all of this stuff comes down to understanding the language of music music is a language and music theory is just the way that we understand that language so i'm excited you're on this video stay tuned let's get into it now the first thing we gotta talk about is the big elephant in the room which is why do so many people struggle with this right a lot of people have tried to dip their toes into music theory maybe you're one of them and you come away just feeling totally confused and totally disoriented well i think what most people are missing is a big picture understanding of what we're even trying to do right we need a game plan we need a map otherwise we're just diving into this huge vast ocean of music theory and not knowing what the game plan is that's why i want you to make a commitment to yourself right now to stay through this entire video it's easy to get distracted it's easy to get lost in the weeds but if you stay through this video you're gonna have the tools that you need to finally get this stuff and i've taught this to tons of people who say i've always been confused about this and i finally have had the light bulb moment super quick disclaimer there's always exceptions there's always times where rules get broken there's always more advanced concepts but for today we're just keeping it simple and we're just doing the fundamentals let's start today with the big picture this is the first section so the big picture to me just boils down to one simple equation okay songs equal melody plus chords that's it so all songs are just melody and chords put together let's dig into those two elements a little bit more starting with melody so melody is simply the part of the song that you would whistle hum or sing it's the thing that most of us think about first when we think of a particular song so for instance if i play this mary had a little lamb that's the melody now on the other side of the equation are chords and all the chord is is multiple notes that happen at the same time so maybe i'm playing three notes at a time four notes at a time and it just sort of makes the bed underneath the melody now let's go to the piano and i'll show you why you need both of these elements let's start with this melody and see if you can recognize this it's a little bland i kind of just walked up and came back down well let's listen to some chords on the left hand does this sound like a song if i just go no not really it just sounds like some chords right but as soon as i put them together check this out it turns into beauty and the beast that's the power of having both melody and chords let's do one more example let's say i wanted to play some katy perry and if you just heard the chords to this song it could really be anything if i played just the melody it sounds good but it's a little bit empty as soon as i put them together it becomes a full song check this out all that to say we really need both melody and chords to make a full song on piano very often the right hand plays the melody and the left hand plays the chords as you just saw but it doesn't always have to be that way let's say someone's singing and playing guitar well the vocals would be the melody the singing and the guitar would be supplying the chords so there's all kinds of different ways we could have these two elements but they're always gonna be there that's it that's the entire game plan all we need to do to be able to understand music theory is to be able to understand melody and be able to understand chords i really want this video to be applicable whether you're a pianist guitarist producer songwriter whatever you are i want this to apply to you but it's important that we have a basic understanding of the piano just so we can talk about this stuff and be on the same page so for now i'm just going to throw a quick graphic up of where the piano keys are we have a b c d e f g and lastly we just need to make sure that you know about sharps and flats so super quickly a sharp is where you go up from a certain note and a flat is where you go down from a certain note for example here's a if i go up to this key this is a sharp i could also do a and go down to what would be a flat all right another very basic element of music that we have to talk about is something called intervals an interval is just talking about the distance between two notes for example if i go one two that's a second if i go one two three that's a third and some people think of that as a skip right i'm skipping a note i could keep going one two three four and i could go one two three four five basically just think of seconds as steps and think about thirds as skips that's it for the overview section and what we talked about is that songs are just melody plus chords we talked about the layout of the piano and we covered sharps and flats as well as our intervals so let's talk about how each of these things work the next section is specifically based around scales now a scale is something we've all heard before it's that doremi faso la tito that's a scale now a lot of people talk about scales and they learn scales but i want to start in sort of a different place i want to start with why are scales even important why do we need them well what a scale does is it gives us a set of all the right notes for our song and what i mean by that is any melody we could ever have is just some combination of notes from our scale i'll say it again any melody known to mankind is just some pattern of different notes from a scale so if we learn the scale we have the tools we need to make melodies hey lorelai so if our scale is doremi faso la ti do let's just take the first five notes do remy fosso and that was beauty and the beast then i come back down sofa me redo so the melody could even be as simple as walking up the scale for a few notes then walking back down the scale and that katy perry example from earlier starts on so and walks down to rey sofa me re re domi and one last melody example could be journey don't stop believing that melody goes like this and all i'm trying to show you with these examples is that every melody is just a pattern of notes from our scale and on top of that one really really good reason why you want to learn your scales is because they help with your improvisation your songwriting and your ear training so let me show you how that would work let's say we're trying to make up a certain song okay we're just trying to improvise or songwrite well as long as i stay within a certain scale it's going to sound good for example here's a g scale and we'll talk about how to make this in a second but let's say i'm just making some stuff up as i go i'm improvising i'm writing a song anything i hit is going to sound pretty good until i forget my scale so let's say i missed this note oh gosh you heard that wrong note there and that's a wrong note because i didn't stay within the scale and that's why if we know our scales we automatically have the ability to find all the quote unquote right notes alright that was the songwriting and improvisation side of it but let's talk about ear training let's talk about playing songs just by hearing them well let's say hypothetically that you're a singer okay maybe you were in chorus maybe you've done some vocalizing before and you have a really good understanding of solfege do remy faso latito and let's say you want to play beauty and the beast and you can hear you already know doremi flasso sofami redo but you go to the piano and all of a sudden you don't know quite how to do that maybe i try to figure it out and i get this no that's not right no okay what we need to do is use our scale and we'll automatically be able to get to the right notes there we go that sounds better now of course you need to know your scales before this can work for you so let's talk about how to actually make a scale let's dive into it now know you don't just snap and blue stickers magically appear all over the piano it'd be awesome if it worked that way but instead what we do is we use two things to make our scale those are half steps and whole steps those are the building blocks and a half step is just one key to the very next key on the piano it's the smallest distance you can possibly go so in other words from here to here would be a half step so with this to this or that to that or even here to here that's a half step as well so what i want you to do if you're at a piano you can pause the video and try just doing all half steps doesn't have to look pretty i'm just chicken pecking it right now with one finger uh there's a more technical way to do it but for now just see if you can do all half steps and get the hang of what those feel like then let's talk about whole steps all a whole step is is two half steps okay so in other words if this is my starting note i'm gonna count one two that's a whole step same thing starting note one two that's a whole step now check this out this is important from here to here that's only a half step right so a whole step would be one two there's our whole step so you really want to pay attention and make sure that you're doing two half steps for a whole step now again if you're at a piano and you want to try an all whole tone scale you would do this [Music] okay if you're interested pause the video and try that out but let's keep on going and the way we use these half steps and whole steps to actually make a scale is something that i call the golden scale formula and here it is it's whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step and you can write that down if you want to but that's going to be two whole steps then a half step three whole steps then a half step okay here's how to apply that let's say we're starting on c and we want to make a c scale so what we would do is we take our starting note and then we go up a whole step up a whole step up a half step then up a whole step and then i could cross over to my third finger do another whole step whole step half step all right so i followed my scale formula and i found out that the c scale is all natural notes it's all white keys that one's kind of easy so let's do another example let's say i want to find a g scale okay i'm going to start with g then i'm going to go up a whole step then another whole step half step whole step i might cross over here for another whole step and now check this out i need a whole step here so i'm going to go to f sharp okay the note right above f and this is a whole step and half step so in this case my g scale has one black key which is f sharp and that brings me to the next point whenever you do a scale whenever you go through those whole steps and half steps it takes a lot of work so after you figure out your scale go back and take stock of what you just did right in this case i'm going to think okay my g scale was all natural notes except for f sharp right i make a mental note of that so i don't always have to go back and do whole step whole step half step instead i'm going to think all white keys until f sharp alright another thing to talk about with our scales is we always want to keep our alphabet intact i always want a b c d e f g so here's why i say that that seems kind of obvious but let's look at this note right here okay now this could either be a sharp right a going up or it could be b flat b going down well what decides whether that's a sharp or b flat is the scale that we're using for instance if i start on f f g a b c so in this case that would be b flat a b c i wouldn't want to say f g a a sharp c that doesn't really make sense the alphabet isn't a a c it's a b c all right same thing on that g scale we just did i wouldn't want to call this g flat because we're doing g a b c d e f g the moral of the story is just keep your alphabet in order and you're going to be fine quick side note if this was like a piano technique video we would talk more about the technically correct ways to play all these scales right what fingers to start on and where to cross under that would be its own separate video today it's just about understanding the mechanics of how to make a scale so maybe you're a guitarist maybe you're a producer you know you're someone who doesn't care about playing piano in this technically great way you can still chickenpec through your scales and find them even if it's just with one finger because now you understand the golden scale formula that's all you need let's do one more scale example to really bring this home so if we want to do a d scale we're going to start on d we're going to do a whole step whole step so i'm going to skip over f i'm going to go one two then half step then whole step whole step here's another whole step one two and half step so my d scale i had f sharp and i had c sharp okay so i'm going to make a mental note of that so i don't always have to come back and use my scale formula and i'm going to play it a few times even if i'm just chicken pecking it i'm gonna make sure that i internalize it on some level now you know how to make a scale starting on any key on the entire piano it's always going to be that golden scale formula your action step for this module is to use that golden scale formula to figure out your c scale your g scale and your f scale and an optional add-on to that assignment is to try and find every white key scale alright quick section to recap here we learned that scales give us the quote write notes we also learned that melodies come from scales right any melody is just some combination of notes from a scale and then lastly we also learned how to make scales with the golden scale formula alright let's keep going and let's talk about something new chords they've stricken fear into the heart of many a brave soul but i'm being so heavy-handed point is chords aren't nearly as scary as you might think the truth is chords also come from our scales i'll say that again chords also come from scales so just as we had do remy as individual notes we can also have do as a full chord the only difference is instead of saying doraemi we say one two three for the chords if we're talking about our c scale that was all white keys right so what i can do is i can take the note do and instead of just treating it as one note i can build a full chord off of it i can play re as a melody note but i can also play it as a full chord i can go me i'm just going through the scale and turning each individual note into a chord now here's how you do that we take our starting note let's say we start on do or one which is c and what we do is this every other note kind of shape that's all it is so watch i'm just doing every other note to get my chord and the slightly more technical way to talk about that is we have what's called the root or the starting note of the chord and then we have the third you know if i just count up one two three and then i have the fifth one two three four five right so it's root third and fifth is how we make a chord so if you like thinking about it that way you can think about it that way if you'd rather just say every other note that's fine too it's the same end result now check this out we did do let's go up to re root third [Music] and i would highly recommend at this point pausing the video and going through and trying one two three four five six seven back to one now that may seem really easy but what we just did was absolutely monumentally huge what we did is instead of worrying about all the hundreds and thousands of different chords out there we narrowed it down to the exact seven that are the right chords in the key of c so any song that's using a c scale the chords are just going to be some version of those seven chords and if we take what i just played for you on the piano and we wrote that down it would look like this and these are what are called chord symbols so don't get freaked out by these we're going to talk more about chords later on but for now just know this is exactly what i just showed you how to play on the piano and just like how painters have a certain palette of colors to work with to create a painting what we have here is a certain palette of chords to work with to create a song so if we look at songs that use the key of c we'll find that these chords are for the most part all we need so let's examine some songs together and first up is all the small things by blink182 and the way they wrote it is they just did a c chord then g then f then back to g then hallelujah by leonard cohen this is a classic and what he did was went from c to a minor then back to c back to a minor so there the beginning of that song is just two chords back and forth then come sail away by sticks this is a personal favorite of mine i love this song this is c to f to g and back to f so as you can see all of those chords were included in what we found a second ago they're all chords from the key of c and what's also crazy is as we did these chords did we have to stress and strain over okay is this major or minor or diminished or no right the scale did it for us the scale automatically guided us to the correct chords we're still going to talk about major and minor chords later on but that's just to show you how powerful pulling these chords from the scale can be okay now let's keep on rolling the c scale is the easiest one because it's all white keys now what makes it a little more difficult is if you have a different scale you have to stay within that scale as you find your chords i'll show you let's say we go to the g scale and remember that g scale has f sharp built into it so as we do our chords we have to remember that it's not f natural it's f sharp so here's g that's do let's turn it into a full chord by taking every other note there we go now let's go up to re same thing let's go up to me but now here i would have f natural so instead i'm going to stay within the scale and do f sharp that's my three chord then my iv chord my five chord again here i would have f instead i'm going to use f sharp then my six chord then my seven chord and again i'm just doing the every other note shape and then my one chord every other note all together we have one two three four five six seven one those are all the right chords in the key of g alright same exact thing these are the chords that we just played in the key of g and if we look at real songs that use the g scale we're gonna find that the chords are there for us first one is good riddance by green day also known as time of your life and that starts on g then goes to c and then goes to d shake it off by t swift that starts on a minor then goes to c and then ends on g and last one is brown eyed girl that is g c g d now that's not to say we can't use other chords of course we can but i want you to think of this as your starting point and there's actually a technical name for what we just did these are called diatonic chords and all that diatonic chords are are the chords that naturally come out of a scale like we just did recap chords come from our scales instead of doremi faso latino all we're doing is one two three four five six seven now to make those chords you just take every other note and keep the scale in mind if there are sharps in the scale or flats on the scale remember those sharps or flats when you make those chords your action step is to find your diatonic chords in the keys of c g and f so again you're finding one two three four five six seven in those three different scales and again what we're accomplishing by doing this is cutting away the guesswork we're not worried about the hundreds and hundreds of different chords floating around out there instead we're finding the exact seven that we need for whatever key we're in all right let's keep going to the next section in this section i'm going to show you how to play like 500 different songs with just one set of chords sounds crazy but stay with me because right now we're going to talk about chord progressions a chord progression is just a set pattern of chords that we repeat over and over and over so for example we could even just take out of those seven chords we talked about last time we could just take the first four one two three four but by far and away there's one chord progression that's the most common one chord progression to rule them all i call it the legendary chord progression which is one five six and four with these four chords you can play everything ranging from rock pop musicals it's everywhere now remember i showed you how to find the seven chords for whatever scale you're using and let's say we're in the key of c we're just using all natural notes so the c chord would be number one because it's a c scale then i'm going to count one two three four five i'm gonna do the five chord then i'm gonna go from five up to six and then from six down to four six five four all right so all together it sounds like this one five six four pause the video and give that a try believe it or not you literally just played like 400 different pop songs that chord progression is at the heart of anything from disney to the office to journey and you saw every time it was the same four chords the only thing that changed was the melody aspect of it i could sit here for literally an hour and just play you song after song that all use that legendary chord progression and what's even crazier stay with me here even if the chord progression isn't exactly one five six four it's usually those four chords but maybe in a different order for example maybe it's one four six five or one six four five like heart and soul and these chords are so common and so fundamental that we actually have a term for them just like there are the primary colors these are the primary chords and technically one four and five are the primary chords and then six is sort of an unofficial primary chord it's not technically one of them but it's just as common as the main primary chords so i want you to think of these four as being your bread and butter and just to really bring it all home now you've seen real life examples of different chord progressions all it is is a set pattern of chords that makes up our song whether that be one five six four or one six four five or one two three four it doesn't matter different songs are gonna use different chord progressions but they're all based off of these concepts and i hope you're feeling good about that this is a really exciting moment for a lot of people but now i'm gonna sort of throw one last wrench into the mix and that is that obviously not all songs are in the key of c not all songs are going to use the c scale but the good news is we've already learned everything we need to know to put this into a different scale so for example let's say my song is in the key of g well we learned that we have an f sharp in the key of g so as i go through those chords number one which would be g in this case one two three four five i just have to remember not f natural f sharp right and then from five to six six back down to four six five four okay so there it was very similar i just had one sharp built into the mix and of course you could do the same pattern for whatever scale you're in so some songs do it in the key of f 1 5 6 four other songs might use say a d scale one five six four and of course it takes time and practice to go through your scale to find those four chords but it's always the same underlying principles and it doesn't even matter what genre you want to play those four chords are a huge gigantic part of most of the music you're going to come across recap time in this video we talked about how chord progressions are just set patterns of chords we talked about the legendary chord progression which is one five six and four and we talked about the primary chords which are one four and five your action step for this video is to find the legendary chord progression in again the keys of c g and f now you can go the extra mile and you can find the legendary chord progression in your other white key scales but for those of you just trying to get your feet wet i would stick with those three okay in the next section we're going to get way more into how to actually use this stuff how to practice it how to apply it but before we can do that first we have to cover how to find your key right how do we know what scale a certain song is using if we can't find our key if we can't find dome then we can't really do anything else we talked about right we can't figure out what our chords are we can't figure out where the melody is sitting so being able to find the key for our song is very important and in my mind there's three main ways to do that the most concrete way the first way is if you like using sheet music you can literally look at the sheet music to find your key now i know not everybody uses sheet music some people use youtube videos some people have you know maybe a friend shows them a song or a teacher shows them maybe you play by ear and if you're one of those other people just wait for the next two methods if you do use sheet music all you have to do is learn one rule for sharp keys and another rule for the flat keys and the rule for any key that's using sharps any sharp key what you do is you look at the last sharp and then just go a half step higher so for example in this key signature we have two sharps the last one is c sharp so if i play that on the piano it looks like this to find my key now all i do is go a half step higher and i find that i'm in the key of d and if you know your d scale that checks out because the d scale has two sharps in it one more example this one has four sharps and i'm just going to look at the last sharp which in this case is d sharp now d sharp on the piano if i go a half step higher i get e so this would be the key of e which has four sharps for the flat keys which is again any skill that uses flats instead of sharps all you have to do is look at the second to last flat in the key signature in this particular example we have two flats and the second to last flat is the b flat there so this would mean that our song is in the key of b flat it's using a b flat scale another example might be if i had four flats well the second to last flat here is a flat so that would be an a flat scale now the only scale that this trick won't work for is the scale with one flat because there's no second to last flat there's just one this one i typically recommend that people just try to remember and this is going to be the f scale we talked about this a little in the scale video but the f scale has one flat built into it which is the b flat there in that key signature okay now what if you're not using sheet music right what if you picked any other method of learning a song and you don't have it written down in front of you well what i recommend is looking at the very last note of the song typically songs are going to end on do they're going to end on the first note of the scale not always but a lot of the time they will so looking at the last note of the song gives you a great clue about what key you're in and there's tons of examples i could show you because again most songs do this if i play thinking out loud by ed sheeran and i get that last note is d and sure enough this song is in the key of d similarly if i play i don't know piano man and i do [Music] that last note is c so in this case piano man would be in the key of c it's that simple and again not every song does this but a lot do as a matter of fact i would say most do so looking at that final note really gives you a great picture of what key you're in now this last method is my favorite method it's the most foolproof one but it's also the most difficult and it boils down to this just know your scales right so it takes a lot of time and practice but once you know your scales it doesn't matter where the song starts or ends or what it does you can kind of just see okay if i have one flat i know that that's my f scale because i've practiced the f scale over and over and so if that's what my song is sort of sticking to that's the key i'm in for example let's say i'm playing just the way you are [Music] okay so i found that it was a lot of white keys except for this b-flat and that is exactly what you would see in the f-scale all white keys except for b-flat so again not super useful in the short term but if you've learned your scales it's infallible you'll know exactly what scale you're using the entire song there's one last sort of curveball that gets thrown into all this which is that up till this point we've been talking about major scales and major keys but a song can also be in a minor key it can be using a minor scale as well it's nothing to worry about we're going to get to that in a future section that's coming up but for now let's keep going let's recap we talked about the three different ways to find your key number one was looking at the key signature if you like to use sheet music number two was looking at the last melody note or the last chord of your song and lastly just knowing your scales knowing what sharps and what flats are in certain keys so that you can compare to the song that you're playing your action step for this video is to take two songs that you already know how to play and try to find the key for those songs try to figure out what scale that those songs are using putting it all together we've talked about melody we've talked about chords now we want to talk about the combination of those two things so stay with me here this is to me where all of the light bulbs start clicking now this is so important this is the biggest question i get asked on my other videos it's the biggest question i get asked teaching this in person and it's this corey how do i know whether a melody is do re me or whether it's a one chord or a four chord well the answer is this we have to start practicing this stuff we want to take the time to analyze different songs and get more comfortable with this new language and in order to do that we have to start with songs that we already know alright so whether you learn songs off youtube or sheet music or maybe you take piano lessons and you have a piano teacher you want to take a song you already know you know where the notes are you know where the chords are then we use our music theory to analyze what's going on you know we figure out what's the chord progression what scale is this in we pick apart the song and figure out what's going on behind the scenes every time you do that you're gonna get more and more comfortable with this stuff to the point where it's automatic so let's say we're talking about beauty and the beast again and it doesn't matter if you learn this off youtube or sheet music but either way let's say we already know it and it sounds like this what we want to do then is go in and analyze what's happening so starting with the melody c d e f g g f e d c if that's my melody and i'm doing this within the c scale right i'm starting and ending on c then c is do do is the first note of the c scale now if i go up to the next note of the scale that's going to be re then up again from rey i would go to me and then fa and then so would be the top so all together that first melody is about as simple as it can possibly get it's do re mi fa so now the next part you can probably imagine if i'm coming back down it's just going to be the other way it's going to be so fa me re do now let's talk about the chords what i was playing started on the c chord then the next chord started on e and then the last one starts on a [Music] and now i just wrote down those left hand chords the c the e and the a and if we sort of go back and analyze that well c is the first note of the c scale so c is going to be the one chord the c chord is number one because it's the first note of the scale now e let's figure out what note of the scale that is well c is one so one two three is going to be our e minor chord here and we'll talk about the minors and majors in a second but for right now that's one two three then we do the same three chord again and then we go to a minor so let's figure out what number a is well again c is number one so a would be one two three four five six all right that's our sixth chord and all that means is that in this case the chord progression is one to three then three to six now remember you don't have to always write this down this was just to show you how you want to think about it you want to put numbers to your chords and you want to try to put solfege the do-ray me to your melodies you want to take that extra time to go back and analyze what you're playing now you might be asking well courtney why would i do that you know c already has a name right c d e what advantage do i get out of calling this do-ray me same thing for the chords what's the point of calling this one and three why don't we just say c and e minor that is a fantastic question to me if you don't ever get into the music theory side of things you're always kind of stuck on the surface right and a lot of people live there they're just stuck they don't really understand what they're doing whereas if you take things to that deeper level it's almost like you get musical superpowers so just to show you a few examples let's say i was a singer which i try to be but let's say i was like trying out for a part or something and i want to sing beauty and the beast the original key is right here bitter sweet and strange finding you okay so i'm not a nice kindly old woman so that's a very awkward place for me to sing it what i want to do is maybe shift it to a lower key because i'm a baritone and i have a lower heavier set voice if i know my music theory i can shift it from that higher key down to a lower key maybe one that uses a different scale and that's called transposing when you change the key of a song so maybe i'd sing it here instead bitter sweet and you can strange learning you were wrong that feels a lot more comfortable than the super high one and all i did to transpose it was i took the solfege of that melody doremi faso and i remapped it on to a different scale that's all transposing is so that's one example of something cool you can do with music theory another thing you can do is just understand music better i mentioned this a second ago but what i want you to do is take a look at the two songs i'm putting on the screen here we have let it go and we have don't stop believing on the surface these two songs have nothing to do with each other literally not a single one of those chords is the same but again if you're used to looking at things on a slightly deeper level if you're thinking about your music theory you can see that they're actually the exact same chord progression it's 1 5 6 4 in both cases the only difference is let it go is in the key of a flat and don't stop believing is in the key of e so what does this mean well we could do a mash-up of the two songs that would actually be kind of cool to hear or even without talking about something cool and gimmicky like a mashup you'll just have a better understanding of what songs share the same dna you're increasing your understanding of music and how it works and what your favorite songs do you're seeing the commonalities between certain songs that maybe share a melody or share a chord progression whereas if you just kept things on the surface level if you never wanted to dive into this stuff you wouldn't get any of those benefits but you know what i'm still not done i want to give you one more example of a way that music theory can help you something cool you can do with it and that is playing by ear so believe it or not learning this stuff can help you play songs just by listening to them no youtube videos no sheet music uh you know just totally by hearing it so again a lot of people think well that must be really hard and you know the truth is yeah it's not the easiest thing ever but it's also much simpler than a lot of people realize all we have to do is train our ear to hear the underlying music theory the underlying language of music so here's what i mean by that if we go back to the diatonic chords that one chord has a certain sound to it the two chord has its own certain sound to it each chord has this distinct flavor to it that a lot of people actually can innately hear and i'll give you an example to most people the sound of the one chord is the sound of the song ending right that's the chord that makes the song sound like it's over for instance if i play happy birthday i ended on the one chord now listen if i end on something different listen to how this sounds okay now that is a correct chord in the key of c it's not like i hit an egregiously wrong note but it wasn't the one chord so it sort of freaked your ear out to not hear the one chord there and if i do that in a different key it's still going to sound the same way let's use like an a flat scale all right check this out guess what the one chord still sounded like the song was over so i guarantee you your ear wasn't thinking oh yes in the first example that was the tonic which is c major and in the second example that was a flat no you don't have to worry about that again no matter what scale i'm using the sound of that one chord whether i'm in a c scale a g scale or a d scale the sound of that one chord is going to stay the same because your ear already could tell okay that's just the sound of the song being over and now you know that that's the one chord so that's just the tip of the iceberg obviously we could do a whole lot more on ear training specifically and if you're interested in learning more about that i do have a full ear training course where i walk you through my methods step by step this is what i personally do to play songs by ear and it's what i teach my students to get them doing it as well but for the time being that's just one more example of how music theory can help you and this was by no means a comprehensive list of all the ways it can help you but we just looked at a few we looked at transposing we looked at chord progressions we looked at ear training without it all of those things are going to seem downright impossible but with it on your side when you study this stuff you give yourself the tools to be able to do basically anything you want to do and just to recap here we talked about how to analyze a song that you already know then we talked about a few different ways that learning this stuff can really pay off in the long term your action step for this video the way to actually get better at this stuff and finally start to understand it is every time you learn a new song take the time to figure out what the solfege of the melody is the doremies all that stuff take the time to figure out the chord progressions for the different chords it's going to make it so much easier for you long term because you're really going to understand how your favorite songs are made the more different songs you do this with the more comfortable you're going to get and the more this language is going to become second nature but just like any language it's a little bit tough first you have to pay your dues you have to start slow the last step is the hardest one which is just getting out there and doing it all right let's take a deep breath we've covered a lot of stuff so far and we still have a few more things to talk about but this is a great stopping point to recap what we've learned so far alright we learned that a song is just melody plus chords we've learned that melodies come from our scales right we've learned that scales are made of the golden scale formula we also learned that chords come from the scales too so melodies come from scales and the chords come from scales as well we learned that to make a chord progression we're just taking a certain pattern of those chords for example one five six four the legendary chord progression we learned the three different methods for finding our key and the last thing we did was looked at real-life examples of how certain songs are constructed what was happening with the melodies what was happening with the chord progressions and we put it all together all right let's regroup we've got two more sections left next up is chord types what makes a chord major what makes it minor you've probably heard these terms before so let's go over to the piano and let's talk about it the cool thing is major chords and minor chords are very similar there's just one subtle difference between the two so let's actually start with what they have in common both major and minor chords have what's called a fifth we talked about that during the interval section and all that means is i'm counting one two three four five now the more technical definition is a fifth has seven half steps but i don't really super want you to worry about that just realize that you can count to a fifth and that's going to be in both major and minor chords now the difference is for a major chord the middle note is going to have a spacing of four half steps so let's count it one two three four okay so that's root third fifth a minor chord on the other hand has a spacing of three half steps one two three and as you can see that's just a one note difference between major and minor they're very close but they're slightly different and that slight difference makes a big impact on the sound a major chord has a happier sound and a minor chord has a sadder sound now the way you would write this out the way you would talk about it is that a major chord is a root a third and a fit a minor chord is root flat third and a fifth and it's important to note that when we talk about sharping things or flattening things it doesn't always mean black keys right a lot of the time it does but really all sharp means is that we're raising something and all flat means is that we're lowering something so let me show you an example if i play a d major chord i'll just show you this is d major and we can double check that one two three four half steps so that's d major and you can see i've already got a black key built into it f sharp now if i want to find d minor all i have to do is flat or in other words lower this f sharp this third so i'm going to lower it down to f natural and here we are on d minor d f and a and as you saw it's only a one note difference between d major which has f sharp built into it and d minor which has f natural now let's apply this a little bit and let's find some chords together let's say we want to figure out say e minor so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get e and i'm also going to get the 5th ready because i know both major and minor chords have this same fit right 1 2 3 4 5. now the only question is where is the middle note well for e minor remember that's three half steps one two three so this chord would be e minor now let's say i want to find a major well again i'm going to go to an a fifth because that's going to be the same regardless and then for a major chord i'm going to count four half steps let's do it one two three four a major now in this case a major is a c sharp and e it works the exact same way on the black keys so the fifths let's say for instance c to g it works the same way if i just sharp both of them my fifth is c sharp to g sharp then all i have left is the middle note which would be one two three for a minor chord or one two three four for major chord so in other words all that to say i follow the exact same mechanics i find a fifth i find my middle note depending on whether i want major or minor all right now the last thing to be aware of is that these fifths are really easy to find right it's that kind of shape you can just use your hand as a guide one two three four five but the one place where it's sort of different if i go from b to f what's interesting is right here we're at a spot on the piano where there's no black key here and there's no black key here so it sort of throws off the spacing and if you count it out this isn't a fifth because i only have six half steps one two three four five six remember for an actual fifth all those other ones are going to have seven half steps but right here we're just in a weird spot on the piano where it ends up being only six to fix that if i want to do a fifth on b i've got to compensate and stretch from b to f sharp okay so i hope that makes sense all the other fits you can just eyeball it's super easy but b is sort of this one weird one that we need f sharp to make it a full fit same thing with the flat keys i can just keep the same spacing of c sharp to g sharp or d sharp to a sharp same exact spacing until i get to the problem child of b so b flat if i go up here to like g flat or something that's way too far instead what i do is i go b flat to f and again all i'm trying to find is seven half steps one two three four five six seven all of this boils down to the fact that you know c is normal c sharp is normal d is normal and so on and so on the weird one is b b flat and b natural those two are the ones where it doesn't quite match up so just keep that in mind as you're finding your chords that the fifths really aren't too weird unless you're on the note b or b flat alright let's do one more example and let's say we want to find b major well we're gonna go to b and we're going to remember that this isn't our fifth in this case it's actually f sharp now that we have our fifth all we're going to do is count four half steps for our major third one two three four there we go b major root third and fifth now you know the dictionary definition of major and minor and one quick thing to note we're not going to spend too much time on this but every chord can be rearranged for instance instead of playing a c chord as the standard c e g what if we take that c on bottom and move it to the top of the chord then we would have e g c and that's what's called an inversion so root position is the term for when a chord is in order we say that's in root position but when we change the order when we rearrange it we just call that an inversion and inversions are totally fine as well they're just as valid as root position chords but i don't want you to get too confused about that right now i just wanted you to know that that is a thing that can happen what i want to do now is tie this back in to our video on finding the diatonic chords the chords from our scale you'll remember for the c scale we went through do re and we found the one two three four five six and seven chords like that well now let's go back and let's figure out well what were those chords right in other words this was my one chord from the key of c well what is this is it c major is it c minor in this case because i have four half steps one two three four it's c major but now check this out if i go up to the d chord the two chord if i look at the spacing look at this one two three so the two chord is actually minor which is kind of interesting let's keep going the three chord we have a spacing of three half steps so that's minor the four chord has a spacing of four half steps that's major five you know again we could take this a lot slower and really work through each one but this is also going to be major six one two three is minor and seven is actually something called diminished you don't have to worry about that in this section we'll cover that in a later video here's where things get a little more interesting let's do a different scale okay so for example in the earlier video we did a g scale and we found all the chords that come from the key of g and we've remembered that f sharp as we went through right because that's part of the scale now if we look at each individual chord we'll find that one is major so g major two is minor a minor in this case three is minor b minor then c major d major one two three four half steps e minor one two three half steps seven is diminished and g is major yet again at the top so what i hope you noticed is that the one chord in both cases was major the two chord in both of those instances was minor and so on and so on right so what i'm getting at is that no matter what scale we use the one chord the four chord and the five chord are major and the 2 3 and 6 chords are minor that's going to hold true no matter what scale we're using no matter what key we're in and to me this is so crazy this is why our ear doesn't care about what scale a song is using right the melody the chords it's all based off of the same set of whole steps and half steps so everything that we pull out of the hat whether that be a certain melody whether that be a certain chord progression since it's all based off of the same thing it's always going to sound the same to our ears right doremi faso sounds relatively the same in any scale the one chord sounds relatively the same in any scale for people with perfect pitch the differences between the scales are a lot more pronounced but for people without perfect pitch like myself and probably like you we're just as happy to hear a song and one key as we already hear it in another so earlier i did happy birthday in the key of c and i did it in the key of a flat and both ways sound perfectly acceptable and same thing earlier when i did beauty and the beast i started in the original key and then i transposed it to the key of e [Music] and either way it's still going to sound like the song that's why learning this underlying stuff is so powerful you learn the basics again do re me for the melody and one two three for the chords and then you just apply that to whatever scale you need and all songs in all genres are based off of those simple building blocks okay recap a major chord has four half steps between the root and the third and a minor chord has just three half steps we also learned that within our diatonic chords within our scale the one four and five chords are major and the two three and six chords are minor the seventh chord is diminished that's something we'll save for the more intermediate video for now just remember that word diminished we'll get to that later your action step for this video is to play every major and minor chord one at a time so for instance you might start on c major and go to c minor then d major to d minor e major to e minor and so on alright i'll be honest with you i debated putting this last part in the video or saving it for the more intermediate level but i do feel that it's fundamental for beginners to understand so we're going to talk about minor scales people get very freaked out about these just like they get freaked out about chords but every major scale already has a minor scale baked into it so the beauty is if you can play all of your different major scales you by default have your minor skills too so what on earth am i talking about right that doesn't make any sense let's go to the piano and i'll show you exactly what i mean now first thing to say about minor scales is that to a lot of people myself included they sound very sad they sound kind of dark and somber check this out [Music] and for that reason a lot of people prefer them they have a sort of gravitas to them let's talk about how we can actually find and work with minor scales every major scale has a minor scale built into it and since they're related we call it the relative minor here's what i mean to find your relative minor scale you take any major scale you want let's say c for this example and you're going to find the sixth note of that scale in this case one two three four five six would be a now if i keep the key signature from c so again this is all white keys for this scale if i keep that scale but i play from a to a i get a minor watch it [Music] nothing really mind blowing nothing really difficult all i did was kept all the white keys from the key of c but i started and ended on a and that is the a minor scale and again they're related a minor is the relative minor of c major because they're both all white keys they just start in different places so the c scale starts on c obviously and the a minor scale starts on a but let's do another example because that one was kind of easy let's say we want to find the relative minor of g major well as we remember the g scale has an f sharp built into it we talked about that a little bit in the scale video so as i go to find my minor scale i need to remember that i'm going to have f sharp okay so hang on to that and let's count up to again the sixth note of our g scale and that's going to show us what our relative minor is so if you can count to six you can do this watch g is one one two three four five six all right so the relative minor of g major is e minor now as i go through all i have to do is remember the key signature from the key of g i have to remember that there was an f sharp as i play through this so watch here's e and i'll go up not to f but to f sharp just like the g scale e f sharp g and then everything else is pretty easy after that [Music] so there we go that's my e minor scale and just to drive it home one more time the g scale had f sharp right there and the e minor scale also has f sharp they're related it's the same scale basically but starting in different places and the cool thing is this basically means if you know your major scales you already know the minor scales as well all you have to do is count up six notes and start there now what you might have noticed is that finding the relative minor is a little bit of an indirect way to find a minor scale right we take a major scale then we go to the sixth note then we start on that so the question i get asked immediately after showing people that is well corey how do i just sit down and say bam this is a c minor scale right how do i just go right to the scale i want and play it well you're in luck there's a way to do that as well and this is called finding the parallel minor and all that means is we're going to keep the starting note the same going from c major to c minor and i'll show you how to do that right now so again let's say we have c major and i want to find c minor the parallel minor that also starts on c the way i do that is i flat third the sixth and the seventh this works for any major scale just flat three six and seven and you automatically get your minor scale check this out here's c one two and i'm gonna flat the third note so that's three four five six so i've got to flat that seven would have been b i've got to flat that and one so again i took my c scale and i flattened three i flattened six and i flattened seven let's do another example let's say we're in the key of a major and we want to find the parallel minor so again going from a major to a minor well the way we're going to do that is we're going to take the a major scale and i'll play it like this so you can see it better but i'm going to flat the third sixth and seventh notes one two three i'm gonna lower that four five six i'm gonna lower that seven lower that and it turns out that a minor is all white keys and at this point you may realize well hey i already know that scale we already talked about a minor it's all white keys right exactly whether we find it from c major using that relative minor method or whether we find it from a major using the parallel minor the end result is the same and i know that might seem a little bit confusing but really it's more tools in your arsenal there's two different ways to find any minor scale you can use the relative minor in this case we went from c major went to the sixth note and found a minor or you can use the parallel minor method which is where you start on the exact same note and just flat three six and seven from that major scale they're both perfectly valid it's just a question of which one you prefer to use okay now just when you thought you were safe i'm gonna throw one last thing at you and that's this for our minor scale we have a couple alternate versions that we can use that give it a little bit more flavor so in other words the major scale there's really only one version of that but for the minor scale there's three different versions of minor scales the first one is the one that we've already talked about that's called natural minor and natural minor is referring to the minor scale that is the default right sort of the starting point the one that we just covered now to add a little bit of flavor what we can do is sharp the seventh note of a minor scale and that's what's called the harmonic minor scale so for example we learned that a minor is all white keys but what i can do is i can go from a natural minor which is our starting point and instead go to a harmonic minor which is where we sharp the seventh note watch this one two three four five six here's seven so i'm going to sharp it and that's a harmonic minor it's nothing too crazy that's just a one note difference but it does change the sound of the scale check this out for a lot of people that sounds sort of egyptian right you have that interesting kind of exotic sound there but the reason the scale was invented was to give us a little bit more pull the natural minor scale if you look at the top two notes here it ends with the whole step so the whole step doesn't have quite as much pull if i'm playing something in a natural minor key that's okay but if i do the harmonic minor if i have g sharp instead of g natural listen to the difference it's just a little bit more definitive a little bit more final as opposed to the natural minor scale which has a g natural different sounds both very useful but i wanted you to be aware that there are a couple different types of minor scales that said there's one last one we're going to talk about and i almost don't want you to worry about this one this is one that if you're playing modern music you're not going to really come across it a ton but it's called the melodic minor scale and the melodic minor scale sharps 6 and 7 on the way up but does the natural minor scale on the way down so you heard that right it's different depending on which way you're going but i'll show you how it goes one two three four five i'm gonna sharp six i'm gonna sharp seven and then hit my top note and when i come back down it's the same as the natural minor scale all white keys here it is all together all right now we've talked about finding the relative minor and the parallel minor and we've talked about three different types of minor scales once you're in that minor key the first way is the natural minor which is the naturally occurring minor scale the second is the harmonic minor where we sharp the seventh note to give it a little bit more pull and the third minor scale is the melodic minor which is different on the way up than it is on the way down at this point we're not really going to do anything new with minor scales but i know you probably might be feeling like a little bit lost a little bit hazy so let's just do one more example where we tie this all together let's say we want to find the g minor scale well for this example let's go with the parallel method right we're going to go from g major and we're going to use that to find g minor okay so here's g major we know that and now what we're going to do is we're going to flat the third sixth and seventh notes okay one two three we're gonna flat that four five six i'm gonna flat that and seven i'm gonna flat that as well and here is my g minor scale i have two flats b flat and e-flat going from g to g and now that we have the starting point of our natural minor scale now we can do some of those alternate versions so let's say i want to go to g harmonic minor well i'm just going to sharp the seventh note one two three four five six and here's seven so i'm going to sharp it and that's g harmonic minor if i want to find g melodic minor well i'm gonna sharp six and seven on the way up watch one two three four five here's six so i'm gonna sharpen seven sharp that and g on top then on the way down it's the same as the natural minor all together here's that g melodic minor scale and again i don't really want you to worry about the melodic minor all that much i mainly tell my students to focus on the natural minor and the harmonic minor those are the two you're going to use the most often now you might be wondering well how does this affect the chords right we talked about pulling the diatonic chords out of the scale so now that we're in a minor scale does that sort of change it does that throw it off and the answer is not really essentially we do the same thing the chords from the key of c are the same chords for the key of a minor only instead of calling c1 we're going to call a minor one and then everything else just sort of follows out from there in other words a minor used to be 6 but now we're just going to call it 1. then the b diminished chord would be 2 and c would be 3 etc etc it's the exact same seven chords but we've just relabeled them i know this section was a doozy i know it was a lot to take in but now we've made it to the action step what i want you to do is find the relative minor of c f and g major and then i want you to find the parallel minor of those same scales and of course an optional add-on to this action step could be finding all of your minor key scales from a through to g phew okay at this point we've equipped ourselves with a ton of information we've learned a lot of new things but now the question is well how do i use this how do i apply this stuff and ultimately it depends on what you want to do if you're a songwriter well let's say we want to write a song in the key of i don't know d now we know how to find a d scale [Music] so now we can also know what all the right chords are and we can get to work right maybe i'll find a chord progression i like like one five six four but the point is i have the tools to create chord progressions now let's say we want to play songs by ear well now that we know about do remy faso latito and we know it's going to apply to any scale all i have to do is train those sounds so for instance dota re do redo then maybe i go dota me [Music] domido and i start working those sounds into my ear then maybe i graduate to full melodies doremi fasofami redo once i do that work of really getting the hang of those seven syllables it's going to work on any scale so i could change to the key of i don't know e flat [Music] omega it's going to sound more or less the same way so i just get comfortable training up those sounds or maybe let's say i want to improvise i want to be able to make stuff up on the spot well all i would do in that case is pick a scale for instance in this case i just picked f and i'm gonna stay within that scale and just play notes just make stuff up see what happens [Music] right and i'm purposely trying not to do anything too crazy i'm just i'm playing through my scale i could go up i could go down i could skip you know all the options are open to you you just have to dive in and practice whatever it is you want to get better at and as you practice those things everything we talked about is going to make more and more sense and just to sort of put a bow on everything that we talked about whether i'm ear training songwriting improvising just playing music for fun whether i'm in the key of c or a minor or purple it doesn't matter it all boils down to you guessed it these two things now of course there are tons of examples of songs that break these rules right places where composers or artists stepped outside of that framework and did something a little different as a matter of fact there's other more advanced concepts that sometimes step outside of what we just talked about we can talk about all the extra stuff in the intermediate and advanced videos but for now just think of this as being your default your starting point final recap we learned that a song is just melody plus chords we learned that melodies come from our scales and how to make those scales using the golden scale formula we also learned that chords come from scales as well we learned about those diatonic chords that we just pull out of our scale then we learned about chord progressions which is where we just take a certain pattern of those chords for example one five six four we learned the three different methods for finding our key we learned about how to put it all together and make a full song out of both of those elements and then we went ahead and talked about chord types like major and minor and we figured out that major chords have four half steps and minor chords have three we talked about how 1 4 and 5 are always major 2 3 and 6 are always minor and last thing we did was we figured out how to make a minor scale based off of a major scale and there's two ways to do that there's the relative minor and there's the parallel minor and that once we find our natural minor scale there's a couple of alternate versions as well which are the harmonic and melodic minor if you made it this far in the video you are a champion and i want to hear from you i want to hear if it made sense i want to hear if there's parts and i need to explain a little better so let me know any and all questions are definitely welcome if you did find this video helpful definitely leave a like drop a comment down below and subscribe to the channel it really does help with algorithm stuff and it helps to get this in front of more people that's it for me today keep on rocking and i'll see you next time

Channel: Corey Lennox

Views: 230,228

Keywords: music theory for dummies, music chords theory, music scales theory, chord progressions theory, music theory piano, music theory explained, music theory for beginners, music theory lessons, music theory 101, music theory, how to learn piano, piano lessons online free, piano lessons online best, piano lessons easy, learn piano online free, piano lessons online beginners, learn piano lessons, piano lessons online youtube, music theory for dummies full course, chords explained

Id: QWnTVipZgT4

Length: 75min 15sec (4515 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021