Secondary Dominants- Write Better Chord Progressions! [MUSIC THEORY / SONGWRITING]

if you're sick of right and chord progressions with the same four or five or six chords one of the quickest ways to break outside of that box is to learn your secondary dominant chords in this video what I want to do is go over the concept of what is the dominant chord what are our secondary dominant chords and then really focus on how can we write music using these where have we seen them before in actual music all that kind of good stuff now this video won't make a lot of sense unless you really understand building a major scale and building the diatonic chords of the major scale so if you're not familiar with that concept please check out the video I did on writing major chord progressions I've linked to it in the description I want to get started though by understanding the concept of the dominant chord so here's the deal let's pick any major chord or minor chord I'm gonna pick G major alright so here's a pretty little G major and the dominant chord is the chord that will take me to G major there's a chord out there that when you play it your ear is just gonna be praying to come back to G major and that's the dominant chord I can find it just by counting up a perfect fifth that's like five notes of my major scale one two three four five it's also seven frets away and it takes me to the note D and then once I find that note I just build a seventh chord on top of it so D seven alright this is the chord that will take us to G major listen to how strong of a landing how definite of a resolution it was when we got back to G there's no mistaking it G is our home is our tonic G has been taught Asajj that's the word I'm gonna be using quite a bit in this video so very simple you want to find the dominant chord of a major chord just go up a fifth play a seventh chord and here's the great thing this also works with minor chords as well so G minor you want to find the dominant chord of G minor easy go up a fifth one two three four five give it a a seventh chord D seven and listen as it comes back to g-minor very strong resolution right there so really all you have to keep in mind is that dominant chords will pull you back to a tonic all right and they're easy to find you go up a fifth you build a seventh chord for them this works for major chords or minor chords now if that makes sense to you all we have to do is apply that concept to every single chord in my key so let's figure out the key of G all right key of G has a G major chord and a minor a B minor a see a D and E minor an F sharp diminished and a G major all right so I've got all those seven chords I can build a dominant chord off of all these different chords like I had an a minor in there what's the dominant chord of a minor well go up a fifth make it a seventh chord that would be up a fifth as E and a seventh chord is e seven so I can build the dominant chord of my second chord we would call that the five of two the dominant chord of my second chord and that would be an e7 e seven would take me to a minor even though I'm in the key of G so how can I use that chord right there well let's just play a G major chord and let's just bring in that e seven and you see it sounds alright it does want to come back to that a minor and maybe let's just end with my normal dominant chord D seven is the dominant chord in the key of G so not that g e7 a minor G seven and that sounds good really really nice interesting chord you can hear how much color pops up with that a seven we've all of a sudden got a note in there that is not in the key of G specifically with this e seven we're bringing in a G sharp and you're not allowed to play a G sharp in the key of G so any time you're introducing one of these secondary dominant chords you're going to be introducing a non diatonic note and you're gonna have to accommodate that I'll talk about that a little bit at the very end of the video we can also hear this v of to change in the song let it snow that song is in the key of C five and then from our to two or five then all of a sudden it goes from our two chord to our dominant chord of the two and then finally back to our dominant chord to our top so you got all the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful then right here and when there's really no place to go here our nice exchange that is attention in the middle of my verse right there that a7 pulls me so strongly back to D minor that it's almost like temporarily it's like temporarily we're in the key of D minor if you picked up the song right there if you started playing it from right there that's pretty clearly the key of D minor with the dominant chord in there so you know it's it's interesting to think of the secondary dominant changes as little tiny modulations you don't have to think of in that way but I really like to think that these are temporary modulations into a new key and that helps you accommodate that part later on down the line now also with this song at the very very end of it I like to close it off with that five of two again but with a little bit different of a context you've got let it snow let it snow let it snow and then bringing in that a7 again really cues you off to hear that again let it snow so that five of two to me is a really funny jazz jazz hands you know shows over kind of said chord I really have a very distinct identity other and hopefully you'll hear that it's got kind of a like a ritzy kind of sound to it so let's go back to the key of G for a little bit here and I want to look at my one chord to my full record to my one chord and that four chord specifically if I want to get to my four chord I'd have to play a g7 but I'm starting here on a G major right and g7 is not in the key of G major if I do it anyways though listen to how strong it's gonna pull to that four chord which once I've got there I could do all sorts of stuff I could borrow the four chord and then come back to my cotton so really nice change is that seventh chord built off of my tonic because it takes me to my four chord great example of this is Hey Jude Hey Jude is in the key of F we got my 1 chord five chord of C stay on the five chord make it a c7 that's just my natural the dominant chord back to F here's my four chord b-flat minute you better into your heart five for that you can't stop now check it out I'm gonna come back to my tonic ass but then I make that happen f7 cuz that's really gonna warm us up and get us ready for really nice change is collapsing into our 4 chord right there Tata sizes the 4 very well to the point where it really feels like you're in the key of B flat major there for a little bit but you're not you're in the key of F they just play a really great trick on you now what about my 5 of 5 so I'm in the key of G my 5th chord is d and what's the dominant chord of D well that's a 7 so if I wanted to play an a7 that would take me to a d which would then resolve me to G and I'll actually play it as a d7 that way I've got my dominant the secondary dominant of my dominant then I've got my dominant then I got my tonic so a7 d7 to G and do you hear that chromatic movement there I've got a C sharp right here on my second string and then on a d7 there's a natural C and then on G major there's just that natural be so nice little natural chromatic descent to help us resolve there we hear this exact same change at the end of Kokomo by the Beach Boys which is a perfect chord progression it's in the key of C alright so here's my 4/4 to the key of C here's my borrowed 4 chord here's my tonic then d7 is the five of five it takes me to my natural five and it back to my tonic awesome chord progression now the most common secondary dominant chord that we hear is the five of six this might be one of the most overused chords in history if I'm in the key of G my sixth chord is a minor and if I want to get to E minor I would play a b7 first so you can hear how nice even if I just went from G major play that secondary diamond right off the back it's gonna take you to E minor and then I can with pretty much anything so great progression right off the door just fine sneaking in five of six and following up with the six what's weird about that one is a lot of times people will use that secondary dominant that five of six and they won't even follow it up with a six for example the song creep by Radiohead is an E major we've got our one chord and our three chord would normally keep the G sharp minor in this case it's G sharp major which is the dominant chord of C sharp minor so this is the five of six but they don't give you the six to give you the forward step so following up the secondary dominant chord with the wrong chord little little surprising from the traditional point of view but I think it works just fine we hear this a lot also in the song you by CeeLo green it's in the key of C major we've got our one chord we've got our five of five which you would expect us to take to the five chord but no they take you to the four chord instead all right so C major D seven F major C major awesome little courage [Music] just a few months back I finished a country track that uses this exact same chord progression we've got a 1/2 hour 5 of 6 and then it takes us straight to our 4 and then our 5 instead [Music] now before we wrap things up there's a few things I want to talk about here when you introduce one of these cords you're introducing a note that is outside of the key and you usually have to do a little work to make sure that whatever you're singing or whatever you're playing lead guitar on is gonna accommodate that new note so here's my suggestion because this is a very deep topic and we can spend a lot of time talking about this when that 7th chord keep comes up keep in mind it's only four notes it's a root a third a fifth and a flat seven and there's a lot of scales that contain those notes so I would say pick a scale that contains those four notes try playing it on top of that chord and see if you like the way it sounds your primary candidates would be the mixolydian scale that's got all those notes in it also the Phrygian dominant scale has all those notes in it but you would be working off of that mainly if you're resolving to a minor chord so for example if I'm going from the 5 of 2 to the 2 then I would think about using the Phrygian dominant scale on that first chord to accommodate both the chords also I have no problem just dropping the 7th completely you know it the 7th chords can get a little old-timey and a little not so modern sounding sometimes so we do hear the same kind of ideas just without the 7th just using as a major chord instead and one last thing the reason I didn't give you a dominant chord off my 7 chord is because no matter how hard you try you're not gonna be able to resolve to a diminished triad you can't really tana sized it so you could build a 7th chord off the fifth there and call it 5 of 7 and that's been done before it just doesn't function like these other ones do so once again diminished is the cause of the odd man out in these cases so I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned something and I hope you've expanded your cord vocabulary a little bit if you really like this video you can consider supporting my patreon page really these lessons wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fine folks over there who are donating to support these lessons and if you can't do that that's totally fine you could just like comment subscribe all that kind of stuff helps me out so thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 547,201

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, guitar lesson, cool guitar, how to play guitar, secondary dominants, secondary dominant chord, secondary dominant progression, dominant chord, v7 chord, v7/v, v7/iv, v7/iii, v7/ii, v7/vi, music theory, write chord progressions, write interesting chord progressions, writing better music, writing better chords, more interesting chords, writing interesting chords, new chords, chromatic chords, songwriting lesson, writing chords

Id: py4HaueW50Q

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The video is great! Please tune your guitar.

[u/Nottheunicorn]

This guy is really good at explaining theory