Songs that use the "Eight Days a Week" chord progression

this video is sponsored by session Studio stick around to find out how you could win a thousand pounds in cash by entering this month's songwriting competition this is what I would call the eight days a week chord progression the corporation goes from chord number one in the key up to the major version of the second chord of the key to the four chord and then back to the one chord or in the key of D major that would be d e g and back to D again now as the name would suggest this is the chord progression that was used in eight days a week by the Beatles [Music] The Beatles actually made use of this chord progression in a few more of their songs including you won't see me [Music] and in the title track from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band they use this chord progression but with dominant sevenths on each degree of the chord progression leading to a more bluesy version of the progression [Applause] [Music] a smile and the Beatles fondness of this chord progression extended into their solo careers we can find various Beatles solo tracks using this chord progression [Music] [Music] nobody loves you when you're down nobody sees you winning [Music] so later in this video we'll take a closer look at what makes this competition work what makes it sound the way it does but before we do that let's look at some other examples of songs that use this chord progression so far we've only looked at examples of it used in Beatles songs or Beatles solo tracks so this chord progression obviously has a Beatles sound and if a chord progression has a Beatles sound there's one band you can be sure has used it as well [Music] we're gonna make but of course this chord progression hasn't just been used by The Beatles And The Beatles tribute act it's been used by very stiff artists over the years here's a small sample of them [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] this chord progression has also been used in some video game soundtracks for example in undertale foreign [Music] so in the moment we'll take a closer look at what makes this chord progression work but before we do that I want to tell you about today's sponsor which is session studio session studio is an app that allows songwriters to share ideas together over the app when they're collaborating on a song for example you can upload or record ideas directly into the app and once they're recorded they'll be shared with everyone else in your session so now that I've uploaded my idea everyone else who has access to this session can have a look at it contribute ideas and discuss it with this app you can organize your song credits and splits keeping track of who contributed what so you can release the song with all the correct song and recording information also if you sign up for the app using my promo code down below you'll get 45 gigs of cloud storage for free for six months now the most exciting bit of all of this is that session Studio are currently running a monthly songwriting competition called song Drop and for the month of March I am the guest judge for that competition all you have to do to enter the competition is download the session studio app which is completely free to use then write an original song and submit it to the email address down below the winner will get a thousand pounds in cash and the complete 14 ultimate production Suite which in itself is worth over a thousand pounds as well if you're interested in the competition do follow the links Down Below in the description to find out more information so now let's take a closer look at what makes this chord progression work the most interesting feature of this chord progression is the second chord in the progression which is the major two chord usually in the major key in D Major for example like we are right now the second chord of the key would not be a major chord it would be a minor chord it would be E minor but here instead we're getting E major which sadly has this bright uplifting sound it also means in the chord progression all of our chords are major chords so it has this very bright intense sound to it uplifting sound [Music] the presence of the E major chord gives us this temporary lydian feel so lydian is exactly the same as the major scale but the fourth degree has been raised and that's what's happening here when we're in D foreign we usually have a g natural so the fourth degree of the scale is usually G natural one two three four but when we're on the E major chord we have a G sharp instead so the fourth degree has been raised so when we're on this e major chord we're temporarily in D lydian instead of D major we've switched to a parallel mode and in some songs that uses chord progression that will just be kept to the chord progression but sometimes for example in It's a Kind of Magic by Queen the vocal Melody will make use of that raised fourth which really highlights that sort of temporary uplifting lydian sound but temporary is the way it is because the next chord is a normal G chord so we've lost the G sharp and it's gone back down to a regular fourth degree so this chord progression is mixing the normal major scale with lydian so we're getting a moment of uplift and then we're getting the sense of coming back down to our regular major sound the other way we can think about this second chord in the key is that a secondary dominant so usually when we talk about a dominant chord we're talking about the fifth chord of the key so in the key of D here one two three four five that's the fifth degree of the scale a so if we build a chord on that fifth degree that is our dominant chord and it functions to take us back home to where we started in D dominant chords resolve us back down a fifth to where we began now a secondary dominant is a chord that's a fifth away of one of the other chords in the key for example if we wanted to be in D Major but we wanted to then feel a sense of resolution up onto the fifth chord A well we could use the chord that's a fifth away from a which is e e major so we're in the key of D and then we use the fifth chord of a which is e which takes us up to a and a takes us back to D so we have a secondary dominant a dominant and back to where we started but of course that's not quite what's going on in the eight days a week chord progression we're talking about we do get a d chord we do get an E chord when it doesn't go to a it doesn't go to where a secondary dominant would usually go to it instead goes to G instead which sort of interrupts what we were expecting and that is how we could think about it it's a secondary dominant but rather than giving us the perfect Cadence the five to one Cadence that you're used to expecting of a secondary dominant it instead gives us an interrupted Cadence where the motion that we were expecting is interrupted by going to a different chord namely G the fourth chord instead of a the fifth chord one of the other really interesting elements of this chord progression is the different ways that we can voice lead it for example because each chord in the chord progression is a major chord mostly it in this way where if each chord is in the exact same position so root position for example we get this parallel motion between the chord moves because with each chord change each note in each chord is moving the same amount in the same direction at the same time parallel motion and sometimes parallel motion is something that we want to avoid because we don't want each note in each chord to sound unified and we want to have them each having their own independent sound but parallel motion does have its own appeal which can sound really powerful and unified rather than a chord progression it starts sounding like one big Melody one big riff but all of the notes are moving together all of the time but against that conversely to that we could also arrange these chords in a way where we have this really nice independent motion between each note and we get this lovely step-by-step line between each chord for example like this when I arrange the chords like this the top note of the chords winds up playing this semitone motion down the piano with the first chord we have a on top next chord we have G sharp and top then we have G on top and then we have F sharp on top [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 132,304

Keywords: eight days a week, beatles, beatles chord progression, the beatle progression, music theory, john lennon, paul mccartney, oasis, chords, george harrison, chord progression, major 2, lydian

Id: 5ANjO8ypYfQ

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023