Supercharge Your 2 5 1 Chord Progressions on Piano || Great For Songwriting and Improvisation

[Music] hey everyone today I'm going to be showing you how to create variations on the basic 2/5 1 chord progression now 2/5 ones and also four five ones which are very closely related are incredibly common in all kinds of music and if you can learn how to mix them up substitute them enrich them and vary them then that's a really useful skill to have whether you're improvising or writing your own songs or just playing kind of messing about on the piano just before I get started I should say that today's tutorial is sponsored by district 8 calm now if you're making and recording your own music I know quite a few of you guys who have regulars on the channel do that then district it offers you a quick easy and very cost effective way of getting your songs into all the major online stores and streaming services and that includes Apple music iTunes Spotify Amazon and Google Play now the deal with district it is simple you pay just under 20 US dollars a year to upload unlimited songs and 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G a minor and B diminished before we get back to C at the top of the scale there okay so those are the C major diatonic chords but to make it easy to discuss things outside of the context of key we can also give those chords numbers okay one two three four five six seven and when you see them written down it's often in Roman numerals with lowercase new balls for minor chords okay an uppercase four major chords so the two chord of C major is the chord built off the second degree of the C major scale D minor the five chord is built off the fifth one two three four five G and the number one chord is built off the first note of the scale the tonic C so two five one now I'm playing each chord in its root position there but actually you would usually play them invert in inversions that lock together more logically like this D minor G C two five one okay so exactly the same chords as two five one but just played in a different inversion to give them a more natural flow two five one D minor G C now two five one sequences usually exist within a larger chord progression often at the midpoint of a progression and then again towards its end that's because two five ones offer a very handy way of getting back to the tonic chord of a key the number one chord so the number two chord D minor in the key of C leads naturally to the number five chord that's one of its harmonic functions to use the technical language and the number five chord the so-called dominant chord leads back naturally to the number one chord the tonic chord lots of popular music uses two five ones and four five ones which are very very similar four five one is just like a two five one but instead of using the chord built off the second degree of the scale it uses a number four chord so in C major that would be F G C four five one rather than two five one as you can probably see the F chord a number four chord and the D melina called the number two coordinate are very similar they sound very similar they share two notes and in a chord progression they they will often have the same harmonic function they will do the same job when it comes to sticking their progression together they just have slightly different sounds slightly different colors to them okay but but a two five one and a four or five one are pretty much interchangeable you'll also find two five ones and four five ones in classical music a lot of the time yeah and the other night I was a really good performance of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and towards the end of that there's a whole sequence of four or five ones yeah it's just before Don Giovanni the hero the antihero is about to be dragged off down to hell and he's you singing this song about wine and women which he calls they have the sustenance and glory of humanity and he's in the key of b-flat and you get this whole sequence of okay two five one okay but just notice what he's doing there there's a little variation because we've got the cord of a flat and then before cord then for the five chord we've got F sus f sus 4 okay without B flat held in it resolving to the B flat okay four five one okay gives it it gives it a kind of churchy kind of choirboy sound which you're kind of ironic and probably deliberately so knowing Mozart considering the considering on a subject matter so when it comes to spotting to five long sequences of all four five one sequences remember that the most likely place to find them is going to be in the middle of a progression or towards the end just as we're heading back towards the tonic chord to the number one chord so what we're gonna do now is look at how you can extend an enriched or to five ones make them sound cooler yeah we'll start off with some pretty straightforward techniques and to then move on to some approaches that are a bit more technical and a bit more professional sounding so the very first thing you can do the two five one is extend its chords to create a richer and more interesting sound let's say that we're in the key of F major there's a scale of F major or two five one in that key is going to be G minor C F now right away we can make that sound just a little bit a little bit kind of richer by extending either or both of the two and five chords here and to start with we're just going to do that by adding seventh stem so G minor can become G minor 7th yeah I'm just gonna take that F and put it down the bottom instead to kind of retain the the shape of the original chord our basic C chord can become c7 by a b-flat perfectly diatonic in the key of F major because that that b-flat Croxon at the scale okay and the F chord we're just gonna leave it as it is for now if we were playing jazz or or cocktail or something like that we could enrich that chord you know we can make an F major seven or whatever but for now we're just going to leave it as a straightforward F chord now listen to the kind of before-and-after there here's the kind of undressed up the unadorned two five one G minor C and here it is with the seventh G - seven C seven F not a massive difference but just a little bit rich a little bit more complex sounding now that kind of extension they're just adding sevenths is so straightforward that if you're working on someone else's song you'll probably find that it's already baked into the chord progression yeah you know when you get the chord progression that will already have those sevens in it if you're working on your own songs though adding those sevenths just enriching the two five one a little bit is one of the first things you should try doing don't forget when you're messing around with two five ones like this it's also really important to think about the chord shapes the the inversions the voicings that you're using so we can play our G minor seven C seven F like that but we can also do it like this G minor seven C seven F or like this G minor seven C seven F lots of different ways also think about the bass voicing a little bit because with note you playing the bass has the biggest single effect of any notes in the chord okay so straightforwardly we might do something like this okay just playing the the root of each chord in the bass but you don't have to do that you can create different effects with different bass notes so G - seven c7 retaining the G in the bass F okay odd G minor 7 c7 F okay look given there's a kind of incomplete sound down there because we haven't got the the F right at the bottom of the chord there so you know suggesting learn and move on to something else as always with all the stuff we're talking about here don't just play around with a chord to play around with the emotions take it to the piano keyboard and have a go at some of this stuff for yourself and listen to the effect that these different things have as you play it's pretty easy to move beyond just using those seventh extensions in YouTube five ones in particular you might find ninth extensions pretty useful let me show you how that might work in the key of C so here we are on the scale of C again and we know that our basic two five one in C is D minor G C now let's see what happens if we use a D minor 9th chord there okay so D minor 9 there's the basic D minor seven we create D minor 9 by adding an E now because that's a five note chord typically we would spread it across two hands it's awkward to play in one hand and the most common way of doing that would be to play that kind of shape in the right hand or something like it with the root of the chord in the left okay so D minor 9 and let's run that with a 2 5 1 [Music] okay two five one D minor 9 g 7c do you see what that D minor 9 is giving us a it's giving us that e which gives us a natural flow down the scale in terms of our top note our melody notes ok towards the sea so d-minor 9 g7 C we've got the e d see this look really important to notice there you remember earlier we were talking about the similarities between the two chord and the four chord about how they share notes and how they often share harmonic functions well here you can really see that in action because if you look at even at the D minor seven chord you can see it contains excuse me it contains all the notes of the chord of an F just with D added to give it that kind of minor tonality okay if we look at D minor 9 then what we're doing in the right hands in effect is playing an F major seven chord okay F major with a seventh on top and major seventh on top and a D in the base with D minor 9 and then these two chords are very very closely linked to one another and we can chop and change it and replace them with one another so if we had D minor 9 g 7c it's very easy to just just play that as F major 7 g7 C ok functionally what's happening there is exactly the same it doesn't make any structural change to the music we just get each one just gives us a slightly different sound so if we go for the 2 5 1 you know we get a kind of slightly maybe kind of darker maybe richer sound on the D minor nine whereas if we want to make brighter and more open we could go for the four five one okay so functionally the same just slightly different in musical terms and if you're songwriting if you're improvising that's when you have to make a decision about the exact type of sound you want to make okay because those called really are in many ways interchangeable your next option is to change some of the chords in your to five one completely to use the technical term that means substituting those chords replacing them with other chords that maybe sound very different and maybe have so many different names but which have the same function which do the same job in terms of the overall harmonic structure now we've already done a bit of a very basic chord substitution when we were swapping around our number two chord and our number four chord and those chords are very easy to substitute for one another but chord substitution we can get a lot more complex and a lot more interesting than that as especially in styles like jazz yeah let's start off by looking at quite a straightforward substitution we'll stay in the key of C for now and let's start off as normal with our number two chord D minus seven but then instead of going to the number five chord G I'm gonna go to D minor seven over G and we're gonna substitute that for the G because it will also just as effectively as the gene resolved us to the sea okay listen to that again D minor 7 Z minus seven over G C okay so that D minor 7 over G has the same function as a regular G chord it wants to take us back to the C it does so with a slightly different character it has a kind of a little bit more of a bit more of a mellow sound bit more but sholde out sound it's not quite as neat and tidy and regimented as a regular G chord okay but it does the same job so that gives us quite a nice substitution and with that substitution we can extend it we can play around with it so we can play D minor 9 F major 7 over G to C we can change the voicings and inversions D minor 7 F major 7 over G to C yeah there's loads of different things we can do there ok and we can begin to create sounds that are distinctive to this young girl playing now you know that's especially handy if you're playing jazz yeah so we could if we want to define a jazzy or a cocktail type style we could do something like Z minor 9 G 13 C 6 let me play that again Z minor 9 G 3rd whoops G 13 which is what that is with some notes missing C 6 or we could begin to play around chromatically adding notes that aren't part of the diatonic scale D minor 7 D minor 7 with a flat 5 over G - C 6 yeah once you start playing around chromatically like and and that's really what you should do play around the experiment see what sounds you can make then there's all sorts of stuff you can do with the basic two five one you can even go for the famous tritone substitution is part four two two five one D minor seven D flat seven over G and C that's for tritone sub which I've talked about elsewhere in the past how about if you want to achieve a cleaner kind of less jazzy sound than a two five one well something you can do there is use a sus four chord especially in the five slot of the two five one now we saw that in the mozart example earlier but let's have a look at how it might look in the key of C let's start on number two quarters normal a D minor 7 and then go to a G sus 4 okay and then to see okay can you hear how that works let's just trying a different inversion let's just try a straight D minor chord Jesus for to see okay quite an interesting sound they're quite quite clean quite sparse the Jesus four chord is just an ordinary G chord but with the be taken out and to see added so that's C is one two three four a fourth above the the root of the chord and G sus four point we're really interesting unstable sound now one thing you'll find if you use a sus four chord in that slot on the five chord you'll find that the suspended note is the tonic of the key it's C so in the key of C major the tonic is see Jesus for peasants has as its suspended fourth that tonic note so you can do quite a bit of quite interesting stuff and again we're retaining the yin the tonic notes at the top of the sequence D minor seven Jesus for to see okay often you might come off the suspended notes down to the third note of the five chord the B and C major and that gives you a leading tone up to the C that's what Mozart did in the example we looked at earlier yeah lots of cool stuff you can do that [Music] so as you can probably see your two five one and four five one sequences might look fairly straightforward but they offer you lots of opportunity to add musical interest to add variety to a character to your songwriting into your improvisation do you remember though that picking call extensions or substitutions is great but you need to make sure they lock together in a musical way you need to choose good voicings and inversions to play them in okay one good way to do that is to think always about your top line to think about the shape that your highest notes are describing on the keyboard yet even if you're not playing a particular melody to think about that top line now if you're playing a two five one then most of the time probably one jump in that top line is going to be fine but if you've got two jumps that's probably gonna gonna indicate that you've got some sort of problem so let's say we choose these inversions these voicings D minor 7 G to C okay we're movin stepwise one note down the scale at a time from the D minor 7 to the G but we've got a jump and down to the C okay not such a big problem but if we had a jump between each chord and especially if they were big jumps okay that suggests that we maybe want to think again you might want that as a musical effect and if you're doing it deliberately that's fine but if you're having those big jumps that you know that they need to be part of your musical plan as it were if you're playing the chord inversions and getting big jumps in your top line without planning that suggests you've got a problem with your what we call voice leading okay and voice leading is all about how we manage the flow of our melodic lines okay and poor voice leading in that top line suggests that you are picking chord inversions which don't lock together well aren't as musically logical as they could be and don't sound quite as good as they could be okay so a good general principle for playing chordal accompaniments is don't jump around too but I think it's particularly important because it's particularly noticeable in two five ones and four five ones okay so that's about it for another tutorial hope you enjoyed it as usual if you have any questions or comments just add them below don't forget to check out destroy kid comm if you are producing or writing your own songs because a great opportunity for you there to get your stuff in all the major online stores as usual don't forget to subscribe the channel follow me on my various social media bits and pieces links all in the in the description text below and check out my book how to really play the piano in this stuff your teacher never taught you which you know if this stuff about chords and Sonia it's kind of a bit new to Khan a bit confusing it will explain the basics that you need to know as long as you can read just a little bit of basic right and left hand piano music okay there we go hope that was useful I'll see you next time

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 68,864

Keywords: 2 5 1, 2 5 1 chord progression, ii V I, ii V I chord progression, chord substitution, piano chords, piano tutorial, keyboard chords, keyboard tutorial, jazz piano, songwriting chords, 2 5 1 progression, ii V I progression

Id: NIMcgMAl-W0

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018