The INCREDIBLE Harmony Of Studio Ghibli Themes

Studio Ghibli often serves as the Gateway for people who don't necessarily know a lot about anime myself included to discovering so much of the absolutely incredible music that exists within this world let's check it out that's pretty cool notice what's going on in the base down there right listen to that again foreign so we're using a consistent upward Motion in the bass line we start on a minor and then we hit G major except in order to keep that bass line going we don't use G in the base we use B which in the key of G what is B it's the third so we're using the G major chord but it's over its third which is B so G over B is what we'd typically call that and then we go right up to C major and then we get this interesting little now this could be a couple different things I mean is this c-sharp diminished or is it a dominant with its third in the bass and then D and what is probably B maybe a B7 chord with its third in the bass so you'll see what we're doing a lot of what we're doing is we're using like solid points where we would resolve except we're not resolving we're using a baseline that continues this motion [Music] to get us all the way to where we're ultimately going which is E minor right so this is a really good illustration of how when you write lines you don't want to just necessarily jump around because if we played every chord in this sequence in its root position we'd wind up with a minor [Music] G major C a maybe an a dominant D and then B so from a motion perspective we have this kind of strange jumping around work if you just wrote it that way but that's not what they did here it's a small thing and it's very simple but it's really effective in creating orchestration that just feels like it makes sense it has a pleasing sort of resolution it forces your ear in a certain direction where you create expectations and that's exactly what we deliver on oh wait oh they are using the five there look at that so they break that upward motion only when they set up the V chord and it sounds like they are using the B which makes sense because now we're going to resolve [Music] just so you know we have a massive holiday sale going on right now you can get a ton of huge discounts 50 60 even 70 off of our products on the Cornell Music Academy so be sure to use the link down in the description go check that out I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit this is the chord I'm questioning I'm wondering if this is actually over B whatever the melody is here I forget it's kind of a two five one but what I'm wondering is if that actually is a b [Music] I think it is B B now why would I assume that it's B well once again we're talking about motions in bass lines that are staying consistent if we look at foreign that's where we're going we're winding up on this A minor chord before we do our two five one for this section right but we start here I can only assume that it's going to be a b you know because if I jump down to a g would that be the same chord would it still work of course it would work it'd be fine but we've created this beautiful motion here foreign do we really want to give that up do we really want to go it sounds okay but isn't this a little bit more interesting I love that and maybe that it might not be voice exactly that way but that is how you can really see the effectiveness of creating these bass lines that have a consistent motion we saw it right in the beginning I mean we started from here we went and then set up now we're going down check it out [Music] oh whoa is that what happened the first time I gotta go back and listen but the second time I thought it was but again remember how we were talking about the motion of bass lines we can literally play those exact same chords E minor B major E minor e dominant but we can do it in a way where our Baseline isn't doing this that's fine right but if we did this instead [Music] now we're sticking to our theme of our consistent motion bass lines going on here and that's a very very nice line and it's exactly the same thing it doesn't change functionality at all with E minor this is still B major it's just that instead of using the third in the bass we're now using the fifth in the bass and then we go right to E minor again or uh probably E minor but cares if we don't have the e in the base it's still E minor even if we put its third in the bass and then once again our e dominant with its third in the base of G sharp and it helps us resolve very smoothly with leading tones with those chromatic resolutions to get to a minor right there and then B minor right to E minor that is brilliant writing yeah [Music] foreign let's just take a second because I want to look at that inner that voice movement there I guess it's not in her voicemail it's pretty much Melody but listen to this so we have two that's our harmonic motion but listen to the way the strings voice this melody look at that line same thing right and then we wind up on that a dominant we have an enclosure of our root there outline the cord right and then same thing and another enclosure oh that's just beautiful [Music] there's our anime chord progression right we have flat six flat seven one sometimes you can look at that as a four five six but you'll remember from the video we made a while back this is the classic anime chord progression this is one of my favorite chords of all time this chord sometimes if you want to make it kind of like you can add instead of just being this you could add the get out of that that note as well you could add that note as well I really like voicing them kind of like this you could sort of look at this as a minor seven sharp five because if we take C minor seven right we just make the five sharp we get this but what does that look like to you or sound like to you does it sound like a minor chord it sounds like a C minor chord to me not at all to me this sounds like sounds like an A flat chord so to me when I when I play this chord anything like this I'm looking at it as though it has the third in the bass which is kind of what we're talking about a lot so far in this video and it's just an A flat chord that's kind of what I look at it as so if I want to play this chord in C I'm going to put its third in the bass so it's gonna be this and this is gonna be this now if you want to do something really cool on the piano take this voicing which is just we got a major seventh in there it goes like three one nine five seven it's such a beautiful chord you can literally do whatever you want with it you can even construct improv around it and just kind of play all sorts of things [Music] foreign you just can't go wrong with a chord like that wow [Music] isn't it amazing how much mileage you can get out of something as simple as that flight six and flat seven one it's just it's an unbelievable chord progression especially when you put it in the context of this big string Ensemble it's just absolutely beautiful [Music] you guys ever noticed this this is a chord you hear a lot in anime isn't it I mean this Major Seventh chord with sharp 11. that's a very common chord we hear a lot in these orchestrations especially in Studio Ghibli it's a very common Studio Ghibli sound and then we switch key all together we just go same flat six flat seven one but now in the key of B flat minor instead of our original key which was F minor that's an F minor that's in B flat minor same thing though absolutely amazing work from Joe he's saying she here oh so we have a four five one we think we're gonna get the logical place to go here would be five to the one right two five one but instead we have two and then five one but to the minor key instead of major that's a clever move there foreign interesting so this is an interesting form that I'm hearing both in the piano and then when the brass comes in as well so we have this thing now here you would typically expect it to maybe go and from there you can go wherever you want what is that [Music] is that Spirited Away I think that might be Spirited Away yep so we have and then it kind of starts over yeah it's interesting and very simple and I think that's one of the things that draws so much of the anime music together is that a lot of it harmonically is not necessarily all that complicated where it derives its complication is sometimes in the way that it changes keys or the way that the orchestration sort of morphs into different harmonic areas even if it's using like the same kind of structure over and over again like when the brass comes in in this one we actually hear the exact same chord progression but just in a different key this is a very common thing that gets used a lot in anime and what we often hear are these classic sounds whether it's the flat six flat seven one chord progression or even something like that major seven sharp 11 sound regardless of what we use it often is used in a way that's simple and just so effective to learn more about what a lot of this stuff means that we're talking about and how to apply it on the piano be sure to check out our holiday sale on the Cornell Music Academy we have all of our products currently on sale you can buy single products for 50 off or if you want to buy certain bundles we have our ultimate intro bundle as well as our prop Essentials bundle available for 99 bucks or if you want to get all of our courses all six of them as one giant bundle it's available for 70 off the original price right now and it's only through Christmas so check out the link down below and check out the courses that we have to offer hundreds and hundreds of hours of instruction and video and countless exercises and actionable steps there's so much content in there to work on your skills working on playing the piano work on your understanding of Music Theory if you're not familiar with the courses we have available right now include an intro to the piano intro to improvisation intro to music 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one [Music]

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 190,165

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, jazz pianist, studio ghibli, studio ghibli music, studio ghibli soundtrack, studio ghibli react, porco rosso music, porco rosso soundtrack, kiki's delivery service music, kiki's delivery service soundtrack, princess mononoke music, princess mononoke soundtrack, studio ghibli jazz

Id: kUGwFdvsmn4

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022