The INSANELY Smart Harmony of Earth Wind and Fire

this video is brought to you by curiosity stream hey everybody my name is charles and today we are going back to 1979. i'm pretty sure there's like next to nobody who doesn't know about earth wind and fire and even fewer people who haven't heard september but earth wind and fire obviously wrote a ton of incredible music and i wanted to take a look at one of those things today because it is an incredible use of key changes and the circle of fifths and that song we're gonna take a look at is after the love has gone if you know it chances are you probably love it because it is an incredible song and it's a great representation of the actual real world usage of the circle of fifths almost to a systematic degree so the song starts just fairly normally it's really beautiful chord progression here we're using this one chord to the minor four chord even though we still have that f in the bass now we enter sort of like the sort of like the pre-hook [Music] now this is a really interesting key change because we're actually moving down a half step previously the key center was f you know even through the the the pre-hook there so that whole beginning of the song we're in the key of f major and all of a sudden now we're in the key of e which is a step down but for some reason now tell me if you feel if you feel differently about this let me know in the comments but i feel like it's kind of an elevation in sort of uh i don't know if mood is the right word but but the vibe kind of like takes a step up like oh we're starting to go somewhere which is kind of ironic because we just moved down a half step in key center we went from f to e now i think that e naturally has a brighter sound than the key of f if that makes any sense so certain certain keys just seem to be brighter than others and certain keys seem to be darker so we've moved into the key of e one thing i want you to notice is how did we get there literally the only thing we did is we threw a five in front of the e now if you remember back to the celebrity singing imagine video i i had to try to figure out okay how am i going to chase these people around because they're in a billion different keys and the way we wound up doing that is okay every time we want to change key all we have to do is throw a five in front of the new key and it'll magically make sense to our ears [Music] if we had just gone it wouldn't have made as much sense it doesn't set your ear up enough to really understand where we are the second we drop into the into the key of e but when we throw that five of e in front of it which in this case is b we're using a b sus chord here as a five chord [Music] that b really helps set up the e and that makes it just make a little more sense to our ears that's a really really handy device that when you're writing anything if you want to change even to a weird key if you put a five in front of that new key it's gonna make a lot more sense than if you just dropped into that key without any warning [Music] and boom we're just we're totally have moved away from that into the next key let's check that out and it does it in a super brilliant way because we're sitting on b major seven and we have the third is the melody but watch what happens when we change key we've now shifted our chord to the c minor seven but we've kept that e flat as our melody note so with the previous chord it would be d sharp technically and then once we move to c minor seven it's now e flat same note well how does that oh boy here we go um is it the same pitch different note i believe that's is that it same pitch different note confusing music theory stuff that doesn't really matter that much so now we've changed key again and this is where our circle of fifths comes in really handy because watch this see how we're just going right around the circle and we follow it for quite a ways too before we deviate away from it and we only deviate away from it to march ourselves back up to the starting point so we can do it again let's just talk very quickly about what the circle of fifths is the circle of fifths at its most basic explanation is just an organization of all the different keys in such a way that we place keys next to each other that are most similar now visually if you're looking at this on a circle what will stick out to you is that depending on which direction around the circle you go you're either adding one flat each time you change key or you're adding one sharp if you go the other direction there's a couple different ways to play this but in short the circle of fifths just refers to a sequence of perfect fifths would sound like this then we run out of room [Music] what if we go the other way so we start on c and go down a perfect fifth [Music] now if we take that same note sequence but go the other direction on the keyboard okay so what i mean by that is we started on c and we went down to f which is a perfect fifth down another fifth would be b flat another fifth would be e flat a flat d flat g flat b and so on and so forth if we take that same sequence of notes and flip it and go the other direction c f b flat e flat a flat d flat g flat b and so on and so forth again you can see that instead of perfect fifths we now have perfect fourths [Music] now i was confused when i was younger because the circle of fifths was described to me as up four down five up four down five now you can see how describing it as fourths when it's the circle of fifths it'd be a little confusing but hopefully this kind of makes it clear how if we go from c to f that might look like a fourth if we're going up but it would be a fifth for going down so they're kind of interchangeable in that way this up four down five motion is really important because as you're about to see it literally is how we build a two five one [Music] and 251s as you know are one of the most common devices in music so we start illustrating this this kind of bizarre but yet very important interconnectivity of all these different musical concepts a 251 is simply moving in one direction around the key circle we're only going three steps because that's all we need to get from two to five to one but if we keep going in that pattern we'll go right around the circle of fifths in one direction or the other utilizing the circle of fifths creates some really really interesting harmonic motion as well as harmonic motion that it just inherently makes sense to us because it is the organization of closely related keys okay now that was a quick rundown of the circle of fifths so that we can apply what we now know to looking at earth wind and fire because boy did they use it i particularly love that little chord sequence too because it's it's unexpected and ultimately it does throw us back to where we started however you're kind of when you hear those particular chords you almost expect it to go but instead we do that same thing that we did with the common tone melody note before we do the same thing with the b flat now check it out it was going to be [Music] we still would have expected that melody note to be in in this case a sharp but instead we turn it into we're still using that note b flat but the chord is totally different and the key center is totally different letting your ear develop an expectation and then throwing it off by introducing a totally different sound what an effective tool that is it just it makes you go oh as you're listening to it because it just sounds so cool [Music] and again the tool of putting a five in front of any key you want to go to that's exactly what we do there we're trying to get back to the overall you know where we started the tune in f so oh now we're landing on this g flat so how are we going to get from this to that well let's just put a five in front of it and all of a sudden it makes sense we do that hook again and then back into the chorus again and then we go into what's ultimately going to be the ending section there's this ascending pattern oh my god just check it out [Music] oh my god all right all right we uh we we finished the phrase in the original key [Music] we go to do our climb up that we've been doing throughout the whole song to get us back to the beginning of that of that chorus section right that's what we normally do but this time we're gonna keep going because we're gonna completely change key all together [Music] that is exactly the same chord progression as we were doing before with even the same uh couple of chords walking up to start it over again the same exact thing just in a different key and in this particular case we've actually moved up a fourth remember the first chord of the chorus in the last key was c minor seven now it's f minor seven so even that movement of our key change follows the circle of fifths so this whole tune is really just a master class in how to use the circle of fifths to create really interesting yet super grounded and understandable harmony that goes in in very um yeah unusual directions i mean so much of their stuff was just incredible but what a harmony master class this is just this is one of my favorite things of theirs by far but let me know in the comments below what what is your favorite earth wind and fire song what do you love about this composition what have you learned from this composition i'm curious to know your thoughts in the comments down below if you enjoy these types of breakdowns i would highly recommend you go and check out my channel on nebula where we do a lot of these types of videos but even on a greater scale diving into even more detail nebula is a platform that a bunch of like-minded creators such as myself came together to create where we would be shielded from the effects of the youtube algorithm if i posted a super long breakdown of something complex the algorithm on youtube probably isn't gonna show it to many of you we've done videos on jacob collier and corey henry and mr rogers we've had conversations about going to music school and all types of things that we can do over on nebula because i don't have to worry about a video not getting shown to you guys and that's a great segue to talk about the sponsor of today's video curiosity stream curiosity stream of course is the home to thousands of the internet's best documentaries and we have teamed up with curiositystream to offer you an incredible bundle where if you use the link in the description below to sign up for an annual subscription of curiosity stream you're also going to get access to nebula for free there are so many incredible documentaries on curiosity stream on an incredible range of topics certainly gould is one of the most important artists of the 20th century by any objective measure one of the most important pianists of all time certainly so please if you get a chance use the link in the description to sign up for curiosity stream and check out some of those amazing titles and when you do that you're 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Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 554,119

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy, Earth Wind and Fire, Earth, Wind, Fire, EWF, September, EWF September, After the love has gone, EWF after the love has gone, Earth Wind and Fire September

Id: ZBpV-n10sfo

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021