The Power Of The TRITONE: Resolutions, Substitutions, The "Magic Second" And Lydian Mode

[Music] hello from a really damp and gray and miserable north yorkshire it's really wet and horrible here today so i thought i would liven things up a little bit by talking about a really interesting and useful aspect of music theory the tritone the so-called devil's interval now lots of you asking me about the tritone all the time and i think that's because of all the legends and mystique that have grown up around it people think that the tritone is weird and exotic and strange and that's kind of half right because the tritone is weird and exotic and strange and in some ways it deserves its reputation but in other ways it's really common and every day lots of the chord progressions that we take for granted for example are driven by tritones tritones crop up in music all the time so what we're going to do in today's tutorial is dig into exactly what a tritone is how tritones work and why they are so powerful and along the way we're also going to touch on some other really interesting aspects of music theory just before we go any further a quick mention for a couple of my books that i think you'll really like in particular how to really play the piano the stuff your teacher never taught you how to really play the piano has been on the market for more than 10 years now thousands of people have bought it i've had fantastic feedback about it so i'm sure that you'll like it as well basically what it does is cover the stuff your teacher never taught you so things like chords and harmony and getting started with improvisation and jazz and blues and pop and that kind of thing you need to be able to read a little bit of sheet music and right and left hands but that's about it yeah so if you've got that basic skill on the piano how to really play the piano will take you to the next level i should also also mention seven studies in pop piano which i don't give enough love to really because people who have got it really really really like it basically if you're interested in playing like elton john or ben folds or toriya most piano players like that who play in that kind of pop piano or ballad piano style then seven stories will really help you it's seven short pieces of music in pop piano style with full kind of explanation walk through suggestions for improvisation explanations of the chords things like that both of these books are available both as print editions and ebooks and you can find out more about them by clicking the links in the description text right underneath this video or in the little youtube cards that pop up in the top right hand corner of the screen i should also give a quick mention to my patreon crowdfunder patreon.com bill hilton it doesn't cost much to sign up but there are some great benefits to be had on my patreon including my downloadable piano packs with video walkthroughs which i think you'll really like so once the video is over do go and check out patreon.com bill hilton a tritone is really just a type of interval now as you may know interval is the term we use to describe the distance between any two notes on the piano keyboard so for example if we had middle c and the e above middle c we would say that those two notes were an interval of a major third apart if we had c and the g above middle c we would say that those two notes were a perfect fifth apart perfect fifth is the interval and you can perhaps see how we're building those intervals what i'm doing there to create those intervals is just counting up the major scale you can go down as well but we'll stick to up for now so one two three interval of a major third one two three four five an interval of a perfect fifth now there are some really important intervals that we need to know about probably the most important interval of all is the octave okay the same note but just the next octave up on the piano keyboard so that is the interval of an octave by the way when we play two notes of an interval together that's not a chord it doesn't have enough notes to be a chord instead it has a special name we call it a dyad so that's a dyad that's a dyad that's a dyad it's just two notes of an interval played at the same time so an octave is a really important interval the other two really important intervals are the semitone and the tone which are the smallest intervals in if you're in the states you'll call them half steps and whole steps but i'll stick to semitone and tone or whole tone for today semitone is the a semitone is the interval between any note and the next note above it or below it on the keyboard so from c to c sharp is an interval of a semitone likewise c to be natural we would say that that distance is a semitone because those are the next door neighbor notes a whole tone is just two semitones so we would say that d is a whole tone tone above c there's one semitone there's another semitone and there's a whole tone a tritone is three whole tones so if we start at c and count up three whole tones c to d is one d to e is another because there are our two semitones so that's two whole tones that's a major third but then if we add a third whole tone two more semitones we get our tritone now tritone's really interesting for lots of reasons for example the tritone is the halfway point of the octave there's our octave between c and c we could choose any octave but i'll stick with this one because it's simple and there is the f sharp the tritone above the root and that is the exact halfway point of the octave you might be tempted to think it was the fourth or the fifth but it isn't the tritone is halfway the tritone is also interesting because it is like the octave its own inversion now most intervals if you turn them upside down change so for example if we have a major third and we turn it upside down if we take the e and put it down here it's not a major third anymore it's a minor sixth you can see that the distance between those two notes is bigger similarly if we have a perfect fifth okay if we take the g and put it down here so the interval is turned upside down you can see that the interval has become smaller one two three four it's a perfect fourth instead but whichever way you chop a tritone it's still a tritone okay so there is c to f sharp our tritone if we take the f sharp down here and count up the number of tones there's one whole tone another whole tone and the third so it's that is a tritone just as much as that is and the only other interval that does that is the octave okay that's an octave that's an octave that's a tritone that's a tritone but the tritone's most important characteristic from our point of view as musicians is its instability the tritone really wants to go places [Music] now it's that instability that gives the tritone its power and that's because tonal music by which i mean the majority of songs the majority of classical music and jazz tonal music is driven by patterns of harmonic tension and release of harmonic instabilities resolving to stability the classic expression of that is the five one chord progression just to go through that if you don't know what it is let's say we're in a key like c major then our number five chord is the the chord built on the fifth degree of the scale so the fifth degree of the c major scale one two three four five is g we would say that g is an interval of a fifth above the tonic c so the chord built on that note is g we would call that the five chord or the dominant chord in the key of c major and the one chord is the tonic chord okay c and you can probably hear that the five chord has a really strong pull that really wants to take us back to the one chord five one and it doesn't matter what shape we play those chords in so we can play the g like that five one dominant tonic incredibly common crops up in nearly all music okay we can make that instability to stability that tension release feeling even stronger if we take that basic dominant chord and make it dominant seventh that is a g7 chord really incredibly common in uh music if you've played any kind of chordal music you'll have come across simple seven chords like g7 or c7 or f7 or whatever we'll stick with g7 here because we're in the key of c major now let's take that g7 chord and play in this inversion and listen to how it resolves to the one chord five one can you hear that's a really strong instability to stability okay we feel like it's really pushing us home now a tritone lies at the heart of that g7 chord and is what gives it its power there's the tritone in question f to b there are our three tones okay why does that work so well well that's because though that tritone represents the two tendency tones as we call them in the key of c major here's our scale of c major and there's our f and our b the fourth and seventh degrees of the scale one two three four five six seven they are the tendency tones the b is the strongest one we call that the leading tone it really really wants to pull us up to the c the note a semitone above it the f the fourth degree is also a tendency tone it really wants to sink down not quite as strongly as the b it really wants to sink down onto the e okay so we have tension of the tritone both the tendency tones want to push apart and become the part of the tonic chord so the fact that the seventh chord has a tritone in it is really really important and remember that tritones stay the same whichever way up you put them yeah that's important as well so if we play our g7 there we still have a tritone but here it's between the b and the f okay so instead of the f and the b being in that position they're there but because we've swapped them around we know the tritones are the same whichever way we invert them the tritone is always present in the seven chord [Music] powering dominant seventh chords is just one of the interesting and useful things that tritones can do their instability makes them so flexible they can be exploited to achieve lots of different effects say for example you want to change key tritones are very very handy for that typically what happens is you go from your original key to your new key via a kind of period of instability and uncertainty that might be short or it might be long however long it is there's a pretty good chance that there's a tritone in there somewhere almost certainly buried in a dominant seventh or maybe a diminished seventh chord so tritones don't simply have to be used to resolve outwards to the tonic of the key urine you can use them to build chords in their own right so the diminished seventh which i just mentioned is in some ways built of tritones there's a c diminished seven chord and you can see there are two tritones there one and two and they're kind of interlocking and the diminished seven can be used in its own right okay for its kind of weird sound it's often known as the horror movie chord but it's also a really useful functional chord for example in jazz progressions but also again in modulations another place where the tritone sticks its aura in is in the blues scale okay one of the most important blues notes in the basic blues scale which is what i played there is the diminished fifth [Music] there's another tritone okay so this is an interval which has lots and lots and lots of uses and it all comes down to that fundamental instability my personal favorite use of the tritone is in the tritone substitution which is a technique we often use in jazz and it's worth looking at in detail because it shows how weird and counter-intuitive tritones can be let's imagine we're playing a jazz song in the key of c major just to keep things nice and simple now the chances are that somewhere in the chord progression for this song we're going to come across a 5 1 resolution which might be written as g7 to c or g7 to c major 7 just as a nod to the underlying jazziness now what we would tend to do in those circumstances is change those chords in some way and in particular change the five chord or you know the um the dominant chord or the dominant seventh chord to stop it sounding so clean-cut and neat and tidy yeah that doesn't sound like jazz we want a cooler sound so the tritone substitution delivers that for us and the way it works is we find the root note of the dominant chord which is g and from there we go up a tritone [Music] okay and that gives us the note d flat and we build a whole new dominant seventh chord off that d flat so we have d flat seven and as you can hear it still resolves really nicely to c or to c major seven but it sounds an awful lot jazzier the g7 to see okay now here's the really interesting thing we've completely changed that dominant chord it is completely different we've moved it a tritone up from the original dominant chord but look how it works the tritone within that chord that is making things happen is unchanged it's still the f and the b so there's that tritone in the g7 chord okay we can play it in that inversion still a tritone but if we play the d flat seven chord that tritone is still there it's still providing the power underneath the chord although the chord has changed completely i find that completely mind-blowing it still amazes me kind of 20 years after i learned how to do it but it shows you how tritones have this habit of cropping up when we don't expect them yeah we create music and the tritones appear within it now there are loads of other things we could say about tritones for example we could talk about their roles in minor keys there's the scale of a natural minor and that contains a tritone but it's the same tritone as the key of c major which is the relative major key of a minor and that's great because it makes it really easy to modulate into c major but also it means there isn't another tritone we can use further up the scale to have the same sort of five one effect that we get in the major key so we have to find ways around that but there's one final thing about the tritone i want to mention because i think you'll find it particularly interesting and that's the way that the tritone works in particular modes and specifically in lydian mode let's just have a quick refresher on what modes are mode is really just another word for key or scale so both the major scale and the natural minor scale are modes and they even have modal names so the natural the major scale is called the ionian mode and the natural minor is the aeolian mode but there are other modes as well and they're all defined by the particular pattern of tones and semitones that make up their scales so for example the regular major scale has a pattern of tones and semitones that goes tone-tone semitone tone-tone tone semitone and it's the same pattern across all major scales so let's go and look at f major tone tone semitone tone tone tone semitone okay e flat major tone tone semitone tone tone tone semitone now different modes simply have different patterns of tones and semitones and lydian mode which is a one we're interested in goes like this let's play c lydian tone tone tone semitone tone tone semitone as you can see it's pretty much the c lydian is pretty much the same as c major but f has become f sharp and instead of starting with tone tone semitone we've got three whole tones and we know what three whole tones make they make a tritone now lydian is the only one of the principal modes that has a tritone as the note four steps above its tonic okay and that has some really important and useful effects now what underlies that effect is the fact that lydian mode and indeed any mode has its own naturally occurring chords you might be familiar with this from when you've seen my tutorials in the past and i've talked about the diatonic chords of a major key so for example let's say we're in the key of c major we can go up the scale of c major using simple triads three note chords using the notes of the scale to build the naturally occurring chords of c major and if you have a song in c major most of the chords in that song will be taken from that list of diatonic chords and you can do exactly the same thing in any mode so let's try building chords from lydian mode okay so there is c lydian let's do exactly the same thing remember we're going up using a triad but only using the notes of the scale to build the chord we get c d major e minor f sharp diminished g a minor b minor and back to c can you see how different that is from the regular chords of c major c d minor e minor f lydian gives us c d major e minor f sharp diminished now this has a number of effects first of all it makes lydian very very unstable because our ears are so trained to listen for major and minor keys it's very easy for all modes in fact to accidentally resolve out into major and minor keys but lydian in particular really wants to take us off to the major key a fifth above the tonic okay so c lydian can easily whether it's accidental or on purpose easily become g major if you want to write a song or create an improvisation in lydia and you have to manage your tonality that's a subject we talked about in our last video actually on stride you have to manage your tonality very very carefully but it does mean you can achieve some amazing effects so one effect that's particularly beloved of um movie composers is this you know finishing a piece of music yeah you've probably heard that at the end of a disney movie or something all it's doing is finishing on the tonic chord c major but then for a bit of a flourish going up to d major and that is a pure lydian sound lydian has this lovely kind of edgy magical ethereal kind of sound okay um if you're a fan of lynda bernstein's west side story then pretty much that whole musical and it's incredibly clever it's incredibly clever musically but pretty much the whole show or at least a good part of it is made up of lydian oriented or lydian themed songs and the tritone um appears endlessly so it appears in the theme at the start there's a tritone c to f sharp i'm not playing it in the key it appears in the show and there it's used to express tension and discord and the you know the the anger between the two gangs the jets and the sharks but then later it crops up in a love song warning i'm gonna sing maria i just met a girl named maria okay so bernstein does this very clever thing where he uses this incredibly flexible tritone and first of all uses it to express anger but then resolves it to create a love song it's like we've gone from stravinsky to puccini you know two very different styles exactly the same notes just changed around um another place in west side story where lydian crops up is in the song tonight [Music] okay which uses the tonic chord it's i think it's in g major uses the tonic chord followed by the major chord a tone above the tonic okay so here's g lydian and our first three chords are g a b minor okay and tonight is particularly clever it uses that lydian tonality and that and that magic sound but it also that bernson also uses ninth chords add nine chords to make the transition between the two smoother because it can feel like a bit of a jump sometimes so we have g add nine so with the a added going to a add nine with the b added so there the a belongs to the next chord and there the b belongs to the previous chord there's more of a bridge between them so that that effect my pet name for it is the magic seconds because it's so kind of magical you know as i said in the in the movie example lydian does give you these incredibly rich sounds and it's all because of that tritone above the tonic okay so that's it for our lovely tritone yeah it's got this terrible reputation but i really love it it's responsible for such beautiful sounds especially when you embed it in that lovely rich in that lovely rich lydian tonality so there we go if you have any questions or um comments please do put them in the comment thread underneath this video remember to like the video remember please to subscribe to my channel if you haven't subscribed already and hit that little bell notification icon so you get regular updates of what i'm up to um check out my social media facebook twitter and instagram links are all below and of course please do check out my books and my patreon you'll find all the relevant links in those little pop-up cards that appear in the top right hand corner and once again in the description text right underneath this video have fun with all that i'll see you again very soon

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 17,303

Keywords: tritone, tritone substitution, intervals (music), tritone piano, tritone songs, lydian mode, lydian mode piano, piano tutorial, piano

Id: v3ybEzgyMJE

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020