The Scariest + Creepiest Chords AND How to Use Them

journal entry October 18 it has been 11 days since I began my journey to discover the creepiest chord my quest thus far has taken me to places I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies and now that I sense my destination approaching I'm beginning to question the wisdom of this journey starting to believe that some secrets are best left undiscovered must they be the end of me and the residents as not all chords are created equally some are just more inherently creepy than other ones and composers can really use these courts to their advantage if they're looking to spook startle or scare their listeners so in this video I want to give you 6 chords that are really unnerving and are very easy to use if you're trying to discrete people out I'm gonna keep this pretty quick I'm going to show you the core themselves how they're built and show you a few examples of how you might be able to use it but let's just get started with a really simple one which is a minor flat 6 chord I'll build it off of the note e so an E minor chord is what we start off with and that's just a minor triad and if I add in the flatted sixth note which is the note C then I have an E minor flat six chord which is pretty uncomfortable I go back to here peddling between an E minor and an E minor flat six you can hear that's a really unsettling kind of sound and this is the very first few chords you hear in Laura Palmer's theme by Angelo Badalamenti who did Twin Peaks soundtrack starts off with just a minor flat six to an E minor to an E minor 7 to an E minor back to E minor 6 back to E minor and then just low E like that really unsettling score and I think that theme song specifically I mean just starting you off with a minor flat 6 is a really great way to creep people out and it just gives me that haunted forest effect all the way throughout that song [Music] next we have minor add nine quarts and I just discussed add nine chords in my last video so if you'd like more information on these you can just check that out but really all we do is we take an E minor chord and we add the ninth note or the second note which would be the note F sharp so if I can find a way to play an F sharp at the same time as my E minor chord then I get this which is E minor ad nine and hopefully you hear that's once again got a lot of mystery wrapped up into it I can add that down an octave lower like this and now I'd say it's still kind of mysterious but I feel a little bit more Western right now that you're kind of down on that lower register if I could add in that F sharp down to the low register I'd get some really cool distances but I can't do it on my guitar just check out what it would sound like on a synthesizer instead playing an E and F sharp and a G right next to each other and then having the v be on top so I call that a minor ad - and a lot of times I like to voice my minor chords is ad - because of that dissonance between the second and the minor third that minor step right there creates a lot of tension and I personally love it I think it works really well off of the one chord or off of the four chord in any natural - you can play an add nine chord or add two off of the one or off before and you're gonna really darken up the mood get a lot scarier than just a regular minor chords [Music] next we've got minor major 7th chords I did an entire video just on this one chord so definitely check that out if you like the sound of this but really all you gotta do is take a minor chord like a minor and then find the 7th note so the 7th note of the e scale is d sharp and I'm just gonna tack on a deep D sharp I get that which is the detective chord it's the spy chord it's got a lot of mystery wrapped up into it I don't think it's so spooky and set in like scary I think it's just more suspenseful so it's a nice counterpart to all these other chords and it's very very easy to apply just take a minor triad and on that 7th note and there you go next is the Augmented major 7th chord and to build an augmented major 7th off of EE all I do is start on the note e and then I build a major 3rd which is G sharp another major 3rd would take me to the note C and then I'm gonna go to the note D sharp which gives me an augmented major 7 and if I add in another e then I get this lovely our patient hopefully you can hear this is quite unsettling undetermined [Applause] it's walking really on set the state of suspended disbelief of suspended animation it's kind of hard to get a grasp on it but it just feel endless possibilities of those possibilities are really that good a lot of times augmented triads feel awkward to me so I kind of associate awkward augmented they just kind of have this floating question mark kind of feel and just hacking on that major seventh gives it a little bit more color now the next chord is actually a chord change but it could be any chord so you can make any chord really creepy just by proceeding it with a minor chord a tritone away that might sound confusing but this is really easy let's start on an E chord I'll pick a a minor okay in my lani minor let's find the tritone off of E and you can find a tritone just by moving over six half steps or six frets so if I travel over six threats from E it takes me to b-flat that's the devil's note the tritone if I play a b-flat minor chord now so here was E minor let's listen to the flat minor that is about as evil as a single chord change to get going from a minor chord jumping up a tritone or down a tritone to get to another minor chord and if you tried singing melodies on top of this [Music] really cool little haunted floating like soulless imagine this with like a theremin on top of it [Music] [Applause] to me that is a classic Halloween sound and really all you need is a root and a tritone building a minor triad off of each one of those the last chord I want to talk about is the use of cluster cords and a cluster cord is pretty much any cord that you can't call by a name because it's got too many notes in it so imagine you had a cord like that had an e in it and it had an F in it and it had a D sharp in it so these are three chromatic notes right there little chromatic cluster and all on their own really Mark's really unsettling this is like psycho killer stuff extremely suspenseful and once you have a chromatic cluster like that you can kind of throw in any note with it and it's gonna work so what if I just throw a D underneath that okay yeah that's pretty ugly and maybe just throw in you know I'll put a how about a bee so this is the kind of stuff that gives people nightmare to this is terrorizing music and of course think outside of your instrument if you start layering this on the piano or especially strings I really like using these kind of cluster cords with strings and a nice little crescendo great way to creep people out now I just want to touch on a few topics here why are these chords so creepy I can't really explain that that seems more of a topic for Adam Neely he does a lot of videos on the psychology of music as well I can't say that culturally we've been conditioned to hear and feel these chords is creepy because they've been used so often in creepy scenarios especially the minor major 7th chord right there I mean almost every spy movie has one of these chords in it so when we hear that chord we're thinking back to spy movies that we've seen so that is one element of making it creepy now if you were planning on writing some scary music using some of these chords I want to give you a little bit of advice the chords themselves are pretty unsettling but really what's gonna make it really spooky is what you do with those chords arranging things in a lower register has a tendency to sound a little foggy R and a little bit more ominous you know if you play all these chords on a ukulele or like a mandolin they're gonna lose a little bit of that scary bite because you're in this very very high bright happy register you also want to be thinking about what instruments are you gonna be playing these kind of chords on me personally I think certain instruments are just ways scarier than others I think the hurdy-gurdy is terrifying I think that a theremin sounds really really creepy and I think a nylon string is scarier than a steel string guitar I feel there's a lot of these bright resonances on on a steel string guitar that kind of go away when you're on this muddled nylon string guitar so keep in mind that the quality of your instrument in the quality of the note you're playing is going to really have an impact on if something is scary or not so I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you learned something if you did enjoy this video please thank my patreon supporters for making it possible if you'd like to join them you can there's links below in the description but if you can't do that a like comment subscribe who's good enough for me thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 431,539

Keywords: jake lizzio, crystal lake, scary chords, creepy chords, scariest chord, creepiest chord, dark chord, dark chords, scary chords guitar, halloween chords, spooky chords, spooky chord, how to write dark music, spooky music theory, dark music theory, write scary music, write creepy music, writing creepy music, writing scary music, scary sounding chord, creepy chord, creepy sounding chord

Id: -dgicW1ioP0

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019