Writing Progressions with Borrowed Chords: Songwriting Lesson [MUSIC THEORY - MODAL INTERCHANGE]

hey I'm Jake Lizzy oh and in this video what I want to do is explore the idea of borrowed courts what are they and how can we make music with them now this can be a very confusing topic but it can also be a very simple topic so in this video we'll start easy we'll keep things pretty basic and then gradually we'll introduce more and more of the advanced concepts and these concepts will kind of depend on your knowledge of all the modes that I've taught previously on this channel so if you ever get lost you can just check the description and I've linked to a video that should fill you in on the missing details to briefly summarize why we want to learn our borrowed chords well when you're writing in a major key it can feel kind of limiting there's only seven chords in a major key if you want to stay in that key so if you want to start bringing in chords outside of the key there's a few different options we've already talked about secondary dominance on this channel but my favorite option is borrowed chords you find a chord from a parallel mode and then you bring it in to your progression and then you have an easy way to play over that too so let's go into that process of borrowing chords from a parallel mode I'm going to start by building the C major scale and the chords of the C major scale and that's what we'll be composing and we'll be in C major but I also want to be aware of the chords of C minor so here's my C minor scale and the chords of C minor let's come up with a very basic chord progression in C major about 1 6 4 5 so we've got C majors my 1 my 6 is a minor my 4 is F and my 5 is G this is a chord progression that's been played a billion times before it's a good old classic please do op love song progression the 164 5 I want to use this as my baseline chord progression but what I want to do is I want to introduce a borrowed chord and let's look at that C minor scale let's try borrowing these six are at the sixth chord of C minor is gonna be an a-flat major right there alright so a flat major is my borrowed six chord I'm gonna bring that chord into my new progression so let's just replace one of our chords with a flat I mean there's a million ways we could use this chord what I want to do is just just throw it in there let's just replace it right so here's C major here's my a minor instead of F let's borrow that a flat and then we can go back so what I've got a C major a minor a flat major mangie and I think that sounds far more interesting far more unique than my initial point so when I hear something like that I think man that would be really easy to turn into like a modern oldie song you know kind of that dream space rock kind of stuff so let's just take the same idea add a bass guitar add some or gonna add a singer I had my friend Joe come in here and help us out and here's what we got [Music] [Applause] [Music] I stir [Music] [Applause] [Music] now like I said there's no hard or fast rule on exactly how and where you are supposed to borrow these chords so let's just slap that borrowed cord and at the end of our progression instead so I'll keep the C keep the a minor I'll keep the F but I'll replace G with the a flat and now I've got this bridge C half major surprise b-flat pretty weird sound what to do with it well what if you played him as power cord to set C power-chord a power chord F power chord and a G power TVR power chord a flat power chord well then you got kind of like a punk rock song well I got to do is add some whiny vocals on top and boom there you go [Music] it wasn't true [Music] [Applause] my favorite example of this being used as in Louis Armstrong's what a wonderful world that's on to the key of C right and we go through quite a few of the diatonic chords of the key of C major here for two and then the one here's the five of six and then here's the six and then we borrow and puts borrowing in that six and then coming down to the five suspended four chord really lovely use of that chord now I can borrow any of these chords I don't have to keep just borrowing the six let's try borrowing that seventh chord which is gonna be B flat major right so I'll be in C major and here's a see here's my five chord G here's my four chord F what if I just jump to that borrowed board right there now I give this nice to see three half now when that b-flat comes up it did come from the C minor scale right so one of the good bets that you could use or like to sing over that or to play over that would be use the C minor scale you can absolutely go into that scale but this flat seven chord also occurs in C mixolydian so which one are you really borrowing from are you borrowing from C mixolydian or borrowing from C minor that chord could be either of them alright and this is where it gets a little fuzzy when you borrow a chord like b-flat it it doesn't have to be for minor or mixolydian you could play C mixolydian over that B flat major and you're still going to get a sound just a different sound than playing the C minor scale so long story short when you do borrow a chord from a parallel scale like minor it would be a good idea to shift your playing into that parallel key right when that b-flat comes up I'm gonna pretend like I'm in the key of C minor or since it's also in mixolydian I'm going to pretend like I'm in C mixolydian but there are no other keys that have this flat seven chord in there so those are the only two scales I'm going to be thinking about the most common borrowed chord is the for if I'm in the key of C major and if I go to my fourth chord which is F if I borrow the fourth chord it becomes F minor and I can resolve that back to C in a whole video on that highly recommend it because we go through several different examples of that borrowed four chord showing up let's try borrowing the two right I'm in C major the two chord of C minor is a d half diminished i play a d half diminished it will resolve pretty nicely back to C major so using that concept I decided to write a very very small little finger style section in the key of D that just went in the key of D and basically what we'll do is start on the four chord and then the five chord and then we'll go from the one we walk down to the six and then we'll bring in the borrowed two and then resolve it finally back of it so here's what it sounds like as a fingerstyle arrangement [Music] I figured hey what the heck let's try turning this into a string quartet I don't know the first thing about arranging for a string quartet but I figured let's just go for it as long as it sounds good I'll be happy with it so here's my arrangement of that same idea [Music] now I encourage you to experiment with the other cords you can also borrow the three cord that is going to be an e-flat major that's gonna give you that very Concord feel very epic weird change if you come straight off the C like that but I also want to talk about borrowing from other modes we don't have to borrow from just minor we could borrow from the parallel Lydian scale we could borrow from the parallel Dorian all sorts of parallel modes of C so if you think about all the different chords that are available to us we're in the key of C major but look at the ports available to you in C Dorian those are all chords you can borrow look at the chords of C fridge and all those chords you can borrow and so on and so on and so on and so on so that is in my opinion why it is such a good thing to be practicing your modes and really practicing your modes in isolation right really treating Phrygian like its own key treating mixolydian like its own key if you learn to do that then it becomes a very trivial task to just borrow those chords because you're familiar with the structure of Phrygian you know that Phrygian has a minor one chord and a flat two major chord so if I wanted to borrow from Phrygian in the key of C major I can just borrow that flat two major that would be a D flat major and I'm borrowing from Vichy for that little tiny bit of time there I would be in C Phrygian it's a pretty disruptive chord right but you can actually get away with it and it's a fairly common chord to use in the classical world this is known as the Neapolitan chord if you play an inverted Neapolitan sixth so playing that D flat and then just putting an F on the bass instead would give me a Neapolitan sixth chord you see let's take that borrowed Phrygian chord let's combine it with some of the stuff we were doing earlier I'll be in the key of C and then I'm gonna go to my 4 chord and I'll go back to I 1 C at the scene here's the see here's the borrowed two from Phrygian and then to five I'll go from my four again to my one and then I'm gonna borrow the seven from minor back to four years the bar at six for minor five so that chord progression I put together and it reminded me of kind of like a Phish song like a like a hippie jam band rock song so I had my friend Mike moogly helped me out with the vocals on that one and we got together this piece [Music] nice to me you say [Music] another notable borrowed cord that's not from minor is the two chord from Lydian if I'm in the key of C major and if I think of the parallel Lydian scale that would be C Lydian well C Lydian has a D major right and I really like bringing in that chord every once in a while the example I'll give you is from total eclipse of the heart that that song is in the key of a flat and it's just that classic one six four five progression we already heard before but eventually they go from four the 4 to the 5 to the minor 6 and then they borrow that to to give it a little bit of brightness it's a really nice kind of rejoicing unexpected brightness that comes out of that major 2 and then they do it again back to the tonic to the 5 the six and then borrowing izu from Lydia and the Lydian scale would work absolutely perfect there that the a flat Lydian scale would be though the appropriate choice for [Music] the last thing I want to talk about is borrowing from other modes when you're already in minor so not starting in major right let's pretend like I'm in the key of a minor here's my one by six chord and a minor is F my 3 chord and a minor in C but if I bring in a D major that board really doesn't fit in to the key of a-minor but i can think of it as being borrowed from a durian right because then the a durian key I have an a minor and a D major so that's kind of what I think of House of the Rising Sun House of the Rising Sun is an a minor a C the D major and then write to an F major so to me that is like we're either in a minor and then we're borrowing from a Dorian forward and a Dorian and borrowing from a minor but I really feel like it's strong a minor tonality that Dorian comes in there just temporarily before we start sinking back in the minor key introducing the dominant so I decided to write with this in like the techno EDM style I just took an a minor chord and then I went to an F major chord and then I went straight to the D but I put F sharp on the bass and then I went up to the G major which would be the seventh chord and a minor so a minor F major D over F sharp [Music] and I thought it was a pretty energetic progression and so I used it for this little build up into electronics in--they nonsense [Music] so when a chord pops up and it's not in the key one of the first things I ask myself is is that a borrowed chord because if it is a borrowed chord if I could figure out where it came from it gives me a very easy way to solo over that chord or to sing over that chord that's not the only way to treat these chords right if I'm in the key of C major and an a-flat pops up I'm not forced to play C minor over this right you could treat it different ways but I think thinking of the parallel mode is a very simple way to figure out hey what scales should I play on top of this also keep in mind I already did a video on modal mixture but it really focused on the lead side of things so if you like this concept but are more concerned about you know what would you do over the top of it I suggest you check out my video on mixing major and minor and modal mixture that's what this is all about modal mixture borrowed chords modal interchange it all means the same things it all means we're in a key and we're exploring two other parallel keys not relative keys so other keys that start on C so I hope you liked this video and I hope you learned something if you did like this video you can thank my patreon supporters for making it possible if you really like this video you can consider joining them at my patreon page but if you can't do that that's totally cool just like comment and share this video with your friends that's good enough for me thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 383,680

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Keywords: jake lizzio, free lesson, guitar lesson, Chord progressions, writing chords, writing chord progressions, write chords, borrowed chords, modal interchange, modal interchange lesson, borrowed chords lesson, writing chords for a song, songwriting lesson, music theory lesson, chords, musical chords, guitar chords writing, writing guitar chords, advanced theory, advanced music theory, writing music, theory for guitar, chord theory, chord theory guitar

Id: 7IdttvJSedg

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019