I Didn't Know Where Chords Came From Until I Knew This

Hey guys, in

this

lesson I'm going to talk to you about how to harmonize a major scale and turn it into triads or if you want to call them letters between you and me, we'll call them

chords

, which I'm going to do. I'm going to address some of the technical aspects. If you're studying for pleasure or for academic use, I hope you find

this

lesson useful if you subscribe to us and all that good stuff, this is

where

we are. we're going to do, we're going to look at the ingredients that we need to make these cards and the ingredients that we use are scales.

Scales are great for a couple of things because scales aren't just used for melodies. You might think that's what they serve to create the melody but it's not just that the scales we can consider them as ingredients and that's how I see these guys the ingredients for the tone. They are chord scales and arpeggios and they are all linked together, let's start with the ingredients of the C Major Scale I use the C Major scale because it doesn't have sharps or flats and when we don't have sharps or flats it's a little bit easier for you to think about how this works, so these are the ingredients, but how do we mix them? to make

chords

I'm glad you asked let's number them this is the root note or the first root note second third fourth fifth sixth seventh and then we get the octave and you may have noticed that that's the starting note and that's the final note and what we have is a repetition there, so relay, we don't have eight notes, we have seven notes that are ingredients, this is just a repetition of the first note, the way it works when doing triads, we do something called tertian movement and that means basically go three at a time and the easiest way to see it is to show you how we make a C major chord, this is the root note and what we do is we play a game of LeapFrog, we jump over this D note and then what we do is collect this ingredient here you imagine it is a game this is you here you jump you have collected the third and then you jump and you have another element that you need to collect and that is the fifth if we take In this part we have the root, the third and the fifth, this forms what is

know

n as the Triceratops triad, the third part of the triangle, so it's about three, but what I have to do is use each of these ingredients as a jumping off point and create a new exchange if I do it like this c e g and I can do the same thing here D jump to get an f and then jump again to get an A let's continue here e jump to get a g we've collected that jump and take this B at the end okay let's go from the F jump again, take the a, jump again, let's get the C, let's go from G to B and we don't have it here, so this is a little sketchy, you start to see that you can lose track, but I'll give you a tool so you can't lose track in a minute, but it goes b c d there, then we get e, then we get C and then we get e jumping and then the last ingredient is a b jump, we'll get a d and we'll get an F.

Now this is a cool way to understand those Triads. If I just put them on a table, what you'll find is This is the easiest way for you to see them if I just hit them like this and then I'll label them now. This column here. These are all the fundamental notes of these Triads and this will be the third. is

where

we take all those thirds and this column here will be the fifth. What you have to keep in mind is that we have two types of thirds, this is a string and these are frets, if we go up two steps like this, this is a major. third, that is a distance of a major third if you think of major and minor, think of them as two sides of the same coin, they are a yin and yang agreement wherever there is a major there will always be a minus, the minor is minor . lesser agreement means less essentially, so if you imagine you had a major leak in the roof of your house, then that would be a big deal, but if you had a minor leak in your house, that means we're going to get this minor third here , then we're going to be able to deal with it much better than if we had a major leak in our house.

The way we get a minor third is by simply going back one fret, so you can see here. I had a step and a step now. what I have is a step and a half, so a step and a half, if I put it there, it's a minor third, a major third, so we have two types of thirds and that's important because what happens here is the distance between these changes, if you don't have space to draw this graph on the sleeve of your shirt or the back of your hand, then you might want to use this thing I call a cycle of thirds.

I think it's really important that you can transpose it to all your keys by adding sharps and flats, let me say it again in case someone writes in the comments, what do you do with this cycle? Another 13 keys, what you do is if it's in the treble clef, you add an F sharp to the loop, that's all you do, here's the mnemonic I use for this. Every good band deserves fans and cash, so what you can see here is that this little mnemonic will help you remember all these notes instead of building this awkward skyscraper. from a graph here, so what you get is c e g if you look here c e g I can find the third and fifth root just by going through it now.

I used every good band deserves fans and cash because that's how I remembered it, but it's completely up to you. You don't even have to start with E if you want to create your own mnemonic. The thing about mnemonics is that they are crutches and you use them until you

know

exactly what to retain in terms of information, but remember that every good band deserves fans and cash. There is a reason this is useful because this is how you remember the notes on your musical staff. Look, every good band deserves fans and cash. We can use this as an awesome little tool to help us, but.

This is what I want to assure you because at the end of this there is something that I want you to memorize and you need to memorize it just like you need to memorize your major scale formula because it is very important, this is something that I simply need to memorize I'm going to explain it to you in the key of C major this is the first chord this is the second chord third chord fourth chord fifth chord sixth chord seventh chord but these numbers here do not tell me if that chord has a major third or a minor third and that is very important because that will tell us if a chord is major or minor.

What we do is change these Arabic numerals to Roman numerals. This is a Roman numeral number one and you can say that it is a. Roman numeral number one because it has this top line here and this bottom line here serifs and this means greater whenever you see that capital version of a Roman numeral it means greater, however, if it is lowercase, it means that it simply has the dot means that is minor means it is minor and in fact when I spell major I use a capital M when I spell minor I use a lowercase M I'm going to take this information here.

I'll show you how. this works to build triads. I actually made a video on triads and if you want to watch it, I'll post it at the end of the video, there'll be a link to that, so I'll build this first c e chord. and G, if we look at the distance between this C and this e, we can discover that the distance between c and e is two full steps, which gives us a major third. Now I'm also going to introduce some shorthand symbols, so there's a lot going on here, but this is like a massive overview.

You have this in your head, you'll understand the key, so we have a triangle symbol that means major, it's shorthand, so instead of writing the word major, three major, six, all that, I just write major. So, like a triangle, I'm going to use this minus symbol here for dinner. I'm thinking of major and minor intervals. This is going to become super important when we look at the distance between these in the cycle of thirds, so look, I can put this major and minor symbol in this cycle of thirds so that between C and E I can put this major symbol there to help me between the e and the G which is smaller.

I'm going to complete them so you don't do it. I don't have to think about it too much while I'm doing the proof, but you'll have to do this later in your assignment G a B is greater B a D is less D a F is less f2a is greater a a c is less, so if If we mean this, we will be able to find out what is happening with these Triads, so from C to e we discover that now this is the root, this is the third, this is the fifth. I'll put it there so you can see where we are.

We're turning that table on its side and we're extending it this way the root third and fifth so that the distance between C and E is a major third, which means the chord will be major as long as this fifth is a good fifth. , which is interesting to note when we have a major triad that goes from the third to the fifth it will always be minor, it's really strange how they flip like that, it's one of the beautiful things about music and this symmetry that but because we have this major third here, we can confidently put it into Roman numeral format and then tell us if it's major or minor, which version of this I'm going to use because it's called extended Roman numerals. we take these extended Roman numerals, I know that's important because it has a major third, let's put that Roman numeral in there like this, so let's move on to the next note, the next ingredient we had here was DFA, let's look at d f a, let's put those in there d f a that's the root that's the third and that's the fifth the distance between D and F if we look at our cycle of thirds here we can see D to F we get that minor that's cool, we can work it out on our guitar like well, on the fretboard, If we also want the F to an A, we can solve it, look at F to an A which is major and here's the good thing again, notice that the third we have now is a minor third, which means this chord. it's D minor and then I would go up here and alter them accordingly so I know that by taking that c there that's major, I don't have to do anything to it.

I'm looking at the re there and I have to add that. minor, that means I get a D minor chord. I'll write them all down below as well, but notice how we get this third shift, so in a minor chord between the third and the fifth we get a third meter. pretty impressive now because this is a minor chord we're going to use my Chinese version of the Roman numeral, which means we write a number two and we just put a colon on it to show that it's lowercase, let's take this one and I'm just moving forward with a ingredient at a time, you can see that we get e g and B, let's put them in e g b, so if we go up there and we go up with those brackets e to G, let's meddle a little bit in our cycle of thirds e to G is minor, let's put that in there, can you guess what is it going to happen here between G and B?

Let's take a look at G to B which is a major third, so the third in this E chord here is minor, which means it's going to be an E minor chord, let's add that here we have that E chord minor because it's a minor chord, that's how we write it in Roman numerals. Wonderful, so we have the first three chords done, let's do the next F solo. follow up guys f a c those are my root third and fifth root third fifth going up stacking them as they go up in the pitch brackets there F a a let's see our cycle of thirds, it will help us from F to E is major wonderful Can we guess what's going to happen here?

A to C is minor, that means we have a major third there. This means that this will be a major chord, the root note is F and it will be F major. Do we need to do it? put something in that, no, nothing at all, the Roman numeral I would use is a four, but since it's important, I'm going to put those serifs in there like this, that's how we get these extended Roman numerals when you see the Roman numerals. which are sometimes written like this one two three four five six seven these are basic Roman numerals and what they don't tell you is whether they are greater or less when we use upper and lower case letters, it tells us if it is greater or less, it is useful to know. so we get a g, let's look at gbd, the good band deserves it, so I just remember in my mnemonic, let's see the distance between G, B and D, the distance between G and B is a major third, let's hit that there, come on look the distance between B and D, tells you to look for major minor, this has a major third, the root note is G, so it will be a G major chord.

Do we need to add anything to this? No, we don't, but because it's a major chord, if I put my Roman numeral five in there, I have to make sure it's written in major capitals or serifs at the top. The next note has to do this a c e a c e in that cycle of thirds there just to help you. AC every once in a while, that e is okay, from a to c, it's a C minor to e, it's major because it's this pattern that happens, it just happens in the major chords and in the minor chords, they turn around and we can see that We have a minor third. with a root note a, so we'll call it a minor, let's modify that by putting a little M next to that a and we can see that tells us what chord we're going to get because it's a minor, let's look at the Roman. numeric spelling we have a five and a one there because that's five six and it's less so we put the period just to show you that it's lowercase wonderful now here's the complicated fool this is the stranger in the family this is what we need too let's get it into our heads this is a strange chord b d f you see there BDF look what's happening here B to d is minorthird and D to FIt's also a minor third, so this introduces another rule, another thing we have to remember in the way I think about it is that, because it's a minor third, I'm still going to use a minor version of the spelling. here, but because we have two of these miners, then we have a problem: this distance between B and F is not what is known as a perfect fifth, the chords one, two, three, four, five and six all have fifths perfect, which makes them sound very stable but this chord does not sound stable because it has a flattened fifth, it is a fifth that is lowered one fret we can also call it a diminished fifth we take the perfect fifth and we decrease it and when we decrease it we make it less if you think about it well if you

didn

't eat for a week hopefully your torso would shrink, if you ate twice as much food all week you would get the opposite of shrink which would increase they would make you bigger so this is a flat five or a diminished fifth and because it's diminished that means we need this symbol here, this little shorthand that will tell us that this chord is diminished and to show you that I put it there, breathe and take that in because I just discovered, from our ingredients , how to make these triads, how all these nuts stack up, but the cool thing is that hopefully now you can see that these three chords are major, so we have three major chords that we can put in an order like this major this is what you have to memorize major major we also have three minor chords and then we get the diminished chord right at the end we apply these Roman numerals to them when we do it like this it applies to any key, not just the key of C major if you change them and put your sharps or your flats in the letters of the alphabet will change, but this structure will not work because this structure is linked to the major scale four five six chord seven, the reason you need to memorize it is because chords one, four and five of its majors They are known as your primary triads.

Great, we need to know what your primary triads are because those are the most important because this is where we derive our most important movement of the lullaby chord and that's something. called cadences, let's look at this minor from chord two, chord three, chord six, these are called guess what the secondary triads are like and then right at the end we have the main note, which is this diminished wobbly Bob, I call it, I have shown you how. we get the chords from the ingredients here major minor minor major major minor diminished let's say when you fill up the car with gas or do something mundane your major minor minor major major minor diminished it becomes easier if you remember that one four five are your The Primary Triads two , three and six are your Secondary Triads and your diminished chord is Chord Seven.

The reason this is important is because once you understand this, I can show you how you can put this on the fretboard of your guitar using something I call the L7 grille. and if you want to learn that then watch this video here thanks