Musician Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty ft. Jacob Collier & Herbie Hancock | WI

Hello everyone, my name is Jacob Collier and I am a

musician

. Today I was challenged to explain a simple

concept

in five

levels

of increasing complexity. My theme harmony. I'm sure everyone can come away from this video with some understanding on some level. How are you doing? It's going good, great, do you know what harmony is when people sing together and it sounds good, yes, that's 100 right? Have you ever heard a song called Amazing Grace? No, it's good, the melody alone just says that melody. It's a bit lonely yourself, isn't it, and no one really knows how it feels.

Which one did you prefer? The second. Awesome and why did you prefer that one because it sounds better. Yes. Oh, that's great. I can decide how I want this melody to feel. The more notes there are, the more exciting it is, that's what musical harmony is, it makes sense, you're the best, thank you, have you ever heard of harmony? Yeah, okay, so what do you think harmony is? I think it's basically like a person has the lowest voice and like a girl usually has the highest voice, yeah, and then they combine them, I like that, that's absolutely right, harmony is about injecting melody with emotion so that you finally leave home and come home and have learned something along the way.

Yeah, a good place to start is with the idea of ​​a triad, a triad is a three-part harmony basically, so that's a trump, you know, this kid's name is C major, have you ever heard this idea of major and minor chords? chords yeah yeah yeah so this is C major yeah and then this one is C minor so the feelings are different right yeah it feels dark and creepy yeah this one is darker and how it makes you feel happy, clear, pleasant, yes, I like it, yes. so with amazing grace if you start with f you know if I go there where I am now I don't know where I am and my job is to come home but to get to make this chord make sense yeah so it could be that my job as a harmonizer is to find that narrative and make it make sense.

It was interesting because I didn't think it would work well together because there were two completely different sounds, but then he just made it happen and just It was amazing, essentially, what harmony is, it's like a language, and as with any language, how many The more words you are able to speak in a language, the more you will be able to say correctly, so in harmony, this could be the number of notes you can think of. to add to a chord to make it feel a different way, have you ever heard of the circle of fifths?

Okay, that's cool, on one hand we have a lot of notes that make us feel brighter, you know, like these kind of really bright sounds and the other hand has a lot more to do with the darkness of a key center, so we're at home in f, but imagine we're doing a quick visit to B flat but then the sun comes up, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, what notes would you take? I suggest you add f f is cool, yeah, and if we go in that direction, yeah, uh, c, yeah, and then g, you got it, yeah, yeah, so this is really like a shiny clearing or something, you know. , let's play these two incredibles.

Play it in its simplest form, yeah, okay, so let's start a f, yeah, f, yeah, yeah, nice, okay, cool, let's try one more version where we add some colors, so let's visit the if flat with a little more imagination just to see how things feel, yeah, okay, let's make it so that it's F major 7, but it ends in a, which is f7 over B flat major 7 with an energy a in F major 7 with an e, a d and a g in d minor 7 with the g in it c salsa oh minor nice b flat major g seven f sharp major seven oh yeah I like that so what harmony does is just give us even more tools to tell those stories great, yes, good man, incredible, a good emotional device when it comes to Harmony is just thinking about how to get somewhere.

You know it can be so sparse, it can be so rich and it can be very emotional, so this idea of ​​overtone and understanding the harmonic series, how much do you know about this just until I started hearing singing like a barbershop quartet and like I I was also a violinist, I finally understood the idea where the series of harmonics came from: if a group of singers nailed a chord or tuned it perfectly, the harmonics would be heard. a tone that was not necessarily produced by one of those. The amazing thing about harmony is that it exists in nature, so take the harmonic series of the f note, for example, okay, you have the octave and then the fifth, then the fourth and then. but that's a little bit sharp with that one and then the intervals get smaller and smaller below that note you have the series of overtones that essentially is like a reflection of something in the same way that when a tree grows in nature you have the branches that go up and the roots that go down, so it's very nice to think that this is the key center of the floor, the soil and then these two different directions of ways that it can be expressed and the differences in the sensations with that lots of I think when it comes to reharmonization or harmonization people think that the solution to the problems comes when we add more notes.

I think people forget that you can work with the notes you already have by simply rearranging them with the simple idea of ​​investing. you know, the inversion of the simple triad of F major, so I was lost, how do I want to go home? You know? Is there another verse to come? because I can do it. I can delay the gratification of going home in the first place simply by using inversions. Even before adding notes to the chord, one thing I was very happy to discover is that every note in the melody works with every bass note, so you can show that yes, this is the note f yes f major f minor g flat major seven G flat diminished G flat minor major seven G minor seven G sus G G seven G seven sharp eleven and then G seven with a flat thirteen right a salsa flat a flat major seven a flat major seven sharp five with the eleven sharp essentially what what it shows is that every note and every bass note are compatible so once we realize this it's great now what should we do what should we what to do like what am I supposed to do right and sometimes it's paralyzing when it comes to fixing there are too There are many options, two things are possible, that's when it becomes super important to be aware of what you want to try and say emotionally, you know, but what about negative harmony?

The dark side. Basically the way I would apply negative harmony would be this idea. of polarity that you know between the series of nuances and the series of nuances or you know one side and the other side perfect on the playground the feeling of a minor political cadence resolving is so moving, you know and it's just a good alternative to something like It's funny, you know what you're doing that makes something in a major key sound like some kind of sad, melancholy song, right? You know you changed the feeling of what you would otherwise know if you told a child that this is an important song, they should be exactly happy.

Yeah, no, sure, and you know F major can be something where you arrive from, if you arrive in F major from D flat, then it's like the G has risen right, but if you arrive in F major from a major, then it's like if the sun had set. So there's a lot about context. I think once you have a language, it's about using it and applying it emotionally. I think that's what makes the difference. Very well, many people will see you as someone who has drunk in harmony all his life. I've seen so much harmony I've heard so much harmony How do you make decisions?

There are so many things that are possible when you know things. How do you have the courage to make a decision? It comes only from your life experience and that moves you. in a certain direction how it is expressed is often a complete surprise yes yes yes I find it fascinating in music to think about you know how to say that I arrive at a place if I am going to say that I am going to D flat major and there it was something that you once taught me , you taught me this song called don't follow the crowd, oh yeah, and there's that chord, it's not a dominant chord but it works like a dominant chord, but it doesn't matter because you're still going to the place you're going to go to the right is something like um, right, right, right, yeah, so this chord is like a major seven with the sub five and a natural like there's not something dominant, right, but at that moment I come from here and I want to forge some solution I get into a situation yeah, yeah, right, and then that haunted me for days because you know I wouldn't think of using that chord in that situation, yeah, and there it was and yeah, you know, you read the rule book, that's not there , yeah, and this is what I learned from the great Christian Chris, yeah, yeah, yeah, the idea of ​​going to the D flat chord normally makes a dominant like a flat seventh, but in the '20s they also used to do things like oh yeah , you know, so it always comes, yeah, it comes right below the key of c, yeah, with a seventh, yeah, and we don't normally say that a C seventh and a flat seventh are related, yeah, you know, because some that a lot of the notes are different because you got this and you got it, you got it exactly right, it gets twisted, yeah, sure, yeah, but if you phrase it right, oh yeah, and then you're safe, you can get all the ones you you can.

Outside of that, yes, yes, the other thing that I like, that we both do sometimes is to be on the pitch that we want to reach with the bottom of our structure and the chord before the arrival chord to have that in the top, yes. oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, something like that and that's not because emotionally it's almost like I'm here, I'm getting here, but if the bass note is the same, it's that inevitable, it's like it's there all along and it makes a jerk, yes, yes, it happened, it's like one thing moved in one direction, one thing came, so it's this tension and it's glorious.

I love thinking about these things emotionally just because it's a feeling, I know that feeling. In my life, music is no different from life, no, you know, and I think that's probably the biggest attraction for those of us who play music. Yeah, was there ever a time in your life when you were younger where you felt like you had constantly fallen back into the same habits that you know you would find, oh man, I'm not going to play the same game again. I had a really great experience working with Miles Davis. I felt like I was stuck playing the same thing and I was getting depressed about it and Miles told me something.

I thought he said don't play the butter notes too well and I thought what he meant by that. So you thought he said butter, butter, he didn't say down, but you thought he said. butter, yeah, wow, and then I thought what butter b what's butter then I started thinking what are the obvious notes, for example, in a chord, the obvious notes are the third and the seventh, so I said, oh, maybe If I leave them out, everything would change. For me, from that moment on, yeah, I got more applause for that solo than I did all week.

Wow, I wouldn't play the vocals I play today if that hadn't happened. Is incredible. I know I've been using this song. Incredible grace. Oh, and then we could play a little bit of that, if you want, we could talk about some things that I'll do and I appreciate you.