Hi folks I'm pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson - you're watching Get Your Sax Together.
This video is part three of my four part series on harmony for
beginners taking you from zero to hero. In the last part we covered what
chords are and how you find the notes out but now, in this part, we're really
going to get to the magic and look at how those chords link together
in functional harmony to make up the songs that we all know and love.
So this video is part three of this four-part series on harmony. In part one we covered
the absolute basics, in part two we covered how chords are constructed and
how you notate them. In this part we're going to get right into how you link up
those chords to actually form real music - really cool stuff! There is a free pdf
linked down below in the description so be sure to go and get that. That is
wicked and really invaluable to help you follow along as we go through the lesson -
and, as usual, do share the love and subscribe to the channel and "ring the
bell" to be notified of new videos if you like what you see. So I'm gonna jump
behind the lens, get behind the screen for the lesson and I'll see you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail!
Okay welcome behind the curtain,
welcome behind the screen. So the first thing to understand about how cords move,
or "functional harmony", is that in western music, music is based on tension and
release. A chord is tense and wants to go somewhere and then is resolved. So for
example, this chord [PIANO CHORD], which is G7, wants the resolve to C
and then you get home and you think ah... So let's have a look at this with the
cord types that we've learnt in the second video in the Harmony [Series]. So first of
all, our major seven chord. Now our major seven chord is used as our home base. It
doesn't have any tension and it doesn't really want to pull anywhere. It's
perfectly happy where it is. By contrast, the dominant seven chord, or
seven chord, feels like it wants to pull somewhere. So for example, this chord [PIANO CHORD]
feels like it wants to pull somewhere.. and the way, the place it wants to pull to is
here [RESOLUTION CHORD] Of course this is the basic dominant to root movement that most
western music is based on, and it turns out that dominant seventh chords pull
to a home key a fifth lower. So in other words a seven chord on the fifth of that
key will want to pull you back home to the root. By the way, another word for
root is tonic, so you could say the tonic of the chord. Sadly you can't mix it with
gin and a slice of lemon [lol]. But it's also useful to use Roman numerals to number
each note of the home scale so that we can see patterns that apply within
any key. So going back to what I just said a few seconds ago, we can see that
the dominant to root cadence is a chord five, in this case G, to chord one, in this
case C. So G7 wants to pull, that's chord five, wants to
pull to cord one, which is Cmaj7. Once you look for that five to one (V-I)
progression you'll see it absolutely everywhere in music from Green Day to
Mozart. In case you hadn't noticed, the chord notes of G7 - G,B,D,F are all from the
key of C major, which is the key that G7 pulls towards - C major. For our next trick
when writing music we can slightly delay our route home by putting in a minor
seven chord built on the second degree of our home key before we hit that five
chord that wants to pull us home. Or another way of putting that in Roman
numerals is a II-V-I pattern and this is seen especially in jazz
standards. So in the key of C major it would be Dmin7, that's it in root
position, to G7 to Cmaj7. So that sounds nice. And if I just
rearrange where the notes are it sounds like this...
a very familiar sound in music. That's a II-V-I. If we swapped our Dmin7
for an F triad, or an F chord as you call it, on the fourth degree of the
key we get the slightly simpler chords that are used in most classic rock and
pop and blues songs, which is IV-V-I. So in the key of C you'd have F
then you'd have G or G7 going back to C. Now, you might also have noticed that the
chords of Dmin7, the II chord in the key of C, just like the V chord
and the F chord on IV ALL come from the scale of C. So the notes of Dmin7 and
G7 and F are all derived from the notes of the home key C. This is pretty cool
and the lesson is - both the melody notes and the chord notes within a key are
derived from the home major scale key. Another way of looking at this is to say
that melodies are horizontal expressions of the home major scale and chords are a
vertical stacked expressions of the home major key. This is important for single
line instruments like sax as we can't play chords. If you want to express the
harmonies of the key we have to do it one note at a time by playing notes of
the chords one after the other. So that's all quite interesting stuff. Now then
let's just have a quick recap of what we've learned so far...
Western music is based on tension and release. The heart of harmonic tension and release is seen
in the dominant to root relationship. The dominant 7th chord V of the key resolves
to the major 7th chord I. Like this. Chord five..goes to chord one. This tension
and release can be slightly delayed by adding a minor 7th chord on the chord II,
or a triad on chord IV, which would sound like this... do you - Dm7 G7 Cmaj7
In pop and rock stuff you just have
F to G or g7, back to C. Also, the notes of these popular chords can all be found in
the major scale of the home key, which is pretty cool. So far so good!!
Now that you know what you're looking for if you go hunting through chord
progressions for your favorite songs you'll see these two five ones and four
or five one chords all over the place and they all use the notes found in the
major scale of the key. Let's now look at two examples where the chords have notes
outside of the home key and to do this we're mainly talking about chords
typically find in jazz standards, but bear in mind that all functional harmony
has its roots in the Western classical tradition. The first example is where we
insert a cheeky little dominant chord that throws us to that minor 7 II
chord that we've already covered. It's another harmonic delaying tactic that
momentarily delays our gratification of getting back home. So what we're going to
do is we're going to put a seven chord on the sixth degree of the home key. So
that is a dominant chord on the sixth note of that major scale. So in the key
of C it would be an A7 for example. Effectively what we're doing is fooling
the ears of the listener. Pretend that we're going to the minor key that we've
got on chord II, but then we keep moving through into chord five and then back
home. So in the key of C, which is often a simple key to look at things as there's
no flats or sharps, it would look like A7 - Dm7 to G7 to C. So
that's A7, Dm7 G7 to Cmaj7. And here's that chord
sequence written with massive chord symbols. Let's just play that through...
A7takes us to Dm but then we keep going through
to G7 and finally we get back to Cmaj7. So if we redistribute the notes of
those chords it'll sound a bit more obvious what's going on. So let's try
this... A7, Dm7, G7, Cmaj7. So the reason this device
works is that in the home key of C we don't have a C# normally, so when
we're in the key of C, then we hit that A7 chord
this C# jumps out because it wants to resolve here - to the D minor - which it
does, but then it goes through again to G7 and finally home to C, and we're
finally back home. So that's the first way that we can start to use notes not
in the HOME key to create more tension. I'm going to show you one more example
and that is a delaying tactic commonly found in jazz standards and it's called
a "secondary dominant" chord. This involves replacing our m7 II chord with the
dominant 7th II chord. It's called a secondary dominant because it acts as a
dominant chord to the REAL dominant chord which is on chord V. So you might
see it as a temporary V chord going to the actual V chord which then takes us
home. So let's put this into our example of our home key of C. Now normally our
II-V-I in C is Dm7 G7 and Cmaj7, however, we now replace our Dm7
with the secondary dominant. Instead of a Dm7 it's D7. So let's
put that in. So we've now got D7 which then changes to D minor 7 and G7
taking us back to C major 7. So let's just play that through again with these
giant chord symbols. We've got a D7 to Dm7, G7, C. So what's happening is this
D7 here, which has got this F sharp in here, this wants to pull to this key...
which it does... which is the G7 but it keeps going back to C. So secondary
dominant - this D7 is a dominant to this G7, but we just kind of sneak in the
Dm7 to smooth the gap between the two. So this harmonic trick is used
all over the place in all sorts of jazz tunes and standards. However one really
good example of it is in Girl From Ipanema - the bossa nova tune. So I'm
going to keep it in C to keep things simple. We start off with C major seven
then we go to the secondary dominant which is D7,
which changes to Dm7, then G7
then finally we're back home. So that's all we're going to cover today in part
So that's all we're gonna cover today in part three.
We've been through how chords link up, how chord V wants to resolve the chord
1, how we can make it into a 2 5 1 and then we've had 2 examples of cords that
don't have notes from within the key. First of all putting a dominant on chord
6 and also the secondary dominant - putting the dominant on chord 2. so I hope
So I hope you enjoyed the video today. We've got into some really cool stuff - we've even
started covering secondary dominants and other really groovy stuff like that. So
in the final part of this four-part series we're gonna get really detailed.
We're gonna cover how guide tones move in chords. We're going to get into
extensions, ninths, flat 9, sharp 11, you name it! We're gonna get into the
nitty-gritty so definitely stay tuned for that one. In the meantime make sure
you go and get your free pdf linked in the description below, that's a really
cool piece of information that you can use to really bed in the video. If you
need to re-watch this video several times please do that'll really help it
cement the information in your head, and of course subscribe to the channel if
you like what you're seeing and "ring the bell" to be notified when I upload new
videos, and I'll see you next time on Get Your Sax Together!