Okay, so we've looked at a lot of different chord types now.
And we've built triads on every degree of the
major scale and every degree of the minor scale.
And we've heard a lot of different quality of chords coming through.
Now, we know that we can actually harmonize any diatonic melody just with
the chords that you build on the tonic, the subdominant and the dominant.
But we also now know that there's all these other
chords that we could use, so it's, it's a time to
start perhaps playing around with that and hearing what we
can do using that familiar melody again, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
>> Okay, so we've had this melody in week one.
You know, we've used that a few times today.
So far today, we've talked about harmonizing it just
with cord five the dominate and cord one the tonic.
And we had the kind of important
structural impact that this has on the melody.
Now we're going to hear it just with chords one, four and five.
And then we're going to take some other chords
and make it sound a wee bit more interesting.
So, Nicky is going to play the guitar.
>> It's not my guitar.
This is Zack's guitar and he's been very kind and trusting
by lending it to me because I'm not really a guitarist.
But we thought that probably quite a lot of you will guitars around at home.
And also we're going to sort of teach you turning around in this, in this format.
Might just give you a break from where we've been teaching at the piano
and, and give you an insight to how we learn to do things as well.
>> Okay.
So I'm going to sing the melody, Nikki is going to
harmonize it using chords one, four, and five.
[MUSIC]
Okay, so it's just the first phrase but we're using chords 1, 4, and 5,
and you hear how the, how the melodies sounds and you hear its cadential point.
So, let's try something different.
Let's take another one of the chords we've learned, and this
is arguably the next most important and the next most common chord.
We're going to use chord six this time.
>> Okay dokey.
>> In the key of G, that is the chord of E-Minor.
That's chord two, we're going to have.
>> That's chord two.
>> We're going to have chord six, which is E-Minor.
>> E-minor.
there you go...
>> ... In the key of G.
Thank you.
Okay.
So what I want you to do is just have that just as the last chord in that phrase.
>> Mh-hm.
>> We're going to hear how just a subtle change in chord makes a real
difference to the feel and the overall effect of the harmonization of the melody.
Okay, so let's try again.
[MUSIC]
Okay, so again, we've got this, a completely
different sound when we arrive at that chord.
And it's interesting because it gives the melody a different color.
And it gives us a new direction to go off in.
>> But it kind of worked because that chord that we just
used, chord six, has a scale degrees in it, six, one, three.
And that overlaps a lot with the scale degrees that you get
in the tonic chord one, three and five, which we were using before.
>> Okay.
Let's try a different one.
This time what we're going to do is we're going to extend
the feeling that we get towards the end of the phrase.
What I want you to do is just before the five chord, which in the key
of G is D, I want you to just put a wee A-Minor chord in it.
>> Which I already practiced.
>> Now's your chance to have the A-Minor chord in place.
>> There it is.
>> That's it.
A-Minor.
Okay?
So that's chord two in the key of G.
G chord one, A-Minor is chord two.
Let's try exactly the same thing again and see what happens.
All right?
>> Okay.
[MUSIC]
>> So the progression we got there was two, five, one in the key of G.
And this is really important.
Particularly for those of you who've maybe
come to this course from a jazz background.
This is something you'll recognize, whether or
not you're necessarily familiar with theory of it.
But that's a sound that's really important.
>> And I think that's enough for me massacring Zack's guitar.
So, now what are we going to do is get back to the
piano, and we are going to do, then looks again at some more
of this typical patterns where we are using cords like two and
six, to extend and elaborate the basic harmonic functions that we've seen.
We can get with mainly chords one and
five, and sometimes with chords one, four, and five.
So we've now seen that there are
some really important structural moments called cadences.
And we've seen a few ways that we can travel.
We know that we have to go from five to one.
We've seen from the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star examples there that a common
way of getting to the five to the one is to put a chord four in beforehand.
And that sort of elaborates and extends that progression.
So if we were in G-Major, then a
four, five, one progression would sound like this.
[MUSIC]
But there are other ways of heading back to the tonic.
>> Yeah, and another way to do that is to change our dominant chord
in some way so that it gives us greater pull back to the tonic.
So let's jump back into the key of C, just for ease of example at the moment.
So if we're in the key of C.
[MUSIC]
Our fifth note is G.
So if we build our triad.
[MUSIC]
From there we get G, B, D.
>> That's a dominate triad.
>> Dominate triad and it uses five, seven, and two.
Now, if we add the fourth degree of the scale to that as well, again
we see it's a third up from our fifth degree there, of the, of the cord.
[MUSIC]
G B D F.
And this is our dominant seventh chord, we've altered our dominant drive in a way
by adding this extra note and given it a greater sense of pull towards the tonic.
>> So let's hear how that would play out
in that sort of credential sequence, so the pattern I'm
going to play now is chord 5, then chord
five-seven or dominant seven, and then back to one.
So in C-Major we will have
[MUSIC]
That's quite a strong cadence isn't it?
With the way that the five goes to the one.
So, let's just look about what,
what's working, what's working within that cadence.
We've got the G, the B and the D in it.
Now that chord, we're saying is a dominant triad of C
Major, but you might be thinking, what other chords could that be?
That could be.
[MUSIC]
>> Well, it's just a G-Major triad so in
theory it could be G-Major, chord one in the key of G-Major.
>> Okay, if we were adding a seventh to it in in
the key of G-Major that would have to be this note wouldn't it.
[MUSIC]
Because we've got F sharps in G-Major.
So if we had a seventh chord built on G it would sound like this.
[MUSIC]
And that's not what we're hearing at all.
So one reason that this five, five, seven, one movement
sounds quite strong is it's really, really giving us quite
emphatically our sense of key when we get the G
seven with F natural, we know we're not in G major.
So we know that that chord is probably going to take us back somewhere in C.
The other important features of that dominant seventh
chord is that it's not only got the
leading notes in C-Major, which is B, and that wants to lead us back to C.
So the dominant seventh has got that leading note
from C, from B to C, from seven to one.
The other thing that's going on in a dominant seventh chord
is it's got a four that also wants to move a semitone.
That's the other semitone that happens in our major scale
and that wants to come from four down to three.
So, there's two types of harmonic movement that happen in
that dominant seventh that can resolve this back to the one.
Let's just listen to the five, five, seven, one again.
[MUSIC]
See, it's got two harmonic pulls in it, going in different directions.
So you might have been wondering now that we just introduced
four-note chords to you, why we've only been using three notes up till now.
>> Well, there's absolutely no reason why you should have to, we've been
talking triads because it's a good way to illustrate how chords work within keys.
But there's some styles of music that almost always use more extended chords.
Jazz is a good example of this where you'll have seventh chords,
ninths, elevenths, thirteenths and a lot of alterations to these scale degrees.
But, actually, we've been talking about harmonic function in a way
that focuses on the, the tonic, the subdominant, and the dominant.
When we're talking about other, other styles of
music that use more extended chords, this doesn't change.
It still works in the same way, but what's
important is addition of extra notes to the chords gives it
a definite color, definite flavor, and sometimes softens the
way that the chords move from one to another.
>> So we've just heard that progression five, five-seven, one and we've heard how
strong a perfect cadence that is with
the dominant seventh leading back to the tonic.
How about instead of five, five, seven, one,
we use the progression two, five, seven, one?
Let's hear how different that sounds.
Here's five, five-seven, one.
[SOUND].
And here's two, five-seven, one.
[MUSIC]
Harmonically speaking, that last cadence, two, five, seven, one,
has got a lot of strong things going on.
It's, it stays very securely within the key.
It shows us always where our tonic is, but it's never static.
It's got major and minor chords happening in it, and it's
got that dominant movement that dominant seventh movement that gives us
the leading note to the tonic, and also gives us that
semitone action between, from scale [UNKNOWN] four going down to three.
>> It's also got a really nice,
secure, and definite movement happening in the bass.
So when Nicky played it, you have the top part there, the higher sounding
notes move nice and smoothly from one to the next, moving in quite, small jumps.
But actually what was happening in the bass was that we had a big
jump from the D up to the G, and then down to the C.
So what happened was, we went from the D, up four notes to the G.
And then down five notes to the C.
>> These are big movements, if this where a physical
structure then you could think of it as being really solid.
We've got really big wide placed pillars giving you a good foundation on the
ground leading up to the supporting structures
the, the highest of happening at the ceiling.
So what we should do actually, is just look at what this notes actually were
and then maybe draw your attention to
a pattern that you remember from previous weeks.
So if we look at the D to the G.
[MUSIC]
This is a fourth, and then from the G to the C, this is also a fourth.
So you might remember the circular of fifths when we were talking about key signatures.
What we said is that if you went clockwise in the circle
of fifths, each jump that you made progressed you a fifth, a perfect fifth.
But we actually said if you looked anti-clockwise
round the same circle, you would move in fourths.
D to G, is a fourth, and G to C is a fourth.
Regardless of the fact that when we actually played the piece
of music we moved from a G down to a C.
This again serves to show that up a fourth and down
a fifth are equivalent, they take you to the same note.
>> Some harmonic progressions sound more logical and flowing than
others and they tend to get used more than others.
And quite often it's this root movement of the chord working
with the cycle of fifths that's actually producing this very flowing sound.
Another feature of a harmonic progression that can make it sound
really coherent, is where a particular
pattern gets repeated within the progression.
So, some of the most memorable harmonic progressions, that get most commonly used,
might include both circle of fifths, and they might keep going with that some way.
We've included an example here and you might well recognize this one.
There's some more in the supplementary material for you to follow up with.
[MUSIC]
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