- Hi, I'm Gareth and in this video,
we're going to be talking about the submediant shift
which sounds very complicated but in just a few minutes,
it will be crystal clear, hopefully.
Why would we want to use a submediant shift?
We might want to use it to create a little bit of colour
inside one key by borrowing something from another key
or we might want to use it to modulate
so there are two fundamental ways
in which you might do this.
Okay, let's talk about how we modulate
from one key to the next.
Normally, the convention is
that you try to find a pivot chord.
So, for example, I could look in C major at the tonic chord,
which would be this, so it's a chord of C
or it's a chord I or it's a tonic chord.
And if I wanted to move to another key,
I'd have to find chords in this key
that would also belong to this other key.
So, for example, chord I in C major
is also chord V or the dominant chord in F major.
So, if I was playing a piece of music in C major,
I could start in C major.
And then, I could come to a chord I,
that's this chord here and then, I could say, well,
it's chord I in C major but I'm going to call it,
from now on, chord V in F major
and then I could carry on in F major.
So, that's a very conventional way to modulate,
you literally find a pivot chord, a chord that belongs
to the key you're leaving and to the key you're joining
and having passed through that chord,
you can carry on in the new key.
So, looking for pivot chords, that means
that all three notes of this chord
have got to be a chord in this other key.
But you could also do something that's even more colourful
and this is something that really took off
during the 19th century, where composers began to say,
"Well, do I need to use a pivot chord
"or could I just use a pivot note?"
So, how about we just take the note C.
Well, if you think about it, there are various keys
that would have the note C in it.
So, for example, it could be this chord I in C major
that we've just talked about, we could say
that it's chord I in A minor because A minor is A, C, E,
it could be chord I in F major, F, A, C.
So, already we've found some possibilities for other chords,
other keys that we could go to so we could quite easily
use that pivot note to go
to A minor or to F major, for example.
But actually, we haven't said anything terribly radical
so far because A minor is the relative minor of C major,
F major's the subdominant key of C major
so we're not doing anything, really, beyond what we would do
if we used a whole pivot chord but this is where
the submediant shift comes in because C might be the note
that's at the bottom of a chord I in C major
but it's also the middle of an A-flat major chord.
Now, that's quite a dramatic shift, isn't it?
If I go from C major to A-flat major
because C major's got no flats and sharps,
A-flat major's got four flats
so that's quite a dramatic key shift, isn't it?
And normally, through using a pivot chord, I would struggle
to get from C major to A-flat major because trying to find
a pivot chord is impossible, I might have to go
through other keys on the way to A-flat major
but just by using this pivot note,
I can go to A-flat major very quickly.
So, I could be doing a piece of music in C major.
And I could just use A-flat major as a colour
to come back to C major, you see,
it's a very effective colour, isn't it?
Just using that A-flat major so it's just a colouring chord
in C major but I could also use it
as a means of modulating from C major to A-flat major.
So, I'm in C major.
♪ And then having used this note ♪
♪ I'm now going to to pivot ♪
And now, I'm in A-flat major.
So, you see what I'm doing?
I'm just taking a note and using it as a pivot note.
Now, it doesn't have to be the tonic note,
it could be any other note of the scale
but I'm just illustrating it using the tonic note
as an opportunity to go to the submediant
and effectively, what we're doing,
the submediant being the sixth degree of the scale.
So, C, number one, one, two, three, four, five, six,
the sixth degree of the scale is A
but it's the flattened submediant
that I'm talking about in this example.
So, you can use any note on the scale, you can look
for any other possibilities but this is
a particularly effective thing, either to give you
that A-flat major colour, from which you return
to C major straightaway, just by using the pivot note,
or by saying I want to modulate to a key
that's four flats away from where I am now,
simply by saying, C is the root of that chord
but C is also the middle of this chord and therefore,
it becomes the pivot note that enables
that flattened submediant shift.
So, it's another means of creating a bit of colour
so if you're wanting to improvise or you're composing music
and you're thinking, "Well, I can do the standard stuff
"but it just sounds a little bit dull, a little bit boring,"
you want to put some colour into it or you want to have
a slightly more dramatic modulation, have a little think
about using the flattened submediant of the key you're in
to make this move using a pivot chord, see how you get on.