Hi, my name is Jeremy, this is Red Means Recording
and today I wanted to do a little video about something that I get asked about a lot
and that is, how do you come up with chords?
This is gonna be a introduction to that, sort of more about just the basic of chords
The basics of the major triad and how I think about the major triad when I walk around it on the keyboard and do stuff with it
A quick explainer on my extent of musical theory
I was a classical flautist from elementary school up until the first year of college
I was on track to be a music performance major
I learned a lot of theory while I was taking private lessons and doing symphony and stuff like that as a young'un
but I dropped out of my music performance major in my first year, so I never really got super deep into
theory classes in college, so please bear with me if I'm using the wrong language, or I'm not explaining things perfectly
I'm going to explain it the best I can with my musical knowledge. And yeah, hopefully it helps you out
So what is a chord? We're going to focus on the C major triad
which is made of
three notes from the C major scale. The C major scale is
That's c d e f g a b c
all natural
No flats or sharps
So the C major triad and the major triad for any chord is going to be the tonic, the root note - C
In this case
E, the third, the major third and G, the perfect fifth
You get this really pleasant, kind of boring chord
There's a couple ways that you can play this chord
You don't have to play it with C as the root note. You can play it with
E as the root note
Or G as the root note. That's kind of nice
And as you do that
You can hear that the leading note up here, the note that you kind of hear most, kind of changes
So here you hear the major third, here you hear the tonic again
but it's not the fundamental, and here you hear the perfect fifth
So that's great
now we know what a major third looks like and sounds like
so when I'm thinking about chords and I sit down
and I play a triad, because that's usually how I start, with a triad or a seventh chord
which I'll show off in a bit
I think about how I can move from that chord to something that's going to create tension and
create room for a melody
There's a lot of ways that you can do that
but the thing that led me to want to make this video is
that I was thinking about the C major chord and just how much you can get from moving one finger in one direction
So let’s start diving into that and I'll show you what I mean
There's your C major chord
if I move one of these fingers up and down just
one note in the actual scale, as opposed to just one semi tone, which is a half step
I have the ability to
fundamentally change the sound in a really interesting way, in a lot of different ways. So let's start off
Here's a C major. If I move the E up one note to this F here
I get a C major suspended chord
And this is really really nice
Suspended chords allow you to move with sort of some nice tension between other chords
So that's one way you can move around the C major chord
The other thing about the C suspended chord is that it shares a relationship, now that I've added that F, to F major
Because the F major chord is F, A natural, and C
so you can see I'm one note away from that
That's pretty nice
let's move around again, so if I move the G up one
I get an A minor inverted chord, and that's what we call, I believe
when you're playing a version of the chord that doesn't have the name of the chord as its root note
so in you know the case of C major you would be playing a C
A minor would normally look like this but it's an inversion
because we have the same notes
A natural, C and E. But we're playing them in a different order so you can get
Some nice
major minor
modulation there, which is always kind of a cool thing when you're moving through chords
You'll also see that now
I'm one step away from an F major there. So
C major
A minor
F major
So we're already getting some cool stuff going on, just by moving our fingers around a little bit
All right. So we've done C major, we've done C major sus, we've done A minor
Let's see what else we can do
if I move the E down
to a D
Too much philosophy there
I get a G major suspended chord
and there's the resolution of it so
Suspended
Resolution
G major would normally be G, B natural and D but
I've moved into an inversion of the suspended chord there
And then the resolution is bringing that C down to B natural, so that's pretty nice too
One of my favorite ones coming off of C Major is the C major to
an inverted E minor chord and that is moving the C down one half step to B here. So here's our C major
Inverted E minor
That is just so nice, kinda Twin Peaksy, you know
And then you can go from here to like
All the chords that I just played are chords that I've shown you
repositioned across the keyboard
This is something I used to do quite a bit. I used to just move single notes around
And see what happened
and then try to figure out the relationship between what I've created and what I had before. If the relationship between the two sounds cool
that I kind of file that away and realize that I can go between these different things
Now the important thing to understand here, is that like, I'm not just playing
the major triad or the minor triad
Like from its normal position
Almost all of these are inversions and that's kind of what makes things interesting and brings out the movement and tension between chords for me
So if I was just playing, you know, major triads
I mean, that's pretty nice
But it's kind of hokey, you know, yeah, it's not quite as interesting to me
So let's make sure that we've gotten all of our inversions here and all of our things that we can do
So we've done C major, we've done C major suspended, we've done G major suspended
let’s see, what else did we do? We did A minor, which is right next to F major
We did not do yet
Let's see. What was it
moving
No, we did that
Oh this, okay
So if we go from C major, up to, moving us to a D here, we get a
E minor 7th, missing the perfect fifth. So an E minor 7th would be
E, G and B, followed by a D
We take that away, we get that
and that's kind of what we have down
here. We’re just going to move this down an octave
to the D
I love seventh chords, seventh chords are really really beautiful
There's a lot you can do with them. I love
it's kind of dreamy, kind of vaporwavy and
it's that tension there, this B natural here
is dissonant with this C here
This tension that you would normally get by putting
these two next to each other
it's gross, right, but if you put it up an octave
and then add the major thing there. It's just it's really really nice
And
what I just did there was moved from a C major seventh and
I kept that seventh in the C major scale and I moved down to
F major, and you can hear this whole another tension that that's developed there which I can resolve by bringing the B natural to
The perfect fifth of the F major scale, which is the C
Getting a little head of myself, but you know, it's just fun to play these chords
And by the way, this is the D-05, the Roland D-05
I'm using this to make all the wonderful sounds that you're hearing. I'm using preset 225
I Saw The Light
this thing is a pad machine. It's just wonderful. I love it. So let's let's kind of wrap this up
I wanted to show you that you can move
through
One note changes in your scale and have a huge effect
on what you do and I encourage you
To play around with this
And once you start moving one finger around you'll start to hear the tension that you're creating as
Some of these won't work
Some of them will need more than one finger moved
But it's a great way to practice listening to your chords
And how much you can do
with one or two finger movements, making small changes and
listening to what makes you feel something. That's what all this is about. It's just like, does this make me feel something?
That's walking the Triad, as I think I'm gonna call this video, if this was interesting to you or you have anything to add, please let
me know, I'd love to do more videos like this. I don't feel highly qualified
But if this was something that, you know, was useful to people, I might do more. So just let me know
My name is Jeremy. This is Red Means Recording, have a wonderful day
