Lesson video

Hello.

My name is Mr. Chapman, and welcome to lesson six in the Songs for a Better World unit.

In today's lesson, we're going to be learning how to make a chord sequence, how to make that chord sequence sound interesting.

But we also learn about something called a cadence.

So without further ado, let's take a look at what we'll need to be successful in today's lesson.

In this lesson, you'll need a piece of paper, and a pencil to make notes with.

You'll also need your voice, or an instrument, or access to an online app for instruments or a digital audio workstation, such as BandLab.

This lesson is best with headphones.

It's not required.

If you need to pause the video to get any of the equipment you see on screen, or find a quiet space to work in, please do so now and press play when you are ready for music.

Using music software.

You can create music using audio mixing software.

The demonstrations in this lesson use a free programme called BandLab.

BandLab is for use by over 13s only.

And if you are over 13, you still need permission to use it from your parent or carer.

I'm going to play some chords on the piano.

Can you identify the chord by ear? I'm going to play a minor chord, a major chord, an extended chord, and a cluster chord.

On your piece of paper, write A, B, C, or D, and match each chord to the correct name.

So the first chord is A, and it sounds like this.

This is A for the second time.

And B.

So is B minor, major, extended, or a cluster chord? This is C.

C again.

Is C minor, major, extended, or a cluster chord? And here is.

D.

If you need to rewind the video to hear those chords again, please do so.

Pause the video while you answer your question and press play when you're ready to hear the answers.

Okay.

So A was a major chord.

C major to be specific.

B was a minor chord, C minor.

That was B.

C is a cluster chord.

A cluster chord is a chord that contains notes that are very close together.

For example: They tend not to sound that nice.

And an extended chord.

Was the answer for.

Letter D.

Remember, an extended chord is where we add a note to the typical triad.

In this example, we had an F major seven chord.

So we have the standard F triad, F-A-C, and we added on the seventh note, which is E.

Well done, if you got those correct.

Give yourself a tick if you did, and let's move on to the next part of the lesson.

What do we need to decide first before choosing the chords in our chord progression? Well, we need to think about what issue we are composing about.

What mood and feel are you trying to achieve? What metre will we choose, what tempo will we choose? The answers to these questions may influence the chords we decide to pick.

Are we going to pick major or minor chords? For example.

I've put up four examples of topics you can choose to base your protest song on.

We've got climate change, access for all, democracy, and equality, but if you have a different cause you want to compose a protest song for, of course, you may use that as well.

So now we've answered that question.

Let's talk about making a chord progression.

I've chosen G major for my key, because that is the same key that John Lennon chose for Imagine.

However, if you have a different key in mind, feel free to use that.

Some keys are easier to play in on certain instruments.

For example, C major on a piano, D major on a stringed instrument.

So feel free to use any key you would like.

Your vocal range may also influence the key that you choose because some kids might be too high for you to sing in or too low.

So just pick one that is comfortable for you.

Let's study the chords available then, in G major, as an example.

I've put a table on screen, let's work our way from the bottom.

So you may notice in the grey box at the bottom, the grey boxes at the bottom, we have some Roman numerals, which is just a number system that the Romans used.

Obviously we have different symbols for one, two, three, et cetera.

What you may notice first is that the Roman numerals for one, four and five, so it's I, IV and V are capitalised, and that the symbols for two, three, six, and seven are in lower case.

That simply means that one, four, and five are major chords where two, three, six, and seven are minor chords.

Moving up, then, we have the roots notes of each chord.

What would the root note be for E minor? Yes, it would be E.

What would the root note be for C major? It would be C.

The root note is simply the first degree of the scale, and the first note in that chord.

We also have the third and the fifth.

These notes are the notes we use to build a simple triad.

So for example, in the chord G major, we have G, B, and D.

B is the third because it's three notes from G and D is the fifth, because it's five notes from G.

Composers choose different progressions that they know will sound good together.

But how do you know what sounds good together? Well, first of all, whether a chord sounds good next to another one is subjective, and you may like a chord progression that somebody else doesn't, but there are some rules that we can follow.

Okay.

So here I am over in BandLab, and I'm in my library.

To go to my library, I have just clicked a folder with two quavers in it.

I need to head over to the mix editor to put my chords in.

So while it loads up, remember that we're clicking on instrument because we want a virtual piano and here we have a virtual piano, and yes, you can use the letters on the keyboard.

I find that quite confusing.

So I'm just going to be using the pencil tool to draw my notes in.

And so I can get rid of that.

I don't need to know what the piano looks like.

And the first thing I need to do is create a region so I can actually put my notes in, so I can either right click, create region, like so, or I can double click in that first rectangle and I get my region.

I can rename that if I want to, to chord sequence one, or if I know the chord that I'm going to use.

And in this case I do, I know that I'm going to have G followed by E minor, followed by B minor and then D major.

And then that can just, remind me what notes are in this bar.

I'm going to have one chord per bar.

You can see that my region at the moment is four bars long.

So let's jump in and start inputting these notes.

So the notes for my G major chord are G, B, and D.

So I'm going to use the C4 octet, so I've scrolled up a little bit.

G, B D.

And the first thing I need to do is just highlight all of those notes by click holding and dragging and stretching the notes.

So it's filling the whole of bar one then for my second chord is E minor.

So I need E G, and B.

Now I've put a C there by accident and that's okay.

I can either delete it or I can hold the note, and drop it down.

Like so.

So now I've got G.

E.

Excellent.

Now I said I'm going to have B minor next, which is a B, D, and F sharp.

So I'll put in my B.

My D.

My F sharp.

And now I've already stretched those notes out in the first spot, it's automatically making them long for me.

So I don't have to do that again.

My final chord is D major, so that's D, F sharp, and.

A.

So let's hear how that sounds all together.

I like it.

Very good.

And you might be asking, how did I even come up with those.

Chords? And, well, let's head back to the slides and I'll show you.

Okay.

So how did I pick those chords? Well, the first thing is I know that I'm in G major, so that made my decision to start with the G major chord very simple.

It's very common for the first chord in the chord sequence to be the key of the, of the song.

So if you're in C major, your first chord is likely to be C major.

If you're in A minor, your first court is likely to be A minor.

It doesn't always happen like that.

And it's okay not to start on that note, but it makes sense to start on the, the chord that your song is in, or the key that your song is in.

So that's one out of four done.

And what I decided to do is go, decided to go to a chord that shared notes that were in my first chord.

So I got G B and D.

So I was looking for chords that also had a G, a B or a D in it.

So I could play, I could go to B minor.

I could go to.

D major and I could have gone to.

E minor as well, because they have at least a G a, B or a D in it.

And then it's just a matter of experimentation.

So I had my G major chord.

Let's see if I can turn that up a little bit.

My G major chord.

And let's.

See what it sounds like to go straight to B minor.

So I've got.

Sounds pretty good.

I liked it.

And then I thought, okay, well, what does it sound like to go to D major? Again, it sounds okay.

And then, what does it sound like to go from G major to E minor? That's just the one I preferred.

And then I thought, well, then where could I go after E minor? I did the same thing.

I want to go to a chord that has some of the same notes as the E minor chord.

So E G or B.

And I was looking along my list and I've already done, I've already gone to.

To G.

I could go to A, because that shares the E, there.

But I decided to go to B minor.

And literally all I was doing was going through and thinking, well, does that sound good? Not really.

Does that sound good? Eh, it's all right.

Okay I liked that.

And finally, after that experimentation, I got to the chord progression that I wanted to use for this example, but.

It's, there are no real rules.

You can do whatever you want, as long as you like the sound of it, and it's appropriate for your, for your song.

So if I know that I'm writing a really happy joyful song, I want to stick to these major chords.

So the.

The chord one, chord four.

And chord five.

And if I'm writing a song that is a more solemn in mood, then I'm going to stick to the, to the minor chords, perhaps.

And I can, I kind of mix them, of course, but yeah, it just, it depends as much on your topic as well.

So have a go at using this experimentation method and thinking, well, what notes are shared? And then you will come up with chord sequences very, very quickly.

Let's head over to BandLab to do a minor chord sequence now.

Okay.

So now I'm going to make a minor chord sequence and I'll just make it in G minor, 'cause it's nice and easy.

And we just need to make sure that I move my region there, so it starts at exactly bar five and in a similar fashion to the other chord sequence, I'm going to start with G minor.

So the chords, the notes that are in G minor are G, E flat.

And D.

And then I'm going to go to D minor.

Which has the notes D, F, and A.

There we go.

And then.

Go to.

E flat major this time.

So we have E flat G.

And that's a B, and again, if you get it wrong, it's cool.

You can either delete it or click hold and drag the note until it's the right, in the right place.

And then my last chord, I'm going to go to B flat major.

And again, I've put the wrong note in there, so I can just drag it down, and D, and F.

So let's hear what that chord sequence sounds like.

Okay.

So there we go.

So I've got two chord sequences now, and I'll play them from the beginning for you.

That's.

How I would go about it.

Make sure that the chords are sharing notes.

So it doesn't sound like it's going into like, really random chords, although it is fine to do that.

It's just going to.

It's just going to, it sounds better to me if they share notes.

So that's the major chord sequence and the minor chord sequence, and I'll label that one as G minor, D minor, E flat major, and B flat major, there we go.

And this is how it sounds.

There we go.

Okay.

So there are my two chord sequences now over to you.

Make sure that you label them so you, you can easily see what chords are in the region.

Good luck.

Pause the video if you need to, rewind the video if you need to, and click resume, when you're ready to continue.

Let's look at these quick cadences in a little bit more detail.

So the perfect cadence sounds finished like a full stop.

We would hear this at the end of the verse.

We could hear at the end of a chorus, we would definitely hear at the end of a song, and most songs do finish in a perfect cadence, because most songs sound finished.

So the chords we would use would be called five, going to chord one.

So in G major, what would those two chords be? Have a look at the table here to my left.

Right.

Okay.

So if we're going from chord five to chord one, we're going from D major to G major.

So.

V, and chord five.

Chord one.

Chord five.

Chord one.

And it sounds finished.

Okay, so let's have a look at the imperfect cadence.

So the imperfect cadence sounds unfinished like a comma in a sentence.

Imperfect cadences can be found halfway through a verse or chorus.

They may be found at the end of a section, but not the end of the song because the perfect cadence is likely to be at the end of a song.

So what chords do we use here? Well we go from anything, any chord, could be two, could be three, could be seven.

To five.

Usually it's chord one to five.

So that would sound like this Chord one.

To five.

And the interrupted cadence, the interrupted or deceptive cadence sounds unfinished.

And in a major song, they will often go to a minor chord or key.

This can be found leading into a new bridge or new section in a different key, but let's have a look at how an interrupted cadence would work in the context of a song.

Maybe where you, as a listener in a song, we're used to hearing a chord progression that sounds like this.

And that might be the chords to the verse or the chorus song, but maybe I want to go to a bridge or a new section in a different key.

And I would play.

The same chords at the beginning.

And suddenly I'm in the minor key.

So they expected me to do the five to one, which would be the, what, cadence? Five to one? The end, perfect.

But instead I've gone from five to six and the listener thinks, oh, that was.

That's sad.

And they feel interrupted, right? And then finally I get back because they've got the perfect cadence, chord five, to chord one.

There we go.

So those are the most common cadences used in popular music.

So let's test some of that knowledge.

Okay.

So I'm going to play a couple of examples and I would like you to tell me, whether you think it's a perfect cadence an imperfect cadence or an interrupted cadence.

When you write your answer, remember to say which chords have been used.

So for example, I think that was a perfect cadence because it went from chord five to chord one.

So let's get started with the first example.

I'm just looking down at my keyboard.

So, okay.

Here we go.

We have that again.

Remember you're thinking, does it sound finished or unfinished? If it sounds finished, it's perfect.

If it doesn't sound finished, does it go to a minor key or does it just sound like a pause? That's the first one.

The second one.

And again.

Perfect, imperfect, or interrupted? Next one, number three.

Remember, does it sound finished, or unfinished? If it sounds unfinished, is it going to a minor key, or does it just sound like a brief pause and we're expecting more music? And finally.

Okay.

So if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure that I do.

We started off with a perfect cadence chord five to chord one.

Then we had an interrupted cadence from chord five to chord six.

Then we had an imperfect cadence chord one to chord five, and finishing up with a longer extract of there, but we did end on a perfect cadence, chord five to chord one.

So well done if you got those four correct.

Let's move on now to making our chord progressions from earlier sound a little bit more interesting.

Composing with cadences.

Write three chord progressions in G major, with four chords each.

One should have a perfect cadence, two should have an imperfect cadence and three should have an interrupted cadence.

For a stretch play your chord sequences in BandLab or on an instrument.

Pause the video to complete your task and click resume when you're finished.

Adding interest to chord sequences.

Now in the chord sequence we just did on BandLab, We just held the notes for four beats.

Which is.

Okay in certain situations, but it can get a little bit boring.

So how do we make these chord sequences more interesting? Well, we can turn the chords into broken chords.

We can do multiple different versions of broken chords.

So I'm going to do two examples for you in this video, we can talk about chord inversions and also melodic passing notes to add interest to our chord sequences.

So let's talk about the broken chords first, and I've thrown some examples up on the screen now.

So in the first bar, you can see that instead of just playing a block chord, in this case, it's C major, I can play the notes separately.

And you can do that in different patterns and different rhythms. The example on screen sounds like this.

Which is quite a common example of a broken chord, usin', if I.

If I put that into the chord sequence I just made.

Already, it sounds a lot more interesting.

The other broken chord method sounds like this.

Should sound familiar and it should look familiar as well because that's one of the accompaniments styles from Imagine.

If you remember, it sounds like this.

And what I'm doing is instead of playing the full chord, I'm just playing two notes and then I'm playing the C separately.

So if I was to add that into my chord sequence, it would sound like this.

And what if I were to mix it up and do both of those broken chord patterns? It would sound something like this.

So you can try and experiment with different broken chord patterns.

Like I said, there are many different ways that we can do this.

These are just two examples.

And you can make your chord sequences more interesting.

A chord version occurs when any notes other than the root of that chord is played at the bottom.

So on screen, we can see that we have a standard C major triad.

We have the note C, E, and G.

The next chord, we still have C, E, and G, but you notice that the C is on the top now.

So our lowest note in that chord is an E and therefore that is an inversion chord and we call it the first inversion.

So this next chord would be called the second inversion, and we've done it again.

We've put the E from the bottom to the top.

We still have C E and G, but they're just, again, in a different order.

So we have our root notes starting at the bottom, then it's at the top, and then it's in the middle.

They're all C chords.

But they're just inverted.

So why is this useful? Well, on if you're playing on the piano, inversions can be used to make the chord changes sound a lot smoother.

So instead of going from G minor, To D minor.

And having that jump, I can play D minor first inversion, and I don't have to move my hand at all because the notes are closer.

The other way that it can be helpful is in making a bass line sound a lot smoother.

So instead of going from G, to D, and having that leap, again, I could go to first inversion.

And if I were to do that, I would play an F in the base instead of a D.

So.

So instead of having.

And the leap down to D.

A leap down to B flat, I just have a nice scale.

So inversions can help the music to flow and to be connected in a, in a much smoother way than if you were not to use inversion.

We also have melodic passing notes.

A passing note is simply a non-harmonic note that are between two chords.

So the example on screen sounds like this.

So you can see that my left hand was playing these, this sort of melodic line.

And that's adding a lot more interest to my otherwise very basic.

Chord pattern.

Oh, if I play some inversions, broken chords, and melodic passing notes all together in my chord sequence, it goes from this.

To something like this.

Which is, in my opinion, a lot more interesting, and sounds a lot more like an actual popular song.

So.

Choose one of the chord progressions that you have already made today in BandLab and change them to be either broken chords or inversion chords.

Play your new progression on an instrument like I've been doing, or you can use an online keyboard or BandLab.

I will show you how to convert your chord sequences on BandLab right now.

Okay.

So I'm back in BandLab, and I'm about to make this chord sequence way more interesting.

So I've actually just started doing some arpeggios in the G minor chord sequence.

So far, it sounds like this.

So I'm just going to complete that for all of the chords.

So our next chord is.

G.

We went G, then.

We went to D minor, instead of going down to D minor, I'm going to do an inversion.

So obviously I know that my D minor chord has the notes D F and A.

So I'm just going to go to the closest one.

So I'm already at G so I might as well just go to the F.

Here.

And then I can do an A, which should be.

There.

And then a D.

And an F.

I'm going to repeat that again.

Whoops.

So let's say how that sounds now.

Excellent.

And our next chord was.

E flat.

And again, I'm just going to, I'm going to do an inversion here, so I could go up back to the G.

I actually do want to go down to the E flat, I think that's going to sound better.

I'll just do this in root position.

So we have E flat and then we'll go to.

A G, yep, B flat.

And E flat again.

Not quite.

Is that right? There we go.

And we'll repeat that.

So let's hear how that sounds.

Wonderful.

And finally, we will do.

We will do another version.

So we'll just.

I'll try and do this nice and quick.

So we've got D.

F.

In the way there.

F.

There we go.

So our four chord sequence sounds like this.

Wonderful.

That sounds lovely.

Now how about we add a new track and this could be, could stay piano, it could be a bass as well.

Okay.

So I have just added some melodic passing notes into a different track.

So I've created a different track for the baseline and added, I've got my chord tones, and you can see at the end of each bar, I've added some non-harmony passing notes.

Let's have a look at what that sounds like.

So we've gone from.

Let's hear the simple, boring, basic chord sequence into the more interesting one.

What an improvement, right? And maybe we have the basic one for an introduction section.

And then when we get into the verse or the chorus, we can have the more interesting version.

So now over to you.

Take some time to turn your basic chord sequences into some more interesting chord sequences by adding in broken chords, inversions, and if you would like to stretch yourself and challenge yourself, some melodic passing notes, as well.

As always feel free to rewind this video, pause and take as much time as you need before clicking resume when you are ready to continue.

So good luck, and I'll see you next time.

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