Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to your music lessons today.

My name is Miss Al-Hanoush and in today's lesson, we're going to be looking at how EDM composers use chord sequences within their music.

So let's begin with a quick up and our listening quiz.

For your listening warmup, I would like you to listen to the following track, called "Freed from Desire," by GALA.

Focus on the chords and answer the questions below.

How many chords are used? Do they repeat? How are the chords played? And which sounds are used? Here you go.

♪ Oh, people just want more and more ♪ ♪ Freedom and love ♪ ♪ What he's looking for ♪ ♪ Want more and more ♪ ♪ People just want more and more ♪ ♪ Freedom and love ♪ ♪ What he's looking for ♪ ♪ Freed from desire ♪ ♪ Mind and senses purified ♪ ♪ Freed from desire ♪ ♪ Mind and senses purified ♪ ♪ Freed from desire ♪ ♪ Mind and senses purified ♪ ♪ Freed from desire ♪ ♪ Na na na na na na na ♪ How many cords did you hear being used? There were four.

So well done if you got that right.

Did they repeat? Yes, they did.

How were the chords played? To start with, they were sustained and then they added a rhythm to them.

And which sound or sounds were used? Well, there was vocals, but there was also synthesised sounds and drum machines.

Now that your ears have warmed up, in this lesson, you will need a piece of paper, a pencil, and a voice or instrument or an app.

I strongly suggest having a keyboard, if you have one or a keyboard app, if you don't.

And during this lesson, we will be using some music software.

You can create music using audio mixing software, and the demonstration that I will do, we'll be using a free programme called BandLab.

BandLab is for use for over 13s only.

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

So please seek that and seek their help to get it set up for you before you begin today's lesson.

You will also need a quiet space to work in and make sure that you have turned off any app notifications that might come through on any electronic devices and disturb your learning.

So if you need to pause the video now to make sure that you've got all of that equipment and got everything ready so that you can learn, feel free to do that, and then resume the video once you're ready to start.

Here's a lesson agenda for today.

You're going to begin by defining what a chord is and learn how to play one.

You're then going to explore a variety of chord progressions, and then build your own chord progression, and finally compose a chord progression using a digital audio workstation.

So let's begin today's lesson by defining what a chord is and learning how to play one.

So what is a chord? Well, a chord is two or more pitches that are played at the same time.

They can be played in a variety of ways.

And they're used as part of the harmony line, which usually supports the melody.

Can you sing the chord? No, why not? Try.

Well, we can only sing one pitch at a time and the cord has more than one pitch.

Some singers are able to sing chords.

For example, Bobby McFerrin, but it's very, very rare.

So which instruments are able to play them? Well, any instrument that can play more than one pitch at the same time.

So for example, a piano, a keyboard, guitar, a violin, a ukulele, a harmonium, et cetera.

So chords can be played in a variety of ways.

For example, triads, extended chords.

You could add in sevenths, ninths, sus chords.

And a triad is a type of chord, which is used a lot in Western music.

Can you name the triad on the piano screen? It's the C major.

Well done if you got that.

For any major triad, you need to follow the pattern, one, three and five.

So looking at my scale on the top, to find D, I would play D, F sharp is my third and my fifth is A.

And if I play this together, I get my D major triad.

And you can use that same rule for any other major triad.

So C, E, G is my C major triad, for example.

So how do we find a minor triad? Well, this uses the same concept, so I still need to find my first, my third, my fifth.

So go back to D major, but to make it minor, all I have to do is flatten my third note.

And I get a minor triad.

So the same would happen in any of the chords.

So I'll use my other C as an example.

So here's my C major and to make it minor, I flatten the third.

Nice and easy.

Again, you can use that same concept with any minor triad.

For your first pause task, can you find the major and minor triads of A, C, D, and F? Practise them on your keyboard or your app.

And see if you can flatten the third to get a minor and play the first, third and fifth to get a major chord or triad.

Pause the video to complete your task, and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you've defined what a chord is and learned how to play one, we're now going to explore a variety of chord progressions.

Now that we know what a chord is, we are going to compose a four bar chord progression.

Chord progressions are the foundation of which many songs and music are based on.

And to do this, you need to choose a key to work on.

So for now, we're going to work in the key of D minor and the chords in this key on the screen now.

So here is our scale of D minor.

And these would be all the chords that are in D minor.

So these are making up our triads.

We've got our root note, our third and our fifth, and the chord name is here.

And the number is also here of where it fits with the degree in the scale.

So chord one is what we call our tonic chord.

And it's the important chord because it gives music a home.

In a minor key, chord one is always going to be minor.

And that's why it's written in lower case as an i, and not a Roman numeral kind of capital I.

Chord five is what we call our dominant.

And it's takes the music away from our home.

Chord two in a minor key is what we call a diminished chord.

And it has a very different sound to it.

So you need to think carefully about why you want to use cord two if, you use it and why.

Let's take another look at the chord progression for "Free from Desire" by GALA.

When we listen to the song, did this play once or did it repeat? So here's the chord progression.

Did that just play once or did it repeat? It definitely repeated.

So EDM composers like to repeat their chord progressions.

So this played over and over throughout the track.

And again.

Notice how the chords are sustained.

So they're being held down for four beats each.

So they're held down for the entire bar.

So it has what we call a harmonic rhythm of one chord per bar.

So which key is it? Did you notice which chord I started on? Have a look on the screen.

It is D minor.

So we're in D minor for this and which degree of the scale does it start on? It's obviously starting on one if we're in D minor.

Okay? So we're starting on our tonic note of D.

So this is what we call our home note.

Our tonic notes.

Do you notice where it goes next? It goes well away from home to our fifth.

So if you have a look at the screen, it says five here.

So it goes to an A minor.

So here's D, C, B, A.

I'm going to go to my nearest, so A is here.

It then goes to chord six, which is a B flat.

And then it ends on chord seven before it arrives back onto D minor to repeat the chord sequence.

So notice how it goes from chord one to chord five.

These are really important chords and actually chord five at the end of the sequence is also an amazing pivot cord to use as well, to return you back home to chord one.

So how else could I play this chord progression? Well, with my left hand, if you want a bit of a challenge, can you play the root note? So if I've got a D minor chord here, I'm going to play just the D, the root note in my left hand.

And then when I've got A chord here, sorry, an A minor chord, I'm going to play an A here.

And then a B flat chord I'm going to play my B flat.

And then a C.

So let's put those together.

So I'm going to hold them as sustained chords.

So, one, two three, four.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

But that isn't all that GALA did.

During this song, they changed the rhythm of those chords.

So they weren't just held down and sustained the whole way.

They actually put in a rhythm as well.

So I think they went like this.

Sorry.

Okay? So notice how my left hand actually, I had a sustained root note there, but my right hand was actually changing the rhythm of the chords to get a little bit more variety in it.

So think about that when you go on to create your chord progressions later.

For your pause task, take five minutes to play through the chord progression for "Faded," making sure that you're holding down each chord sustained for four beats in a bar.

As an extension, can you add a rhythm? And can you add in your left hand? Pause the video to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

Let's take a look at another example.

This example is "Faded," by Alan Walker.

Let's take a listen to it first.

♪ You were the shadow to my light ♪ ♪ Did you feel us ♪ ♪ Another start ♪ ♪ You fade away ♪ ♪ Afraid our aim is out of sight ♪ ♪ Want to see us ♪ ♪ Alive ♪ When we listened to that song, did that chord progression play once or did it repeat? Which key is it in? Well, the chord progression repeated.

And again, we can see that it's in the key of D minor.

It starts on the tonic chord of D minor.

So can you see again, that it moves away from chord one before it returns back to chord one on the repeat? Did you notice how he played those chords as well? To start with, they weren't sustained.

Those chords were actually played arpeggiated.

So he changed the way that he played those chords.

And then as he went through the piece, he actually played them almost on crotchet beats.

So you can play around with the chord progression.

You can also do what he did, where he arpeggiated the chords.

So you could do something like this playing the first, the third and then the fifth, and then go back down.

So you get a nice.

a nice arpeggiated feel to it as well.

Let's look at one more example.

This one's called, "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites," by Skrillex, and he uses again, another chord sequence in D minor.

Take a listen.

So in this EDM track, we definitely heard a chord progression, but we heard a lot of effects being used as well.

So computerised effects, and that's fine.

It's easier music.

That's what's going to happen when we play them into our BandLab later on.

We can play around and change the effect that we want from our chord progression.

So let's just have a look at how this one would be played.

And again, notice that here we've got a harmonic rhythm of one chord per bar.

On those plainly are sustained chords.

So here's my D minor two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

B flat, two, three, four.

C, two, three I'll add in my bass.

two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

B flat, two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

Add a rhythm.

Changing my root note.

So there's lots of different ways that you can start to develop your chords within a sequence by changing the rhythms each time you play them through on the repeat to keep your listener engaged.

So those are three different examples that I've shown you where composers have used a four chord bar.

So those are three examples that I've shown you where composers have used a four bar chord progression, and they've started on their tonic notes and moved away from home, and then come back to their tonic notes on the repeat of their chord progression.

For your next pause task, I'd like you to play through the different chord progressions for the songs that we've looked at.

Which ones do you like best and why? Take 10 minutes to complete this task and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you've explored a variety of chord progressions, you're now going to build your own chord progression.

So now we know what a chord is, we're going to see if we can compose our own four bar chord progression.

Now the sheet on the screen is in the downloadable section.

So if you want to use that, feel free to download it and print it and work on that.

Or if you want to draw your own out using a pencil and a ruler, feel free to do that as well.

It's the same layout that I showed you of the D minor chord progression earlier.

And we have four boxes that are empty, which are going to be our triads that we're going to write in.

We're going to write in our chord names down the bottom and our chord numbers in Roman numerals down the bottom.

We're going to write in what our root note is, our third and our fifth so we know what we have to play on the keyboard.

So I'm going to use the key of D minor because that's what we've been using our lesson.

However, you don't have to do that.

You can use whichever key you want to work in.

That's absolutely fine.

So the first thing I'm going to do is, because I'm in the of D minor, I'm going to use my tonic note of D minor here.

So my tonic chord and note is going to go here.

So D minor.

And I know in my root note is going to be a D I know it's an F and I know it's an A to play D minor.

It's chord number one, because it's my tonic chord.

So I'm going to write that in there as well, okay? That is a Roman numeral.

It looks like a one, but it's a little i.

So I've chosen D minor.

Then the rest of it is up to me what I want to do here.

So I'm going to go for C next.

So I know that chord C is seven.

So I now write in chord seven as well there.

And a C, it's a C major chord in D minor.

So it should be C, E, and G.

Okay? So firstly, I can write those in and then I can try and play them on the keyboard.

So I know my music starts at home.

I then know it's going to go to chord seven.

So let me just hear what that sounds like on the keyboard.

I'm going to play over the top here.

So two, three, four.

two, three, four.

That sounds quite nice.

Let me think about what might sound nice going next.

I might go up to an F, okay? So I've got an F major.

So I'm going to write in F and in an F chord, I've got F, A, and C and I need to work out my Roman numerals.

So D, E, F it's chord three.

Okay? So I've got chord three there.

And where am I going to go next? So let me play that again.

So D minor two, three, four to C two, three, four to F two, three, four.

Let's see if we can go to B flat, sounds nice.

Okay.

So I'm going to write him B flat as my last one.

And for my B flat, I need a B.

I need a D and I need an F, okay? And let's work out what B flat is.

So if we work out from D you'd have D, can't see my thumb.

D, E, F, G, A, B is chord six.

So I need to write in chord six here.

Okay.

And can we spot the mistake? These actually should be capital Is, because it was a major chord and so should my seven there, because those are major chords as well.

Okay.

So the only minor chord in here is my D minor, which is why it's a little i and not a big I.

So there's my chord progression.

Let's just hear that again.

So I've got D minor two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

F, two, three, four.

B flat, two, three, four.

And I'm happy with that.

I think that's a nice chord progression.

And does it go, does it flow nicely if I play that again and go down, back to my home? So let's try it and see if we can play it as a loop.

Here we go.

Yeah, it sounds nice.

Okay, now, I was lucky I got something that sounded nice straight away, but you might not be so lucky.

You might have to do a bit of trial and error with the cords that you put in.

You might not like it.

And that's absolutely fine.

It's personal taste.

Again, try and avoid that chord two.

It might sound a little bit funny, but every other chord, go for it, have a play around on the keyboard and see what you can come up with and build your own chord progression.

Some pieces might have more than one chord progression, so don't be afraid to print off another sheet and do a second chord progression, if you want a bit of an extension as well.

For your next pause task, can you build your own four bar chord progression? As an extension, can you use a key, other than D minor? You'll have to work out the key signature for your chosen key before you choose your chords.

You could also add in a root note in the base and think about how you would play your chords.

For example, would you use some sustained, like GALA did? Or would you add a rhythm later on or add sus or inversions or extended chords? You could also create a chord progression with a different harmonic rhythm.

And if you have a family member present, can they improvise over the top of your chord progression with the pitches of your chosen key? You could always use D minor as an example, as you have all the pitches written down earlier in the lesson.

Pause the video to complete your task, and then resume once you're finished.

Now that you've brought your own chord progression, you're now going to compose a chord progression using a digital audio workstation.

And we're going to use BandLab.

The first thing that you need to do is open up a BandLab project.

Now, if you've got your one from lesson one, where we made the drum machines, you can go ahead and open that if you saved it.

If not, you can open mix editor and start a brand new project.

So I've got my drum machine one.

So I'm going to open that in the mix editor.

And that should bring me up to the drum beat that we looked at last lesson and created last lesson.

There we go.

We can hear them there.

Okay, so those are my drum beats.

What I need to do to be able to put in a chord sequence though, is I need to add in second track.

So I'm going to click add track.

And here, instead of going to drum machine, I'm going to go to instruments.

And that brings me up a nice piano track there.

Now I'm going to play on a midi keyboard.

So I'll put mine in the corner for you so you can see, so I can play on here and you can hear all my chords.

However, if you don't have a midi keyboard, that's absolutely fine.

If you go down to the bottom left of the screen, you can see instrument.

And if you click on that, it will show you a piano here, and you can click on all the keys and you can play in like that.

You can also play using your keyboard.

So you can see here, the letters that are on your actual computer keyboard.

And if you press those letters, if I press zed, it presses a C for me, Notice how they're in the pattern of the keyboard as well, to help you out.

So you can pay them in that way if you don't have a midi keyboard.

So I'm going to play them using my midi keyboard.

So the first thing that I want to do is I want to bring my cursor all the way back, and I'm going to practise playing my chord sequence.

So I'm going to hold them down as sustained chords.

So I'm going to play them for four beats in each bar.

So I've got D minor first.

I'm going to put my root note in as well.

So I'm going to play D minor.

So D two, three, four.

C, two, three, four.

F, two, three, four.

B flat two, three, four.

Okay, and I'm happy with that.

I can play my chord progression and you can play a chord at a time if you want to.

That's absolutely fine.

You don't have to do all four in one go.

So to help me out, I'm going to make sure my metronome is on.

So I've clicked that and it's gone green.

That will give me a click.

So that's going to give me my click and it should also give me a counting.

So it's giving me a counting of one bar.

You can choose two bars, if you like.

So I've put my count in and I'm ready to record.

So I move my cursor back to the start, and I'm going to click this red button here, or you can press R on your computer keyboard and that will start recording for you.

And I'm going to play in my chord sequence.

The first time I'm going to do it, I'm going to play it with sustained chords.

And then the second time I'm going to change the rhythm.

Okay? So I'll do it once first, and then I'll do the second one.

Here we go.

So I did the first chord sequence there.

There seems to be a bit of a delay on my keyboard, but we can fix that.

So, to check what I've played, I can press play here and it will play it for me.

And we can hear it's slightly delayed, okay? So to work out that delay, I'm going to double click in here and we can see that they've not been played right on the first beat of the bar.

So if I put my magnifying glass down, and then if I highlight them all by clicking on the area.

I can make this bigger as well if I want to see them all, okay? So click on the area and then hold it and drag it.

You should see this grey box coming up and it's highlighting them all for me.

And then if I press either Q on my keyboard or I press quantize here, you'll see them all jump to the first beats of the bar for me, because they're going to a 1/16.

So let's do that and see them jump.

Here we go, three, two, one.

And they've jumped, but they haven't jumped all the way to the beginning.

So let's make that to go to an eighth and see whether that works oh, it's gone the wrong way.

So you can play around and see which way you want them to go.

And I might just have to do it manually.

It's not going to do what I want it to do.

There we go.

Okay.

So they should now all be on the first beat of the bar, but we can also see that they don't last that full four beats.

So to do that, if I click on them and press legato, we can now see that they've all gone to four beats long.

So I'm going to go back to the beginning and have a listen to that again.

And space bar to stop, okay? So I'm happy with that.

So I'm now going to record them in again, but this time with a rhythm.

So here we go.

Here's my counting.

And if you want to mute the drums, you can, if that helps whilst you're doing this.

Here we go.

Now, there was a massive delay on my part there, and I'm not quite sure why it's doing that at the moment.

However, we can quantize again.

And hopefully it will fix it.

So if I press that and I'm going to say quantize, and let's see whether I can quite dragged it, let's see if that works.

Okay, so my quantize didn't quite work on my last two here.

So if I click off and I can do this manually, or I could re-record so manually it's going to be quite quick for me.

I'm just going to highlight these in and drag it.

And I can see that that's not quite on the beginning of the bar either.

And let's see, I think that was meant to be to that and that one was really uptight.

And we can drag them again.

Let's just hear that.

Okay, so this last one, we can still hear it.

It's not quite right.

Let's see if we can quantize it.

There we go.

So that one's back on the beat and you can move that into that.

So it's a little bit fiddly and you need to go through everything and see whether you can make them in time.

Now that's quantized.

It's the wrong side.

Let's move that back by one, that back on the eight.

And this one, I think you need it there.

Let's have a little lesson to what that might sound like now.

See how I'm manually making these.

If you press control and zed as well, you can get rid of any, you can go back.

Okay? So let's have a listen to that one.

Not quite there is it? So if we look at the other ones, we can see that there's only one, one kind of square there.

So I need to mute these.

And that should now go up.

Let's give that a hear.

Okay.

So you can play them in that way and then fix it that way as well.

And I can make that, just go to my nine bite.

It's a bit fiddly, moving it back.

There we go.

Okay.

So that's now on bar nine.

So I've now got my second chord sequence written in.

And if you don't want to play in on the keyboard, if you press command, watch my cursor change to a pencil.

Okay? So you can draw it in if you want to draw them in instead.

I'm just going to delete those because they won't make any sense, but you can draw in your chords, as well, in this area, if you'd like to.

So let's just go and have a listen to both my chord sequences now.

Go back to the beginning.

There.

No.

Go back to the beginning.

It's going back to nine instead of all the way down to the beginning.

Okay, so drag it back.

Excellent.

But, so at the moment, it sounds a bit poppy.

It doesn't quite sound like an EDM track.

And that is because at the moment, I've got it on piano and drum machine, I haven't actually put in any synthesised sounds.

So I want to change this to a synthesise sound.

So how do I do that? Well, if I click down here on instrument, it brings up a piano, grand piano, and then my midi device.

So we can change this here.

And I can say, actually, I don't want a piano.

Maybe I want to go on synth leads or synth pads, or synth keys and have a play around with the different sounds that come up.

So now if I go onto that, it's changed in.

It's now an Atlantis pad.

Let's have a listen to what that sounds like.

Terrible.

Okay.

So we can change that and you can change and decide what you want.

So let's maybe put it on a string pad and see what that sounds like.

Okay.

That was a little bit better.

And if I'm not happy with that, I can go in again and change it.

The other thing that you can do is start to layer these chords as well.

So if I want to duplicate that track, I could press duplicate and that's given me a copy of it here, so I can call that synth strings, if I like.

It's a pretty name.

We'll call that one synth strings, and then on this one, I've got exactly the same thing here, but actually let's change it to something else.

So let's go onto, let's have a go.

I've got no idea what it's going to sound like.

Let's see what this one sounds like if I solo it.

Okay.

That's okay.

So we've got another synth sound there.

So this is a FM pad.

So let's write that in so we don't forget what that is.

So FM pad, okay.

Now if we play those together, they're the same, but I've layered my synth sounds.

Okay? I'm going to take my metronome off, 'cause I know it's in time so we can hear this.

Okay.

And let's unmute these.

Okay.

This isn't soloed.

There we go and we've layered them.

The other thing that I can do is start to layer this a little bit later, actually.

So I can maybe delete that one to start with.

And so we get the layer coming in on bar five.

So let's try that.

Okay.

So we get a slightly delayed sound on that FM pad.

So I might want to go back and change that synthesise of that.

But that's the idea of it.

So you can start to play around with the different synth sounds to make your piece start to sound like an EDM track.

For your next pause task, can you input your chord progression into your digital audio workstation? Remember to find and select the empty chords track with the piano sounds, record in your chord sequence, using sustains, the held chords, quantize the material you recorded to a 16th, if possible, choose a different sound for your sustained chords from the instrument library.

And you can also explore the synthesiser, the pad folder.

As an extension, can you think about how you could vary the chord you're playing? For example, syncopated rhythms? Pause the videos to complete your task.

Take 10 minutes to do this and then resume once you're finished.

Wow.

You have learned a lot today.

Let's just recap the lesson agenda.

You began by defining what a chord was and learned how to play one.

You then explored a variety of chord progressions and built your own core progression, which you then composed using a digital audio workstation.

Well done.

For your final pause task of the lesson, on your piece of paper, can you answer the question, how are chord sequences use in EDM? Take five minutes to answer the question and then resume once you're finished.

How did you get on with your composition task? I'm really excited to hear some of them.

So your last question said, how are the chord sequences used in EDM? Well, they use triads mainly and they build them up using tonic and dominant.

Remember, they want to go home and away from home and then back home again.

They also usually sustain the chords underneath the melody line and then build them up, potentially using different rhythms as well.

And they're also used as the main source of harmony within the piece as well, supporting the melody line.

So hopefully today has given you lots of compositional ideas of how you can input chords and build your own chord sequences for your own compositions.

So the last thing for me today is do not forget to do the end of lesson quiz, to see how much you have learned.

And if you would like to share your work with Oak National and show us your beautiful chord sequences and what you've managed to achieve, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

We would love to see what you've achieved in the lesson.

So that's all for me today.

Hopefully, I'll see you in the next lesson.

Goodbye for now.