 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, we are going to learn how to build minor progressions, minor chord progressions if you will. They come from minor scales pretty much or you can build them in some instances even without the scale, just learning a few nice sounding chords. And whenever we say minor chord progressions or minor progressions in general, we don't necessarily mean only minor chords. That will tend to sound like only sad. Here we are trying to get more different colors or different emotions or different themes using chords but generally when we say the minor theme, we mean things like melancholic, pensive, yearning for something you can't get or bravery or perhaps as you will see at the later part of the lesson, you can even get a very epic sounding vibe, a very victorious kind of vibe. So minor may not be very cheerful or very happy to say the least or very playful but there can be a lot of other modes and obviously a lot of other themes which you can build around these chord progressions. I've tried to make the lesson as simple as possible without involving too much theory but there is a little bit of theory needed so I would really suggest that you get your pens, your papers out and your keyboards out if possible. You can play a lot of this stuff along with me and let's get cracking now. So to start building any chord progression, we tend to just use three to four chords. I'm using pretty much the bare minimum which is three chords and what are the three chords? We have an interesting subject in music called as functional harmony where each of the chords are named or formed based on their energy levels if you will. So generally with functional harmony, you'll have the first chord which is your predominant chord. Well, you could have any first chord but if ever you do have this so-called predominant chord or some people call it the subdominant chord, you know, its purpose is to resolve to another chord called as the dominant chord and the dominant chord is also rather unstable. The dominant chord will then in turn resolve to the tonic chord and as you can hear these are just normal triads G minor A dominant or A major and D minor but for some reason the D minor feels like home. It feels the most stable right and these are things which I guess you can't explain. This is the physics of music. You can't really change what is there on planet earth. We are just there to enjoy it I guess as music makers and even music listeners. So the whole idea behind this whole lesson is to show you that you just have these energy states right. You have the predominant predominant base which gets more unstable to the dominant and that results to the tonic. In this case minor. Play that again so you can just keep that vibe going and of course a melody can be built through the chord progression. You can try out some other predominance. Color up the dominant, color up the tonic right but the functions remain the same. Let's get used to the vibe further. Pre-dominant. You can even make it more you know more heavy or more brave. You know maybe desolate and sad. You have all these options available. So the chords which I'm using for this entire lesson are pretty much three chords if you think about it. There's G minor. There's A major and there's D minor but it's important to understand the roles of each of these chords. The G minor is what we call as the predominant. It serves the role as the predominant chord right and I'm on the key of D minor. I should have said that earlier but I'm in the key of D minor. Now whenever you're dealing with harmonizing a minor scale, you have to understand that the seventh note can either be a flat seven in this case C or could even be a C sharp right. It's the leading note or it could be C. So these are the two minor scale options you have. One with the C is called as the natural minor. That's called as the harmonic minor right. So we're going to bring in both flavors. So whenever you're composing chord progressions on a minor scale, you pretty much have these variants right. You even have the Dorian which we can get into in another lesson. So you have the chords now. You have the G minor which is the first chord. Now if you think about it, G minor is the fourth minor with respect to whether it's D minor or D harmonic minor, you'll have G as the fourth. So that's the fourth minor okay. Going to the five major which I'm playing as A major here. So I'm borrowing notes from the harmonic minor scale which has that C sharp which has a great pull towards the D minor. Actually A major can even resolve to D major but this is not a major lesson. So you have A major resolving to D minor right. If you had A minor, it could also resolve to D minor but it's more common to play that dominant A major sound. That resolves strongly if you will to D minor. So G minor A D. So you have G minor O A major D minor right. Let's just get acquainted with these three chords para A D. And we are trying to play D minor a bit longer in the piece G minor A major D minor para para because we stay at home a bit more right. G minor so it's common to do this with the home chord a bit longer. Para A para para para Now I've composed a melody which can be used I guess throughout this lesson for the most part right you could just use this as a kind of template melody you don't have it necessarily played on the piano you can pretty much just sing it because this lesson is about coming up with the chord progression in the first place right. I'd leave the melody even to you you can improvise it but for the purpose of this lesson we'll go with something like this. Dara Dara Dara Rising it along. Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Okay so that's the melody these are the chords. So once you've got cracking with the melody and the chords well the chord progression kind of sounds nice it could build us a song on its own isn't it because it has that functional pull or that magnetic attraction to each other and it all also has that looping concept where you can repeat it for the whole song and it'll sound great if you ask me. So in this lesson as part of a series of videos on exploring minor chord progressions we're going to use this as the template and kind of stop with this we have the predominant minor, the dominant major ending on the tonic minor and try to sing that melody along. Dara Dara Dara You can even play it if you want on the piano. Play the chords in the left and the tune in the right. Right so that's pretty much it for this part of this lesson series. Now we're going to do a lot more parts which are going to come your way to explore minor chord progressions. So I'd suggest to practice this one and head over to the next video where what we're going to do is we're going to look at a vast amount of options in order to colour up these minor progressions and remember by minor it doesn't mean only using minor chords. There are going to be all sorts of chords. We're going to look at diminished chords, augmented chords, some jazz tensions, some passing chords or slash chords, secondary dominance and tritone subs. The list is going on and even I'm forgetting some of the options. So come over to the next part and we are going to explore minor chord progressions together. If you have any doubts regarding this lesson, do leave us a comment and also support the video and our channel by giving it a thumbs up, perhaps leaving a comment, sharing the video with your musician friends and if you haven't already hit subscribe and don't forget to turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. I will see you in the next part.