 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to cover five approaches which I regularly use in my music to create what you could call as thematic chord progressions or movie like chord progressions or epic chord progressions or basically any scenario where the environment you're trying to write music for is on the more surreal side. You know you're writing music about aliens or zombies or Batman and stuff like that. Also when you're writing lyrics which are not very standard, you could use these chord progressions or you can use this approach or these approaches to come up with any chord progression which doesn't sound too cliched or too popular or run of the mill if you will. Right guys? Stick around till the very end. There are five approaches and it'll be great if you can bring out your keyboards, get a book along and follow through and all of the notes to supplement this lesson will be on our Patreon channel and you'll get the notes for pretty much this lesson as well as all lessons which have been done in the past and anything we're going to do in the future. The notes are there. You'll also get staff notation when needed, MIDI files, backing tracks and so on. Right? Let's get started with our lesson. So the first approach I have for you to build chord progressions which sound surreal or mysterious or spooky or you know anything which is out of the ordinary would be to just go out of the scale. So you will need to have some kind of a rule or some kind of a structure to allow you to create non-diatonic stuff that means stuff or music or chords which are out of the scale. And whenever we try to make anything in music there has to be some kind of symmetry, some kind of order, some forms of rules and regulations but there are so many rules that that's what makes our art form that creative. So this is one of the many rules which may not be there in too many textbooks. So it uses what we pretty much learn every other day, the topic intervals and you take intervals which are very common for the year, intervals of thirds are very, very common. So what I tend to do is if I take let's say an E minor chord and start with E minor, I'm not at all telling myself, oh, which scale is this part part of? Is it part of like E something? You know, I just know, okay, it's E minor chord, okay, there we have it. And now journey towards the next chord via a interval and a third interval is always going to sound symmetric, it's always going to make the music lead to the next event. So E minor, if you can study your thirds from E, you have two kinds of thirds we learn, you have the minor third, E to G and you have the major third, E to G sharp. So what's going to happen is if you play an E minor and follow it with another minor chord which is a minor third apart, you can play a G minor after that. You get a very mysterious sound. You'll also notice that E minor and G minor are not really part of any scale, right? So E minor can go to G minor and then can go to B flat minor, which is again a minor third from E. So you have E to the G to the B flat and you may be guessing it from B flat, let me go another minor third, B flat to the C sharp minor, so let me just play those four chords together. There you go, you could sing one of the notes of those chords or maybe played on a Stereo and Synth lead to make it very, very horror like. So you go E minor, minor third to G minor, minor third to B flat minor, minor third up to C sharp minor and most of the symmetric things in music sound beautiful and also very different. So what I mean by symmetric is if you take let's say the circle of fifths which is a great tool to study the geometry of our chords. If you build a diamond from anywhere, if you build a diamond or what is a diamond also called if you look at it another way a square I guess, right? So if you look at a diamond and start building it from E, you will find that the diamond of the circle of fifths creates this sound, this diminished seventh vibe which I am trying to give out. Why is it a diminished seventh vibe? Because E to the G, G to the B flat, B flat to the C sharp all form a diminished seventh chord and diminished seventh chords are symmetric. You could call this E diminished seventh, G diminished seventh, B flat diminished seventh or C sharp diminished seventh and they all pretty much sound the same. We've done a very detailed lesson on diminished seventh chords and also half diminished seventh chords. We'll put the link in the description and we've also done a playlist which I've called as my favorite chords of all time. So you can check out that as well which gives you a lot of these interesting chords which you may not find in conventional music. Okay, so that was it. That was a theory behind this particular technique. So you take minor chords galore but you take the minor chords which are displaced a minor third apart. Now you may be arguing what about the major third, right? So the major third from E would also work as a great transition chord. So what's a major third from E? G sharp. You get a very lonely sound if you ask me. You find this a lot in Edward Scissorhands, a great Johnny Depp movie. You should check it out. So major thirds galore, what happens is you get an augmented chord. You get E, G sharp and C which already is a very, very dreamy mysterious chord. So now if you build minor chords out of this, that's your composition right there and have fun making a melody on that. That'll be even more cooler. You can have some violin with a lot of vibrato. That'll sound really cool. Okay, so you may be thinking I moved up a minor third and a major third and I've ended up getting a quite unique set of chords in the progression. What about major chords over these same intervals? That will work awesome too. So you can take the same diminished 7th family if I can call it that and look at all the elements in the diminished 7th family, E, G, B flat, D flat and now build major chords from within that family. Each root will form a major chord. That's E major, G major, going to B flat major, going to C sharp major. It's like an explorer's chord progression if you ask me. G, B flat. It's like you've gone inside the pyramids for the first time or something which is on my bucket list as well. Let's all do that. Okay, so basically intervals of thirds are great because they make the music non-diatonic. At the same time, they make the music symmetric and another word for symmetric could be predictable. So we make music ironically for people who don't really know music for the most part. So they need familiarity. They need patterns and this tool will really help because you're going in defined periodic intervals which are equal, namely thirds, minor third and major third. And the notes will be there where you can look at the circle of fifths to really zone in on the shapes behind the chords. So I encourage you to invest some time and learn the circle of fifths really well. So this is one technique which I use a lot in my music. The song you heard in the intro video is a song I composed with my band called Plight. You can check it out and we'll put the link in the description. Let me know what you think about the song. It's a bit spooky. We've done a little bit of back masking and all of these scary stuff in our production. But yeah, it's a fun song. It may not be the right word but still check it out in the description. Okay, let's move on. And the next surreal chord progression if you will or mysterious chord progression technique will be using the mysterious minor sixth interval. So it's an interval like any other. But if you take a minor chord, I'm just going to take C minor for simplicity. So this is our good old friend C minor. So the minor sixth interval can be added to this particular chord. What's a minor sixth? It's a sixth in this case C D E F G A minus one. So that's your minor sixth. Even if I play it with nothing, it sounds very mysterious, doesn't it? Very detective like very James Bond like and so on. Now, if you stack this up with a minor chord. Start sounding very, very spooky and very stranger things like or very X files like. You can just do that. You can take a minor chord and just stack it up with its minor sixth interval. That's a flat in this case. And if you apply the earlier technique skipping intervals. Go down a third, go up a third C minor yearning E flat. Maybe also you can go random like C to F. And this sounds really cool on a minor chord. You get that as I said stranger things or X file sound, which I think is even there in the theme music of those two respective TV shows. You could also start with a major chord and and do the same thing. You get the minor sixth. Of course, in this case, theoretically, you may feel it as an augmented fifth. So an augmented fifth is a sharp five while a minor sixth is a flat six. Right. Minor generally means you're going flat from the major and augmented generally means you're going up, you're raising it, you're going sharpening by one. So a major or C major with its sixth, in this case, flat six. Again, very mysterious chord, very uncertain sound. And you can combine this with other chords of the same flavor. Right. So that's what I call is the mysterious minor sixth interval chord. You take a major or a minor chord and you stack it up with this minor sixth interval. Right. So moving forward, the third technique to create very unique sounding, interesting chord progressions, very filmy movie theme like progressions would be a concept called chord trees. Now, if you take a note C, all you have to do is ask yourself how many triads have the notes C in them? So it's quite easy if you visualize you have C major, C minor, the namesake majors and minors. Then what else do we have? Which note or which chord has C as its fifth? That would be F major, F minor. So all these chords are tied to the tree of C as I call it. So the branches of the note C are C major, C minor. They're all linked in some way. F major, F minor. So they may not be linked via a scale as what we learn in conventional theory but they are linked by this concept what I call as chord trees. C major, C minor, F major, F minor. Now the others are rather tricky. You have to ask yourself, C is the minor third of and C is the major third of. So to answer that question, C is the major third of A flat major and C is the minor third of A minor. A, B, C, A minor. So now if you fool around with these chords, now just look at what is conventional. Is it conventional to play C major going to A minor? I think it is. And then A minor to F major. Very conventional. So how do you break the convention? You do a C major to a chord which you would not play or find in the major scale chord family. So that C major gliding perfectly well or sliding perfectly well to its friend F minor. Which we didn't really learn in the major scale or even in the minor scale. Of course we would learn this with the mode of the melodic minor. A topic I will definitely cover soon. You could also do C merged up with A flat major. And mind you these are all branches of the tree of C. So you don't have to always play C major with F minor and then C major with A flat major. You can merge A flat major with A minor. Because what do both those chords have in common? Our friend C. Isn't it? And then you have C. You can do C major to F minor. You can do C major A minor is very vanilla sounding. But C major to A flat major. A flat major to A minor. A minor to F minor. F minor to C major. C major to maybe major. Now here I've left the tree of C and I've hopped on to the tree of E. And now E, the tree of E will have its branches. E major and C major. So chord trees is a very visual chapter which we cover a lot in our schools theory lessons. You could consider signing up for a structured course where we teach all this stuff. So that is irregular chord progressions using a very interesting chapter called as chord trees. Let's move on. Right. So we looked at the minor sixth interval over a major and minor chord. You could also stack up what we call as a tritone interval which I'm sure some of you may know. The tritone is nothing but A 5 minus 1 in the key of C. Perfect fifth is G. You go down by one chromatic step and you get F sharp. Or you go C to F. You go up by one chromatic step. You still get that F sharp. So tritone is either referred to as an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. A sharp four or a flat five. So what we can do with a tritone is again like I told you earlier with a sixth flat six you stacked it along with a major and minor the same story with a tritone. So you play a major chord and the moment you do that you get a very out of planet earth sound. Very dreamy sound. Almost Raga like in nature. You can almost imagine a scale through this chord. And the same would be done with a minor chord. Great for riffs. That's how you use the tritone. A lot of ways to use the tritone as we've covered regularly on our YouTube channel with so many theory and piano videos. But yeah, I just thought that there's an interesting way to just take one chord and make it quite interesting and use it in a theme, use it in a progression. I've done this a lot with some of my riffs so you should check them out on our website. We have a website which is filtered out well. Okay. And last but not least I've left something which seems very obvious but doesn't sound very obvious if you dive into it as a concept. It's what I call as spread chords or spread triads without their roots as the base. So let's first look at what a spread chord is. We have our chords C major which can be played in inversions. You have root position, first inversion and the second inversion G C E. But you can take the same chord played at the deep end in the bass clef and you find that the sound can turn over its head. It doesn't sound as stable as you played here. You can voice it differently. Now if you play it with the same voicing in the left hand down below what they don't tell us in the textbooks is sounds absolutely nonsense. It's almost unusable. It just sounds horrible. So we anyway need to develop a spread technique where one way to voice the chord would be the root, the fifth and the third. And as you can see I'm on my second last C of the piano and it still holds its ground. It sounds very very crystal clear. And isn't this how color also works? The darker the color the tougher it is to have a contrast between them or a distinction between them. So I would argue it's the same with musical pitch. The lower it is it's tough for a year to make them out. It's easier when it's higher. Same thing with colors. This is what you call as a spread chord and spread chords have three. We've done a lot of YouTube videos on that and whenever you watch a YouTube video on our channel, especially a video released in 2022 and beyond. There are bound to be a lot of other videos which complement these topics well or support these topics well with further study and a lot more in depth study. So another thing I would encourage you to do is go to Nathanielschool.com head over to our free tutorial section which are pretty much all of our YouTube lessons. But you do not have to rely on the challenges of the amazing YouTube algorithm to find our video content. You can go to our website filter it and decide a topic if there are some really well done tags which we've spent a lot of time doing. So that'll be very helpful. So this is a topic called spread chords. Right. So now taking the spread chord. This is the standard way to play C major C, G, E. But you can now play it as E, G, C as well. So that's E, C, G. It's creates a very different vibe for our C major chord, right? The E, C, G seems to take us to F major that way. And then you can also play C major like this G, E, C which seems to want to resolve to G major. Then if you take C major with E in the bass, then you can do C minor. That's D minor. So none of these chords sound the way we hear them normally. So especially when you invert them, first of all playing chords spread is unique enough. But then if you spread chords with inversions, the inversions which are not really taught conventionally in the books as piano inversions. You do have these. In fact, we should probably have a chapter in future books where these are the left hand inversions and those are the right hand inversions. I wish things were covered or explained that way. But anyway, so you have C major, E flat major. So what you could do is play around and also observe the also be adventurous about the uncertainties of what could go on. So if you take C major, just look at your fingers and just tell yourself, okay, let me just move my pinky to C sharp. Let's move this thing, the thumb to A creates a very different vibe. Things like that. You could just fool around with one note here and there and it becomes a completely different vibe or a different tried altogether. Right, guys. So that's what I plan to cover in this lesson. And I guess I have covered the stuff which I plan to cover in this lesson. So in the first segment, we looked at intervals of thirds and you took triads major and minor and shifted them across that symmetrically. Then we looked at the mysterious minor sixth interval which we could add to any triad major or minor. Then we looked at irregular chord triads where you group chords together based on a note which they have in common. Example C would have six major and minor chords, three major and three minor. Right. Then we looked at adding a tritone interval over a major and minor chord for some very diabolic and interesting music, if you ask me. And then we looked at revisiting the triad itself and just playing it down below in the bass register of our instrument. It could even be done on a cello. You should listen to the Bach cello suite. That's where this idea of spread triads would have definitely come to me and a lot of you people watching this video. Listen to a lot of Bach. He uses a lot of the cello and the way the cello is used harmonically is really, really interesting. Right, guys. Hope you found the lesson useful. Again, do consider getting a copy of the notes on our Patreon channel that would help support our channel as well. And if you'd like something regular, structured, like a full-time course or a semester at our school, you could consider going to Nathanielschool.com. You will find the relevant links in the description. And thanks a ton for watching. But then if you have not subscribed to the channel, I'm not going to say thanks to you. So do it right now. Hit that button and we do a lot of content. It'll be great if you can even hit that bell icon for regular notifications whenever we release a YouTube lesson. Thanks again, guys. Thanks a ton. Stay safe. This is Jason.