 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are basically going to explore the concept of drone chords or what we call as bass pedal tones, a very, very important music theory, songwriting and compositional tool which you all need to have along with you as you are composing songs. Now where this tends to help is primarily because you are breaking the monotony or you are actually breaking the monotony from chord progression. So instead of doing something like believe it or not, people could actually get bored of chords and the Beatles did that a lot in their songs. They would kind of explode the song with an actual chord progression usually at the chorus, not just the Beatles, a lot of people who do this. So you start with the verse pedaling or using a pedal bass. So a pedal bass just means nothing but just stick with a G. If you're on the key of G, you're going to play all your music with G in the bass. You don't change that. So even if you change your chord, let's say C major chord, you're going to still play a G there. If you play a D major, no D, you'll have to play a G. So this is very different to an inversion. An inversion is where you're changing the alignment of notes. Here you're telling yourself the bass is just constant and these patterns also we call them as ostinato bass lines. If you think of them in a groovy context, for example, see the groove is nice but it's also around or pivoted around that G. Very useful for things like fusion music. So the whole idea or the whole goal of this lesson is to teach you different music creation tools or ideas which you could use to embellish your compositions. But all of the ideas are going to be derived around just a pedaling note. It could be G. I will try to keep it similar throughout the lesson but sometimes I do get carried away. So just understand that it's G or it's a pedal tone or it's the root of that scale. It could be C. It could be E flat but that's going to stay with us for the entire lesson. And I've developed five ways of exploring harmony with drones. Five ways. So I've done my research. I also tend to like these sort of songs which have the drone. You should definitely check out a lot of Phil Collins' music and Genesis' music. You can also look at a lot of progressive bands like Dream Theater and Rush. They do this a lot to create something very ambient. The Beatles for sure have done this drone thing a lot. And we will try to leave a few links to these songs in the description. So do check that out. There's also an Indian band called Parvaz and I've done a cover called Abkiya Suba and that seems to have a lot of this drone thing going. With pretty much a G and this drone concept also kind of works when you're playing the guitar. I think guitar players acknowledge this droning thing a lot. Either they drone two of their open strings or they just hold a top note like a G is very common and or a bass note. Sometimes you do a drop D guitar tuning. It's very common or just E. Just the E bass tuning and you kind of play a lot of stuff around that particular setup. So let's get cracking with developing harmony using the drone or the bass pedal note. I have five methods in this lesson and I think all of them will give birth to different ideas, different genres. So do stick around if you're a bit more of a beginner on the piano. You may find the theory useful and over time I'm sure you'll be able to execute it efficiently on your instrument. If you're an intermediate person, I would definitely advise you or even if you're an advanced student, get a keyboard out. All of you should get a keyboard out and play along with me. A lot of these things will be learned better when you actually play it with me. So get your book, get your keyboard. It'll be great and also the notes for this lesson will be available on our Patreon page. If you'd like to supplement the learning with that, you can head over there and support our channel as well for a $5 a month subscription. So before we get started, it'll be great if you can give the video a like, leave us a comment with anything you'd like to learn, share the video with your friends and fellow musicians and don't forget to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and hit that bell icon for notifications. So let's figure out the first style of creating harmony with drones using tried and tested cadences. So a cadence is nothing but a very short and sweet chord progression, two to three chords at the very max, you could say. And the whole idea is to practice and see what ideas you can come up with by just droning the root of the scale and not changing the roots of the chord as per the cadence. So for example, if you take a plagal cadence, which is nothing but a four going to one. So if you're in the key of D, the four of D happens to be G. So what you want to do is play G major slash D. That's the chord G major. So we write it as a slash chord forward slash D. You'll see that in the graphic. So G over D. So GBD in the right hand and D in the D in the base. So you could do that and then resolve it to the root and cadences work great. If you want to have a major and a minor chord interplay, for example, you could go G minor ending off with D major. So minor major, minor, minor D major works or G major, D major. Or you could go very minor. That also works out. So you have all these four to one plagal movements. So plagal cadences with a drone base, you can create a lot of stuff like always think of the cadence to build a melody over a bar of four. That's how I like to use it at least. Minor you can try. You could also establish a scale which could go over those two chords. So that was the plagal cadence. What is the other kind of cadence we associate ourselves with the authentic cadence or the five going to one. So that could be, well, what is five of D? It is A. So this sounds really dreamy. Very open sound, right? You could go five, four, one. Now it kind of closes the gap. Wide open, staring at the sun. It's a very progressive rock sound. You'll hear this a lot with Genesis, with a yes, maybe a little bit of Pink Floyd, but it's all around that drone. Now it's very different than if you played very classical, very tried and tested five going to one, but here it's a very different vibe when you keep the one pivoted or pedaled, as we say. I'm only pedaling the bottom, the base note in this lesson. So that's your cadences seem to work very well, if you ask me, into a six flat, seven flat going to one, a lot of these options. So I'm not going to take that much time on cadences because we've done a lot of detailed lessons on the subject. Head over to the description and you'll find a lot of these links for you to learn probably after this video or whenever you find the time. So cadences with drones, very important. So another way I like to express how many using drones or that pivoted base is using modes or a modal sound. So a mode is nothing, but I think you could just treat it as a scale in this context because it's just a scale, but we find them in that modes topic in a theory lesson like Mixolydian, Dorian, Lydian, Phrygian, Mixolydian flat six and whatnot. So you have modes of different scales you can form them or you can just learn them. For example, if I take a Mixolydian scale from D, a Mixolydian scale is nothing but a major scale with a flat in seven. So you could create a very Mixolydian drone sound by playing harmony from that scale, but pivoting the root. This sounds really cool. If you ask me, you can play like a seven flat which is C major, a normal four major which is G and then resolve. Also can be quite Raga like if you're composing, you know, a lot of music using Indian Raga as if you want that drone sound. Well, Indian Raga performances especially in the classical usage tend to always happen with the root and the fifth droning in the bottom or not really the bottom with another instrument always giving you that sense of what the Sa and the Pa as we say is. So start with a major Mixolydian gives you that C and then the four going to very Mixo. You could also do like a five minor, a four major going to the one. So it's important you plot out the triads of each mode and see which triad with the root in the bass you feel brings out the vibe of that mode. Like for example, Lydian, if I take it with E with D the Lydian vibe would be really nicely generated. If you play like a E major sound over the D sounds quite nice. So you could drone D and play D major and E major in your right hand. So that's normal but this is really nice. D merging with E can change the mode also. We'll get to that later. What if we want something like Phrygian? Now Lydian is characterized by a sharp four. What is a sharp four with respect to D? G sharp. That's why that E major chord worked so well because it had a G sharp. What does Phrygian have which is unique? The flat two. So you would want to probably look at a D minor because Phrygian's root chord will be a minor. That's very Phrygian. In fact, you could just hold that chord that's E flat over D and kind of play the Phrygian. So you could build a phrase or build a section which is just D minor with D and then go to that E flat. You could even play F major over D. That makes it very Phrygian. I like that. What about Dorian? You can play a G major with a D minor with an F major, G major, E minor, all droning with the D. So you could also try and see when you invert the chord, the top note of the chord could move around on that scale and try to bring in a melody as naturally as possible. So something like that. So two chords will make up a nice drone movement. You could also use how many ever chords the scale gives you. So a scale will form triads. So do consider checking out the notes. We'd have that written down on the keys of D. So check it out. Now moving forward to the third style of drone-based harmony, something which I like a lot and I think you'll also like it. I'm calling it basically the line cliched drones. So what happens there is you keep your D and maybe you start with a D minor home bass or a D major home bass. I'm going to start with D major and you just look at the octave. Start with the octave which is D and now I'm dropping it to C. Let's do that again. Playing it a bit higher, it sounds nicer. Drop it. You can actually drop all the way down, C sharp. This is what they call as the line cliché all the way. Pretty much just a chromatic with the D drone. So still over the D. I have to use it that way in such an aggressive way. You could build a build a ballad around it. So many songs like this. I'm sure you know a few Beatles ones already as I'm playing this. So that's basically the drone with a with a cliche movement. You're not going. You're not dropping the bass fully. You could also consider doing that. But in this case, you're just maintaining the bass but chromatically in the upper register, you're dropping the harmony. So if you drop it, it becomes very interesting. It's more like a D major 7th, D dominant 7th. That's like a G major over D. This is very interesting. Rather diminished sounding chord D, D major over D, E over D and then you could do like a G over D and do all over the D. I mean, right now in this lesson, we're overdoing it with the drone just to show you the impact. But you don't have to stick with that drone, you know, all the time. Now another nice line cliché is if you if you take an upper register, let's say the A and upper note of this and go higher, it's kind of getting more intense, isn't it? While the other one was more calm as you kept going down. So I like the idea of even going up to the augmented chord, going to the major 6th and dominant 7th leaves it hanging in the balance and then you could probably change your chords. Okay, so line cliché going down, line cliché going up. Eventually the line cliché could even resolve to an actual chord. So we've covered cadences, we've used modes, we've now we've all recently now just looked at line cliché drones where there were two options. Let's now look at what I call as melodic chord drones. So in this instance, if you take D and just keep it pumping like a pulse and think of a melody, just any old thing, you know, like maybe what I'm trying to do there is to play that melody, not with just the melody, but with chords which have that note in them. And I invert the chord so that I'm sticking my desired tune on the top. What did I want there? I wanted F sharp, E, G, F sharp on the key of D major as I think this entire lesson has been. So something simple like this. This will be a very glam rock approach to the idea. So what you could practice is just like, you know, Van Halen's jump for example, just get used to playing the one four and five chords of your scale, which is D major, the one chord is D major, the four chord is G major, the five chord is A major. Get used to playing those chords in different inversions and explore that melody. So G major with a D sticking out, G major with a G sticking out, G major with a B sticking out. Now if you put that all together, it becomes very melodic. That's why I call this type of drone harmony as melodic chord drones because the chords are breathing the melody and you're still droning with the D. Very different vibe than when you change your bass, right? Just do it for fun with. Very good for these percussive stabs. You would get a horn to embellish like a nice brass patch if you're a keyboard player and so on and so forth. So along with using inversions and stuff for melodic chord drones, you could also look at suspending one chord. For example, D, I can take D major and what is its sus notes? You have the G, which is the sus four, E, which is the sus two. So you could play with that. All the one four five sound good when you suspend them. So if you're on G, G sus four is C. Then if you do D, if you do A. So if you combine inversions of the one four five chords along with their suspensions becomes very melodic to a point that people feel that bass, but they feel it in a more drone kind of environment and so much of eastern music seems to survive completely well without the need for a bass movement. It's just happy with just the D and a lot of western bands have also acknowledged that. You find music becoming very eclectic, you could say, these days. So there's one more style of using drone harmony, which I have for you that would basically be a concept called modal interchange. So when you compose music with modal interchange, you can happily use the same drone because there is no compulsion to play a major chord or a minor chord right now. I'm just playing a D. So I can start my music off with let's say a Dorian. Do a little bit of Phrygian. Lydian depends on how you wish to use them. Mixolydian flat six. So that's an example of minor. Keep that rhythm. Minor. That was very a little bit sad, right? A lot of despair, a lot of struggle, but make it a bit more positive with another mode, another emotion like breaking free back to struggle. So the beauty of keeping that pivoted D without much happening is you can weave in any scale which now you learn scales like that. Don't be all major scale we say is happy. The word word go, minor scale is sad. So this can really help you weave a story with just and just think of the melody and there's no rule which states that you have to make a song just on one scale. That's absolute nonsense. You can change your scales as so many great musicians will continue to do and have done in the past. So keep the D drone and even if you don't make a song, it's a great kind of prelude to an actual song because it'll give you a phrase like and then couple it with a Mixolydian. Do something with a Mixolydian meeting this minor scale or Aeolian like a rock song again like a very call and response kind of a setup going for you. Right guys? So just to recap there are five ways in which I've looked at the idea of drones in the bass or pivoted basses. You have the cadence idea where you just take two simple chords which are cadences, tried and tested cadences and instead of playing them as the actual chords with the actual bass, you just play them with drones. Then we looked at modal drone chords where we brought out the flavor of a mode example Lydian or maybe Phrygian and so on and so forth. Check out the notes. It'll be quite helpful. I hope. And then we looked at line cliche drones which give you these nice long chord progressions. Stuff like that. Then we looked at like glam rock usages of these drones where you where you take pretty much the same major chords of the major scale but you invert them, suspend them and that creates some interesting drone harmony. And then we looked at modal interchange with a single bass drone where you play the drone and then you just think melodically. You can bring a little bit of harmony but just bring it more on the melody side for a while which allows you to now change to a another scale or another mode. So that's what we call as modal interchange. So just changing just a fancy word. You can just say many scales or whatever over a constant drone. So those were the five things which I would definitely encourage you to explore on the piano. It's a great instrument for that. You can even groove whenever you're doing something with a drone. Think of grooving it. Otherwise it may start getting very predictable and boring. Before I conclude the lesson I'd like to leave you with three composition tips which I think will help you in your journey of composing using modes. The first one as I may have mentioned earlier would be to look at grooves or riffs in the bass. So instead of doing just hold that instead of that you can do. So try and make this talk. I know it is not talking harmonically. It's just one note. So why only do that groove? Just root and octave would be more than enough or you could add the fifth to your drone. You could add the seven flat depending on if the scale has that seven flat or the seven natural or just stick with root and octave. So that's one important tip while using drones. You may find better results if you create an actual riff using that drone. The other thing I would like you to do the other application of this is you can use drone harmony to actually extend the length of a chord in a chord progression. So let's say you're playing D and it's just going on and on. It's a good ballad. It's going on and on but now the piano is not making a statement. The singer wants you to do something. So what do we do? We pull in the drone harmony by keeping the same bass doesn't affect our bass player. The bass continues to drone D but you can go. You can also promote certain notes for the singer and just one chord and then the chord changes to G major and you could adopt the same thing. So it's a great way to reduce the monotony of a chord. It's just not going to sound like D major all the time. So that's another serious application I think using these drones in the bass because it doesn't change the chord function. It's still the same chord. You're just making it more colorful and making the listener enjoy the journey from one chord to eventually the next chord. And the last compositional tip I would advise you when you're using drone harmony is to use it but use it for a specific section of a song. So maybe you'd use this for the build up or the bridge or maybe the verse or the intro where the song starts in a very meditative way. You want to set the listener into the scale and then you explode with a chord progression somewhere in the chorus or whatever else. So the three compositional ideas as I mentioned think of riffs and grooves here instead of just holding the drone. The other idea was to make an existing chord progression a lot nicer. Enjoy the journey by expanding its survival capability. And last but not least use the drones for one section and then don't use the drones for some other section like the chorus can have normal hard hitting chords or it could be the other way around. So we've looked at a few compositional tips at the end of the lesson but prior to that it was all about five strategies, five really tried and tested strategies by a lot of musicians to use the drones in music. And a drone as we conclude will be nothing but a base note which doesn't change throughout the lesson we've been pivoting that D but it's the upper extensions which make it more interesting. The upper extensions could be a chord, it could be a inversion, it could be a suspension, it could also be a melody. But the drone in the left hand or the bass stays the same. Hope you found the concepts useful, hope you can apply it in your music and do consider getting yourself a copy of the notes which is on the Patreon and you can get these notes as well as any other notes we've done in the past or going to do. There's also a lot of other resources there for all of our YouTube videos as we've been doing for a few years now on the channel. Also thanks for watching the video and if you haven't already do consider giving the video a like, sharing the video, leaving us a comment with something you'd like us to do in the future and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and if you have subscribed consider hitting that bell icon for regular notifications whenever we drop a new lesson. Thanks again for watching, this is Jason from Nathaniel, cheers.