 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to practice our chord changes combining two of the rather tough things to do in music or rather maybe the toughest things if you think about triads at least to shift between two rather tricky chords which we will call the tritone interval which I am going to explain shortly and also how to shift between them using rhythmic variations using odd time meter and making the speed of the shifting incrementally faster as you go along and whilst shifting we practice broken chords, we practice arpeggios, we practice a nice pattern which we have notated for you. So first off a little bit of theory in the lesson as to what is the tritone, how do we change between them, how do we pair them and then a little bit on the topic of inversions on how you can shift between them. So if you are looking at the topic of chord inversions which is the ability to move smoothly between any two chords on the piano or guitar or anywhere, let's say C major, going to F major, you know that it is to shift in the most efficient way possible using the least motion possible, you want to keep the common notes consistent so that is the general flow of inversions. So I have taken the same strategy of chord inversions by using the tritone interval between chords and using this technique you can practice all the 12 plus 12 major and minor chords out there in all their respective inversions. So stay tuned to the very end, it is going to give you a very holistic way to practice all your triads and we are tackling the biggest challenge of them all, we are poking the bear when it comes to our chord movement so to speak and while doing that I love rhythm as some of you already know, so we are going to bring in a lot of rhythm patterns using arpeggios in this lesson. And before we get started it will be awesome if you would consider hitting that subscribe button on our Nathaniel School of Music YouTube channel, you could also hit that bell icon for regular notifications and remind yourself of new videos which get released on our channel pretty much every other day. And also my handwritten notes are waiting for you on our Patreon channel forward slash Jason Zach. Do consider heading over there and supporting us, let's get cracking. So first off what is a tritone, a tritone the way I look at it is it's the only interval in music which divides the octave believe it or not into exactly two slices. So if you want to divide something into half in music you need the tritone and if you look at the circle of fifths the tritone is the farthest away from anywhere. It is so far that it is the diameter from anywhere in that circle to the next point. So if you connect the diameter from let's say C in the circle of fifths you're going to go all the way down to F sharp also implies that the interval contained between those two notes C and F sharp in this case is going to end up being the most tense while the closest neighbors namely C and G seem to sound very stable and peaceful with respect to each other and almost emotionless it's almost like a blank canvas or something. So the tritone gives you that tension and that immediate urgency to resolve. So if there is a tension in music what do we do we try to resolve it to something to a chord or to a new note. So without tension and resolution you can't really do much with this dynamic art form as it's called. It's not a static picture isn't it music it's not a painting or a sculpture it's a art in motion. It moves for sort of like a movie for the years if you think about it. So if you take these two intervals now C and F sharp and build chords out of them what are the two possible chords well there are many but the two I've chosen for this video are major and minor. So you're going to want to do C major let's just stick with major major for now. So C major going to F sharp major that is the harmonic motion that's the chord movement. C major F sharp major they are both separated by a tritone and there's a very very interesting interval. It's used a lot in movie theme scores for sure I'm sure you're observing this and if you change the chords to minor another very beautiful artistic sound. So if you imagine a movie score by Hans Zimmer or Danny Elfman you're probably going to have these sort of connections between the chords and right after this video it would be nice if you can watch my series called mysterious chord connections which we'll link up in the description it shows you all your Jurassic Park kind of chords and all your scary movie chords or Halloween chords and so on and so forth also the Batman chords so do check out that after this lesson. So coming back you know how to form a tritone now it's very important to note that the inversion of a tritone is itself so it's the only musical interval which when inverted is pretty much the same so C's tritone is F sharp what is F sharp's tritone you might argue or think C C's tritone is F sharp F sharp's tritone is C does that work anywhere else in life C's perfect fourth is F F's perfect fifth is C F's perfect fourth when you think about it is not C it's not the inversion it's B flat so the only interval in music which when inverted becomes pretty much the same thing is the tritone interval and the connection or the movement between the tritone when you play two triads a major to a major or a major to a minor is going to be rather tricky which is why I've chosen it for its artistic nature or its mysterious nature as well as its technical complexity if you can shift the tritone you've pretty much got yourself covered with any two triad motions between two chords with three notes basically so we form the tritone pair C to F sharp how many tritone pairs would there be in musical life well there are 12 notes in music C to F sharp is a tritone F sharp to C is the next tritone so that's your tritone pair as I like to call it then look at all the other tritones just for your reference D's tritone is A flat again if you see the circle of fifths wheel diameter if you draw it correctly you'll you'll get the greatest distance from D to be A flat so D to the A flat D major to the A flat major or D minor to the A flat minor then what about E stritone E stritone is B flat E stritone is B flat you can either go E to up to B flat E down to B flat okay that's your tritone combo similarly for D what did we do D A flat D A flat C was first C F sharp C F sharp and then let's look at F stritone F to the B B to the F F down to B B up to F and then there's one more tritone pair to learn that would be G down G to the D flat G tritone is D flat G to D flat you can practice it lower as well okay write down all your pairs you can even see my handwritten notes which give you all that then A last pair A to the E flat A to the E flat so C F sharp D A flat E B flat F B G D flat A E flat B F and then it obviously repeats because each tritone is the same right so C to F is F to C so we have six tritone pairs so what I first want you to do before you get your right hand started is to just shift between the roots of these chords that can be a workout just for your left hand so you do C F sharp and go either down to F sharp or up to F sharp so C F sharp C down to F sharp C up to F sharp C down to F sharp it's a great way to recognize your notes because they are all over the place they're not consecutive or grouped diatonically so to speak because the tritone is not part of a major scale from the root at least so you can also practice this in a nice disco like manner what pushes your shifting you can do an eighth note F sharp you can do other tritone combos D A flat D and A flat maybe E B flat E B flat F B F B G D flat G D flat A E flat A E flat those are all your tritone left hand workouts so six of them are there and now coming to the right hand so the right hand you're kind of forced to use inversions because if you just go it's a huge jump you need your eyes to do them and as I generally tell students while discussing inversions if ever you've done it well you have to do it blindly you have to do it without your eyes so very tough I would need my eyes eventually to find that right so you need to definitely use inversion so the practice would be C E G how do I go to F sharp major perhaps this way and the challenge for this particular movement is that your fingering matters a lot so if you take C major you'll play F sharp major like that because you've given yourself the ring finger and the pinky finger room or freedom to play those notes in the upper register C major C sharp F sharp A sharp you're playing F sharp in the second inversion second inversion is root in the center right however if you were to play C major like this with your pinky on the top then you have to choose F sharp major like this you'll have to slide left slide down basically so depending on the fingering the tritone position would matter you practice this maybe start with another inversion of C the first inversion of C and let's see how that goes higher so basically from every point you have two possible inversions that's why I like the tritone exercise because a normal triad C to F is just one way to go from C major to F major once you've planted C you know F is there you it can't possibly be the other way but tritones you have two potential ways of going towards so if you take the first inversion of C you can play F sharp that way if you're going downward if you're going upward if you give yourself a finger towards the right you can go up then if you take the second inversion of C major you can do your thing to F sharp and for some reason practicing F sharp going to C would also be a nice challenge don't just do C to F sharp just do for practice purposes F sharp to C F sharp to C it'll force you to use the C major as an inversion if your F sharp was in root right so practice that and this exercise gets really wholesome and will cover pretty much all the 24 chords in all of their inversions 24 means 12 major 12 minor are there in life right so if you want to cover all the 24 here's what you do you take the other tritone pairs and start working on them D A flat D lower A flat so you're doing all the versions of going from D major to A flat major even though it's tough your this skill or this investment of time which you put in will help you play a lot of things in the future I can guarantee you so the other thing you might want to do is because I want to achieve 24 chords 12 major and 12 minor how do I bring in the minor look at the binary permutations that exist between major and minor so you could do coming back to C to F sharp major major major what if I now say minor minor C minor F sharp minor both minors what if I like major minor C major F sharp minor you can start with the root positions then minor major but you'll realize inversions are a lot easier so now it clearly becomes a very wholesome exercise with all the 24 calls I'd like to cap off the discussion with an exciting chord pattern to play this stuff with and also explore perhaps different time signatures along the way and as the time signatures get introduced the shifting between the chords is going to get trickier and trickier because you have to count the time signature and the number of beats is going to reduce and the other part which I think is going to make this chord pattern exciting is it combines block chords with an arpeggio system whenever we deal with the pattern we play blocks you know arpeggios I thought let's combine them so the pattern is so block hit so you could count it as one e and a two e and a repeat and a four you could count it as 16s if you want to play fast or if you'd like to do it in an eighth note style feel free it'll be one and two and three and four and one and two and so block arpeggio arpeggio something like block arpeggio block arpeggio change arpeggio change so totally if you count the beats it'll end up being a four by four or maybe an eight by eight if you want to call count it as eight quavers one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one same shapes you can even do minor so that's your default pattern so practice that I think you can use this even in songs which are about to play it's a nice piano pattern for sure now to make that change a bit more exciting and challenging for you you can drop one beat from the four by four or eight by eight and convert it to seven by eight so then it's gonna be I'll play and then show so if you count it it'll be one two three four one two three one two three four one two three one two three four five six seven three four five six seven you can also use conical to give you that vibe of seven if you don't use conical what tends to happen when you play piano or guitar is you go one and two and three one two three four five six seven one two three four five six seven one the reason that's wrong is it's actually eight you're just not saying the number eight you know which is wrong because you observe that extra beat in any case so don't go one and two and three and four and and think you're doing seven now you need to force that seven in by saying what I would recommend either one two three four one two three one two three four one two three or one two three one two three four one two three one if your voice if you're phrasing it like that one two three four I'm phrasing it as one two three four one two three one two three four one two easy on the tongue would be using conical So we've converted or we've moved from 8 to rather challenging 7, what's lesser than 7? 6. So block arpeggio, that's been our pattern, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2. So as you can see the time you are going to get is a lot lesser and it's still musical because you are following the meter of 6, 8, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I'm phrasing 6, 8 with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I'm not doing 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. I'm not doing it in the lazy way, which we use for 6 by 8 songs in general. Let's move forward. What about 5, 8? Can count like that, or you can use? And then of course you can come to a 4 and see how ridiculously fast it becomes because 4 you just have 4 sub beats to move to the next chord and not just any next chord you are going to the toughest possible change in triad history. so that's 4 this will really squeeze out all the technique you need to play the piano then triplets 1 2 3 1 2 3 or 3 8 if you want to call it that or that's every subdivision and then something which even I don't want to do will be Let's not bother doing that now, right guys. So let's just recap. We've looked at the tritone, a very exciting interval in music for composing, for general study and creating this great art form. You need to have tension and resolution and tritone provides the best possible tension and it's been a tried and tested tool for composers for hundreds of years from the classical era. So then we looked at triad shifting using inversions, using the major to major connected by tritone examples C to F sharp. There are six tritone pairs. When we connect them, we could do all the binary permutations, namely major, major, minor, minor, major, minor, major. And lastly, we looked at a nice block meets arpeggio combo exercise, which will enable you to shift with a lot more musicality and improve and strengthen your timing as you do so. Right guys, hope you found the lesson useful. And for more of our lessons, you should definitely consider heading over to Nathaniel school.com for our video courses, which go in a very structured way. You can start from absolute beginner foundational and then move forward. And you can also learn a bunch of instruments at our school, you can learn the guitar, you can learn vocals, you can also learn the piano. And I'm the piano teacher if you'd like to learn. So you just have to fill up the form, the relevant forms are in the description waiting for you to fill up. Right. Thanks a ton for watching the video catch you in the next one. Cheers.