 Hi guys, welcome to part 5. In this lesson I am going to introduce you to Quortal voicing to make your chord progressions or a pop chord progression a little bit more exciting. So with triads or with thirds as we have learnt so far and at least in the first lesson we learnt a lot about thirds. To build harmony, thirds are not the only thing, there are all sorts of other intervals. So the Quortal voicing concept builds harmony using fourths. So there are two kinds of fourths you can get. One is the perfect fourth, that sort of a sound D to G, the other will be like a sharp four which actually sounds a bit dissonant but it actually works really nicely in a chord progression as I am going to show you. So we use these kinds of fourths and again you can extend the fourths. I am going to just show it with a piano perspective so that means you will be able to play about three notes in this hand and one note in this hand which is pretty much going to be the root note or the base note of the chord. So let's get started. The first thing is how do we form Quortal chords or how do we form these fourth chords. In the scale of D major, again we are taking D major for this entire series, you could however do it on as many scales as you wish. Basically two sharps, C sharp and F sharp. So to form a normal triad what we did was, moved up the third and then moved up another third to form the fifth and that formed a normal triad but the Quortal chord still will use the notes of the parent scale or the diatonic scale. So in the case of D, the fourth would be G, isn't it, 1, 2, 3, 4. That's the diatonic fourth and from G I need to build another fourth, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4. Automatically it's a very open-ended sound but it's a really pleasant and very dreamy kind of sound as well. It has its own beauty, try playing it everywhere. And then the next Quortal chord will be E, A and D which will start from the E and then go E, fourth to A and fourth to D and like that you will have seven Quortal chords if you take F sharp, F sharp, B E, G Quortal, G, C sharp, F sharp, A Quortal, A D G, B E, A, B Quortal, C sharp Quortal. Again, calling it Quortal is a very unofficial terminology because in theory it's just the diatonic fourths of that scale or that mode. So if it was Dorian or if it was Harmonic Minor, in this case I've taken the major scale but in any scale the Quortal voicings come from the scale or come from the mode. So they are very dependent on the scale, thus Quortal voicings can really bring out the beauty in the scale almost as much as a melody in the song. So to show you guys how to use the Quortal chord, as I talked about earlier you had seven of them to use, right? D, G, C sharp, A, D and so on and so forth. Now the cool thing with the Quortal chords which I like to use in a lot of my music is to take an existing chord like D major has the root D in the D major scale and let's try out all these seven Quortal chords and use them accordingly. This is D, G, C sharp, quite a dreamy, maybe eerie kind of sound, mystical sound. E, A, D, this is all over D, right? F sharp, G, A, B and C sharp. So as you can see over the D chord all these voicings work really well, don't they? Similarly over the E chord the same voicings will pretty much sound really pleasant as well. Or on the F sharp chord. That's a very, very cool Phrygian sound right there. Right, so the Quortal chords are really, really interesting to a point that there's almost no theory required to using them apart from how to form them diatonically which you anyways do for forming triads and thirds, right? So normal triads seem to not work with every root note or with every bass note but the Quortal chords seem to work over everything. That's all the notes of the D major scale or any major scale and that's also because the notes come from the scale and then the notes are also separated by an interval which is a fourth. That's a very open-ended interval. It's not an interval which is as resolved or committed like a third. Okay, so Quortal harmony is something you can use again like all the other lessons in this series to embellish a popular chord progression. A normal 1625 or a 1564. So let's just see how it's used in action. I'm going to go back to what I did earlier which is the 1625 and just show you options and again like I said earlier over every chord whether it's major or minor you can play a lot of these Quortal voicings. So I would suggest step one, write down the scale and write down all the possible Quortal chords with it and then while you jam, you can choose which Quortal chord works for you, works for the song, works with the singing melody in mind and generally works for the vibe of what you're trying to create. So if I play D now, again my progression originally was D, B minor, E minor and A major. We've all heard that, haven't we? So now, check that out. That is D major with D, E, A. So with this I get the 13, I get the 9 and I get the 5 which is normal. I could also voice it like this where I get the third, I get the 13 and I get the 9. So you can try out whichever voicing I've just written down a couple but you could try out what works best for you and similarly to play the B minor chord quite like that or it's quite a, that's quite a very mystical or also quite an uplifting sound in my opinion. So again, the choices are yours guys. You have to decide which one to use and for E I've chosen this shape or you can even do an A, D, G and these are all one of the seven quartal chords which you guys would have anyways needed to write down. There are seven quartal chords in each key and finally for the A again, focusing a lot on the 13 which is the F sharp and also the flat 7 which is the G. So I really like that voicing. You can also bring that 13 down to a flat 13 to create some really interesting vibes. In short, you basically take a four chord progression play the bass notes in your left hand and in the right hand choose whichever quartal chords among the seven you've already written work with the progression. So we've written it down for D. If you haven't, please write it down right now and also the kinds of quartal voicings you choose should not be random. It should be based on something you really enjoy and connect with. Also something which doesn't clash with the singer of your band or the improviser. That is also very important and like a lot of the other parts in the past which we've done in the fifth part in the series but like any other part if you take any chord let's say you take the B minor played like this that's with this quartal. This can really inspire your melody the singer in your band or yourself or whoever is making the melody to actually sing on these notes. Of course you can sing the root and so on or so perhaps you can also make a few suggestions to your singer if you're working with a singer to kind of latch on to those notes because ultimately I see the vocal line or the melody line at the top end of everything it's sort of like the fruits or the flowers of a tree that's ultimately what makes it all complete like the point of the tree so you want to tell your singer what to do or you want to guide your singer as to the notes which are available and then the singer may also have options of their own so you could then change the quartal voice accordingly that's what makes it a very free and a very open ended sound and advantages of this quartal voicing are also that it doesn't clash with the rest of the band it's a very open ended sound and the advantage I find in using it is it makes my music which could be very simple it could just be like we just played 1, 6, 2, 5 or 1, 5, 6, 4, whatever it could make it very dreamy or mystical or eerie if you're going for that sort of a vibe something more filmy or something more not so popular vibe so this is used by a lot of musicians we'll try and put a link in the description you can check that out there's a lot of musicians out there some classical guys and some jazz guys who use this voicing in their music you should definitely check out the links we've sent out and last but not least let me show you the same song which we've been doing all through let it be by the Beatles we've really messed it up haven't we so the same chords D, A, B, G B, A and of course with the quartal I like that sound very plain right B, A just change it around remember there are 7 options you can play around with so it's quite a weird thing for some of you who have not heard this because normally you have a triad there are 3 inversions and now you have like 7 quartal chords so that's 7 ways of playing all the 7 chords so I hope I didn't confuse you but hopefully gave you some new stuff to try out as always thanks for watching this video and also for those of you who watched all the 5 parts thanks for your time and patience and there is an elaborate set of instruction material or study material which we have in our description we urge you all to click on the link and download yourself a copy also share the video with your musical friends or not so musical friends and get them to be more musical and as always keep watching and keep subscribing and what else stay tuned I guess cheers