 Hi guys, this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to explore the chords of the major scale, everyone's favorite, from all sorts of different perspectives, ranging from the emotions the chords will give you, to the themes they can bring for your music, to also how you can connect them to build various chord progressions. So let's get started. First off, the major scale, as you know, has seven notes and thus seven chords. However, when we form those chords using the triad concept, namely one, three, five, from any root, right, when we form them using one, three, fives, we observe something interesting, right. Some of the chords tend to not sound the same as some of the other chords. In the sense, you'll find that some chords sonically sound happy, some song, some chords sound sad, and some chords sound maybe even scary. So what happens in a major scale is when you form triads, the reason why we form triads first of all is primarily because it doesn't create a sense of dissonance, right, because each interval is separated by a third and then a fifth at the extreme. So it's sort of a wider sound, and thirds are considered as stable intervals, which are your kind of understands, right. So we build triads from the scale as you learn in the theory books, and the way the triads seem to be formed, I'm on the key of C major right now, which is C D E F G A B. Okay, those are your notes. So the chords you're going to form are nothing but C major, which is built from the one D minor, which is built from the two E minor, which is built from the three F major, which is built from the four G major, which is built from the five A minor, which is built from the six and B diminished, which is built from the seven, okay. Now as you will hear the major chords namely I, IV and V just have a very positive uplifting happy kind of vibe right or you could use it maybe for a more playful context or maybe for a folk song or like a children's nursery rhyme if you will while the two chord is D minor the three chord which is E minor and the sixth chord which is A minor especially when you sort of play them together they seem to have a very melancholic sad mournful or serious kind of sound right of course it depends on how you play them but in general minor chord sounds sad and very weighty while major chords just sound happy and cheerful victorious and all those nice words okay and then you have this lone diminished chord which is the B diminished right now you may try to figure this out for other scales using the same tried approach but then you'll learn that the major scale is a very universally agreed-on scale for playing chords and generally constructing harmony so pretty much all of our pop rock even classical music is based on the major scale primarily because of the intervals between the notes the fact that you can form three major chords and three minor chords the major chords and the minor chords are considered the most stable in music right the major sound very happy of course but stable and the minor chord sounds sad but stable the main idea is to understand what these chords mean for your for you when you play them so the first way I would like to compare chords is the obvious way observe the emotions the natural raw emotions you have your happy chords it's called major C major F major G major then you have the sad chords D minor E minor and a minor and then the one lone diminished which is rather scary or anxious so maybe yeah you get the idea another way you can analyze these chords is from the point of view of functional harmony that means when you play one chord what is its purpose is its purpose to go somewhere or is its purpose to be fine where it is or to be stable and resolved or at home where it is so we start with what you could call as the tonic chords in the scale right so in the C major scale the tonic chords are known as the one chord which is C major C E G then the A minor which is A C E and the E minor which is a little bit subjective doesn't feel very homely to me sometimes but anyway it's called as a tonic so you have C major A minor and E minor so if you play all of these three chords together it just feels very calm and very normal right it's like you've not really gone out of your comfort zone so much and all of these chords have one note in common what is that you may be already seeing it it's the E so believe it or not that is what's the tonic function of a chord that's what makes something sound tonic or homely it's the E or the major third not the root as some people think it is it's actually E which is common to A minor C major and E minor okay that's your tonic so what do you do when you want to just be at home play the tonic chords moving on so obviously you don't want to always be at home that'll not be a lot of fun so then you have what's called as dominant chords dominant chords are chords which are unstable in nature and lead to the tonic their purpose is to sort of be at ease when once they resolve to the tonic so the dominant chords in the major scale are considered to be the five chord which is the G major chord and the diminished chord which is B D F so G B D is G major B D F you could also combine G B D and the F of the diminished chord get a bigger dominant seventh or a G seventh chord so what happens here this seems to want to go to the tonic pretty much any tonic could also go there or generally the one if you're trying to get back to a happier sound why does that happen well because of what we call is the leading tone in this case is B or the seventh note of the scale that is like a magnetic attraction to the tonic so if you analyze chords this way you can sort of start creating chord progressions the earlier analysis was just oh major is happy minor is sad diminished is scary but now you're like I'm playing a chord I want to know know where it should go does it feel at home or does it want to go home okay so that's another perspective I guess and then you also have these sort of in-between chords which they call a subdominant chords the subdominant chords are built out of degree number 2 that'll be a D minor and degree number 4 which is F major okay they seem to have this A in common which tends to either go up to the 5 which is the dominant which is generally what we do with subdominant chords you in functional harmony D minor which is the 2 going to G major which is the 5 ending on C major which is the tonic right G can even go to the minor tonic major tonic right you get the idea or maybe you can do F major subdominant G major dominant back to C major tonic the other tonic so it's a nice way to kind of link your chords so let's recap you have seven chords in the major scale again you're now grouping them as tonic chords subdominant chords and dominant chords not major minor diminished we know it's already major minor diminished so the tonic chords are 1 the 6 minor and the 3 minor or you can just sort of ignore the 3 minor and just call it an embellishment which you use just to spice things up 3 minor is a very sort of obvious sound and a very interesting sound to kind of really elevate the theme of your song so maybe you should just use it separately then you have the dominant chords which lead to the tonic what are the dominant chords the 5 major and the 7 diminished or you can combine 5 major and 7 diminished and what do you get the dominant 7th chord which goes to the tonic then you have the subdominant chords which are Roman 2 4 and that's it so you have the 2 or the 4 which have that A in common going to the dominant chord which is G ending on the tonic which is C so if you analyze these chords and play them this way you will really start feeling this and as a songwriter this will really work when you're telling stories with your lyrics and it'll also work in a in a score or for a movie or some visual where you know there's a moving scene and eventually it seeks conclusion but at the same time it also needs its needs the interest and the chaos and all the fun which happens before the conclusion so another way I'd like to analyze the chords of the major scale is using what we call as cadences in music so cadence sort of means an ending so you play whatever chords you want rather freely but then focus on the ending depending on the kind of objective you are trying to get if you want a very strong homely ending we have what's called as the authentic cadence where you go the five chord going to one let's call the authentic cadence in this case G going to C then you also have the plagal cadence or a cadence used very often in gospel music or in church hymn music where you go the four chord F major going to C you'll find is very common at the end of a church hymn where they say amen amen at the end it's also called the amen cadence so authentic cadence 5 1 complete amen plagal cadence the plagal cadence has a lot of fun about it you don't have to just do four major going to one can also divert that major slightly and make it a four minor going to one I love that or you can do major four minor four plagal cadence is very cool then you also have something called as the deceptive cadence where instead of resolving back to the one you go to the sixth chord instead sort of deception so you is generally would like to do the five going to one close the chapter go to sleep but now what the deceptive cadence will do is end on the sixth minor so it's just called deceptive for that reason I guess so you end on the sixth minor which in the C major case is a minor and last but not least we have what's called as a half cadence where you take pretty much any chord of the major scale other than the five and end on the five so it creates a kind of a question mark effect if you're writing a story it's like a question mark so you go you're like what's next what's happening what's going to happen or what is the answer or what's the next line about you know so that's where you could use these cadences so you have the authentic cadence five to one the plagal cadence four or four minor going to one then you have the deceptive cadence five going to six minor and finally you also have this half cadence as they call it which is some chord ending on the five another nice way to analyze them is to look at it as melody meets harmony or harmony meets melody however you look at it so for example if you take let's say the note C consider that to be a melody okay figure out all the chords which have C in it in the C major scale now you'll be surprised or may be surprised and not all of them do just three chords in the C major scale have C in it what are they C major a minor and what else F major so when you're composing music using triads anytime your melody line or your singer goes C you could look at harmonizing it using the C major chord the a minor chord or the F major chord right now if you played some other chord maybe like the G major doesn't sound as awesome or as synchronous you would say because G major does not have a C in it so the same thing you could do let's say for D D has a D minor then what else you have B diminished which has D in it of course G major the 5 so D with D minor D with G major and then finally D with B diminished so we are not really observe we're not really getting into the emotion of each chord we're just trying to say see there's a melody line there which is D and there is a chord here which also has a D in it so why can they just work together right let's now move on to something which I call as modal chord analysis so within this major scale believe it or not there are seven scales right and each of these seven scales have their own emotions have their own team have their own vibe right so the C major scale is very deeply rooted on C that means you seem to start and end on that C so this is the major tonality because it has that major third perfect fifth however the same degrees or the same intervals between the notes which is the two steps here two steps here one two two two and one don't have to always start on the C why not we start on maybe the a instead and the a is a sixth from C is it not C D E F G A one two three four five six so the a ends up being called as a minor the scale itself will be a minor or a Aeolian so now coming back to chords you use the same chords of C major scale but you sort of use more of the minor chords right and immediately you feel that you are in the world of minor this doesn't sound major anymore doesn't it D minor I'm just playing the minor so that's and that's the minor scale but a lot of people feel that the minor scale is just sad I don't agree because now you still have those major chords which C major always had which is C major F major and G major so why not use them in a more hopeful way maybe build sections start sad in the verse build it up now with maybe a major what shall we play maybe F major quite like that F G and A lot of hope like you're telling a tale I guess by all this right giving the listener some hope maybe making it about a very brave group of people and then coming back to what the overall theme of the song is which is I guess gloomy okay so what else can we do we can also take the major scale starting from the second degree that we call as the Dorian so C is second is D that's D Dorian very characteristically heard with its natural sixth which is very different from the minor flat six so very common progression would be to play D minor G major and just cycle that or you can add more cause you feel like the root is now changed to D right but I'm accessing the same harmonic data from the C major scale which is still the seven chords which we discussed at the very beginning so Dorian very brave and very epic kind of sound you find that a lot more in movies themes and stuff than even the major scale last but not least the mixolydian which I really love to use especially in these nice rock songs and brotherhood like kind of songs the mixolydian starts from the G which is the fifth degree of the C major so build it and it's noted for its flat seven right as opposed to major which is that so it's and I'm conforming to the C major key signature which is why I have that F in the first place so what can we do with this maybe I'll do some major chords but end on the G major chord instead of the C major quite popular right right so the major scale is always thought of as being a very you know happy sounding scale but then how does every artist use it you know and every single pop and rock song they have to find different ways the first way as we try to discuss at the very beginning of the tutorial is make a list of your chords as their emotion major happy minor sad and diminished scary right then what did we do we looked at functional harmony where you have tonic subdominant and dominant chords essentially you're looking at each chords as moving from one to the next and creating a nice cyclic chord progression which can be looped for maybe the whole of your song so then we looked at cadences the endings of your chord sequences right you have endings on the one which is your you know authentic or plagal cadence you also have endings which don't go to one like the deceptive cadence which goes to the six minor or the half cadence which goes to the five or the dominant chord of the scale right and then what else did we do we then try to combine harmony with melody we try to say okay for that note what chord goes with that note is this common sense the chord has three notes the melody is there so just find a chord which has one of the notes of that melody and you have a way of playing very coherent sounding music with the melody and the chords going together it may also help you choose chords if you didn't like one what is the next option right you always have three chord options for every note and what else the last thing we looked at was how you can change the theme completely of the scale if ever you thought the major scale was happy and shiny well it doesn't have to always be that we looked at a minor sound where you start on the sixth we looked at a Dorian sound where you start on the two or you look at the mixolydian sound which you start on the five that's pretty much it hope you guys have found that lesson useful practice hard and as always this is Jason here from the Nathaniel School of Music if you have any questions or if you'd like to learn something in the future do leave a comment and we'll definitely consider it also make it a point to share the video with all your musician friends like the video share the video subscribe to our channel if you haven't already turn on the notification thing for more updates and I will catch you guys in the next lesson cheers