 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel's School of Music. In this lesson, I've put together sort of like the levels of songwriting with chords. And if you are an upcoming piano player or an aspiring songwriter or if you've been doing something in the business for a while, do consider watching the video till the very end where each of these levels as I'm calling it may not actually be actual skill levels but I'm just looking at it as ways you can grow your chord vocabulary. So each of these levels are supplemented by my handwritten notes. So you could consider getting that on our Patreon page that'll also help support the channel greatly. So do consider heading over to Patreon.com and there'll be a lot of lessons on our channel for the for you first time viewers who've just stumbled on this lesson. So do consider hitting that subscribe button and hitting the bell icon for regular notifications. If you like our channel, if you do that, you will not miss any of our content, right guys? So let's get cracking with the lesson. So I'm going to take the simple chord progression in the key of C major and that brings me to level one, level one would be just use diatonic chord. So it's a simple concept where you take the scale of interest right now I'm taking C major. OK, so in the C major scale, you have the one chord, the two minor, the three minor, the four major F major, the five major or dominant if you want to add that, then you have the A minor, which is your six minor B diminished and that's pretty much it. So the first way of using chords while composing a song is to take just diatonic triads or diatonic harmony and build progression. So you can then tell yourself I want to do one, six, maybe four, five or one, two, four, five. And what you're going to guarantee is all of these will work well together because they are all part of the scale. So you need to remember a chart in the major scale one, four, five will be major chords, two, three, six degrees will all form minor chords because of the intervals they form. If you start with D, it will be a minor chord because your intervals are the ingredients which form the minor chord, namely the minor thirds between the first two notes. And with a major chord, it's the major third between them. And with a diminished chord, you have that tritone, which is a bit tense. So that's why each of these chords have a different vibe. So it's important to know, okay, my major chords are one, four, five. My minor chords are two, three, six. My lone diminished chord, if ever I use it, which is rare in a pop song will be the seventh degree. So we've got a list of diatonic chords. Even when you build chord progressions, you could pull them out of a hat by, you know, just randomizing them. That's one way. But you could also look at maybe you have a tune in your mind, which you already came up with. And then you try and figure out a set of chords. So check another one. Or you see a lot of them, all of them seem to work, but you need to see what you like and what doesn't clash or what makes the melodies pop out best or give you the emotion you want. So I'm choosing C major for now. Also, when I land on some notes like a C, I can find a chord which kind of has that C in it. So then it'll be very stable or you can find a chord which doesn't have the C in it. That'll form, that'll make it more interesting. See, E tends to sound a bit wrong, E minor at least, because there's no note which has that C landing note. But you can stay on C, but that's boring because you started with C, so F works. I'm going with A minor, I kind of like that and that's D minor because of F and you have a G there. So I'm playing this on the piano and also singing the melody with my voice to give you an idea that this is not necessarily a lesson where you have to always sing it. If you're a musician, composer who just plays instrumental music, I think the concepts are very similar, but the vibe of each instrument, the tonality of everyone's voice, the texture of everything you work with will also inspire your melody and the chord choices and a lot of things. So I'm going to leave it at that. The first level of composing harmony will be with diatonic chords and with diatonic chords you need to realize that some will work really well with the tune, so you have to consider the tune or you could look at diatonic chords using popular chord progressions for a start. You can watch my video which we'll put in the description where I've looked at 15 super popular chord progressions, probably the ones you've heard most commonly, so you could watch that, we've put it in the description and this is how you just use diatonic stuff, things from within the scale, within the major scale and you make some music. Now let's move on to a couple of levels. Before you actually go beyond, beyond maybe the diatonic realm, beyond the scale, you could consider bigger chords, so if you take let's say a C major chord, you can retain the mood of it kind of, but add a note or two, maybe you could go, you could add a D, so it just makes it more sophisticated. So we call this as an add chord, it just somehow feels like if you're playing it with add chords, you're not playing something which every regular composer plays, it just feels a bit different. So you're adding either a two we can add, you can even add a four, that's you're adding the four from C, the interval or you can even add a six, that's your add six or you could add seven, we don't say add seven as a chord, we say just seventh chord, so you can do like a C major seventh, you can do a D minor seventh, these are all the diatonic seventh chords, so E minor seventh, F major seventh, G dominant seventh, A minor seventh and then B minor seventh flat five, because it has a flat five there, a minor seventh up there, a minor third and that's the flat five, so that's how we name our chords and yeah these are all your extensions or added notes if you will, you can even add more, so I'd suggest you watch some of our other videos as well, we've even done an add chord versus suspended chord comparison, you could check that out in the description, that would be very helpful. Seventh chords or seventh chords is another nice way to take your journey forward as a songwriter, it'll give you more notes also to play around with like, because I'm playing an F add two, that G is inspiring my melody, so you could actually look at a scenario where you compose the chords first, because of that sus four there, and that's my tune, nine or an add two, add six, add sharp four, but it's still diatonic, it's a minor sixth, major seventh, that's an add nine, sharp four, that was both a flat seven, add sus four, add four, okay, so it gives you a bigger, even though you just have seven notes in a scale, the concept of add chords or sus chords or extensions gives you a kind of a different tool kit, even though it's still the same tools, come to think of it, it just feels like you have a lot more to work with, with these same old seven notes which C major has to offer, we didn't go out of scale, we're still in the scale, so let's now move forward to another thing which I think as a songwriter you'll benefit, the idea of slash chords, now slash chords are an incredible tool which is not talked about that often in the field of music, especially in theory books, but if you think about it, slash chords will completely change the vibe of a major or a minor chord, so if you're working with a diatonic system, if you take C major chord and if you play C in the bottom, it's a C major chord, it has a C major vibe, but if you slash this, slashing basically means chords with a different bass or a different root, if you want to call it that, so if you take the other available chords of the C major scale, C major chord, you'll see that there's E, so if I play E with the C major chord in the right hand, wait for it, it's gonna move from something very stable to something very different, it's almost like it's wanting to go somewhere and now it feels like F is the stable chord and C major which used to be stable is no longer stable, it's like, because it has an E bass which wants to go to F, then if you take, let's say, C over G, that's the other note, C slash G, this seems to want to go to G major, doesn't it, so C slash G wants to go to G and then because G is the dominant chord eventually wants to come back to home which is C major, that's really weird, so you have this progression which is F major, nice chord progression you can build just with the C major slash chords and where they would want to naturally go, so C slash E, F major, C slash G, G major and back to C major, okay, so that's slash chords in a nutshell, now you can even go beyond the diatonic world, you can go out of scale and that's where we are going to analyze our future levels of songwriting, so let's now move forward, now before we move forward, it's exciting to know that you don't have to just play slash chords with the same triad notes, you can play like, let's say you can play an F major with a G bass, this can make it very sophisticated, so this is just F major, just doing its thing F major but you play the same F major in the right hand and then you play G bass in the left, it's a very different sound, that also seems to want to go to C, so slash chords definitely up the game as a chord composer, so let's now try and leave the diatonic realm and look at other possibilities as a songwriter writing chords, let's see how far we can take this concept, so the next level of songwriting would be to basically borrow chords from parallel scales, so if you take the C major scale, you know all the chords, we've been using them in this video, now if you borrow chords from a parallel scale, you have different parallel scales, you can say parallel minor, parallel Dorian, so what does a parallel thing mean, in a nutshell it's the same root but you have a different set of chords because the parallel scale will not be majored, it has to be different, same root different scale, so if you borrow from maybe C minor or C Aeolian, you'll realize you have E flat, A flat and B flat, the new note, so you can automatically harmonize the scale, you'll realize you have a six flat major, you have a seven flat major, you have a three flat major, you have a two diminished which you never had in the C major scale, and the four minor and the five minor, four minor, five minor, so how can we use this as a songwriter who's just made something on C major, you want to add some more spice, so let's look at what the borrowed chords have to offer, you can make a chart, the major and the minor chart under that and you will have a good idea of what you can borrow, now that you know that you're still in the key of C but you're changing your scale to be C minor or C parallel minor in this case, so you could do that F minor going to C, that's a very what we call the minor plagal cadence, so it's like at the end of a chord progression like you could let your singer do his or her thing, so that's borrowed from the natural minor or it was very elaborate, I chose a lot of chords from the minor but if you do this in context, just like squeezing in that E flat at the chorus to make it more heavier or more braver sounding, so if you want to borrow that E flat, you can do it now you know in context with that E flat major chord being played, only at that one point are you allowed to change your melody, otherwise it's going to be very weird, you'll be singing an E and playing an E flat chord, so whenever you're borrowing it comes with a little bit of responsibility, you need to know those notes and sing your melody on those notes or if you sang something which sounded a bit weird or out of context, don't think it's out of context, for all you know it may just be a borrowed chord which you had in your subconscious mind, you know you never know how the mind will work, maybe you heard a song or two or maybe you heard an album which had a lot of interesting chords yesterday and in your mind you're singing something very inspired from that album which I do very often and then you need to match chords, so either you need to get chords with your melody which you you prepared or vice versa, the chords are there first then the melody comes in, so that's the conundrum a songwriter generally faced with, you don't know whether to start with the tune or whether to start with the chord progression or maybe even the lyrics as well, so I don't look at that as a conundrum, I would just say start with what comes organically or naturally first, be it the chords, be it the melody, be it the rhythm, maybe a groove can inspire everything, maybe the lyrics can inspire you to make the song, so let it flow, there's no hard and fast rule or order of business to write a hit song or any song for that matter, so hopefully this discussion is getting you to see that you either can do melody or you can do harmony, it depends, so with the borrowed chord concept you are primarily on major, all the major chords then you borrow, that's sounded very different I'm sure for your year, so that's a borrowed from minor which is the 6th flat minor, so that's 6th flat, 7th flat, C major, so many people have done or you can do can do 3 flat, 4, 5, now do you have to borrow only from the minor, no that'll be a bit boring, you can borrow from maybe the mixolydian scale as well which is just the same as major except the 7th flat, that's major 7th, that's the mixolydian so, so you need to know the chords of that respective mode, so C mixolydian will give you that B flat major, F major which both major and mixo had, C major which both the major and the mixolydian scale had, so you have that one exciting chord maybe in the chorus, so if your verse is like gives you a vibe for a new section and that's a new melody okay, you can borrow from anything, you can even borrow from a lydian scale so which is F sharp makes it lydian versus F which major had, so lydian has F sharp, so so F sharp makes it very interesting, so more on borrowed chords most definitely in an upcoming video so do stay tuned to our channel, let's now move forward to more ways in which you can create some very interesting chord progressions as a songwriter, we've slowly gone out of the diatonic scale with borrowed chords, now we are going to look at a very simple age old classical concept called as secondary dominant or secondary chords, so secondary chord is basically a tool where you just say I'm playing a chord, now let's say this is my first chord C major and my third chord is A minor, so that gets me to question what should be the second chord, so the way I looked at least as a younger composer when I looked at the concept of second re-dominant chords, I never knew what it was called of course, I just looked at it as that kind of thing I would do in a song, so I would do it this way, I'll take the first chord as C major let's say, the third chord is A minor, you may think this is the second but in my mind thinking I have to put a second chord as well, so I play C major, something, A minor, okay, so the question now is what is that second chord, now more songwriters will play the second chord based on the melody maybe, maybe the melody had some note which sparked that second chord or maybe the second chord was related to the previous chord or the first chord but in this study I'm here to encourage you to play the second chord based on the third chord, based on the next chord, so you do C major, forget about C major, now you're targeting A minor, so good way to kind of create a red carpet if you will for A minor to like present it as you know the important person of the pack is to play a chord which is its perfect fifth apart, play a major chord or a dominant seventh chord more particularly which is a fifth of the target, so what is the target now A, what is its fifth E, so you would play an E major or E seventh, we call this as a secondary chord because it's out of the C major realm and that takes you to an A minor, so it works in that sort of a scenario so you are allowed to kind of sing that make it a bit more bluesy or a bit more ballad, rock ballad like or maybe you had a song which was very pop-ish very run-of-the-mill but with the secondary and now combine it with the borrowed at the end, so you can combine secondaries and borrowed to write some incredible chord progressions which you know if you're an old school music lover, if you've listened to the Beatles they've done it all, if you listen to music from the 80s, the power ballads they've done it all, if you've looked at classical music by Bach and Beethoven and Mozart they've also done it all, it's just that a video like this may be exciting for for a modern-day perspective, if you're writing music in 2023 which is the year of making this video for a modern-day audience who hasn't heard of all that other who haven't heard of all that amazing stuff in the past, you're kind of giving them the future because they don't know what there was earlier or what the Beatles did or a better way to look at it would be to encourage them by writing these chord progressions to appreciate music from the earlier the great generations of the past, so the way I look at it is even though I'm ranting right now would be music doesn't necessarily evolve, it doesn't get better and better and better according to me, it just kind of goes through cycles or spirals if you think about it because it's kind of rehashing itself, it's rehashing old content going back into the future, so I think this tends to happen with not only music pretty much all forms of art in general, so just keep that in mind, lot of these concepts are very age-old concepts but we try to bring them into the forefront and thrive in a generation which has something which you know is getting rather boring come to think of it, diatonic chord progressions is getting rather boring, so I hope you're also realizing that this takes a fair amount of theory, so you need to write stuff down and lot of the relevant videos which can augment this lesson are found in the description, we have covered a lot on secondary dominant chords where I've used some nice popular song examples to kind of mess around with it a bit and also reharmonize it, that's also a word which is used a lot in music, so that was about secondary chords, it's a fifth of the target chord where you're thinking what chord do I play based on the next chord, not necessarily the previous chord or the current melody context, okay, the last thing I have for you is where you can kind of add chords to a progression, so if you have let's say, let's say these chords were spaced a bit farther apart, four times each chord, now you kind of feel the boredom right, setting in because four beats of that same chord, not too bad but getting a bit boring, so you can try and figure out a way to add chords in between, so one technique I've already told you for secondary chords is find the fifth or a variation of that, so because you have that time between the chords, you can make more chords inside the chord progression, so one tool is just bring in the five of the target, you know five of the C major, what's my target A minor, so what's going to come in between, the five of A which is E, seventh and then A minor, now I want to go to F, so what's preceding F, C right because C is the perfect fifth of the F, F, D which is the five of G, D and then G comes back to C, okay, you can also precede the five by a two of the target, so you can do instead of doing only the E seventh going to A minor, I'm doing I'm doing two chords before that A minor land which is C, B, E, A which is in the circle of fifths the neighbors, B, E, A but depending on the vibe you can make the two either major, minor, diminished, you can make the five also well generally major but in some cases it could also be minor, so you can make some very sophisticated chord progressions using known chords, they're not fancy jazz chords, they're just normal triads and one or two extensions of sevenths here and there I guess, so now my target is F, you can do a two of F which is G minor, the five of F which is my target which is C and then go to F, so so these additional chords give you more options when you're writing a melody especially when you're doing it as a songwriter would which is like a chicken and egg scenario, you don't know what's going on first, there's almost like parallely chords and melodies are projecting forward and you have to just catch the bus so to speak because time is also crucial as a writer, you don't want to brood over what you make, you like to kind of my advice would be just to go with the flow, see where it takes you and you get to a product which you get that internal gut feeling as we say that the product is really good but it's always good to sit on it the next day and refine it no doubt but the feeling you get when you've achieved something and it just has a vibe which appeals to you is very important, so I'd rather not stop it or question yourself while you do all these things, you need to make it get it out there and if it sucks the next day or if you just don't like it so what you can try again, so that's the advantage of writing music, there's no win or lose, it's just a matter of making stuff which either you like or you dislike at the time and maybe the stuff you dislike you will like in the future, so don't lose your compositions, another advice I would have is to record this, record the journey, record the conclusion always and back it up, back up your recordings, we tend to lose hard drives a lot these days so you don't want to write things in books you know because you may lose the book also, so record things back it up respect your work that's the most important if you want to make music you have to respect your work whatever you do right guys thanks a ton for watching the lesson will have a lot of supplementary notes on patreon do consider getting yourselves a copy and we have a lot of exciting stuff which happens in in-person lessons at our school which I also conduct as a faculty you have lessons like music factory where we go deep dives into a lot of songwriters and your favorite artists which you can also vote for in class so do consider a regular six months semester at Nathaniel where you can customize it in a way which suits your learning level your learning needs and also your schedule your time schedule and there are also video courses a lot of ways to learn at our school it's not just a youtube channel we are actually supported or backed primarily by Nathaniel school of music which has regular courses for children for adults for seasoned musicians of all ages and we do it virtually as well as in person in our city of Bangalore hope you can meet us soon cheers catch you in the next one