 Hi everyone so welcome to this next part of our minor chord progression series where we just trying to look at how to build some really nice chord progressions using pretty much functional harmony. We looked at the predominant chord, the dominant chord and the tonic chord in a very simple chord progression G minor, A major and then D minor played for a little bit longer and we've looked at how to color the predominant, we've looked at how to color the dominant to get various other possibilities and now last but not least we have to look at coloring up the tonic. So rather than just look at some of the jazzy options out there, I thought of also looking at how you can build some more hopeful progressions because minor is not just sad, there can also be hope and also how to create a better looping property, how to make the listener go on a very positive perspective, amidst maybe the gloom of the minor vibe which are anyways giving them, how do you make it a bit more hopeful and also how do we leave the listener maybe a bit more hanging in the balance if you will and that hanging in the balance is also where your vocalist or your soloist or you could go crazy so I'm going to give you like this hanging in the balance tonic chord so basically that last chord D minor, if you think about it lasts a bit longer, so A, D minor and you play D minor a bit longer always generally in most of the chord progressions. So that tonic chord being longer in duration, we can do a lot more things to it apart from just perhaps color it, but let's just start with the color shall we, so you're ending with D minor, the first thing you can do is make it a bit more mystical or a bit more James Bondish if you will, what is that chord that's a D minor with a major 7th on top, quite like to roll that, you can combine that with even the major 6th, okay so what happened there that's the melody I'm basically going with throughout the series, so you just add that C sharp, C sharp is the major 7th of D on its own, funnily enough it sounds really weird and possibly wrong, right, but when you bring in the minor chord into the party, sounds beautiful, this sounds like a very mystical vibe going on at the moment right, I like to roll that a bit if you can you can arpeggiate it, tonic now okay so other options you have with the tonic is just the usual jazz coloring of the chord by adding the colors or the tension notes, namely the 7th, the 9th, the 11th and maybe even the 13th, let's look at that as well, so you have your vanilla D minor chord, so you can first color it up by minor 7th, I know earlier we looked at minor major 7th, but that's what I usually like to do, right, but now you can even end it with a normal traditional minor 7th chord, this sounds normal right, you can even resolve that back down to minor 6th or just do that like a cliche down minor 7th, minor 6th chord, normal minor, let's do that so instead of sticking on to that minor 7th, you know, you can even do that and then resolve it back, right, so that'll work really nice, you can even make it even more colorful sounds a bit too jazzy, you know, for my taste because I don't play too much of that kind of music, sounds a little bit beautiful and romantic which may not be the sound, at least not the sound I am trying to go for in this composition, but it sounds really beautiful, okay, so essentially D minor 7th, D minor 7th, with the 9th, D minor 9th, you can even add the 11th which is 2, that's D to G, C minor 7 and now normal D minor, okay, so D minor 7th, I still like the minor major 7th for some reason, so another nice way to use this minor chord progression is to kind of make it a little longer and by doing that I get the feeling that it can also emote something more hopeful, okay, I'll just play you and then show you what I'm doing, okay, so that sounds pretty much sad and, you know, gloomy, but if I do it this way, okay, there's a little bit of hope there, right, I've kind of extinguished the hope, so it's a nice emotion to kind of build your story around, right, so what did I do there, instead of resolving it from G minor, A major to D minor which is what we've been doing throughout this lesson series, you're kind of evading the D minor a little bit or deceiving it, also what they call as deceptive cadence at times, so it kind of elevates the sound, that's B flat major, right, G minor, you could use that in a loop, what I like about this chord, reason why it also sounds very hopeful, it also feels very Lydian, it can emote or it can yield the Lydian mode which a guitar player or a soloist could improvise over, right, very positive and very kind of hopeful if you ask me, you can even play the chord like this, root third and sharp four, giving you that Lydian vibe, what is a Lydian scale, in short a Lydian scale is a major scale with a sharp four, okay, it works really great, come back to D minor because B flat may be a great chord but it doesn't feel like home, unfortunately in a minor chord progression at least the one we are trying to build, unfortunately all hope gets lost, you know, where you end on the D minor or you succumb to a certain thought, okay, so another thing you can do to make the tonic minor, the last chord a bit more interesting is to create some climbing effects, right, so I'm going to show you a couple of options now and the only reason why we consider the climb is because the tonic chord or the tonic minor lasts for a good amount of time, right, so he's just sticking there, so naturally your singer when they just hear that you're probably just going to finish your sentence and not do much but what if you do something like this, so what is happening here, you feel a climb, right, if I sing the bass notes, so what happened in the bass there, D, E, F, F sharp, G minor, G of the G minor which is anyway the starting chord of the chord progression which is G, A, D, so E, F, F sharp and back to the G minor and that creates a great loop with that climbing thing at the end which is breaking the monotony if you ask me of the sound of the chord progression, so what happened there, I'm playing D minor as I should because that is the minor tonic, D minor, C with E bass which has the property because it's a secondary dominant chord of F major, I've landed on F major here but F major is not the true landing point which I need to land on because it should be G minor which is the predominant, right, so I need another chord which is D over F sharp which takes me beautifully and safely to G minor, so it almost feels as though that G minor is now a home you know because there's so much of instability which happened before that so it's great for looping your chord and pushing your vocalist or your soloist to kind of think of new ideas while they are improvising, right, so so jam a bit so feels a bit gospel if you ask me they do this a lot with hymns so you could do that kind of climbing thing which is great because a tonic lasts you know long enough, the last thing I'd like to do to kind of color the tonic in this lesson would be to kind of give a more open-ended or a little bit of a weird or a question mark kind of conclusion where you don't know what's coming next whether the chord progression will loop or whether it's just like the end you know so let's see how it works this is what I call as the fall because the bass notes are going to drop I'll play you again at the tonic you know or C sharp C right so it just creates a what do I do next what's going to happen no one has a clue right and then we have the clue it resolves back to the minor tonic okay so what happened there at the tonic point when you land at D minor no D over C you can either end at the B there so that creates like a B minor 7 flat 5 shape you could even add more tension by going a chromatic down and now your vocalist can go crazy in that point you know and then the end okay so what happened there or hanging in the balance now the song is actually over so that was how you colored up the tonic okay you have a lot of options there so we've looked at coloring up the predominant we've looked at coloring up the dominant and of course the tonic so ideally the lesson series is over if we were to just look at minor as sad and brand it with something mournful or you know a bit more gloomy but I'd like to end this entire lesson with a more brave or an epic approach to make these minor chords or minor progressions actually give you a brave sound or a epic sound and we use this word epic a lot right for some strange reason sometimes I don't even know what it means but anyway in the next part which is the final part of our lesson series we're going to look at how to build brave and epic chord progressions which have actually a minor tonality to them so head over to the next part before that perhaps practice all this stuff as best as possible head over to the next part don't forget to like share comment on this video and there are there's my entire booklet which I've put out for you which you could download on our Patreon page that will also help our channel and give us a lot of support and I will see you in the next part come over there and let's get some brave and epic stuff going on