 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, I thought of doing something interesting At least I hope it'll be interesting for you. It's to take Arguably the most boring chord progression humankind has ever used and seen this one You've all heard it one five six four so in the key of C C major G major a minor F and you know those four Chords as they all call it there are enough and more videos of people performing thousands of songs using them and so on So in this video, I'm not going to teach you that of course. I'm going to teach you how to make that Sound interesting. So in other words for this entire lesson, we are not going to leave those four chords We are going to keep them. We'll deal with them and make them sound, you know a million times better I can guarantee you by the end of this lesson your you may even like one five six four I still don't I have my problems with it still But you I'm sure you will like it at least for a short while if you hate it Or if you like it already, you will love it by the end of this lesson So do make sure to watch the lesson till the very end There are also notes which will help supplement your learning that can be accessed on our patreon page You can head over the link is in the description and Let's get cracking So the one five six four one five six Four just goes on and on and on right So first way which I found to make the chord progression very interesting is each of the chords Could be embellished with their respective plagal cadences So what I mean by that is you do C and you tell yourself. What is the four from C and the answer is F? It's a very gospel sound and it's the plagal cadence. It is the arm and cadence as we call it. So You do the same thing with G where do we go there G? C major And you peddle the G in the base that means you don't change the G similarly for C you do C F over C Come back to see then for G you do G C over G Back to G and then you go to a D a D minor you need because it's a minor chord and you need to stay within the key of C major which is the white note so So I think this sounds a lot more refreshing we don't hear songs which use this sort of a movement You know with these plagal cadence add-ons But it really transform and people may not even know that it's a one five six four running, you know, but it is Right, so the next strategy to make the rather boring one five six four chord progression a lot more exciting Would be to add what I call as passing base notes or I think they call it line cliches where You kind of connect from chord to chord. Let's say you do C G now this is your chord sequence So instead of just going C major To G major you can do C Can do G over B Can do You can pretty much kind of play an A minor and then go to G So instead of doing C G you can go Okay, and then to go to a minor you can go And do like a passing chord there It's also called a second redominant Five of the six minor E seventh going to A minor and then you go F major so you're trying to go via a chord via passing chords you do And then a minor and F major. Let's do that again G major That's the E seventh going to a minor Now to go to F I can go a minor C over G Or I could do a minor C over E base right, so the third way to make the Boring one five six four more interesting would be to add a cadence Which is like a set of chords and the type of cadence I'm calling it as the epic cadence, which I think works a lot for music and Sometimes I am guilty of overdoing it But I think it's fine to do it in a case like a one five six four Which is a rather boring chord progression. So if you do C G A minor What did I do there? I didn't play the F at the end, which is the traditional ending. I did C G A minor A flat which is the sixth flat major a flat B flat C This can influence the melody You can kind of make a tune on that cadence. So it's not just a random chord replacement It can be like a very inspiring tool for the melody B flat C You could also do the same cadence going to the a minor chord. So I also made the chord progressions a lot wider or longer so that you can hear the cadences and the chord changes better Let's do it again That's that epic cadence B flat C I think that sounds quite interesting or quite refreshing at least with With the one five six four moving on to the next strategy So to make the one five six four really radically different or drastically different I would suggest using secondary dominance You could kind of go for the overkill and use it before every chord But you can then start with every chord and then see where you'd actually like to Squeeze in the flavor of the secondary dominant the secondary dominant is nothing but a five chord before every Landing chord or a seventh chord a dominant seventh chord which leads to each of the major and the minor chords You want it to go to so if you take C major Prior to going to G you ask yourself. What is the five of G? The answer is D. So you go C D Seventh G major Now you want to go to a minor. What is the five of eight? Perfect five of AZ So you do a seventh going to a minor Now I want to go to F. So what's the dominant chord of F? C so you do C seventh Okay, so the secondary dominance kind of make each chord like its own Each of the chords of the one five six four as their own landings You know as opposed to earlier when you didn't have them you didn't really care about the chords in general So it makes the landing chords a lot more defined have and definitely give them a lot more character, right? So let's do that one Five now before the five I want to do the dominance so you can see the chart where we've written the dominance there So you go one Secondary dominant going to G major You've kind of hidden away that one five six four nature, let's do it a bit quicker So you go So it's actually one five six four but with those in between chords You don't have to use it all the time maybe Just there before the a minor So you could do it before that for so I gave you the overkill approach before which is a secondary before every chord But yeah, once you learn them you can use them depending on your requirement or the flavor You are trying to bring to the song right guys. So with this one five six four boring chord progression What you could do to make it really really interesting like all the methods we've done so far, right? This is yet another one of them This is what is used by a lot of the jazz musicians and in jazz songs in the jazz standards where What happens is you take a chord Like C major or a G major or an a minor and an F major and you ask yourself What will be the five of this card? Well, that will be More like a secondary dominant right or a primary dominant, which is the five going to one You can expand it further by then asking. What is the two of that five? So what you're doing here is you're doing the five and then five in the one Right or preceding the one with the five and then preceding the five with the two So in other words inevitably every chord will have two cards before it earlier with dominant resolution or secondary Dominance every chord had one chord before it which is C D going to G E going to a C seventh going to F. Now. What I'm proposing is you do your C and Before going to the G You ask yourself in the key of G major. What is the two five one? Okay, off G the answer will be a minor D dominant G a minor a D G So what if we squeeze that via the or through the journey of going from C major to G Now you want to do a minor so you ask yourself What is doing the five and then fiving the one from a minor? What is the two five one in other words? I'll be be minor or be minor seventh E or E seventh and then a minor So I would really go with that something to go to the a minor would sound quite colorful. So you go Now you're going to F So what did I do for F? I did the two of F G minor seventh See being the five of the F and then Back to the F. So if I put this together, of course, it'll be an overkill initially But then you decide I want to do that two five one embellishment Just for the third chord or just for the second chord and you have to take the call I mean you are the person who's going to use this, right? So you go A minor So let's see let's try and add it in a kind of a tentative or a here and there way. So see Minor I like it there before the a minor. Let's stretch the chords a bit C major C major G Going to a minor so you could make it a bit faster You can do this with pretty much any song you don't have to just do it with a one five six four You can do it with anything and there's so many arrangements We find of timeless classics like even nursery rhymes or Christmas songs, which people keep arranging with these sort of Technologies so secondary dominance and the next kind of obvious flow was the two five one or two in the five And then fiving the one between the chords, of course So this whole lesson we've just retained the one five six four, right now for a bonus before we conclude I just like to Consider the fact or consider a scenario where we are not allowed to add any more chords We are supposed to keep one five six four Earlier we had a lot of things we did the plagal thing we did the line cliche the passing base We did the epic cadence which was clearly epic then the secondary dominance and just now we finished off with the two five one Embellishment, but what if you couldn't do any of that you couldn't do any chord other than this this this Okay, so now You have to voice these chords differently. What do I mean by that instead of playing C major as CEG? To find another way of playing it so a quick suggestion would be keep the base notes going Same one five six four base, but in the right hand what you could do is just hold a steady chord You could hold like a fifth chord CGC or GCG In progression So the chords are voiced very differently. So it creates a very pleasing sound for some reason, right? So voicing with fifths Be very helpful. The other thing is you could do and take the triad and kind of extend it by adding instead of just doing CG you could do And add a C major 7th or And a C major 6th, okay, and then G 7th a-7th a F major 7, so Really nice another thing you could do which I find useful Is instead of playing C major always as a triad like that with those inversions and maybe play them in a spread fashion Spread meaning you take the E in the middle and move it to the top so These are what we call using tense or spread thirds There we go, that's your spread cause I keep trying to tell myself don't overplay it It could be some song and then this video may get taken down by the copyright police so Yeah, but you get the idea so we can use a fifth chord the Extensions we can use spread chords and another thing which I do very often is is I love my ad Cords and my suspended chords So if I take the same old chord progression C G a minor F You can kind of add notes to each chord and the best notes to add are your twos Which is D? Which is a with respect to G? If a minor you add the B if you add the G so that's all your add twos That's that emotion to the chord so you can do even a for that Suspend it That's like an a minor with a two and a four Oh Adding so whatever we learn so far taking the same cause without adding any more chords to the party You do with voicing fifth voicing at the upper extensions like the Seventh chords ninth chords, you know 11th chords and Whatever else to make it more jazzy Yeah, you can do a lot of things to really make a one five six four chord progression Actually quite useful if you think about and not sounding overdone or overused right now I didn't take the one five six four to kind of diss it or make fun of it I myself have used it before but it's just something we hear pretty much all the time in a lot of music So maybe as an upcoming composer you kind of find a need to use it and Hopefully in this lesson it's giving you some unique ways of bringing it way more into the forefront You know for the listener and also make it very unique and more refreshing and fresh for the listeners here to hear Right guys. Hope you found the lesson useful This is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music and all our lessons can be found on our YouTube channel So we'll be doing quite a few more We've been doing a lot of videos and we do not want to stop for sure So do consider subscribing to the channel hit the bell Give the video a like that really helps the video work well with the YouTube algorithm Leave us a comment with something you'd like to learn and consider following us on patreon And if you'd like to learn a course or attend any of my workshops the links are in the description Cheers. See you in the next one