 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel in this lesson We are going to explore what is called as the plagal cadence in music Which is a very important to chord movement Which has been done by pretty much all musicians from the classical period to today Sometimes when you're building a chord progression, you can't finish the whole chord progression You want to start with a couple of chords and then build it like building blocks, right? So in order to compose a chord progression, one needs to learn these cadences or smaller movements So in this lesson, we are going to look at what is called as the plagal cadence Okay, and plagal means four going to one. Okay, that's what you need to remember four going to one So if I take the key of C major C major's fourth is F. Isn't it? C D E F So to create a plagal movement, what you do is you play F and Then go down to C. Okay into a lower F Going to C very commonly used in fact even in church music We call this as the amen cadence, which is usually found at the end of every hymn. Isn't it? And the song is over or the hymn is over right in pop music and in these rock epic rock Ballads what they end up doing is they may do four Four minor and end with one that creates a little bit more emotion, right? Okay, this is the normal plagal again F C Okay, with the minor movement F major F minor And end on C major, okay Very commonly used in a lot of pop rock music, so I'm gonna give you a lot of approaches which I found Make this plagal cadence work for a lot of chord progressions The first approach is where you already have a chord progression, right? If you have a chord progression like let's say one four or five running In a in a song what you could do is you could spice up each one of these chords with the plagal cadence Right, so if the chord is going on for very very long, you can use the plagal cadence in this way Okay, so it's sort of still a C major chord It's still C in the bass, but you're making C major more interesting, right? Or the C major is becoming more like a journey as opposed to a Just a block of C major, right? So C major This works really well It takes it to a little bit of a tense state and then you come back down and observe that I'm not changing my left hand So it's forming sort of what we call a slash chord. Okay That's your slash. So how do we call this F major slash C? C in the bass F major in the right. We've done a lot of videos on slash chords So do check them out in the description, okay C major Okay, so you could keep going. So let's say you have a bunch of major chords in your chord progression So to spice up C Play an F major You could also make that movement as part of the melody If you like the minor plagal Now Now go to F That's your next chord in the chord progression And you slash it F What is the plagal cadence from this F chord B flat? Going to F right B flat is F's perfect forth. These are all perfect fourth intervals You don't want to play a tritone by mistake That's a tritone. So F B flat to embellish it and come back to F Right, so let's do C Plagals now go to F B flat F's plagal back to F Maybe go back to C Now go to F and now go to G Back to C and I like also toggling sometimes I may do a major plagal Going to C sometimes I may do a minor Going to C so there are a lot of opportunities you have actually when you're using the plagal cadence and in this case You're not destroying or changing or tampering with your existing chord progression. Your chords are C F G in some order, right? So any time you play C, you're just spicing it up It's pretty much it And you go to F spice it with B flat B flat minor if you want back to it And it'll inspire your melody definitely, okay, I'm just gonna jam with it a little bit Back to C Long C major A lot of songwriters who play the piano who you know find this technique useful and I guess why I sort of got attached to this is it's actually quite easy come to think of it because if you have to go to F major You have to change your left hand But if you use F major as a passing chord your left hand Can just be C so I've heard a lot of great artists doing this and I think you should as well listen to Elton John for sure and Billy Joel These artists I think use this technique a lot and also if you do do this with maybe church music or hymns or gospel music You know you can squeeze in this plagal cadence pretty much everywhere like You can squeeze in this plagal cadence pretty much everywhere like amazing grace how sweet the sound Right Like me Works quite well In fact you could start the chord itself with the slash chord or the plagal chord Amazing grace how sweet the sound Fits like me And so on and so forth so that's pretty much the bare-bones structure of the plagal cadence it's essentially a four going to one And in certain music especially if you're a fan of bands like Queen or maybe Radiohead you'll find that they do You'll have that four major going to four minor and then pulling itself to one major So all these opportunities exist with the plagal cadence So a great way to kind of learn this plagal cadence is actually write down the circle of fifths And you move clockwise to the clockwise neighbor for example F is just before C or is the neighbor of C So all you have to do to create a plagal cadence is do F going to C and you can stare at the circle So even if you have something a bit tricky which you may not have encountered like maybe what about E flat You ask yourself the question what is E flat's fourth that's A flat So the plagal journey will be clockwise from A flat to E flat What about D flat? D flat's fourth is F sharp And you can even create a nice plagal journey You really don't know where you're going right so it's quite interesting it'll really I hope it can really inspire you to take your chord progressions to the next level Or maybe hopefully develop a new approach towards building chord progressions Which in this case need not really be built diatonically You're not really building it from the major scale with those stringent rules you know You're trying to just look at the circle of fifths and do stuff from there So in the next part we're going to look at the plagal cadence in what we call as the mixolydian mode Which is a very commonly used scale for rock music, ballads, the Beatles use it as well And I may even bring out a Beatles song in the next lesson So practice this hard and head over to the next video right now And if you haven't already turn on the bell, subscribe, give us a like, share the video Cheers