 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm going to do like a combo practice video on how you can work on your chords and how you can work on your intervals pretty much at the same time. Now, you can train your ear, but foremost you're going to train your theory and obviously you're also going to train your execution on the piano, the ability to actually play this stuff convincingly well. So all of the three skills to put them all together and learn chords and intervals together, this requires a couple of things. You need to definitely pull out a book, pen, paper or whatever pencil, get your keyboards out or guitar. You can do this lesson on a guitar as well or a bass or banjo and most importantly, try to follow through the lesson, look at our lesson chapters and go through till the end. I don't want you to miss a thing and if you already know your triads major and minor, if you're okay playing them, even if you don't know all the inversions, this video will be fine for you. You need to kind of know your just your triads major and minor and a couple of other things like the circle of fifths could also help you. And whenever in doubt, whenever you have an issue with some of the topics, you have two options really go back to our YouTube channel, go to our channel homepage browse through type things like circle of fifths, type some of the topics which I've been talking about. There are a lot of basic beginner versions of these topics. You'll also find it on our website in two ways. It's filtered very well under our free lessons category and it is also available. All these topics are available as structured courses, video courses or live in person lessons with people like me at the Nathaniel school. So consider any of this stuff. There's also a Patreon which will help you supplement your learning with all my personally handwritten notes. Let's get cracking with the lesson. I'm not going to give you specific melodies or riffs which I sometimes do. I'm going to leave it a bit open in this lesson. So let's look at the most popular interval in music. Well, it's not the unison in the octave even though those are easy unison octave. We are going to skip by and do the fifths. The fifths are very, very strong intervals. You need to know their movement and the first thing I'd encourage you to do to link up your interval of the fifth with the chords is the circle of fifths which is essentially perfect fifths in a circle. Now, if you count in this direction, you're going to get C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F C. I hope I didn't forget anything but anyway. If you count in the other direction, you're going to get C, F, B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat, also known as C sharp, then you get G flat, also known as F sharp, B, E, A, D, G, C. Again, I hope I've not forgotten anything. So you need the circle of fifths or write it down, check out the chart which I have for you which will help you. You count in the counter clock direction, you're going to get perfect fourths. You count in the clock direction, you're going to get perfect fifths. So take major chords, start with major chords, start with C major and go in the merry-go-round which is the circle of fifths. You either move in the clock with the clock or you move against the clock and the circle of fifths is so nice when you visualize stuff because it's 12 notes, same number of notes as a clock. So you can really say things like let's move two o'clock away or let's move three o'clock away, this look to three or whatever. So the circle of fifths is a great tool to practice your intervals with the chords and that's what this whole lesson is about. It's about working on your intervals and working on your chords and I like these combo workouts. It's always very helpful for your overall growth especially when you know some of this stuff. So you take C major, up the circle to G, up the circle to D, up to A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, E flat, E flat and then B flat, F and back to C. Now while you do this, try to train your ear and sing some aspects of the chord, ideally the root. So C, G, D, B, F sharp, D flat or C sharp, E flat, E flat, B flat, F, C. Now you see I moved over two beats. Maybe you're not going to do it two beats at a time, maybe you want to do four beats or eight beats. Feel free, do whatever is comfortable for you. Well you could also end the study by going C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F, C. That'll be like the ultimate goal if you can get there. Also what you see, for me to even survive playing through these chords, I need to know my inversions, right? I have to know that C, G, D, A, I have to play the most efficient path for my chords. So the faster I go, I need to know my inversions. So also train your inversions and it's easy to understand that in the circle of fifths, there'll always be one note in common between the chords and when you move in the direction of the circle, in the clockwise direction, you're actually forming cadences, most specifically C, which is the what of the next chord, G. It is the fourth of the G, so C, G. So it forms this whole church amen cadence, you know, which we call as the plagal cadence four to one, C, G, like amen, you know, which we have at the end of a hymn. So that's the circle going this way and feel free to also do it with minor chords. A. And keep going, all minor. Now major. Build a melody if you can. C. You don't have to start with C. I just showed it as a demonstration. Now you move counter the clock. So now you're going to go C, F, B flat, E flat, E flat, D flat, B, E, A, D, G, C. Now these are all going to be called as perfect cadences or fifth five going to one, if you think about it. C, F dominant seventh going to B flat, B flat likes to go to E flat, E flat likes to go to A flat, A flat likes to go to D flat, D flat likes to go to F, D flat likes to go to F sharp, G flat, F sharp wants to go to B, B, E, E, A, A, D, D, G, C. So just moving around the circle of fifths can be really, really interesting. And what am I doing at the end of the day? I'm practicing major and minor chords. So it's a very nice way to pass the time or challenge yourself. If you already kind of know your chords, do you know all 12? Are you okay with them as inversions? Can you do major round? Can you do a minor round? Can you do clockwise? Can you do counterclockwise? How good are you with major and minor chords? Will be how good are you at this exercise? And then everything you do in the future, I hope, will be easier. If you're doing an actual pop song, you've done such a kind of a gargantuan exercise going all the way around the circle. Why can't you easily pick up a pop song? You'll have the confidence for that, I'm sure. Now, the other strategy which I have, now we've looked at the perfect fifth, we've looked at the perfect fourth, which is the circle going like that, you could also consider thirds. So you could take the minor third, for example, let me help you form a minor third. So a minor third is basically four steps or three steps rather. One step gives you that. One more step gives you that. One more step gives you that. So that's your minor third. Now you move, you can probably now take minor chords. What's the first chord there? C minor. Go up to E flat, because E flat's the minor third. Wow, that's some really Hollywood movie theme like stuff, isn't it? So you have C minor, definitely some scene from something Harry Potter or yeah. And you don't have to stop there. So you go C minor, upper minor third to E flat minor. Now up another minor third, up minor. And then up another minor third to A minor. Now you'll realize once you do C minor, E flat minor, F sharp minor, A minor. Now A minor's minor third will be back to C. So you kind of recycle the exercise. So another nice way to look at this, which I've put out in the chart, is to look at this as a diminished seventh chord. A diminished seventh chord is root, minor third, diminished fifth or tritone, and the diminished seventh or the major sixth. And these are your roots of the minor chords which you're going to play. Build a little tune there. I love that. So that's the linkage. The linkage is the minor third between the minor chords. Now how will this sound if you just replace the minor chords with major chords and retain the interval of the minor third between the major chords? I hope that was not confusing. It even confused me, but yeah. So let me break that down with the actual piano stuff. So you have C major, only major chords. Now separated with the minor third, that's your E flat. Check that out. So C major, E flat major, going to G flat major or F sharp major. Now this to me feels like I've discovered a new habitable planet or something for humans or something, you know, because it's all major chords. So there's a lot of hope, but at the same time, it's very uncertain. It's very mysterious because you've not really encountered the area. So it's fun to do that. And when you do minor, all gloom, desolate. Okay, now you may be thinking where do all these chords come from or where have they come from? The truth is they didn't really come from a scale. They just came from wherever, you know, they just got born out of intervals. As I told you, minor chord separated by a minor third, play the next minor chord, then separated by a minor third, then play the next minor chord. So I'm just making that interval symmetric in nature. Okay, and the major chords again can happen separated by a minor third. And the last thing I'd like to leave you with this lesson, remember, what are we trying to do? By doing all this stuff, you're going to get really good at your intervals. It's a tough exercise, I understand because you're doing a lot of chords, you're in fact doing all of them. And it's important to know that when you go through a diminished seventh chord like this, it's a symmetric chord. So you just have to learn two more diminished seventh chords. So you could do D diminished seventh and do your movement through this, these roots, D minor, F minor, G sharp minor, B minor. Then you have to do E diminished seventh, which is E, G, B flat, D flat. And then you have your E minor, G minor, B flat minor, C sharp minor. Very Edward Scissorhands, like if you watch that movie back in the day. Okay, so now that we've done skipping of minor thirds, we can do skipping of major thirds. How does that work? A major third, E, then E's major third is G sharp and automatically you're feeling the augmented chord. And if you take G sharp's major third, it's it kind of recycles back to C. So you're taking a diminished seventh and practicing your major and minor chords, then you take your augmented chord, which is C, E, G sharp. And then you're trying to do the same drill. For example, now with C, I'll play C minor, with E, I'll play E minor, with G sharp, I'll play G sharp minor. So again, very movie like, or replace it with major chords. And then you've discovered stuff. The Lydian mode works really well over this movement. And then minor. So yeah, I hope this also answers the question, how do you make thematic Hollywood like background score music? Well, this lesson and check out the description. I've left a few other videos, which I've done a little quite long back. It's called mysterious chord connection. So that'll kind of expand on this Hollywood theme like concept a bit more, at least the movies which I watch, I watch a lot of movies. So the music I've heard in these films tend to have these mysterious chord connections. So do check that out. The cards will be there or the end screen and the description will be there and so on and so forth. Let's just recap what we've done guys. So our goal is to master our major and minor chords through the circle of fifths, which gives us fourths and fifths. And we are trying to master major and minor chords using the diminished seventh chord set, that family, that family with D. So there are three diminished seventh families to learn and the chords will be linked around these families. And then you have the augmented families of which there are four. The C augmented family, then the D augmented family, not the E because that's a recycle, then you could even do the D flat augmented family and what is remaining. You have the E flat augmented family. This will all be written down in the notes. You don't have to struggle. It is all in the notes. All you have to do is just head over to our Patreon and you'll get a PDF of this entire lesson. And we've been using Patreon for a while now, at least for about two years from the time of shooting this. So most of my lessons are supplemented there, can grab a copy. You'll get a PDF. Sometimes you get backing tracks, MIDI and stuff like that. Right guys, again, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. What you may also want to do to support the channel is to subscribe. If you haven't already, hit the bell icon for regular notifications. We release videos quite often. The other thing you could do is give the video a share, give the video a like, leave us a comment with something you'd like to learn. It's your feedback, which really helps the channel move forward. And again, we have a website, NathanielSchool.com. You can check out some of our free lessons. You also have the members only videos where we talk about things like year training, theory, which allows us to really dive in and be a lot more structured. You also have the join button on YouTube, which will give you the same resources. Again, this is Jason from Nathaniel. Cheers. See you in the next one.