 Hi everyone, this is Jason Zak from Nathaniel School of Music, welcome back to another one of our YouTube lessons. If you are here for the first time, follow along and hopefully you will enjoy the channel. What I plan to do in this lesson is to cover a very exciting and sort of maybe not so often covered topic, which is the ability to compose or create and understand non-diatonic chord progressions. That's chord progressions which don't use a scale for their formation. You don't write down the major scale or the minor scale and then do your usual triad formation technique and so on. So this is a little bit different. It uses a few techniques which you probably already know and a lot of techniques which apply pretty much just common sense if you think about it and basic music theory. But hopefully in this exploration you will have some different ideas and some strategies which you may like but have not necessarily found in a traditional music theory setup. And I have five patterns or five techniques for you. There are quite a few more but otherwise this video would be like an epic video. It will be really long so I figured we will just limit our study to five. Okay guys, before we get cracking it will be great if you can hit that bell icon for regular notifications whenever we release regular YouTube videos. You will also find the notes for this lesson as well as other lessons in the past available on our Patreon along with backing tracks, MIDI files and staff notation. You may want to check out our Patreon page. What I plan to do for the study is to basically take random chords or different starting points. We will not limit our study to a particular key because it's a non-diatonic setup. So to get started the first approach for building non-diatonic chord progressions would be line cliched descending movements and most of this chapter when you say non-diatonic chord progressions you are also entering into the world of making super long chord progressions as well. The length of the progression will be quite long. It could be even 12 chords long or maybe more. So if you start with a simple G minor chord, G Bb D or Bb D G or D G Bb either way a nice way to build up chord progressions considering that when our human ear processes this sound we are not hearing the triad only, we are hearing the triad with its conforming bass. So in the case of a G minor for you to truly feel the G minor you need to have a G in the bass otherwise it could pretty much be anything. For example if you take G minor over F sharp or if you take G minor over F, G minor over E, G minor over Eb, G minor over D and then G minor over C sharp, G minor over D and so on and so forth. You see what's happening, there is a harmonic motion created just by a dynamic flow of the left hand and the right hand or the treble area depending on which instrument you play is pretty much static. It's the same triad or good old G minor chord which I am considering for this example. So let's figure that out. So if you take G minor let's say in some inversion whichever inversion you like you can play around with this as we call it line cliche movement so you are not really sticking to a scale. In fact I am going to explore this by moving chromatically down from G. It's just going to move chromatically down and you will have G, G, F sharp, G over F, G minor over D, G minor over Eb flat, G minor over D, G minor over C sharp, G minor over D. Now let's also study the chords so vanilla, G minor and then now this is a G minor but with a very prominent F sharp in the sense it's an F sharp chord, we just don't have a name for it. We don't have a theoretical name and it's not really used in a scale context but I am sure you know that famous songs which use this, we have stairway to heaven which clearly uses this concept. A lot of ballads can be made using this sequence and it's not really diatonic if you think about it. Which scale is this part of? In which scale do we get to use all the 12 notes? Well you could call it the chromatic scale I guess. So anyway, so let's try and work that out together. You have G minor, G, G minor over F sharp, you have a G minor over F, yes you may want to call it by fancy names but isn't it simple to just relate to it as a slash chord, right? G minor over F and then you have a tensed up chord, you have that tritone created with the E, it also creates a minor 7th flat 5 sound, there we go, minor 7th flat 5 not to be confused with diminished 7th which is a completely different chord, right? I have done a video on exploring diminished chords, you should check it out on our channel, we've gone quite in depth with pretty much all these chords as individual units. I even have a series called My Favorite Chords of All Time where some of these single chords are explored in its entirety, how I've used them in some of my songs and so on and so forth. So G minor over F, now G minor over E, now G minor over E flat, you might argue that's an E flat major 7th and then G minor over D. Now G minor even though D is part of the G minor chord, it's a very very different vibe when you press D in the bass, it's not like a traditional inversion, it's a slash chord, so a G minor over D is going to not sound like a resolution, it's not going to sound stable, right? It wants to resolve, it's yearning to resolve. It's G minor over C sharp and then D7 and we draw, let's do that again. Now the last chord maybe, I could play a D7th at the end to kind of pull it back. The D7th is like a magnetic chord, it wants to get you back to the key, G minor in this case, some form of G. Even though you've not committed to a scale like G natural minor or G harmonic minor, you're still in the key of G, so it's nice to be in the key of G but not committing to a specific G scale, if you will. And the blues scale also works very well here. This scale, the minor blues will work really well, root, flat 3, perfect 4, flat 5, major perfect 5th, flat 7, octave. Now you don't have to go chromatically downward, you can just play around with this concept, you know, you can go, you can just do 4 of those chords, it's a lot of fun when you play it down. So I had encouraged you to try this at pretty much any minor chords, in this case G minor, you could also do the B minor, this is pretty much any chord really. So that was line cliche descending over a minor chord, let me quickly show you how this would sound with a major chord. So I'm just gonna choose a major chord, A major, out of the hat of major chords, I'm taking A major and do the same example. Now the challenge with just a single A major, for some reason the minors hold their weight, the major chords don't sound really good with all the chromatic notes in the left, in the bass register. So I have a modification, let me just guide you through the chord, so A major over G sharp and A over G, now A major over F sharp is fine, but you could also do like a D major over F sharp, D minor over F, A over D, B over D sharp and then the dominant of A is E that takes or pulls us back to A. Now you may argue, yeah I'm in the key of A, but I might argue back and say yes maybe, but I'm not using only the A major 7 notes, I'm using everything, I'm using all the chromatic notes available to us. Let's play that again and again I'm sure you're getting like the something by the Beatles vibe, you will get a lot of popular song vibes by doing this, this is actually a very popular progression, okay, let's do that again. I'm changing it every bar, A over E, B over D sharp, all of this movement was the line cliche going chromatically down and we could take a major chord, we could take a minor chord, I started with a G minor and then we moved to an A major, you can do it with anything and I encourage you to make a melody, like these progressions beg a melody to be created along with them, you can't just play the chords and end it there, you need to make a tune. Okay guys, so moving on to the second way to create non-diatonic progressions, this is no rocket science, the line cliche thing moved base down, now I'm going to go chromatically base up, okay, to create well a very similar kind of vibe. Now to do this, what I have for you a concept which I'd like to share with you is a scale even though I said non-diatonic but there is one scale which is you need to know in order to form this stuff, it's called the whole tone scale, so I'm going to show you two whole tone scales if I do it from the key of D flat, so what is a whole tone, it's just a succession of whole tones, whole tone from D flat, that's a skip of two steps, continue till you reach the top, if you hold on your pedal it sounds quite enchanting I guess, anyway so not that you have to play that scale but you can visualize the scale, maybe a couple of whole tones, D flat whole tone and C whole tone and incidentally all these whole tone scales are inversions of each other, so that means you can, yeah C whole tone is also D whole tone, you just start with D since you're just populating the movement in tones and you'll end up getting a six note scale, not a seven note scale conventionally, you'll get a six note scale, okay, so what you do is at each whole tone point you can either play a major chord or a minor chord, so let me build D flat whole tone in chords, D flat, E flat, F, G, A, B, D flat or C sharp, na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na You can do that with major, you can also do it with minor, so that's C sharp minor, D sharp minor or E flat minor, F minor, G minor, A minor, B minor, C sharp minor Now, it sounds a bit unclear, right, it's just random major and minor chords, yes they are connected in a nice ladder like motion but it doesn't sound usable, so to make this usable, you need to add some tension because all these chords believe it or not are very peaceful resolutions, right, so there's no context, there's no story because you just have like a very standard stable sound, albeit it's out of the scale but it's still very stable, you're just playing major and minor chords, so what we do with this strategy is you tell yourself, as you're approaching the next chord, what we call as the target chord, if you take D flat and then target E flat, you need to squeeze in or sneak in a chord before or in between D flat and E flat, these are my two roots, so what do I sneak in, well first of all I can play a D bass because it's a nice ladder like motion, but then how do I give this D context, I don't want to do, sounds kind of cool but it doesn't sound usable like in a ballad context or in a regular pop-ish context, so instead of doing like a D major or D minor, here's what you do, you ask yourself what is the fifth of E flat, okay, and the fifth of E flat happens to be what, E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat, this is where the knowledge of the circle of fifths comes in very handy, try to check out some of my circle of fifths videos, you'll get a lot of resources to build it for scales, for chords, for improv, for intervals and what not, so you ask yourself, so my target chord is E flat, what precedes it, it's fifth, what is the fifth of E flat, so you play the fifth dominant chord because these chords are sevenths or major dominant chords, so you go D flat, I want to go to E flat, let's go through the tunnel or through the open the door so to speak with the B flat, B flat gives you the context to go to E flat major and now E flat actually behaves as home, you know, D flat, D flat, E flat, now to make this even more smoother, you can do D flat, D flat over D and E flat, so that creates pump, pump, pump, let's do that again, D flat, and the beauty here is remember what I told you, these target chords of the whole tone scale can either be major or minor, so you can do a minor there or okay, moving forward, after E flat comes F in the whole tone, right, now you ask yourself in between E flat and F there's E, that's going to be your bass note, now E is your bass, but then what triad or what dominant chord will go to F, that will be the fifth of F which is C, there we go, now immediately pulls you to the F minor or pulls you to the F major, there we go, now immediately pulls you to the F major, so far we have, now I want to go to G, my next landing, again the chromatic between F and G is F sharp, that's, what did I do there, I did D major, D seventh with an F sharp, now I want to go to A, how do I do that, via its fifth, that's E flat, E seventh with a G sharp bass, A minor and then I want to go to B, what's B's fifth F sharp, right, but I need an A sharp bass for a chromatic passing, so and now why don't I end with the D flat, what's D flat's fifth, A flat, so I would do A flat with a chromatic in between bass which is A flat over C and E flat, I've got this written down neatly on our Patreon page, do consider getting yourself a copy of the notes, you can visualize these movements a lot better with my colors and all of the fancy things which I do on the app, so you go, let's do the whole thing again with only major chords with the chromatic passing bass chord, so I'll call it out as I play, D flat, B flat over D, E flat major, C major over E, F major, D major over F sharp, G major, E major over G sharp, A major, F sharp major over A flat, F sharp major over A sharp, B flat, B major, A flat over C and end with D flat, so you've ascended chromatically, right, again, let's do this with minor chords, why not? E flat minor, and then of course if major and minor both work in that whole tone movement, why can't you combine them, you can do major, minor and what not, I've also written it for C, you should probably practice the same motion on C and if anything you'll be a very good chord player, your inversions, your, sometimes you need to play chords instinctively, you have a melody line which is going a certain way and your chords need to just happen, you know, so these skills will help you because you're doing endless resolution, tension resolution, tension resolution, let's do it on C and then move to the next point, so C over C sharp, D flat over C sharp, D flat over C sharp, D flat over C sharp, you can see, you can start with D flat and you can start with C, so this was the second kind of non-dietonic chord progression creation process, this uses a chromatic ascending, we call the concept as secondary dominance, there are lot of videos on that as well on our YouTube channel, do check them out, so in this method of using non-dietonic chord progressions, I've chosen our best friend, the circle of fifths and the circle of fifths, yes, it's used to detect scales and to find the fact that this scale is similar to the previous scale or the next scale because of the key signatures, then some people draw relative minors and stuff like that, well, that's fine but you can throw most of that out the window and just keep the points, that's C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, A flat, E flat, D flat, F C, so keep those 12 points, draw the circle neatly and see what happens if you move clockwise and counterclockwise, so if you move for instance clockwise, you go C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, D flat, A flat, what's happening here, every resolution C is the fourth of the G, so we call that actually a plagal cadence, plagal is 4 going to 1 and a great chord progression or a usable chord progression needs to also support a melody line which will eventually happen, so great to start with cadences but to make this non-dietonic I'm going to keep going down the circle or up the circle, however you look at it, so C going to G, clockwise, so using C, G, D, A I've got like a melody line and then you come back to C, quite enjoying this actually, maybe we should build a song on this, right, so the plagal cadence goes ascending or clockwise circle in fourths you could think about it because C is the fourth of G, right, it's resolving, so G, C is the fourth, C resolves to G, it's called the plagal cadence or the amin cadence used a lot in gospel music, then you can also go in the other direction, in the 5-1 direction which is the counterclockwise direction what we call as the authentic cadence or the perfect cadence, okay, so if you take the reverse circle C, F, D-flat, E-flat, E-flat, D-flat, F sharp, B major, A, A, D, G, C, it's a good exercise also to practice your chords, what I like about the authentic movement is you don't have to just do major, major, you can do even like minor major, C minor 7th, F dominant, B-flat, major 7th, E-flat, A-flat, major 7th, D-flat, major 7th, F dominant, F sharp dominant, all dominants, minor, A, major 7th, dominant and then you could fool around with the chords, it doesn't have to be major and minor, right, so plagal cadence is the circle of fifths going clockwise, the authentic or the perfect cadence is the circle of fifths going counterclockwise, so that's how you could use the circle of fifths, now the fourth strategy is still the circle of fifths, but I encourage you to visualize it in geometrical shapes instead of just moving it, you know, clockwise, so what are the most common geometrical shapes known to humankind, apart from a circle of course, you could argue an equilateral triangle or a square, if you flip a square you're going to get a diamond, I guess, that's what we call it, right, so if you visualize those shapes you'll realize you can easily draw them if you draw the circle of fifths neatly, so I encourage you to draw it neatly or get my notes, so what I like about it when you draw it well is you can visualize the equilateral triangles either this way or, you know, this way, depending on where you start where the point of interest is, you can visualize a square or a diamond, again depending on where you start, and you'll realize that there will be four triangles which are possible, so to form a triangle it's great to visualize the circle of fifths and skip four o'clock each, so if you take C, how do we skip four o'clock, well one o'clock is G, two o'clock is D, three o'clock is A, four o'clock is E, so that's also the major third, so if you want to ignore the whole going four o'clock kind of thing just look at it as C's major third is E and E's major third or E's four o'clock in the circle is either G sharp or A flat, so this is my triangle chord also also known as an augmented chord, so what you do is you form these various triangles, you can do the D triangle, D F sharp and B flat, then you could do the D flat triangle which is D flat F and A also D flat augmented, then you can do the E flat triangle, E flat GB, so once you have these three or the trios of the triangle ready then what you can do is just play them in a kind of a random sequence as you feel fit, but replace each of the points of the triangle instead of just playing C, E, G sharp, you can make it as a C chord an E chord and a G sharp chord, check that out, maybe C major, E major and A flat major and kind of group them, play them together, that's the triangle of created with C, E and G sharp, maybe try some minor chords, you get into a very movie theme like territory, all found by just taking the circle, forming some triangles or writing the augmented triads and playing them as major or minor chords, so what comes after triangles, well you may be guessing it, why not do a set of four, so set of three will give you an equilateral triangle if you draw the circle well, a set of four will give you a square, so for set of four and to build squares or diamonds you would be going three o'clock from a target note, C to G1, G to D2, D to A3, so you do C to A and then the same procedure, you can also go counter clockwise by three o'clock to create the same deal, you are moving clockwise three or counter clockwise three, you will come back or you will arrive at the same conclusion of four chords or four notes in that squareish shape, so C down three o'clock would be what now, F, B flat, E flat, so you do C major, three o'clock, E flat major, now what's three o'clock from E flat, F sharp, what's three o'clock from F sharp, A, so C flat, F sharp, A and again I am playing these as major or minor chords, major in this case, you can go in reverse order and actually this is forming diminished seventh of a family of diminished seventh chord, so how many notes do we have in music 12, how many are already paired up or ganged up now in this square shape 4, that means you're going to have three squares which will give you three families of diminished seventh chords and you will have four triangles which are going to give you four families of augmented triads, trios so to speak, right guys, so that was about using the circle of fifths intervilically if you want to call it that to form chord progressions which are by no means diatonic, I have one more strategy for you to do non-diatonic chord progressions and this is probably the first thing I ever did and I think I did this by luck during my college days or maybe school days wherein I just told myself okay, I have a note C, what chords go with C and at that time I only knew a few chords, I knew the majors and the minors so I would you know question that okay and say okay what has C in it, C major, C minor obviously right, then you have maybe F major which has C at the fifth, F minor which has C at the fifth super easy, so C is there in C major C minor, C is there in F major F minor, C is also in the middle of a major chord and it's in the middle note of a minor chord, what is it in the middle of A flat major, right? E flat C, E flat C is in the middle and it's in the middle of the A minor chord where again C is in the middle, so I told myself okay, why not build a chord progression where C is the pivotal point of my melody and then C will linger throughout at the strong beat and then why not just bring in all the six chords which are three major and three minor which are all part of the tree of C so to speak, it's the C tree and the branches of C seem to have all these triads which have C in it obviously, so I can build a melody sounds diatonic that's not diatonic so as you can see I anchored my entire melody around C and I ended up getting six chords which work their magic now this is just one tree, remember in a jungle there are way more than one tree so if you imagine a dynamic creature like a monkey moving through a dense jungle or forest you'll assume that this individual is going to climb across a bunch of trees and go to whatever branch they want to have fun latching on to climbing and doing whatever they want to do on that branch so in this visualization the tree is a note, it could be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C sharp, A flat whatever and when you jump on that tree you have to cling on to a branch, the branch is the chord and then you have multiple branches, multiple chords and then on the branch you're going to make a melody line around that chord and then maybe jump to the next chord of the same tree or the chord of a next tree or another tree now if this visualization was confusing we do have a lot of options to learn this stuff we teach sort of contemporary and compositionally driven theory at our school so you can learn these concepts in a structured step by step foundational till the very advanced stages and this is primarily aimed to give you results so you may want to consider something regular or we have other videos which we've linked up covering a lot of these subjects so what I've done in this lesson is something also which could be looked at as a revision of sorts of a lot of other lessons which I've done maybe spanning about 3 to 4 years of us doing this channel regularly and hopefully you can take something along with this lesson so we have line cliches going downward chromatically either with major or so we have line cliches going down chromatically you can take a minor chord in this case G minor or a major chord A major and then you have the other form of climbing which is climbing this way using secondary chords which are the secondary chords are in between the whole tone families or the whole tone set of six notes and yeah that adds a dominant resolution which makes that pull stronger adds the tension and resolution and thus the context then we looked at two strategies using circular fifths first we went up and down you go up clockwise you're going to do the plagal movement you're going to you do the counterclockwise you're going to get that 5 to 1 authentic cadence movement then we can also do circular fifths with shapes and get very movie like sounding chord progression very alien progression if you use that word you can build triangle shapes and diamond shapes those are simple and last but not least we looked at this whole visualization of chord trees where you throw away the scale you just bring in a note into the party that becomes a tree and then all its branches are the chords which have a note in common or which have one of the notes of that tree right and then you switch trees and that's I think a topic for a future video for sure right guys again this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel a couple of things you could consider doing before I sign off hit the subscribe button if you haven't already don't worry we don't spam you we just release new videos pretty much every day so that might help you get regular notifications and stay alive on our channel and we want to hear from you as well so give the video a like leave us a comment with what you thought about this lesson and what you'd like to learn in a future lesson do consider sharing the video with your musician friends and family and if you'd like to learn something regular as a detailed semester at our school do consider going to NathanielSchool.com and last but not least all the notes from this lesson and everything we will continue to do and what we have done in the past are waiting for you on Patreon for just 5 dollars a month cheers guys this is Jason Zach