 Hi, everyone. This is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are basically going to look at a really simple melody. Why I say it's a simple melody? Well, I think it's quite obvious. It just has three notes, which is E flat, F and G. I'm on the key of E flat major, so we're just going to use those three. This E flat, F, G, G, F, E flat, E flat. And the point of this lesson is obviously not to teach you that melody, because I think even if you played the piano for like one day, you could probably figure out that melody. So the point of this lesson is to actually figure out how to harmonize that melody using a variety of harmonic options. A lot of tricks of the trade, if you will, which I've learned along the way. A lot of very classical approaches, which people for years and years have been doing, and a few modern approaches, a few jazz, a few gospel versions, and a few thematic versions, which you may find in movies. And I have actually put this all together in a performance. We've put out this video also on our YouTube channel, which you could check out. It'll also be presented at the end with all of this stuff in one neat rendition. And if you'd like, you can consider downloading MIDI files of this entire lecture, which basically is me performing it in a variety of ways. I'm playing the same thing with different rhythmic flavors, different melodic articulations, and so on and so forth. So if you'd like, the MIDI files are waiting for you on Patreon, and as always, all the notes, the notation related to the lesson. Before we hit cracking, it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button, hit the bell icon for notifications, give the video a like, leave us a comment with something you'd like to learn, and consider following us on Patreon, where you'll get all this stuff and a lot of supplementary material for a lot of our YouTube lessons. So before we discover all the harmonic options, let's first crack the melody line. The melody is on the key of E flat major, three flats, right? E flat, A flat and B flat. So the tune basically goes just that one, two, three, three, two, one, one, which is E flat, F and G, the one, two and three. You could also sing it with swaras, if you know. E flat, E flat, F, G, F, E flat, E flat. Try to maintain it with a steady pulse that always helps in the initial stages. So again, that's your melody. So the first thing you can do with this melody is try to embellish it with fifth chords. And that's my first style of harmony. So fifth chord will just be root, fifth octave. Now you could play this stuff anywhere. So if I actually stack a fifth with each melody note, it will already sound quite thick. Which is two B flat. One more time. You could even play the B flat and the E flat on the top end. Build some nice arpeggios around that. Whenever the melody is chilling out or resting, a few articulations for the tune, you can do instead of going, you can do or does that. So the fifth itself adds a lot. And along with the fifths, you could color it up with other notes of the scale, like you can do the seventh. The sixth back to the fifth, fourth, if you can. Otherwise, that works or so that's about fifth chord. So write down your root, your fifth, and then you can play the fifth and the root to just embellish any melody and it kind of works. So the only challenge with the fifth and the melody is it doesn't serve a lot of chord possibilities or a lot of harmonic possibilities. So what you then need to do is expand. So the next thing I would like to do with the melody, especially on a piano, is you can use thirds to make the melody a lot more, a lot more thicker or a lot more richer. So if you take the tune, rather thin, but with the thirds, that's what we also call as a tenor part in a choir context. So the upper third of E flat, which is G, is played in the bottom and you go. Quite cool. So that's E flat over G, F with A flat, G with B flat. These are also open thirds. I'm not doing that kind of feels as though the melody has been taken over by the thirds. So instead of playing the third above the soprano or above the root, we play it lower. And we have the tune on top, which has just become a lot more thicker or a lot more richer. So melody with fifths we've seen, melody with thirds. Now the next thing which we start doing harmonically is look at our cadences. There are four classical cadences which are generally taught with respect to analyzing classical songs, modern day pop and rock or pretty much any song. The classical cadences are the authentic cadence which is the five going to one, in this case B flat or B flat dominant seventh going to E flat. So that's the authentic or the perfect cadence. Then you have the half cadence, which is essentially any chord landing or ending at the five. So that would go, so that's your two, two is F minor because F is the two of E flat. So that's two going to five or you could do four going to five. That's four, five, one, four, five, one. Okay. So that's your half cadence is two going to five, four going to five. You also have what we call as the deceptive cadence, which is five five going to six, six is also the relative minor chord. So five going to six. You see all these options are there. That's authentic half cadence to two going to five. That's two going to five or that's four going to five or you do the deceptive cadence, which is and you can add the deceptive with a secondary dominant, more on that later in the video. So don't, don't miss the entire chapter. You need to watch this whole video. You're going to learn a lot of chord possibilities, probably all of, all of which at least I know. So you need to watch the video till the end. So you need to watch the video till the very end guys. There are a lot more chord possibilities coming your way. I've tried to exhaust my options at least with regards to this melody. There's one more classical cadence, a popular cadence called the plagal cadence, which goes four going to one, which is the two. That's your common church gospel almond cadence. Four going to one, but you could do a modification to the plagal by going a minor four going to the one. You could do that. So let's see how that sounds. Plagal minor minor back to tonic. The normal plagal is used a lot. The minor is a bit rare, but you're finding it used a lot more in modern music these days, especially artists like Billie Eilish do that very often. Okay, so how do you actually play this on the piano? The basic way to do this is melody in the right hand, chords in the left hand. So try to get your cadences. Before you get the entire chord, you can play single notes. Roots, which are the roots of the chords. Root back to tonic. Then you can build towards the actual chord. E flat again. Perfect. Another thing you could also do is if you're a bit more advanced on the instrument, you can play the entire chord in your right hand itself as an inversion. I'm playing D flat and E flat, but I'm making sure to squeeze or keep the melody at the top end. So this requires more than hand independence. It requires finger independence, which I would not advise you to do if you're just about starting off with the keyboard. So you should go, if you know this technique, you play. See no left hand, only right hand with the bass. You can just cling on to the chord roots and that allows you to play deeper as well. So three ways of playing the chord progression or the cadences. First play single roots, if you're very new, get the roots of the cadence. Plagal, half or deceptive and then with the chords. You can play the chords exclusively in the left or you could do it in the right hand by inverting the chords so that the melody line is up top. So that's how I'm going to demonstrate pretty much even the latter part of the cadences and other harmonic options. You either play the melody with chords there or you do melody and the chords here in the, in the bass. Right guys. So those were the cadences again, authentic or perfect. Then we have half cadence. Then we have the deceptive cadence and the plagal cadence, which all have their own variations moving forward. So another nice strategy with the same melody is to play it with what I call as the line cliche bass or a scenario where your bass just drops chromatically down and it could also climb chromatically up or diatonically up if you want to do it in either way. And I'll just give you an idea and then show you what exactly is going on. I'm just going to take the journey from E-flat to A-flat, okay? D, D-flat, C, B, B, B-flat, A, A-flat. Now yes, these are actual chords. E-flat, G-minor with a D, you know, and then A-flat over C. These are all, these are all actual triads or actual chords, but instead of actually thinking it that way, you could go, just drop your bass. Now you could drop your bass with octaves down below or you could even do it with keeping the pinky on the root and just dropping chromatically. And you don't have to go fully chromatic, right? You can go, well, you can skip more here and there, right? See here I didn't play the D, but I could also go fully chromatic and see how I'm supporting my melody here with the fifth embellishment, with the fifth. Okay, that's your lion cliche drop and then you can climb up, for example, check that out. C, D, E-flat, flat over G, over A, and on B-flat. So what did I do there? That's my climbing chords as I'm calling it. C, E-flat, so C minor to E-flat. Instead of going directly, I go with a passing D and then I climb further. C, D, E-flat, F, G, which is actually E-flat over G, A-flat, A, B-flat. You can continue and you can loop it. Very nice chromatic loop, isn't it? It just goes all over the place, pretty much. The logic behind these connecting notes, guys, is the fact that they are all dominant chords. So C minor, that's B-flat over D, but that resolves very well to E-flat, because B-flat is a fifth of E-flat. We've done a lot of videos on this. You should check out our lessons on the secondary dominant chord. Lot of these lessons will really help you with understanding how chords connect to the other. Moving on, so that was about line cliches and climbing chords. A couple more things before we sign off with the lesson. We have the idea of secondary dominant chords, which I was hinting at earlier. Secondary dominant chords could give you things like this. So you could play a chord from out of the scale, a dominant chord, coming back to a chord from within a scale, which is pretty much what a secondary does. So we've put a chart together with all the secondary chords of E-flat major. You should check it out in the notes which you can download. So let's break this down. So let's say I wanted to go from E-flat to F-minor. So what's the five of F-minor? C going to F. So it works quite well. C takes you to the F-minor. Or let's say you want to go to the G-minor from E-flat to G-minor. What is the fifth of G? That is D7th or D. You may have to change the melody ever so slightly in order to accommodate an F-sharp there. Now let's say I wanted to go to A-flat, which is the four major. I can do that via the one dominant itself. So I took E-flat major, E-flat dominant, going to A-flat. Now let's say I wanted to go to the B-flat. What is the five of B-flat? F. You need to know your intervals. That's the five. All works. In most cases, you don't even have to change your tune. The tune can be the same. One of the final hurdle now is to go to the sixth minor, which is the next chord of the scale. Yes, you have the opportunity of going from anywhere from the tonic chord, E-flat major to any other diatonic chord. Diatonic means from the scale chord. So that is secondary dominance. I've explained this chapter really well, using a bunch of videos on YouTube. More specifically, I've talked about Do or Deer, the sound of music classic, and just the general theory has been explained all through the YouTube channel. So do go through that. Moving forward, guys. So the most popular chord progression of all time, arguably, is the 2-5-1 cadence or the 2-5-1 movement. So if you can find what the 2-5-1s are of your major key and the relative minor key and then superimpose it with the melody, of course, it's going to sound really, really awesome. So look at E-flat. What is the 2? F minor. B-flat becomes the dominant 5, which you can color by playing as a 7th or with this sort of jazz extension, which is A-flat over B-flat. This gives you a very 9 or 11 feel. So F minor, B-flat, 11 or B-flat. You can just call it B-flat major and that results to E-flat. So F, B-flat, E-flat, F minor, B-flat dominant, E-flat major. So you have to change it a bit fast because it's a quicker cadence. At least that's how I am playing it. You could also go, you could go evenly. F minor, B-flat or go quicker in a gospel. And I do a, I like that at the end because I have a gap. There we go. And now coming to the 2-5-1 minor. So how the 2-5-1 minor works, guys, would be you want to go to the relative minor of E-flat, which is C minor. So to go there, what is C-2-5-1? You have to ask yourself the question, which will be that'll be D diminished going to G7, landing on to C minor. So C minor is a relative key of E-flat major. You need to know that. You can do. So E-flat, diminished dominant minor. So for a minor 2-5-1, that's the deal. And you can always check out after you watch this lesson, I've done a detailed series on minor chord progressions, where this is mentioned almost all the time. So major 2-5-1, minor 2-5-1, pretty much both work for us. So two other very interesting approaches, which I have for you, they use borrowed chords. And I've named them with rather unofficial names, because it's not there in the textbooks. The Brave Cadence, which is the 3-flat going to 4 major. I'll explain this later. And the other one will be the Epic Cadence, which I call. That's a 6-flat, 7-flat going to the major. Now how it works here with the Epic and the Brave, they both use borrowed chords, you could argue, from the parallel minor key. So that would be E-flat natural minor, which has a flat 3, a flat 6, and a flat 7. The flat 3, the flat 6, and the flat 7 always will form major chords. So that's F-sharp major, B major, D-flat or C-sharp major. So demonstrating it with the melody we have, that's your 6-flat B major, which creates a very lydian sound because of the melody being F and then C-sharp. It's a very nice add sound. So it's the Epic one, doesn't it? Feel Epic into a little lick there, into the Brave option. Very Sting, Sting uses this a lot. While I'm talking about this, I'm reminded of a video I've done on hybrid scales, check that out. I've also talked a lot about this stuff as well, borrowed chords and other movement. Just one or two more final variations of this entire melody. Remember, the melody is still, nothing much changed, it's still that, the whole chapter we've been doing that. I'd like to leave you with a very modal cadence, something which reminds us of the mixolidian scale or the mixolidian mode, it would sound something like this. Very Beatles. That's a 7-flat, 4 major, 1, very mixolidian. So I call it the mixocadence, which is D-flat, your 7-flat, A-flat which is the 4 and E-flat which is the 1. So there you go. Then we have the minor plagal, which I may have touched on earlier. That's your 4-minor. You could play around with that 4 minor, 1 major, 4 major, 1 major, 4 minor, 1 minor. Of course in this melody it won't support, since there is already a major third. So I've put together all these variations in one performance, which is going to follow the lesson. So instead of me revising everything which I normally do, I've actually performed it and I have clearly mentioned what is going on in each cadence, in each chapter. And you need to watch that. So before I sign off, guys, it'll be awesome. First of all, thanks for watching the video. Thanks for your continued support to our channel. And do give it a like, do give it a comment, do share the video with your friends, bring more folks onto the channel. It'll be awesome. You can also consider our website, where we have more structured courses or the YouTube join button, which also gives you more structured learning. Patreon is always there to supplement the YouTube lessons with my handwritten notes, MIDI files and whatever is needed to supplement the lessons. You just have to search for the video on Patreon or the link will be in the description. And a lot of additional learnings can be found in the description and on our website as well. All the videos have been laid out neatly. Thanks again for watching. See you in the next one. And here's the performance. Watch it and then go.