"Music is just sound waves and it's just how different sound waves interact, different resonances, different notes, it's how those different frequencies play together and play off each other."
"Music transcends musical notation, and algebra transcends any particular notation."
"For me, a big part of a perfect song is simplicity."
"Music theory encompasses more than just European harmonization; it can describe non-tempered systems and totally different tunings."
"Root lines sound great too, but guide tones give you more options for smooth voice leading."
"Oblique harmony is gorgeous and more people should use it."
"Understanding how to write a good counter line is essential."
"Triads are in fact the DNA and the building blocks of chords."
"Chord tones are the heart and soul of music. Whatever you believe, I'm telling you right now, chord tones are what makes music."
"The blues is the foundation of jazz music, and so one of the most common chord progressions you will see in jazz standards is your blues progression."
"To write a great melody that can communicate with a listener requires both a perceptible internal logic and a sense of fluency for the melody to be coherent and sound natural."
"It's hard to pinpoint an exact formula for what makes a good motif, but in general, they tend to be melodic fragments that are relatively short, simple, easy to memorize, and are played repeatedly."
"My definition of a riff is a repeated melodic motif that happens repeatedly throughout the song."
"The beauty of music comes from the interplay of the different harmonics."
"Every other chord is a derivative of the primary chords. So, if you can play the primary chords, you can play any song."
"Understanding scales and keys: the foundation of music theory."
"Every track is tied to a particular scale and set of notes."
"Major and minor scales are related: every major scale has a relative minor."
"Let your questions inform the direction of our music theory series."
"A chord is three or more notes played together to create a sense of Harmony."
"Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive."
"By knowing these concepts, I am more creative... I have more confidence."
"Music theory is just a way of describing what is there to be used."
"There is no right way; music theory is just a way of describing what is there to be used."
"Learning music theory really, really helped me to write music, not just more music and more efficiently, but better and more interesting music."
"It feels joyous, bright, hopeful. Major chords tend to feel more consonant, more positive, a little more comfortable."
"They sound unresolved and slightly dissonant, but this certainly doesn't make them unusable; in fact, the opposite is true."
"Music and math are exactly the same, and the universal language is math."
"Music creates tension and then relieves tension."
"There's a certain prestige in this case to the key of D flat."
"Their vocabulary of sounds, chord progressions, and covers was immense."
"That's the sound of the Beatles in my opinion, the dominant seven chord."
"A minimum riff, a riff that exists in that beautiful space where it's almost too simple but still somehow magical."
"Descending lines tend to carry a sense of weight and seriousness to them, falling from the lighter, higher notes down into the heavier lower register."
"It is absolutely insane to me that you can go through so many music departments and get a guide to break out a very complicated analysis of a whole [ __ ] piece but have no idea about pop music."
"That lack of understanding of pop music is criminal if you're teaching theory or studying it."
"I think it's really good to incorporate other aspects of theory from other cultures into our understanding of music theory."
"Everything in life is cyclical. Music is cyclic. We have to go somewhere, there's tension and then there's release."
"All great melody has tension, real tension, released. That's the whole thing about us as human beings. You breathe in and you breathe out."
"E shape connects to the D shape so then I hope you went to this shape and located these two roots on our fourth string and second string. Great job!"
"Everything is based on 24. Everything, even our time system, and even music itself, is based on a quarter tone, chromatic scale, not semitone, but quarter tone chromatic scale."
"Arrangement details like that I feel like are the real heart of music they're the things that tell the story that the things that connect people with your musical ideas in a way that makes sense."
"I love these sorts of theory debates because they really force you to think about music in all sorts of ways you might not have previously considered."
"Motifs are super cool building blocks in music."
"Motifs are used to convey character, places, or ideas."
"Music theory is a shared language for communicating ideas of sound between musicians."
"The major scale is what most Western music is built off of."
"Playing for the song is key—technique should serve the music."
"What if I told you that Western music does not use all the notes that exist?"
"Western European music becomes obsessed with the concept of Harmony."
"The silence between the notes being the key that creates the beauty in the music."
"Because we can harmonize every note of the scale, this now allows us to harmonize melodies and provide movement under those melodies."
"I think more intellectually substantive music and music that's maybe more visceral, you know, I don't think either is mutually exclusive."
"Melody and harmony are like lines and colors in pictures."
"Every note is actually a whole bunch of tiny notes put together."
"Equal temperament divides the octave equally so that every whole tone is the same as every other whole tone."
"It's not the frequencies of the notes that are important, it's the intervals between those frequencies."
"Thematic transformation is critical to understanding how leitmotif works."
"Not knowing music theory is like driving a car without a map. You can bump into some amazing places but you have to spend a long time finding out what you're looking for or remembering how you got there."
"Chords and scales are basically the same thing. You have to know the function of the chord to know what scale to play over it."
"Moving up the neck chords opens up new musical possibilities with chords you already know."
"Music speaks of everything in a musical piece is a part that exists in relationship to a harmonious whole right and it has its own intrinsic reason for being and it speaks of meaning."
"Light motifs help the audience keep track of everything."
"Complexity doesn't equal better; more notes don't mean more complex."
"It's how you shape a line that makes you a musician."
"These rules probably lie at the heart of most of the music you actually listen to and want to make."
"Ultimately, the message is still that these rules probably lie at the heart of most of the music you actually listen to and want to make."
"The authentic cadence is the most satisfying way to close out a phrase."
"The more chords you know, the more courage it takes to not play them."
"I think music is driven by energy, you know, like it should be."
"Pitch Center is basically the same thing but in pitch."
"Music is chaos until you order it. It becomes beautiful."
"Playing Jazz requires chords and improvising, creating tension and resolution."
"Thinking about the motion between chords and how strongly a key is being defined can help you slip in chords from outside the key in a way that feels very natural."
"Understanding this harmonic analysis and chord substitution is extremely important for your ability to improvise and to make up chord progressions."
"One, four, and five is major. Two, three, and six are minor. And seven is diminished."
"You got me into Leo you got me in the harmonic major double harmonic major maybe those videos aren't popular but they sure make a difference man thank you Stuart."
"By using this number system you really allow so much more musical knowledge to accumulate and compound."
"Music is then built on the relationships between these notes."
"You just spent 40 minutes exposing the greatness of the paradiddle."
"The real trick to understanding music well is to understand those tonal relationships."
"Next lesson: flats and sharps, learning about keys and theory."
"Learning scales also helps you start to understand how chord qualities work."
"Scales really are connected to almost everything in music."
"Understanding inversions is important for playing songs correctly."
"Music speaks in emotions; it's a language without words."
"It's funny - from the second the song started, I knew it was gonna have major modal mixture. They love playing modally between minor and major."
"At the end of the day, the melody is the most important part of a piece of music."
"Now, when we get to B flat, we're gonna remain with the same chord here, the D augmented."
"This chord what we're gonna do, if we have the D flat major chord, we could also add the seventh degree which is B, and we could lower this half, the E. So this would be a D flat minor seven chord."
"Relative pitch is like having a mental map of musical relationships, while perfect pitch is like built-in GPS."
"You can actually get a lot more nuance in your lines if you're thinking about how the lyrics work with the melody."
"Poly tonality is heavily associated with American composer Charles Ives."
"If you're new to music theory or you want to improve your music theory, I do think this course can really help you out."
"Back in our era, the guitar was always part of a greater concept. It was part of the song, and that's why this is so good. The guitar solos are some of the best in history because they function. They're part of a great song."
"This so-called Fifth Element or missing element of hip-hop is supposed to be the spiritual element, and I maintain from the things that we're able to look back upon now and discern that that spirit always was there."
"The secret behind orchestral programming is to understand how the ear has evolved to accept and trust this form of music."
"Computational musicology takes the tools of modern statistical analysis and uses them to do music theory."
"So now you're probably asking me, why do I need to learn all these modes?"
"Songs are made up, there's no independent universal objective criteria."
"Music is physical resonance in air, and up there it's physical resonance in terms of orbits."
"Music is not subjective. A note can be amoral, a single note, but the way you put it together and even the style in which you put it together can be used for moral or immoral purposes."
"Chord progressions sound the same regardless of what key we're in - they're used time after time in different songs."
"In music, there's no such thing as overkilling."
"By the end of this lesson, you're going to walk away with a deeper confidence in your understanding of jazz."
"Music is almost like another language, but it is a universal language."
"Every chord has a personality... create stories around it."
"A relatively common eighth note combination of unprotected elements that happens to be played in a Tambor common to the particular genre of music cannot be so original as to warrant copyright protection."
"Harmonic theory doesn't say to you you must do this and if you don't then learn."
"Having a good grasp of inverted chords is really gonna free you up to write way more interesting melodic and moving chord progressions."
"Knowing how to create chord progressions is super useful... unleashes all kinds of possibilities for creativity."
"By playing around with chord progressions, you can begin to hear little bits of melody... ideas to take forward in the creative process."
"Changing key, modulating key to use a technical term, is a huge subject."
"If the tonal center seems to have moved completely, then you've got a key change."
"Diminished chord: one of the most versatile ways to modulate."
"It's kind of weird but you have the tritone that wants to resolve and it just kind of works."
"You can go to so many keys with this by just lowering one note of the chord by a half step."
"There are so many reasons why a song might be catchy but at the basis of it they all come down to some musical component of how that song is constructed being easy to remember and easy to replicate."
"The technique is the encounter between the human, the instrument, and the laws of Music In Harmony and Rhythm."
"Now we're going to go into jazz phrasing and syncopation this next step is about jazz phrasing or syncopation."
"Silences are just as important as sounds when it comes to rhythm and creating patterns."
"Rhythm is arguably the most important part of music and it's the hardest to talk about."
"A great melody will usually repeat a couple of times and then change to either go up or down."
"The ultimate harmonic goal in tonal music is to get to the tonic triad, the one chord."
"A chromatic mediant relationship is the relationship between two major triads or two minor triads with roots a minor third or a major third apart."
"The chords that we use in tonal harmony are mostly tertian, built of thirds."
"The piano keyboard helps you to count half steps, whole steps, and solve just about any music theory problem that you come across."
"An octave is the distance from one note to the next highest or lowest note of the same letter and accidental."
"The major scale is simply a specific pattern of half steps and whole steps that encompass one octave."
"The circle of fifths helps you to memorize your key signatures and to know the order of sharps and flats."
"The harmonic minor scale is the most commonly used of the minor scales because of its leading tone."
"An interval is the measurement of the distance in pitch between two notes."
"The use of diatonic modes in music is a very cool concept."
"Music theory hasn't been built as a rigid set of rules that you must follow; it's the music that has been made first."
"Music theory is like a cookbook. It's full of recipes you can follow as is and it will make great dishes, but you can also take these techniques as an inspiration and apply them in another way to make something of your own."
"Chords are coordinates, they send you to a place."
"By having a whole string of non-diatonic chords, it starts to actually muddy where the key center is."
"Music is a language and music theory is just the way that we understand that language."
"We need a game plan. We need a map. Otherwise we're just diving into this huge vast ocean of music theory and not knowing what the game plan is."
"Instead of worrying about all the hundreds and thousands of different chords out there, we narrowed it down to the exact seven that are the right chords in the key of C."
"It's always the same underlying principles and it doesn't even matter what genre you want to play. Those four chords are a huge gigantic part of most of the music you're going to come across."
"What if I had a different note on top of every chord but in a systematic way?"
"So thinking of those numbers is the all-important way to do all this stuff, right? So you know, let's just, let's do a common one, one, five, six, four, right? A lot of songs are in that order. One...five...six...four."
"So I guess you can call that a secret. If you ever see a B chord in the key of E, you can always use a B7."
"Once you really understand and can see that the fretboard is just this interlaced pattern of the chromatic scale and the circle of fifths combined, you can really play anything."
"A minor chord is actually an exact reflection of the relationships of a major chord."
"In music, tension and release are created through low and high registers."
"To make that musical phrase sound good, we need to use notes that are in the same key."
"The beauty of music theory is that it gives you the tools to understand and create music in any key."
"If you know your major key, now, rather than selecting from all 12 notes, you're just selecting from a subset, like the seven. So you've instantly given yourself an extra helping hand in choosing what note to add or what note to go to."
"Scales are the best place to start when improvising because they sort of give you a framework in which you know it will sound reasonably good regardless of what happens as long as you stay in the scale."
"These intervals are known as a major third and a minor third, and that's where these chords get their names."
"Voice leading is about making chords sound much better to listen to."
"That's the cool thing about pentatonic, is everything's either a chord tone or a note where if you bend it up, it becomes a chord tone."
"Understanding how the cycle of fourths affects patterns on the fretboard is crucial."
"Learn the notes of the fretboard cyclically, treating it as a loop rather than a ladder."
"Learn your scales, learn your modes, learn your arpeggios to the extent that you want to and need to, and then play music. Have it come from inside of your being."
"The major scale is essentially the entire genome, the DNA strand of everything in western music."
"Four-note-per-string scale patterns are great for making awesome fast sequenced licks."
"Uniformity of notes per string, especially when they're even numbers, is always easier for your picking hand."
"To build a chord from that, we take the first, the third, and the fifth notes."
"Understanding interval qualities like major, minor, perfect, augmented, and diminished helps in ear training."
"Just like knowing that going five frets higher, 7 + 5 is 12. There's 12 notes in music, so that's how that works."
"Every suspended two chord is also a suspended IV chord by another name."
"Your lead playing is gonna shine because you can recognize chord tones a little bit easier."
"Once you start moving around hunting, it's like, alright, let's say I find an A, okay? Now, an A in the key of A, this will sound right over even the chords when they're changing."
"There's a power that the parent key, the parent note, has over a chord progression."
"Once you understand how it works, you can spell these chords out and the name of the chord gives you the exact instructions to build it."
"Using just one scale, the major scale, you unlock so much in music theory."
"Ending on a minor six chord is the way to do it because it adds so much drama to anything you're doing."
"They're really good ones to know that a lot of other musicians are already gonna know and they don't change, so you don't have to be like all right, well, you know this chord progression goes through four times then it switches and there's a bridge, keeping it simple again."
"You don't need to know about music theory or know about music at all to feel the change, it's just something that happens to you."
"Why do we always learn all these scales? I guess we want to go from the low string to the high string. That's all we need. That's the scale, right?"
"Trim the fat. Take the scale for its essence, for only its parts. Only what it's comprised of, the five notes of the minor pentatonic scale, and play it in every position that you can starting from each string, starting in all ranges."
"Understanding harmony, it can just be on a basic level, and thinking of everything in intervals or intervallically really helped me along the way."
"Ear training is massive. Being able to identify intervals is one of the most powerful tools that you can put in your bag."
"Resolve now tension note, resolve note, tension note, resolve no tension note, tension note, resolve note, right?"
"Adding your pinkie to the first string 7th fret gives you this really cool add 9 sound."
"These are the most important basics of music theory to know."
"You will instantly be able to play any mode you wish without having to work out which major scale the mode belongs to first."
"A lot of my favorite songs go way past this bread and butter diatonic chord only six chord choices. A lot of my favorite songs leave the key and they do interesting things that break the rules."
"Changing chords is one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox...one of the tools that we can use to change the chords is to add extensions and tensions, which is really a way to add different colors to basic chord types."
"All of those chords we looked at, the 10 triads more or less fall into what we call tertiary harmony, harmony built from thirds."
"...not to get into modes too much but if you start at the root of a major scale go up to the seventh degree and then play a major scale starting there in the same key that is the locrian mode."
"If you know your diatonic formula one two three four five six seven, you can replace the two the 3 and the 6 with minor 7th chords and you're golden."
"Every song's made up of three chords."
"The CAGED system allows you to expand your vision of the fretboard. But a consequence of this is that if you're in one area of the fretboard and you're playing a chord progression, you can actually play this entire chord progression in this area."
"So now you're starting to open up your fretboard. And a chord is not just a shape that mysteriously has that name. You don't even know why. You know that major chord is 135, and on the guitar, there's really two main voicings for these chords."
"My goal is simple: to empower and educate guitarists through a clear understanding of Music Theory."
"A chord is not just a shape that mysteriously has that name. You don't even know why. You know that major chord is 135, and on the guitar, there's really two main voicings for these chords."
"Spice up your core progressions... inversions... you can completely reverse the order... invert the cords differently... can help you have one basic chord progression and transform it into endless possibilities."
"The possibilities are endless. You just kind of do whatever you want. This is the freedom that music theory gives you. It just says, 'These are the notes in the chord. What do you want to do with it?'"
"The easiest way to think about nine chords is to find the root note, go back to one note in the scale, and that's the appropriate seven for that chord in that key."
"...and then the same would go for finding the chords to any other keys so for example the key of G major we would have the notes g a b c d e f sharp and then we can number those and add our major minor formula to those as well."
"It makes such a huge difference to your sight reading. It will revolutionise the way you look at music."
"So now we understand the same shape can be used for both minor and major keys."
"The cage system is a hidden, invisible framework and it underlies absolutely everything on the guitar."
"It's the kind of thing I wish somebody had taught me earlier when I had first started learning music theory. It would have saved years of struggles."
"The reason the cycle of thirds is important is because... it's telling you is how to get all of those other colors into your chords."