Chords

The next time someone asks you if you know all of your scales, ask them if they know the Hungarian minor or the double harmonic.

Don’t underestimate the power of these three chords, 1, 5, and 4, to paint an evocative landscape.

This is a tetrachord.

Here are 10 chords for you to chew on, centered around the key of C until you’re ready to join a beat kitchen class.

Tuesday’s Music Theory Gym and its Stevie Wonder adds where we find a convergence of ascending and descending movement.

How tetrachords combine to form every mode and scale. Interval patterns, visual breakdowns, and practical applications.

One thing most pianists understand intuitively is that you can freely fill the gap between the bottom two notes of any root position triad, as long as that note isn’t an F.

Let’s do away with the notion that all major chords are bright and happy and all minor chords are dark and sad.

This might be the easiest complicated chord progression you’ll ever learn.

This is a chord progression you might hear on a Sunday.

If you’re looking for a simple chord, one that sounds expensive, one that you’ll keep coming back to, look no further than this one.

The color tones in a chord tend to be the ones that create a little friction.

If you’ve played Fallout, you recognize this immediately.

As your understanding of music deepens, one of the things that’s going to come into focus is the distinction between structure and function.

These are the chords from Brad Wilson’s "God Only Knows." The song’s originally an E, but we’ve moved it to C to conform to our ten chord toolkit.

There’s a reasonable chance that the first minor chord you ever learned was an A minor.

There are four tetrachords, which are just four note mini scales that span a fourth.

What’s a chordal? It’s a little game and you can play it with yourself. But every week we put them in our story to help you practice music theory. It’s…

Major 7th chords and minor 7th chords aren’t unique.

Every diminished chord resolves to nine different places. Walk through all nine — the first eight follow a simple pattern.

What do you do with a diminished chord?

I would argue that sampling has changed our modern conception of harmony and here’s why.

They’re going to tell you that this is not a minor chord.

We talked about secondary dominance in theory class, and in this song most of the chords are functioning like five chords.

Here is a little gift because if you can play this you’ve got a little gospel under your fingers and that means you’re playing with inversions and diminished chords and if that’s new to you that’s going to open some doors.

I’m going to show you a really rare chord progression.

If you’re just getting chords under your fingers, this is going to be the easiest complicated chord progression you’ve ever learned.

(playing bluesy music) Playing the blues in D, by a harmonica in G.

I want to introduce you to a sweet little chord with an intimidating name.

Let’s take a look at this descending chromatic line and ask ourselves what it has to do with the key of C.

Producers have this habit of trying to understand music theory without understanding one really basic thing, which is form.

Last night, I lay awake thinking about scales and modes so you don’t have to.

Let me simplify chords for you a little bit by telling you that on the piano there are only four augmented chords.

Should I care about poly chords?

Paul McCartney's Blackbird is a masterclass in voice leading. The chord name doesn't matter — what matters is the function.

Cords and scales are a mystery because you're trying to memorize them like phone numbers.

This little moment holds a key to at least three important intermediate concepts in jazz harmony.

The biggest music theory hack has nothing to do with reading music or memorizing chord names. It starts with seeing the pattern.

A useful chord progression that compares a common tone diminished with a dominant chord. What do you call that chord?

A descending baseline over a minor chord appears in thousands of songs. But that little wrinkle at the end means you can't use a single scale.

Another useful chord progression to put under your fingers — a common keyboard trope built on the 6/3 church resolution.

An ear training exercise: identify the note that never changes and name the chord at the end — by structure or by function.

The most valuable piano voicing you can learn — a 6/4 inversion straight out of Miles Davis that exerts maximum force for minimum energy.

We see both experienced and beginner producers at Bee Kitchen.

John Carpenter's Halloween theme — 70% of you identified it as minor. But there's no third in the structure. Music theory isn't about a right or wrong answer.

When you’re arranging you have to think a lot like a mix engineer because every instrument is going to speak differently in every register So the chord that sounds great here May not sound great down here But this note sounds fabulous so we restructure the core And oftentimes when we’re looking at chords like this we’re trying to find the spot where the instrument growls without becoming overly dark *Music* *Music* *Music*

This may be one of the most useful chord progressions you can learn, and it’s deceptively easy, because if you can do this, then you can do this, and even this.

Getting comfortable with keyboard chords means getting comfortable with inversions.

Let me share with you the steps I take to teach harmony to our students.

Like most things, fixing a subtle clash in logic is pretty much the same as it was in Ableton.

A clashing note is one that doesn’t fit with your existing harmony.

Hey gang, look how far we’ve come.

Sometimes we can easily explain the relationship between two chords using an established music theory device.

Let’s look at some expensive sounding chords.

Sometimes the naming conventions in music theory almost seem cruel.

If you’re unfamiliar with the keyboard, this is about to be the best and the worst lesson you’ll ever get.

How do you actually know what key something’s in?

Do you ever get confused about major or minor chords?

The song "Something" by The Beatles uses a very common device to move between chords.

It’s only fair that I tell you what I mean when I say bottom up or top down songwriting.

There are 12 keys. Does it matter which one you pick? As musicians, we’re taught early and often that we should be proficient in all keys and while that’s true,…

One of the most effective ways to learn to identify intervals and chords is to associate those with songs that you know.

Here’s some good news.

Even in the blues, dominant chords tend to function like five chords.

Music doesn’t have to be complicated to be good.

I’ve discovered a new chord!

Did you notice I’ve posted every day for the last 150 days?

Music has rules, but the thing is, you get to write them yourself.

This morning in the region we looked at Stevie Wonder "Isn’t She Lovely?" There’s a lot this song can teach us, but we have time to talk about the first four chords.

We’ll talk about these chords another day, because right now there are two things you need to understand about working with audio and working with loops.

This might just be one of the most versatile structures in harmony.

Okay, in 60 seconds, what do I mean when I say something sounds modal?

There’s nothing more fun than walking our students through the songs they love.

There is a story, and I’ve heard it attributed to a saxophone player named Phil Woods.

Take a song in a minor key and end unexpectedly on a major chord.

Michael Jackson’s Rock with You.

So the song "Just the Two of Us" has a lot of opportunity for things like passing chords.

These voicings for fast car feature a natural third as well as a suspended fourth in the same chord.

When you play most chords, what you’re getting is a blend.

Chords like these allow for an internal melody to thread itself, weaving its way through the chord structure.

We made this in the beat building jam today.

As a lot of music theory conversations break down, when I realize someone’s asking, "What is this chord for?" Chords aren’t for anything.

Learn essential chord progressions: A minor, E7, and B half diminished. Master the flat nine color tone and efficient chord transitions using minimal finger movement for better harmony.

Playing a chord, it’s easy.

How many chords do you know?

Learn the difference between sharps and flats in music theory. Understand how accidentals work, key signatures, and why A# and Bb are functionally different in musical context.

I’ve gotten some interesting questions people asking me to clarify what do I mean by an arrangement?

The first time I heard Imogen Heaps hide and seek, I was driving and I literally had to pull the car over.

If you’ve been scrolling around here long enough, you’ve certainly found somebody telling you that you’re supposed to tune your kick to the key of your song.

Music theory starts with your ear and learning the names for stuff doesn’t really matter if you’re not hearing with specificity I can help you learn the names for things and I would love to but you can train your ear for free by yourself I’ve been giving you about three chordals a week for like a year But you don’t actually need me you can do it in front of your own instrument.

Quick music theory tip: Why you can omit the fifth from chords. Understanding the harmonic series and how it affects chord voicing in music production.

It may look like it to you right now, but my musician Basics Elective is not all math.

In the most basic sense, a chord inversion is a way of reorganizing the notes of a chord.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m incapable of passing up an instrument at a garage sale.

Chord ID part 2. With the chord in its root position, most chords are going to sit solidly within these two pillars of a perfect fifth. This is a very…

What makes a great melody?

Beat Kitchen landmarks are something reserved for things that you go back to over and over again.

A harmonica is an instrument that plays two chords, which makes it a perfect illustration of the plagal and the perfect cadence that I demonstrated earlier.

I shared a toolkit with you yesterday.

If you’re writing lyrics and melodies and having trouble setting them to chords, this video is for you.

Today is part three in our series on identifying chords and we’re looking at the edge cases.

Chord ID part 2. With the chord in its root position, most chords are going to sit solidly within these two pillars of a perfect fifth. This is a very…

Yesterday in class one of the students brought in a sweet Thundercat song called Dragon Ball Durag and it’s a great example of chords that are just stacked in thirds moving right up through the diatonic scale.