Fundamentals of Music Theory Explained

Hey, it's Andrew Huang. Just a little bit of context for this video. It is a complete walkthrough of the basics of music theory in half an hour. Also sprinkled throughout are some exercises that you can do that will help you internalize these concepts because once they're in here, once they're natural to how you operate, it's like a superpower. You'll be able to come up with more ideas, you'll be able to work faster, the things that are in your head you'll just be able to do. It's magic. I love music theory. I'm a huge nerd. I actually made this video as a piece of bonus content for my online class, which you can find out more about at learnmonthly.com slash Andrew. I just wanted to have this there so that all the students would have the same foundation before heading into the rest of the course, which is much more about music production and songwriting and mixing and that kind of thing. But when I finished putting this lesson together, it really felt like a great thing to just share for free on YouTube. a crash course on music theory. So I hope it's helpful for you and if you're interested in a 20 lesson course about my whole approach to music making, more info about that at learnmonthly.com Here's the theory lesson. So what is music theory? It's essentially the language behind music. It gives you the tools you need to understand and interpret and communicate about music. Everyone in this class has mastered talking. Whatever your home language is, it's second nature to you now, you can use it without thinking about it, and it's an incredibly powerful way to interpret the world around you and communicate with other people, relate to them, express yourself. Music theory does the same thing for music. It'll help you understand how chords and notes and rhythms and melodies all work together, and as you get good at the language, you're able to use it really effectively without thinking about it. I hear from a lot of people that they get stuck in this place with music theory where it feels like it's just work and it's really cerebral and it's all about what key am I in and what chord is this and what scale should I be using? And I really want to stress that there is a place beyond that where if you use it enough, it becomes as natural and fluid as talking. I know that when you're talking, you're not thinking about do I use past tense or present tense or like what is the word for this very common item that I use every day. You're a natural at it. You just look at this and your brain goes, ah, it's a cat. With enough experience, you can absolutely get to that same level of natural automatic use of music theory. Similarly with language, sometimes we come across a word or a concept that we don't know, but we can learn it if it's explained to us using the words and the concepts that we already do understand. In music, if I come across something really advanced that I don't understand, it's the music theory fundamentals that allow me to figure it out and learn it and add it to my arsenal. So we're going to start right at the beginning and talk about notes. What is a note? Well, sound is made up of vibrations and our ears and brains are really good at interpreting those vibrations. When the vibrations are faster, we hear them as being higher, and when the vibrations are slower, we hear them as being lower. If the vibrations happen at a consistent rate, then we perceive them as having a consistent pitch or frequency or A note. So for example, if I play this guitar string, it's vibrating, it's physically moving back and forth, in this case 110 times per second, and that's quickly traveling through the air and reaching our ears, and we perceive that as the note. A. Now in case you aren't aware, the vast majority of popular music is made using only 12 notes. Almost all the music you've ever heard is made up of these 12 notes and how they relate to each other, because as a culture we've discovered that that generally sounds better. than frequencies that don't relate together in that way. And there are actually mathematical ratios that explain why all those relationships sound good together, but for the purposes of this course, we don't need to get into that. We've given the notes names so it's easy to refer to them, and the names relate to the layout of a piano keyboard. So the white notes are named A through G. The black keys are named relative to the white keys with the words sharp and flat. Sharp means higher and flat means lower. So for example with this note, it's above an F. So it's an F sharp. But it's also below this G. So in some situations you'd call it a G flat. As you can see there are a lot more than just 12 keys on this keyboard, but the same notes actually repeat themselves higher and lower. That's the one mathematical ratio that I'll get into here, and it's actually kind of fascinating, but our brains can tell when a vibration is twice as fast as another one. It sounds like the same note. If I play an A here... and an A here... It's the same, but one's higher and one's lower? It's crazy! And by the way, this distance of going 12 notes up or down to the next identically named note is called an octave. The increment between each individual note is called a semitone or a half-step, and the increment between two half-steps is called a whole-step or a whole-tone or a tone. So music is then built on the relationships between these notes, and there are common combinations of notes that we call a key, not to be confused with the word key when we're referring to a piano, A key is sort of like a guide of what notes will sound good together in a piece of music, and most pieces of music use only one key. If you remember when I said most songs don't even use all 12 notes, most commonly they would use seven, and that's because there are seven notes in major and minor keys, which are the most common keys. So let's look at an example of a key. The easiest one is C major because it uses all the white notes. So when I play the notes out like that, that's called the C major scale. And the words scale and key are often used interchangeably, but for your knowledge, a key is more like the home base group of notes that a song is based on, and a scale is a set of notes that you would play in conjunction with that. So a lot of times you're playing the exact scale that matches the key that you're in, but sometimes depending on the flavor that you want or the genre that you're working with, you'll use a different scale over your home key. So for example, a lot of blues music is written in E major because that's like the standard tuning of a guitar, But blues solos typically happen with the E blues scale or E pentatonic minor scale. Those scales have some of the same notes as E major, but some that are different, and that's what imparts the bluesy flavor. But let's look at the C major scale again and the relationships between the notes. So if we're in the key of C, we call C the root note, and that's the note that we start the scale on. Notice that as we go up the scale, the notes have a spacing of whole, whole, half. Whole, whole, whole, half. Starting here you go up two, up two, up one, up two, up two, up two, and up one. Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. That is the formula of a major scale. So if your song is in C major, you'll know that these are the notes that you'll mostly or maybe exclusively use because they'll sound better than the notes that aren't in C major. It's also common practice and really helpful to number the notes of the scale, starting with one at the root. So if C is our one, then D would be our 2 or the second degree or just the second, E would be the 3 or the third degree or the third, and so on. Practice applying the major scale formula to a few different notes. Remember that the spacing between the notes in the major scale is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. So for example, if you picked A major, you would start on A and you would move up a whole tone, so skip one and then play the next. That's B, then another whole tone, skip one, play the next, that's C sharp. Then just a half tone, D, another whole tone, skip one, play the E, another whole tone, skip the F, play the F sharp, another whole tone, skip the G, play the G sharp, and then finally another half tone to get back up to A. Also practice identifying the notes, both using the absolute letter names that go with them, as well as the numbered scale degrees that go with each key that you're in. In a major scale, each letter name appears exactly once, no matter how many accidentals there are. Accidentals meaning a sharp or a flat. So to name the notes in an A major scale, we would start on A and go up alphabetically from there. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And of course, G is the last letter that we use in music, so we wrap back around to an A over here. But we also have to add sharp. to the names of the black keys, C sharp, F sharp, and G sharp. So it's A, B, C sharp, D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A. So even though these notes are C sharp, F sharp, and G sharp, because they're a half step above C, F, and G, they're also a half step below D, G, and A. So you could call them D flat, G flat, and A flat. In A major, we use the sharp names for these notes, that way each letter name appears exactly once in the scale, and it makes it easier to remember and communicate about these notes. As opposed to if we use the flat names, and then the scale was A, B, Db, D, E, Gb, Ab, A, where you have skips between the letters, and some of them repeat twice. So to name the notes in the major scale, you start at the root note and go up alphabetically, and that's how you know whether to name the black keys as sharps or flats. In a couple of special cases, you might even name white keys sharp or flat. For instance, if you wrote an A sharp major, your second note, a whole tone up, would be this, which is a C, but in A sharp major, we would call it a B sharp. Because of this, though, a lot of people prefer to refer to this key as B flat, which reduces the confusion of needing to use a sharp name on a white key. I know this is a lot of information, so don't worry if it takes you a little bit to get the hang of it, but that's also exactly why practice is important. Naming the scale degrees is much easier obviously. The root note you picked is the first degree, and then you just count up for each consecutive note in the scale. So in A major, A is the first degree, B is the second, C sharp is the third, D is the fourth, E is the fifth, F sharp is the sixth, and G sharp is the seventh. So the next big piece of the puzzle for working with notes and making music sound good is chords. Chords are just multiple notes played at the same time. They do most of the work of setting the emotion in the song and guide the listener through some kind of musical story. Since chords are made up of notes and notes are in keys, chords are almost always in the same key. If you randomly play a bunch of notes from C major, you're playing some kind of chord from C major. The most common chords contain three notes that have a very specific relationship to each other and we call that the root, third, and fifth. So in C major I can play the root C, the third of C major E, and the fifth of C major G. And that gives us a C major chord. Root, third, fifth. You can think of this as playing a note from the scale, skipping a note from the scale, playing a note from the scale, skipping a note from the scale, and then playing another note from the scale. This type of chord is also called a triad. Now we can take this triad shape and move the root so that it's any other note from C major and we'll get another chord from C major. So since this chord starts on F, it's an F chord, but here's where we need to get a little fluid with our lingo, because the root of an F chord is F, the third is A, and the fifth is C. But we're still in the key of C major, where C is the root, and F is the fourth in relation to C, and and A is the sixth in relation to C. Don't worry if this is confusing right now, it's the kind of thing you get the hang of the more you use it, but it's definitely helpful to get used to the numbered relationships within chords as well as how they relate to the overall key. So there are two really common chord types in music and that's major and minor. People usually say major sounds happy, and minor sounds sad, but there's actually a very specific relationship that makes up these chords. If you take a chord like C, E, G, that sounds happy and it is indeed a major chord. And look at how the notes are spaced out. We start on C, we go up four, to E, and then we go up three, to G. So the first two notes are four semitones apart and the next two notes are three semitones apart. That's the formula for a major triad. Four then three, major. If a chord is three then four, it's minor. So in this case if we change the E to an E flat We've got C minor. So major and minor scales actually have a really tight-knit relationship We say that every major scale has a relative minor scale. So if we look at C major and play that scale Just moving that down three semitones to an A gives us the relative minor and playing the same notes but starting on an A gives us the A natural minor scale. So the relative minor always starts on the sixth degree of the relative major. Now going back to the key of C major, if you experiment with moving your triad shape around and you end up with the triad that starts on B, you'll notice that's a three then three, and that's a diminished chord, and it's used so much more rarely compared to major and minor that we're just not going to get into it right now, but it's there. Choose a few different major scales and practice making triads out of the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth degrees. So for example in A major I would start on A, skip the next note in the scale, play the next note in the scale, skip the next note in the scale, and then play the next note in the scale. That makes an A major chord. The second degree chord will be B minor, so you're playing the second degree of the A major scale, skipping the next note in the A major scale, playing the next note in the A major scale, skipping the next note, and playing the next note. B, D, F sharp. B minor. And that's how you'll go up and construct all the main triads from A major. Also practice naming each chord. Name both the root note and whether the chord is major or minor. So going back to A major, our first triad sounds happy and has A as its root, which means it's A major. The second triad sounds sad and it has B as its root, making it B minor. Remember you can also identify major and minor by the spacing of the notes. Major is four then three So if we start on A and go up four, one two, three four, we get C sharp up three, one two three We get E so A C sharp E. That's an A major chord. If we change that to three then four A One two three gets us to C. One two, three four gets us back to that E. So A C E is A minor Once you can identify all the first through sixth degree triads in a key, you have an amazing starting point for creating songs. You can even just pick three or four of those triads at random, play them in a row, and bam! You have a nice sounding chord progression. So these scale degrees, the numbers that we've been using, are really handy because they help us understand how notes and chords function within a key, and they're also used as a shorthand for discussing chord progressions. They help us understand how chords relate to each other relatively rather than absolutely. So if you look at any major scale, we'll use C again as an example, the triads are major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, Diminished. We don't need diminished. So looking at the chords starting on degrees 1 through 6 of a major scale, it's always major, minor, minor, major, major, minor. There's a common shorthand where you write these down using Roman numerals. The number indicates the degree of the scale, and capitals are used for major chords while lowercase is used for minor. Let's look at another example with a specific chord progression. 1-5-6-4. So if we're in C major, it's 1-C 5-G A minor is the 6 and F is the 4. 1-5-6-4, it has a certain emotional quality to it and we can replicate that now in any key because we can think 1-5-6-4 in that key. So for example in G we'll go 1-G-5-D-6-E minor and 4-C. Same progression, different key. Now you may have noticed that both of these chord progressions contain both a C major and a G major chord, but in each key those chords function totally differently. In C major, C is the root and G is the fifth. In G major, G is the root and C is the fourth. As you use chords more often, you'll start to get familiar with what the degrees are in relationship to certain keys. And as you use the degrees more, you'll start to understand how the chords function. You'll know there's a certain sound when a 2 goes to a 5, or you'll understand the sense of yearning that a 4 can convey. By thinking about chords and notes as scale degrees rather than just the letter names, you're able to transcend the key that you're in and use what you learn in all keys. For example, if you only think about the letters and you find a chord progression you really like, like let's say E, F sharp minor, A. You don't have any way to convert that to another key. But if you think about that as 1 2 4, now you can understand how that could be played in any key. You could do 1 2 4 in D. 1 2 4 in A. And this is useful not only when you're creating music, but also when you're learning from other songs. If you can understand these scale degrees and decipher the songs that you listen to, you'll start to notice patterns. After all, you only have these first through sixth scale degrees that almost every song is using to build their chords on. So you'll probably start to notice, uh, I really like songs that are around the four, five, and six. Or, I'm not really a fan of the flavor of a three going to a five. By using this number system, you really allow so much more musical knowledge to accumulate and compound. Practice creating chord progressions based on numbers. Pick a random key and random number sequences between 1 and 6 and practice playing those chord progressions. So for an example, I'm going to pick a key that we haven't seen in this lesson yet. How about E flat major? The first through sixth degree chords are E flat major, F minor, G minor, A flat major, B flat major, and C minor. So now if we pick random sequences of numbers between 1 and 6, we can play them as chord progressions. So how about 5-6-4-4? How about 4-3-2-1? How about that example from earlier in the lesson, 1-5-6-4? Also practice deciphering keys and scale degrees. Look up the chords to a song that you like, you can usually just google song name plus chords, and see if you can figure out what key it's in. With our triads we've covered the really important chord fundamentals, but I also want to talk about inversions. So that's when you change the position of one or more notes in the chord so that the root is no longer the lowest. So if we look at C major C, E, G has C at the bottom, but what if we move it to the top? E, G, C Or G, C, E These are the same notes, so it's still a C major chord, it's just inverted. This is handy because with chord progressions, it often sounds better to find inversions that have the notes closer together, rather than what we were doing before, moving the triad shape all around. So for instance, we played that 1-6-5-4 in G, G, D, E minor, C. Why don't we move some of those chords around? Why don't we make some of them into inversions? so that the notes are closer together and maybe we can find something that's easier to play and that sounds better. So I think I'm still going to start with this G triad. This is called first inversion. Now to move to a D next, I think instead of playing it up here with this F sharp and A, I'm going to move both of those down to this octave and play this D. So now we're going from G to D. This D stays the same and the B moves to an A, the G moves to an F sharp. It's a really nice movement from G to D in that inversion. Now from the D we want to go to an E minor and I think the most natural thing to do would be for these notes to move back up to G and B because those notes are in E minor and then we'll play this E up here. That's probably the most natural movement from this inversion of D to go to an E minor. So our whole progression right now is... And from this E minor to go to a C, it's super easy because again, E minor and C share two of the same notes, so we just need to move this B to a C. And so now our chord progression, which before sounded like this, has become this. It's nicer, it sounds more natural, and it'll also fit better with other instruments as they all occupy a bit more of a consistent range for themselves. Another thing about inversions is that they'll subtly change the flavor of a chord, and we can emphasize this by reinforcing the lowest notes of our chords. So for instance, let's stay in G, let's play a 1 to 4, so G to C. With the added lower octave. But what if I use G in second inversion with the B at the bottom of the G chord to move to that C. Now if we reinforce that with the lower notes I've always really loved that flavor of a one moving to a four but having the third of the one in the bass. Try making a few different chord progressions and this time use inversions so that they're a little closer together and not just the same shape moving up and down the keyboard You now have the knowledge necessary to pick a key by picking a root note and finding the other notes in that key using the formula for the major scale. You're able to make chords out of those notes and you're also able to call those chords by their numbered names and make chord progressions. The next step is to look at melodies, which are single sequences of notes played with the chords, usually above them. This is usually the thing that you would sing along to in a song, but even in instrumental music, there's usually some kind of lead melodic part that's the most interesting. and the thing that's the most memorable for people. To create a melody, you already have all the raw ingredients. You can just start stringing together notes that are in the key that you're in over top of a chord progression. But there is a really interesting interplay between what notes you're playing over which chords. A lot of it has to do with tension versus stability and whether the note in your melody is a note that's in the chord that's currently playing. Melodies that only use notes that match the chords are usually pretty bland. And it tends to be more interesting to use some notes that are outside the chord. Typically these are passing notes, so notes that are in between two notes that are in the chord. You could even have a melody where none of the notes are part of the chords that they're played with. But that's pretty uncommon, and typically you are playing with this tension and release of involving melody notes that are part of the chord and not part of the chord. As one little tip, often you would end on a note that's within the chord rather than ending on a note that's not in the chord. Another little shortcut to melodies that mostly sound good is if you use the major pentatonic scale. So if we look at C major... And we remove the fourth and seventh degrees, so that's F and B... Then we just have this. And if you play melodies with those notes over chords from C major, typically it'll sound pretty good. That's because overall those notes are the most stable over most of the chords. Pick a key and create a chord progression in that key, then record that into your music software. Once you have that, try to play some melodies over it, thinking about what notes are in the chord that's currently playing. and maybe some that aren't, but that can resolve to notes that are in the chord. Also try removing the 4th and 7th degrees from your major scale to make a major pentatonic scale, and then try playing melodies using that scale. You might find that it's even easier to get something sounding good. For a quick example of finding a major pentatonic scale, why don't we look at the key of F. Uh, the notes there are F, G, A, Bb, C, D, E. So if we number those, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Bb is the 4, E is the 7. We'll take that out of our scale leaving us with F, G, A, C, D. That is the F major pentatonic scale. The last component of Theory Fundamentals is rhythm and how to count it. How do you tell when things are played? Whether that's chords or melodies or drum beats. That's based on On the musical counting system, music is divided into equal sized portions called bars or measures, and typically in Western music you'll have four beats to a measure, which we count. One, two, three, four. So if one note is the length of a bar, we'd call it a whole note. If it's two beats, which is half of the bar, we'd call it a half note. And then each of those four notes that we were counting as beats in the bar are quarters of the bar. Those are quarter notes. So you can have sounds, instruments, whatever, playing on these beats or anywhere in between them. And if something is on the beat, then we would say it's on the one, for example. But if it's in between these beats, then we need to do what's called subdividing, which is like increasing the resolution of our counting. If we subdivide beats in half, we count it as one and two and three and four and. And those ands are exactly halfway in between each of those beats, so now that resolution is eighth notes. We can subdivide further, again getting exactly halfway in between our main beats and our ands, so that would be one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a. So that puts us at sixteenth notes, and even though you can keep on subdividing forever, the main parts of songs are usually not played any faster than sixteenth notes. And this really is a pretty universal system in Western music. If you're talking to anybody who's had some music education and you say something is on the 2E, they'll probably know what you're talking about. So getting used to using this counting system will allow you to play music better because you'll be able to better feel where you are within the beats. It'll also allow you to interpret and decipher and remember different kinds of rhythmic material because it gives you a structure for those rhythms to live in. So let's say you're out and about and you get an idea or you hear something that you want to try But you can't actually make it right then you can make a quick note of it using this kind of rhythmic notation Let's say we had a beat idea that was like We could jot that down into this number system I've made this one a little pretty for the video, but you can do this really quickly freehand I do that all the time So I've got kick snare and a hat here and then a grid of 16 spaces Lining up with our 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a Well, I know that the snare is on the and of one and the four. I know there's a kick on one So it's gonna do two and three and then the high hats are One E and a two E. I think it's on the two E Yeah Yeah, that's our beat idea. And the first few times you do this, you might have to really slow it down and be counting along really deliberately and finding those beats and where they line up to what you want to do. But as you do this more and more, you'll get way better at it. You'll get way faster at it. You'll just know what it feels like to be on certain beats and you'll know how to make note of your ideas. Or, again, this grid is just like your DAW. You'll know how to input those beats into your DAW really quickly. For practice, take a song that you like and select an element like one line of melody or a drum beat and see if you can write out its rhythm using this basic 16th note notation. Alright, I know that's a lot to take in. Definitely try to make some time for those practice exercises, and of course, come back to this video as much as you want to use it as reference. If you're interested in videos like this, but about writing and producing and recording and mixing and mastering, I have a very comprehensive, interactive online class that runs a few times a year. Again, you can learn more about that at learnmonthly.com slash Andrew. Music theory is the best! I'll see you in the next video.

Hey, it's Andrew Huang. Just a little bit of context for this video. It is a complete walkthrough of the basics of music theory in half an hour.

Also sprinkled throughout are some exercises that you can do that will help you internalize these concepts because once they're in here, once they're natural to how you operate, it's like a superpower. You'll be able to come up with more ideas, you'll be able to work faster, the things that are in your head you'll just be able to do. It's magic. I love music theory. I'm a huge nerd.

I actually made this video as a piece of bonus content for my online class, which you can find out more about at learnmonthly.com slash Andrew. I just wanted to have this there so that all the students would have the same foundation before heading into the rest of the course, which is much more about music production and songwriting and mixing and that kind of thing. But when I finished putting this lesson together, it really felt like a great thing to just share for free on YouTube.

a crash course on music theory. So I hope it's helpful for you and if you're interested in a 20 lesson course about my whole approach to music making, more info about that at learnmonthly.com Here's the theory lesson. So what is music theory? It's essentially the language behind music.

It gives you the tools you need to understand and interpret and communicate about music. Everyone in this class has mastered talking. Whatever your home language is, it's second nature to you now, you can use it without thinking about it, and it's an incredibly powerful way to interpret the world around you and communicate with other people, relate to them, express yourself. Music theory does the same thing for music.

It'll help you understand how chords and notes and rhythms and melodies all work together, and as you get good at the language, you're able to use it really effectively without thinking about it. I hear from a lot of people that they get stuck in this place with music theory where it feels like it's just work and it's really cerebral and it's all about what key am I in and what chord is this and what scale should I be using? And I really want to stress that there is a place beyond that where if you use it enough, it becomes as natural and fluid as talking.

I know that when you're talking, you're not thinking about do I use past tense or present tense or like what is the word for this very common item that I use every day. You're a natural at it. You just look at this and your brain goes, ah, it's a cat. With enough experience, you can absolutely get to that same level of natural automatic use of music theory.

Similarly with language, sometimes we come across a word or a concept that we don't know, but we can learn it if it's explained to us using the words and the concepts that we already do understand. In music, if I come across something really advanced that I don't understand, it's the music theory fundamentals that allow me to figure it out and learn it and add it to my arsenal. So we're going to start right at the beginning and talk about notes. What is a note?

Well, sound is made up of vibrations and our ears and brains are really good at interpreting those vibrations. When the vibrations are faster, we hear them as being higher, and when the vibrations are slower, we hear them as being lower. If the vibrations happen at a consistent rate, then we perceive them as having a consistent pitch or frequency or A note. So for example, if I play this guitar string, it's vibrating, it's physically moving back and forth, in this case 110 times per second, and that's quickly traveling through the air and reaching our ears, and we perceive that as the note. A.

Now in case you aren't aware, the vast majority of popular music is made using only 12 notes. Almost all the music you've ever heard is made up of these 12 notes and how they relate to each other, because as a culture we've discovered that that generally sounds better. than frequencies that don't relate together in that way. And there are actually mathematical ratios that explain why all those relationships sound good together, but for the purposes of this course, we don't need to get into that. We've given the notes names so it's easy to refer to them, and the names relate to the layout of a piano keyboard.

So the white notes are named A through G. The black keys are named relative to the white keys with the words sharp and flat. Sharp means higher and flat means lower.

So for example with this note, it's above an F. So it's an F sharp. But it's also below this G.

So in some situations you'd call it a G flat. As you can see there are a lot more than just 12 keys on this keyboard, but the same notes actually repeat themselves higher and lower. That's the one mathematical ratio that I'll get into here, and it's actually kind of fascinating, but our brains can tell when a vibration is twice as fast as another one.

It sounds like the same note. If I play an A here... and an A here...

It's the same, but one's higher and one's lower? It's crazy! And by the way, this distance of going 12 notes up or down to the next identically named note is called an octave. The increment between each individual note is called a semitone or a half-step, and the increment between two half-steps is called a whole-step or a whole-tone or a tone. So music is then built on the relationships between these notes, and there are common combinations of notes that we call a key, not to be confused with the word key when we're referring to a piano, A key is sort of like a guide of what notes will sound good together in a piece of music, and most pieces of music use only one key.

If you remember when I said most songs don't even use all 12 notes, most commonly they would use seven, and that's because there are seven notes in major and minor keys, which are the most common keys. So let's look at an example of a key. The easiest one is C major because it uses all the white notes. So when I play the notes out like that, that's called the C major scale. And the words scale and key are often used interchangeably, but for your knowledge, a key is more like the home base group of notes that a song is based on, and a scale is a set of notes that you would play in conjunction with that.

So a lot of times you're playing the exact scale that matches the key that you're in, but sometimes depending on the flavor that you want or the genre that you're working with, you'll use a different scale over your home key. So for example, a lot of blues music is written in E major because that's like the standard tuning of a guitar, But blues solos typically happen with the E blues scale or E pentatonic minor scale. Those scales have some of the same notes as E major, but some that are different, and that's what imparts the bluesy flavor.

But let's look at the C major scale again and the relationships between the notes. So if we're in the key of C, we call C the root note, and that's the note that we start the scale on. Notice that as we go up the scale, the notes have a spacing of whole, whole, half. Whole, whole, whole, half. Starting here you go up two, up two, up one, up two, up two, up two, and up one.

Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. That is the formula of a major scale. So if your song is in C major, you'll know that these are the notes that you'll mostly or maybe exclusively use because they'll sound better than the notes that aren't in C major.

It's also common practice and really helpful to number the notes of the scale, starting with one at the root. So if C is our one, then D would be our 2 or the second degree or just the second, E would be the 3 or the third degree or the third, and so on. Practice applying the major scale formula to a few different notes.

Remember that the spacing between the notes in the major scale is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. So for example, if you picked A major, you would start on A and you would move up a whole tone, so skip one and then play the next. That's B, then another whole tone, skip one, play the next, that's C sharp.

Then just a half tone, D, another whole tone, skip one, play the E, another whole tone, skip the F, play the F sharp, another whole tone, skip the G, play the G sharp, and then finally another half tone to get back up to A. Also practice identifying the notes, both using the absolute letter names that go with them, as well as the numbered scale degrees that go with each key that you're in. In a major scale, each letter name appears exactly once, no matter how many accidentals there are.

Accidentals meaning a sharp or a flat. So to name the notes in an A major scale, we would start on A and go up alphabetically from there. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And of course, G is the last letter that we use in music, so we wrap back around to an A over here.

But we also have to add sharp. to the names of the black keys, C sharp, F sharp, and G sharp. So it's A, B, C sharp, D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A. So even though these notes are C sharp, F sharp, and G sharp, because they're a half step above C, F, and G, they're also a half step below D, G, and A.

So you could call them D flat, G flat, and A flat. In A major, we use the sharp names for these notes, that way each letter name appears exactly once in the scale, and it makes it easier to remember and communicate about these notes. As opposed to if we use the flat names, and then the scale was A, B, Db, D, E, Gb, Ab, A, where you have skips between the letters, and some of them repeat twice. So to name the notes in the major scale, you start at the root note and go up alphabetically, and that's how you know whether to name the black keys as sharps or flats.

In a couple of special cases, you might even name white keys sharp or flat. For instance, if you wrote an A sharp major, your second note, a whole tone up, would be this, which is a C, but in A sharp major, we would call it a B sharp. Because of this, though, a lot of people prefer to refer to this key as B flat, which reduces the confusion of needing to use a sharp name on a white key. I know this is a lot of information, so don't worry if it takes you a little bit to get the hang of it, but that's also exactly why practice is important.

Naming the scale degrees is much easier obviously. The root note you picked is the first degree, and then you just count up for each consecutive note in the scale. So in A major, A is the first degree, B is the second, C sharp is the third, D is the fourth, E is the fifth, F sharp is the sixth, and G sharp is the seventh.

So the next big piece of the puzzle for working with notes and making music sound good is chords. Chords are just multiple notes played at the same time. They do most of the work of setting the emotion in the song and guide the listener through some kind of musical story. Since chords are made up of notes and notes are in keys, chords are almost always in the same key. If you randomly play a bunch of notes from C major, you're playing some kind of chord from C major.

The most common chords contain three notes that have a very specific relationship to each other and we call that the root, third, and fifth. So in C major I can play the root C, the third of C major E, and the fifth of C major G. And that gives us a C major chord. Root, third, fifth. You can think of this as playing a note from the scale, skipping a note from the scale, playing a note from the scale, skipping a note from the scale, and then playing another note from the scale.

This type of chord is also called a triad. Now we can take this triad shape and move the root so that it's any other note from C major and we'll get another chord from C major. So since this chord starts on F, it's an F chord, but here's where we need to get a little fluid with our lingo, because the root of an F chord is F, the third is A, and the fifth is C. But we're still in the key of C major, where C is the root, and F is the fourth in relation to C, and and A is the sixth in relation to C.

Don't worry if this is confusing right now, it's the kind of thing you get the hang of the more you use it, but it's definitely helpful to get used to the numbered relationships within chords as well as how they relate to the overall key. So there are two really common chord types in music and that's major and minor. People usually say major sounds happy, and minor sounds sad, but there's actually a very specific relationship that makes up these chords.

If you take a chord like C, E, G, that sounds happy and it is indeed a major chord. And look at how the notes are spaced out. We start on C, we go up four, to E, and then we go up three, to G. So the first two notes are four semitones apart and the next two notes are three semitones apart. That's the formula for a major triad.

Four then three, major. If a chord is three then four, it's minor. So in this case if we change the E to an E flat We've got C minor.

So major and minor scales actually have a really tight-knit relationship We say that every major scale has a relative minor scale. So if we look at C major and play that scale Just moving that down three semitones to an A gives us the relative minor and playing the same notes but starting on an A gives us the A natural minor scale. So the relative minor always starts on the sixth degree of the relative major.

Now going back to the key of C major, if you experiment with moving your triad shape around and you end up with the triad that starts on B, you'll notice that's a three then three, and that's a diminished chord, and it's used so much more rarely compared to major and minor that we're just not going to get into it right now, but it's there. Choose a few different major scales and practice making triads out of the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth degrees. So for example in A major I would start on A, skip the next note in the scale, play the next note in the scale, skip the next note in the scale, and then play the next note in the scale. That makes an A major chord. The second degree chord will be B minor, so you're playing the second degree of the A major scale, skipping the next note in the A major scale, playing the next note in the A major scale, skipping the next note, and playing the next note.

B, D, F sharp. B minor. And that's how you'll go up and construct all the main triads from A major.

Also practice naming each chord. Name both the root note and whether the chord is major or minor. So going back to A major, our first triad sounds happy and has A as its root, which means it's A major.

The second triad sounds sad and it has B as its root, making it B minor. Remember you can also identify major and minor by the spacing of the notes. Major is four then three So if we start on A and go up four, one two, three four, we get C sharp up three, one two three We get E so A C sharp E. That's an A major chord.

If we change that to three then four A One two three gets us to C. One two, three four gets us back to that E. So A C E is A minor Once you can identify all the first through sixth degree triads in a key, you have an amazing starting point for creating songs.

You can even just pick three or four of those triads at random, play them in a row, and bam! You have a nice sounding chord progression. So these scale degrees, the numbers that we've been using, are really handy because they help us understand how notes and chords function within a key, and they're also used as a shorthand for discussing chord progressions.

They help us understand how chords relate to each other relatively rather than absolutely. So if you look at any major scale, we'll use C again as an example, the triads are major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, Diminished. We don't need diminished. So looking at the chords starting on degrees 1 through 6 of a major scale, it's always major, minor, minor, major, major, minor.

There's a common shorthand where you write these down using Roman numerals. The number indicates the degree of the scale, and capitals are used for major chords while lowercase is used for minor. Let's look at another example with a specific chord progression.

1-5-6-4. So if we're in C major, it's 1-C 5-G A minor is the 6 and F is the 4. 1-5-6-4, it has a certain emotional quality to it and we can replicate that now in any key because we can think 1-5-6-4 in that key. So for example in G we'll go 1-G-5-D-6-E minor and 4-C. Same progression, different key. Now you may have noticed that both of these chord progressions contain both a C major and a G major chord, but in each key those chords function totally differently.

In C major, C is the root and G is the fifth. In G major, G is the root and C is the fourth. As you use chords more often, you'll start to get familiar with what the degrees are in relationship to certain keys. And as you use the degrees more, you'll start to understand how the chords function.

You'll know there's a certain sound when a 2 goes to a 5, or you'll understand the sense of yearning that a 4 can convey. By thinking about chords and notes as scale degrees rather than just the letter names, you're able to transcend the key that you're in and use what you learn in all keys. For example, if you only think about the letters and you find a chord progression you really like, like let's say E, F sharp minor, A. You don't have any way to convert that to another key.

But if you think about that as 1 2 4, now you can understand how that could be played in any key. You could do 1 2 4 in D. 1 2 4 in A. And this is useful not only when you're creating music, but also when you're learning from other songs. If you can understand these scale degrees and decipher the songs that you listen to, you'll start to notice patterns.

After all, you only have these first through sixth scale degrees that almost every song is using to build their chords on. So you'll probably start to notice, uh, I really like songs that are around the four, five, and six. Or, I'm not really a fan of the flavor of a three going to a five. By using this number system, you really allow so much more musical knowledge to accumulate and compound.

Practice creating chord progressions based on numbers. Pick a random key and random number sequences between 1 and 6 and practice playing those chord progressions. So for an example, I'm going to pick a key that we haven't seen in this lesson yet. How about E flat major? The first through sixth degree chords are E flat major, F minor, G minor, A flat major, B flat major, and C minor.

So now if we pick random sequences of numbers between 1 and 6, we can play them as chord progressions. So how about 5-6-4-4? How about 4-3-2-1? How about that example from earlier in the lesson, 1-5-6-4? Also practice deciphering keys and scale degrees.

Look up the chords to a song that you like, you can usually just google song name plus chords, and see if you can figure out what key it's in. With our triads we've covered the really important chord fundamentals, but I also want to talk about inversions. So that's when you change the position of one or more notes in the chord so that the root is no longer the lowest. So if we look at C major C, E, G has C at the bottom, but what if we move it to the top? E, G, C Or G, C, E These are the same notes, so it's still a C major chord, it's just inverted.

This is handy because with chord progressions, it often sounds better to find inversions that have the notes closer together, rather than what we were doing before, moving the triad shape all around. So for instance, we played that 1-6-5-4 in G, G, D, E minor, C. Why don't we move some of those chords around?

Why don't we make some of them into inversions? so that the notes are closer together and maybe we can find something that's easier to play and that sounds better. So I think I'm still going to start with this G triad. This is called first inversion. Now to move to a D next, I think instead of playing it up here with this F sharp and A, I'm going to move both of those down to this octave and play this D.

So now we're going from G to D. This D stays the same and the B moves to an A, the G moves to an F sharp. It's a really nice movement from G to D in that inversion. Now from the D we want to go to an E minor and I think the most natural thing to do would be for these notes to move back up to G and B because those notes are in E minor and then we'll play this E up here.

That's probably the most natural movement from this inversion of D to go to an E minor. So our whole progression right now is... And from this E minor to go to a C, it's super easy because again, E minor and C share two of the same notes, so we just need to move this B to a C. And so now our chord progression, which before sounded like this, has become this.

It's nicer, it sounds more natural, and it'll also fit better with other instruments as they all occupy a bit more of a consistent range for themselves. Another thing about inversions is that they'll subtly change the flavor of a chord, and we can emphasize this by reinforcing the lowest notes of our chords. So for instance, let's stay in G, let's play a 1 to 4, so G to C. With the added lower octave.

But what if I use G in second inversion with the B at the bottom of the G chord to move to that C. Now if we reinforce that with the lower notes I've always really loved that flavor of a one moving to a four but having the third of the one in the bass. Try making a few different chord progressions and this time use inversions so that they're a little closer together and not just the same shape moving up and down the keyboard You now have the knowledge necessary to pick a key by picking a root note and finding the other notes in that key using the formula for the major scale.

You're able to make chords out of those notes and you're also able to call those chords by their numbered names and make chord progressions. The next step is to look at melodies, which are single sequences of notes played with the chords, usually above them. This is usually the thing that you would sing along to in a song, but even in instrumental music, there's usually some kind of lead melodic part that's the most interesting.

and the thing that's the most memorable for people. To create a melody, you already have all the raw ingredients. You can just start stringing together notes that are in the key that you're in over top of a chord progression. But there is a really interesting interplay between what notes you're playing over which chords. A lot of it has to do with tension versus stability and whether the note in your melody is a note that's in the chord that's currently playing.

Melodies that only use notes that match the chords are usually pretty bland. And it tends to be more interesting to use some notes that are outside the chord. Typically these are passing notes, so notes that are in between two notes that are in the chord.

You could even have a melody where none of the notes are part of the chords that they're played with. But that's pretty uncommon, and typically you are playing with this tension and release of involving melody notes that are part of the chord and not part of the chord. As one little tip, often you would end on a note that's within the chord rather than ending on a note that's not in the chord. Another little shortcut to melodies that mostly sound good is if you use the major pentatonic scale.

So if we look at C major... And we remove the fourth and seventh degrees, so that's F and B... Then we just have this.

And if you play melodies with those notes over chords from C major, typically it'll sound pretty good. That's because overall those notes are the most stable over most of the chords. Pick a key and create a chord progression in that key, then record that into your music software.

Once you have that, try to play some melodies over it, thinking about what notes are in the chord that's currently playing. and maybe some that aren't, but that can resolve to notes that are in the chord. Also try removing the 4th and 7th degrees from your major scale to make a major pentatonic scale, and then try playing melodies using that scale.

You might find that it's even easier to get something sounding good. For a quick example of finding a major pentatonic scale, why don't we look at the key of F. Uh, the notes there are F, G, A, Bb, C, D, E. So if we number those, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Bb is the 4, E is the 7. We'll take that out of our scale leaving us with F, G, A, C, D. That is the F major pentatonic scale. The last component of Theory Fundamentals is rhythm and how to count it. How do you tell when things are played?

Whether that's chords or melodies or drum beats. That's based on On the musical counting system, music is divided into equal sized portions called bars or measures, and typically in Western music you'll have four beats to a measure, which we count. One, two, three, four.

So if one note is the length of a bar, we'd call it a whole note. If it's two beats, which is half of the bar, we'd call it a half note. And then each of those four notes that we were counting as beats in the bar are quarters of the bar.

Those are quarter notes. So you can have sounds, instruments, whatever, playing on these beats or anywhere in between them. And if something is on the beat, then we would say it's on the one, for example.

But if it's in between these beats, then we need to do what's called subdividing, which is like increasing the resolution of our counting. If we subdivide beats in half, we count it as one and two and three and four and. And those ands are exactly halfway in between each of those beats, so now that resolution is eighth notes.

We can subdivide further, again getting exactly halfway in between our main beats and our ands, so that would be one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a. So that puts us at sixteenth notes, and even though you can keep on subdividing forever, the main parts of songs are usually not played any faster than sixteenth notes. And this really is a pretty universal system in Western music. If you're talking to anybody who's had some music education and you say something is on the 2E, they'll probably know what you're talking about.

So getting used to using this counting system will allow you to play music better because you'll be able to better feel where you are within the beats. It'll also allow you to interpret and decipher and remember different kinds of rhythmic material because it gives you a structure for those rhythms to live in. So let's say you're out and about and you get an idea or you hear something that you want to try But you can't actually make it right then you can make a quick note of it using this kind of rhythmic notation Let's say we had a beat idea that was like We could jot that down into this number system I've made this one a little pretty for the video, but you can do this really quickly freehand I do that all the time So I've got kick snare and a hat here and then a grid of 16 spaces Lining up with our 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a Well, I know that the snare is on the and of one and the four. I know there's a kick on one So it's gonna do two and three and then the high hats are One E and a two E. I think it's on the two E Yeah Yeah, that's our beat idea.

And the first few times you do this, you might have to really slow it down and be counting along really deliberately and finding those beats and where they line up to what you want to do. But as you do this more and more, you'll get way better at it. You'll get way faster at it.

You'll just know what it feels like to be on certain beats and you'll know how to make note of your ideas. Or, again, this grid is just like your DAW. You'll know how to input those beats into your DAW really quickly. For practice, take a song that you like and select an element like one line of melody or a drum beat and see if you can write out its rhythm using this basic 16th note notation. Alright, I know that's a lot to take in.

Definitely try to make some time for those practice exercises, and of course, come back to this video as much as you want to use it as reference. If you're interested in videos like this, but about writing and producing and recording and mixing and mastering, I have a very comprehensive, interactive online class that runs a few times a year. Again, you can learn more about that at learnmonthly.com slash Andrew. Music theory is the best! I'll see you in the next video.

Transcript for:Fundamentals of Music Theory Explained

Transcript for:
Fundamentals of Music Theory Explained